Happy Birthday, Darcy Jo!

On this very day five years ago, our Darcy Jo came into the world awake, alert, and ready to kick. 

 And after initially expending much energy with an alert first fifteen minutes, she then proceeded to sleep.

 She slept as she was bundled into her carseat to go home. Believe it or not, the hedgehog outfit was a neonate size -- still way too big!
 

 She slept bundled up as a baby burrito. Until she was a couple weeks old, when the swaddling started to interfere with the kicking. Then, no more baby burrito.

 She slept while being held. No surprise, that was her favorite way of sleeping.

The After Picture.

Apparently, I Need To Get Cranky More Often

That's the lesson I'm taking from my previous post. I threatened crankiness and I got comments! Keep 'em coming, because otherwise I'm left to seek out pageview stats for positive reinforcement -- in other words, more comments = more frequent posts after NaBloPoMo is done. There aren't enough comments in the world that will make November posts more frequent than they already are. Just so you know.

I actually had to go look at the date stamp on my last post because I had a sudden panic that I'd skipped a day. This is a way of saying that today has been a Very Long Day. Tomorrow is our girl's birthday. She will be five. She has told this to everyone she has seen today. Some of them have heard it multiple times. There might be a little excitement over this event.

 The Before Picture

Just about exactly five years ago right now (adjusting for the time difference) we were packing up our stuff at the birthing center after my midwife decided that we needed to move to the hospital. My job was to stay in labor indoors until Michael and my M-I-L Betty had moved everything to the car and gotten it warmed up. It was Anchorage in mid-November and it was below zero heading to 30 below for Darcy's birth.


I had recently gotten my diploma for my PhD completed several months earlier, and on the way out to the car, Betty asked Michael, "When we get to the hospital, will they call her doctor?" He stared at her blankly. He asked her why on earth they would do that. People were tired. There was some misunderstanding. It was cold. And I had been having regular contractions for about 15 hours at this point. Michael got very frustrated trying to figure out why his mother thought the hospital knew or cared that I had just finished my doctorate and why they would be that formal anyway. And Betty, although she has never said so in the many recollections of this story, probably thought her son was being kinda bone-headed for not realizing that she was inquired about an OB. As it happens, my midwives all had full privileges at the hospital, so there was no doctor involved. It's one of their favorite stories about the day before Darcy was born.


Mine might be that my midwife spent quite a lot of time teaching Betty the joys of sodoku after learning that she had never tried them. After checking in with me at our temporary housing, she went home to feed her family breakfast and returned with several books of sodoku. I wasn't all that important after that.


Check in tomorrow for The After Picture.

A New Look In Honor Of NaBloPoMo!

Yes, in honor of the glories of NaBloMoPo, I decided to give our blog an update. It was feeling a little stale. I hope you like it! Feel free to tell me whether you like it or not by clicking on the comments at the bottom of the post. I'm starting to get cranky when a post has had 75 pageviews (like my embar...um, flattering of Michael did) and no comments! I allow anonymous comments! There's no excuse!

Just so you get a nice picture as well as the nice new blog look, here's a picture of Darcy that was taken as part of a photo shoot by one of our great local newspaper photographers. A local non-profit was building a set of generic photos of local kids, teens, residents, etc., to use in their publications instead of truly generic photos. Darcy was in need of a haircut. Or at least a combing. We are terrible parents.

My Bags: Confessions Of A Bag Hoarder

A while back, I started attacking some of my belongings that I really don't need to own anymore. We have too much stuff and while we can try not to buy a lot more, there's accumulated stuff to get rid of. I wrote about some of the shirts I got rid of here.

My bags seem like a useful collection: I try to avoid using plastic bags, so I take bags with me, but I find that my canvas bags aren't the best for grocery shopping. I have lighter-weight bags with gusseted sides that hold more and take up less space. But many of my bags hold sentimental value. They were easier to get rid of than my shirts because I had somewhere to send them. A co-worker's niece makes hand bags out of old canvas bags, so I gave them to her. Here are a few of my favorites, photographed this spring in our yard:

 Mosquito Books is in the Anchorage Airport. I bought it when I went to visit Michael during his second summer at Katmai. I was trying to get a giant CostCo bag of tortilla chips to Brooks Camp without having them reduced to crumbs. I didn't have any way to carry them on the two flights from Anchorage to Brooks and bought this. The float plane crew treated it like the most delicate cargo they had and we had a great picnic with a bunch of the Interp staff. With intact chips.

We celebrated my birthday while I was in King Salmon, I won a chowder cook-off as part of Fishtival, and then I managed to cut my finger to the bone the day before I left. I then used this bag to carry two copies of the new Harry Potter around Anchorage before sending one back to Brooks Camp for Michael and taking one on the plane with my heavily-bandaged finger. It served me well.

The Warwick Valley Farmers Market bag was one of the hardest to get rid of. I was part of the large group of folks who helped get the market started, I was its treasurer for a while, and I sold my beautiful veggies there for two years. More than just a special market, the bag itself is special because my friend Barb designed the logo and helped get our original merchandise. Barb was a great graphic designer. Her specialty was children's book catalogs and many of her rejected, coverless books are now on Darcy's shelves. She loved her puppies and her orchids. She hated removing the frogs that would fall into her pool on a regular basis. When she was sick, she ate only white foods, including white beans straight from the can. Barb died after being diagnosed with leukemia. I still miss her and her blunt opinions. I still cook with her pots and think of her every time I do.

I think it will make an exceptional hand bag.
 

It's Not All About Michael

Tonight, we went out to dinner because my husband is wonderful and I was really, really tired. Darcy fell asleep in the car on the drive home and so we were free to enjoy our evening starting at 7:35! Unheard of. And this story makes today's post NOT all about Michael, as he requested when I asked him to provide me some links for the rest of the post.

Which is all about Michael and some of the amazing things he does in his job. 

Michael looks great in a park service uniform. Those of you who haven't seen him wearing the badge are missing out, but you can get a small taste of it in this post and this one (which also gives you a sense of the wonders of a desert flower display). Michael is an interpretive park ranger, so he's the kind of ranger who teaches you something and touches your heart in a program around the campfire, not the kind of ranger who pulls you over for speeding in the park. Just want to make that clear.

(And apologies to our friends who are or love law enforcement rangers: I'm not trying to say that one kind of ranger is better than the other or anything like that. Just clarifying.)

However, he has a particular specialty these days, as the park media specialist. So he tweets and Facebooks for the park, makes the park newspaper great, creates site bulletins, picnic table signs about feeding animals, and almost any other thing that could count as media. I'm pretty proud of the work he does and I thought I'd share some of it during NaBloPoMo.

First, if you want to know what's going on in Redwood National and State Parks on a day-to-day basis, you can follow him on Twitter or "like" the official Facebook page. The parks also have a YouTube channel where the "Redwood Ranger Minute" series (produced by Michael) is housed (they're video podcasts and can also be found on iTunes). He also maintains much of the park website and is working on an update now. As you can imagine, taking care of the social media for five combined parks every day can be tiring. But Michael still does more!

Recently, the interpretive staff at Redwood have been taking turns writing the "Hey Ranger" column in our local paper, the Del Norte Triplicate (formerly known as the Daily Triplicate, but now it's down to three days a week, so not very daily). Michael wrote this one and helps edit and organize the others. 

He's a busy and productive man-in-uniform, despite what many Republican members of Congress want you to think about government employees. I haven't even mentioned the roadside signs, posters, event flyers, and who knows what else gets designed and produced on the giant pair of computer monitors in Michael's office. He's a all-around good guy and I just thought I'd share some of the stuff he does and doesn't talk about much. I hope you enjoy the vicarious tour of Redwood National and State Parks while admiring my man.

VISTA: Exciting Work, Lousy Pay!*

Many of you know that I served as a VISTA for one year of national service. VISTA, for those who don't know their AmeriCorps acronyms by heart, stands for Volunteers In Service To America. VISTA was created in the 1960s as the domestic version of the Peace Corps and VISTA members still get a hybrid of benefits that straddle those given to Peace Corps members (non-competitive status for federal jobs, anyone?) and AmeriCorps (what? 5,500 bucks towards my student loans???).

Right now, I supervise two great VISTAs at my job and I will hopefully soon supervise a third. They work to improve our region's food system in a variety of ways, working with many different people and communities. They are part community organizer, part researcher, part grant-writer, and part a few other things, depending on the day.

This week, we are recruiting for two of these positions. They are both challenging in their own ways, but offer opportunities to make real, positive change in the world. One is located in Crescent City and will work with two community groups trying to improve food in our schools and neighborhoods. The other will be working in the upper Yurok Reservation, doing similar work, but in a different cultural and geographic setting. They will both be part of a dynamic and friendly team -- my food team!

If you work with young people -- people, for example, who have recently completed undergraduate anthropology degrees -- and are having a hard time finding a job in this economy, encourage them to consider this opportunity. VISTA is a year of service that gives back through training, real-life experience, and a small, but meaningful financial benefit.

For those who love numbers, our VISTA positions provide the VISTA living stipend of $927 a month plus a local housing stipend of $800/month. At the end of the year, members get an education award of approximately $5,500 (it's tied to the Pell Grant maximum) that can either pay off existing student loans or pay for further education.

Please spread the word! My VISTA service was an incredible experience and I highly recommend it for anyone who isn't sure what they want to do with their degree or their life. 

*Really, in this economy, the pay's not all that lousy for a single person around here.

Welcome To Bend!

The house we rented in Bend for our vacation this summer was great and one of the best parts about it was the dress-up clothes. As noted in the previous post, my sister and I drove to Bend separately from Michael and the fashion plates in this photograph. When we arrived, they had been at the house for about half an hour and the girls had already found the dress-up clothes. When they noticed the car, they poured out of the house like this.

Now those of you who only met Darcy recently have not experienced her curls, so you should check out this post and this one, too, to see what her hair used to be like, especially in high humidity. Then you can click on the picture to see it in a larger format and see that this wig is virtually identical to her old hair. It's amazing. In this picture, Darcy's still wearing her trusty Mary Janes, but they spent a good amount of time for three days in plastic kitten heels, raising fears of broken ankles or worse.

When you start a vacation like this, it can only be wonderful and it was. So much so that we're going back for Thanksgiving! I suspect it will be a little chilly for the knickers-and-beads look, but the dress-up clothes will be well-used again, I'm sure!


(I know there are all kinds of warnings about showing semi-nude pix of your kids on the internet and I apologize to any of you who are either squeamish or hyper-vigilant about these things.)