Indy and I modeled a Babyhawk mei tai carrier for Rosie Posie Baby’s ad in the March 2011 issue of OC Family. Check it out! Rosie Posie Baby is the best baby store!
“Like a shepherd He will tend His flock,
In His arm He will gather the lambs,
And carry them in His bosom;
He will gently lead the nursing ewes.”
NASB
Remember her?
We brought her home, and Aveline quickly set her up in, well, a mansion, basically. That’s the attic of her dollhouse.
We named her Jesco, after the dancing outlaw Jesco White, initially. That’s because we thought she was a boy.
We identified her as a Baja California Tree Frog.
Jonny was super stoked on getting a shot of her mid-air! I’m sorta ripping him off putting his photos on my blog, now that he has one of his own. Surely he’ll tell this story differently than I am.
So tiny and cute =)
I definitely had underestimated how much fun it would be to have a sweetie little froggy hopping around the house! We were all a little worried when we read that frogs should be handled as infrequently as possible. She did start showing signs of red leg : ( But she did recover : ) After the kids stopped playing with her so much : (
We had her for three weeks. In the first week, I got a bunch a frog books from the library. Jonny read one of them to me and from it we learned that typically, you can tell if a frog is a male or a female from the size of the eardrums, which are located just behind the eyes. If they are larger than the eyes, the frog is most likely male, if the eardrums are smaller than the eyes, as in Jesco’s case, the frog is most likely . . . you guessed it.
At that point the kids didn’t feel right calling her Jesco anymore and she became Mary.
Sadly, Mary didn’t thrive under our care. She treated the insects we brought more like intruders than lunch. Her color changed, she stopped hopping around so much. She seemed so depressed that I found myself feeling surprised each morning that she had survived another cold, dark and lonely night.
There was only one thing we could do.
Take her home.
It was surprisingly sweet and emotional, watching her return to her original habitat.
See what I mean?
Sid had been justifying our keeping her captive, by reminding us that she is food for large birds that are so prevalent at Irvine Park. So we were sorta saying blessings to her as she hopped away to this new chapter in her life. Since she looks more like a rock than a frog in this photo : ), we have hope that she’ll have a nice long life.
Obviously, that is where she belongs.
I am the type of person that gives off the scent of fear to animals, they make me nervous and so I make them nervous. Not kidding, farm animals especially, but dogs, cats, rodents, you name it, they act normal with my whole family and then comes the point where I hear, “Mom, don’t you want to pet it?” I do want the experience, so I reluctantly go for it. That’s when the animal starts acting weird and I get schooled on how to properly interact with animals. So, I am especially grateful for this gift that family life has brought me. I never touched Jesco/Mary, but she certainly touched my heart. AAAaaaahhhh! So cheesy, I couldn’t resist!! But seriously, my family is my Rushmore. They offer me so much that I could never, ever dream of doing on my own. Life lived with them is expansive and fulfilling and so much more.
I should also mention that this pet frog business was sort of an attempt to see about unschooling. In that respect, this experience blew doors on traditional homeschooling science. It was so much more than science. The word science sounds cheap in respect to the reach of this experience.
We spent a day exploring Irvine Park after all that crazy rain.
We started off on the swings.
This is us leaving the civilized part of the park, heading out into the wilderness.
June. The others were trying to coax a lizard out of the log.
Jonny. So rad to see the creek that full, and flowing.
That’s Aveline’s wilderness shoe holder.
Crossing the dam.
This was such a cool area, there were animal tracks all over the sand and so far no human tracks . . . until we put down ours.
Me and Indy.
Tracks!
We followed them, irresponsibly hoping to quietly come upon a slumbering mountain lion.
This tree reminded me of lungs.
And this tree reminded me of Sid ; )
Up
Down
That little cutie-pie is getting her own post, so stay tuned.
I can still feel that crisply cold water and I wish I could bring a pool of it everywhere I go. Just slip the shoes off, roll the pants up and step in whenever I wish for that feeling it imparts.
Kindred folks there. If it weren’t for my greater desire to tend to the needs of my clan, I would love to spend the day just like that. Maybe with some knitting and my Kindle.
Well, I stopped importing this blog to facebook last night, and I feel such relief knowing that ONLY people who actually log on here will see what I have to share. It won’t go into that crazy news feed that I don’t know how I feel about most of the time (when I see my stuff on there). I didn’t realize how that import setting was hindering my adding new posts here. So cool that I feel more free with this privacy.
That said, without further ado, I present to you, dear committed reader, a dream I had while pregnant with Indy. Before I knew he was a boy, as his birth was approaching. I journaled it and here is what I wrote:
The other night I had a dream, it was so, so, so great!
I dreamt that I awoke with a beautiful baby boy by my side. I was elated and I picked him up immediately and nuzzled him! He was wearing a blue suit and he had a large head, a bit of eczema on his face and he was PERFECT! As I pondered, I realized I couldn’t remember my labor at all, I had slept through the whole thing! I asked Sid, “What was the labor like? I can’t remember anything.” He told me. “It was great, the midwives decided they aren’t even going to charge you, they had so little work to do, it was their pleasure. They were actually asking you questions about birth.” Ha! Next I remember thinking, “Oh man, the baby and I both just slept for hours, he must be starving!” So I began to nurse him and he was chomping like an animal and my breast just flooded his little mouth with milk and it was dripping all over the couch, I put napkins below to catch the overflow. I was ecstatic to see my body, once again, rise to the occasion of providing more than enough of that most wonderful food for yet another of the most precious people in my life, ever. For some reason there has been a worry in the back of my mind, “Just what if I don’t produce enough milk, or I face some other breastfeeding challenge?” I have such strong and beautiful imagery to ponder from this dream, Thank you Lord!
When I awoke and remembered the dream I laughed a joyful laugh, rejoicing that my brain (or God, maybe) is giving me such positive thoughts about my soon coming birth and breastfeeding. It can be crazy when I really think about going through labor again and starting all over nursing a new baby. Regarding labor, I want it, and I don’t really want to sleep through it. I want to experience the overwhelming intensity because it is completely transforming and grants such abundant gifts. So it’s hard when I realize the way labor is designed to be, and I realize that I actually want it to be exactly that way and that I’ll just have to take it moment by moment in all its overwhelmingness. It almost seems that it would be easier on my mind to wish to avoid it, but I do not wish to because the agony increases the relief and the joy that follows and makes the experience what I think God designed it to be for most mothers and babies. I guess this means that the best thing to do is to resign to it and I think I’m as ready to do that as any woman has been. Maybe? We shall see. How ever it goes, it is so way far beyond worth whatever it may be like, to get to the next step: my baby in my arms, on my chest.
You know what’s crazy? When Indy was, maybe a couple of months old, I was sitting with him on our couch, and I began to nurse him, he was wearing a blue suit and my milk was over-abundant! It began to drip onto the couch and I asked Sid for something to soak it up with. He handed me a napkin and I was just like, “Oh my gosh! This is exactly like that dream I had!!” The only difference had to do with Indy being so much more handsome than he was in my dream, no eczema on his face and a tidy little round head. Wow.
I LOVE HIM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And he’s five months old today =)
