At our last visit, the midwife said, "From here on out, you will be growing not by days, but by hours." How true! One to five weeks of growth left, and I just can't imagine how that is physically possible.... Technically, he could decide to arrive today because from here on out he is considered full-term. We still have two classes left for parents-to-be, finishing next Monday, so we asked him to at least wait that long so that we'll have a better idea of what we are doing. ;)
We are beyond excited, but doing our best to be patient. And we are not the only ones who are excited - a couple of weeks ago we visited friends and were gifted this artwork of our family. :) Children are so perceptive (whether they know it or not!). KB's favorite element of the drawing is that he is red, I am blue and the little boy is exactly half red and half blue. Brilliant!
This is the story of three blankets filled with a ridiculous amount of love, patiently awaiting the arrival a little boy.
The first blanket was a project started by his mom nearly two years ago. It was a project specifically designed to pour all the love for this little person that had yet to be created into one place. The project came along quickly at first, then was on hold for a pretty long time as she was grumpy that things were not happening on her timeline, and finally got finished at Christmas time this year in a whirlwind of energy as his arrival grew closer (and she has to admit, his timing is perfect, even if she wasn't patient enough to see that for a while).
This will be his outside blanket to keep him snuggly in the stroller or carseat - it's two layers of fleece so it should do the trick even in a Latvian winter (which finally arrived in the form of a white blanket of snow today in Mezaparks).
Here is a close-up of the stitching, a Latvian sun cross-stitch pattern designed by the little boy's great-grandmother. A mother's welcome-to-the-world present for the little boy...
The second blanket is a project made by two people - the little boy's grandmother and great-grandfather. It's a nice thick quilt with sunflowers in the material (my favorites). It will keep the little boy cozy as he explores his world, learns to roll over, sit up, go for some toys at the edge of the quilt and begin crawling...
If you look carefully at the next photo, you'll see there are tan bits of yarn that have been tied up, holding together the layers of the quilt. These were carefully tied together by the little boy's great-grandfather who is 97 years old and spends some of his time in the nursing home helping his daughter (the boy's grandmother) work on craft projects. What a moment that will be when the little boy learns to use his fingers to start untying all the little knots his great-grandfather so carefully tied... :)
The third quilt involves the most stitches and love from the most people. It was part of a round-robin quilt project completed by six women in the little boy's family. That means each woman added the next section of the quilt (not planned ahead of time - you get what the others have worked on and let your creativity flow to design the next bit) until the quilt was complete. Since the boy's mom is not a quilter and lives halfway around the world from the other women, it was a real honor to be included in this project. Her role was to dye some linen fabric from Latvia for each quilt and to sew a little cross-stitch design for each quilt (from an archive of Latvian designs created by the little boy's great-grandmother). In any case, the amount of love, creativity and family tradition in this blanket is incredible.
The little boy's parents are convinced he was waiting for the arrival of this quilt in Latvia before officially signing up for his journey here on earth. His aunt hand-delivered the blanket last spring and just a couple of short weeks later, as a true surprise, here he was. This blanket will hang in his room (our room) on the wall, reminding him and all of us that he is a ray of sunshine in this house. The photo does not do this blanket justice, it is warm and beautiful and somehow truly radiates the love from every stitch.
A close-up of the Latvian sun cross-stitch design in the center.
All of these blankets contain an element of the sun theme - warmth, energy, brightness and love. Such a fitting way to welcome a little boy to the world.
I can't remember now if I've written about it on the blog before, but in the last years I've realized that my dreams serve a definite purpose quite often in that they allow me to experience things that I feel are missing in "real" life. Often this has included me being on the beach and truly experiencing a few hours of real sunlight in the dead of winter or spending quality time with people I am missing. I can still vividly remember a dream in which I sat and ate a pint of Ben and Jerry's and could distinctly taste every lovely bite of it. I wake up in the mornings feeling satisfied after such dreams.
In the past few weeks, I've had nearly nightly dreams about our baby being here. The first ones had some elements of anxiety to them - for nights in a row I dreamt that all of a sudden I looked down, wasn't pregnant anymore (clearly had somehow given birth but hadn't actually been present for it) and realized I had a baby to feed and care for. Now that I seem to have gotten that out of my system, the anxiety element (for now) is gone. Or it appears in silly ways - the other night I dreamt that his head came out deformed after the birth as sometimes happens but it was shaped like a butternut squash (which has definitely been a favorite food in the last months and that day I had happened to find a butternut squash in an eco store which I was so excitedly planning to eat the next day), but in the dream we were just looking back on the pictures of the butternut head because he was already a bit bigger with a nice round head and I was snuggling him and all was good.
The dreams have now clearly taken on the purpose of just giving me that which my mind seems to need, but can't have yet. Nearly nightly, I dream of this little guy being here with us, we are snuggling him, talking to him, taking care of him and generally being good parents. It is lovely to be able to feel it, experience it and prepare for it. This is the good motivation that will help me do what needs to be done in order for him to be born in a few short weeks - in contrast to what we could call the rising "difficultness" which will also serve it's role in motivating.
Pregnancy in Latvian is called grutnieciba, literally translated as "difficultness". At my last visit with the midwife, she warned me that these are the weeks that they talk about when they mean "difficultness" (though I could also argue that the first weeks of feeling hungover 24 hours a day and not being able to each much of anything because every last smell was huge and disgusting were no walk in the park). In any case, I appreciate her way of thinking - this is how nature helps to prepare us for giving birth. Pregnancy will get increasingly more uncomfortable and difficult with everyday to give me true motivation in order for the baby to be born. So now, when I wake up with my hands swollen and barely able to move my fingers, or am dealing with heartburn and ridiculously frequent bathroom visits at night, or just have to move at turtle-speed slowly but surely to get anything done so I don't topple over, I smile, thank nature for doing its bit to help get me ready, and file the moment away in my memory (or ask KB to remind me when I'll need it) to use as motivation when the time comes.
And the dreams...I appreciate those even more because they are a friendly kind of motivation. Every night he looks a little bit different - last night he had a very thick black head of hair, sometimes he is a bald Buddha baby, always with very wise and sweet button eyes looking out to take in the world. It will be interesting to see which of those babies is actually ours. Hopefully not the butternut squash.... ;)
Last night on welcoming in the New Year, KB and I reflected a fair bit on the last year, which was definitely an uphill year for us in so many ways. This year he has experienced what it means to have your work/job come from the heart. It is a night and day difference to get up each morning when you are doing what you love and loving what you do.
I have always felt lucky that I had figured out what I loved so early in life and have been able to do it - even if I had to step away from it for a while to realize that teaching is absolutely in my heart.
Last night, I received a New Year's Eve email from the parent of a child who was in our 3x3 family camp morning group this summer. (KB and I co-taught the 3-6 year olds - 28 of them! - for one week in July, which was such a wonderful experience for us to do together.) The email included pictures of flowers that we had planted together and a big thanks again from the family and from the little boy in particular, who insisted upon taking pictures to send us. The mom thanked us again for the work we did as teachers, which inspires children and help them grow - seen both literally and figuratively through the growth of the flowers we planted together.
One of the infinite reasons I love the work I do....and it's incredible to receive such reminders, particularly when it's a connection with a child that was created within just a short seven days, which left a lasting footprint.
Hoping that 2012 finds you all doing what you love and loving what you do. :)
Ber, Laimite, sudrabinu
Ziemassvetku vakara,
Lai mirdzeja visas takas
Jaunaja gadina!
All the very best wishes to our family and friends in 2012. May the new year bring showers of sunshine and love, just enough rain to help us grow, and above all plenty of those magical moments of stopping to take it all, leaving you with nothing but a smile!
One of the great benefits to starting a family in Latvia is the maternity leave. It starts 70 days before your due date and continues for up to a year after the birth. For the record, I got to choose my own due date (within a certain range) as was most convenient for my work schedule - I chose February 8 meaning I've technically been on maternity leave since December 1.
The first weeks went by in a flash - lots of midwife and doctors visits and a few trips to government offices to get the maternity leave squared away. (Luckily, since sunrise isn't until nearly 9am in December, I showed up at the offices when they opened at 8.30 and was able to avoid the lines.) Plus I actually spent a fair amount of time at school still in December wrapping things up, and will still be in to finish up a few things in January.
And of course I could not just allow myself to relax during this time - I am on three graduate level online courses (two of which I'm aiming to start and finish in the month of January before we become a family of three). I figured I sure won't have extra time on my hands after February, so might as well take advantage of these 70 days I got. At the rate we're going though, I feel like I could blink one more time and February will be upon us!
Lots of my time is filled with reading - preparing myself for birth and parenting, reading texts for coursework, and also just for fun. Mims the Wondercat has taken this as a time to start getting to know the baby. She kneads my stomach for a while, then lays down and he kicks and pokes her for a while, then she kneads him again, and so we go on.... It's a pretty cozy way to spend this season of hibernation if I do say so myself. :)
It's not that the last year and a half in Latvia hasn't been as deliciously sunny, as soak-you-to-your-bones rainy and as magically rainbow-y as the previous years. It's just that I didn't really care as much to experience it in the same way.
After the first years of excitement at every new experience, friendship and opportunity, realities started settling in. Dear friends who had become our local family moved away one or two at a time. The economic situation was a whole lot rainier than sunny for longer than was comfortable, and the repetition of one-step-forward, two-steps-back just wears on you after a while. And just as promptly as we were filled with excitement again at the biggest ray of sunshine we'd seen in a long time, that got rained out as well when 2010 started with a positive pregnancy test that ended with a miscarriage exactly on my Name's Day a short 8 weeks later. Not so much a downpour as storm that just plain knocks you off your feet.
Now that I am finally slowing down and taking some much needed time for reflection, I realize how I've stepped back from life in the last year and a half. It's not even that I've identified more with the rainy side of life during this time, it's just been more comfortable to spend lots of "me time" in the calm and relative safety of our home. Not sunny or rainy, it just "is".
Happily, this chapter of my life has wrapped itself up (and that's not said in regret, it was certainly a time that was needed and served its own purpose) and I'm ready to waddle back out into the highs and lows of life in Latvia - smile intact. :)
Why waddle?
In the next 5-9 weeks we'll be joined in our journey by a new little person - also already lovingly known as Mazais Saimnieks ("little farmer"), Little Drummer Boy, Pucite (little owl), Chupins (short for "chupins of cuteness" or "little pile of cuteness"),
Mini Dude and "Mazins bet Mighty" (little but mighty). I'm quite sure I'm joining mothers around the world in saying this, but from my point of view, never before has another little human being been awaited with this much love and excitement. :)
I recently had a conversation with my own mom in which she was reflecting on how having children impacted her own life. She remembered actually having free time before us, but even now that we have been out of the house for years, she still hasn't been able to regain that sense of "me time" because something always needs to be done. I already put it down for the record with her, but now I am going public with that (and feel free to remind me of this at any point in the next X amount of years that I'm on earth) - I realize my life will never be just my own anymore and I am ready for this.
Surely there will be days that I'll be ready to give anything for five minutes to myself, but at this moment which I hope I'll always be able to remind myself of - I am ready for this little person to come into my life with all of his quirks and needs because with that comes all of his magic. If I haven't been so interested in getting out to see something new or even to do the same-old in the last while, I simply can't wait to do it all - new and old - with our little person because for him EVERYthing will be brand new and magical. There is so much to learn and experience and do in this life and to see it all through his eyes will be amazing. I've seen it with children I've worked with for years, and I'm thankful beyond words that this will be part of my daily experience. He will bring heaps of sunshine, undoubtedly plenty of rain, and above all brilliant rainbows into this home.
We're working hard to catch the Christmas spirit this year with the soupy gray weather just outside our window and sloppy ground that instantly absorbs any chance at brightness that the few attempts at snow have tried to bring. The thing that warms us every time is talking about how next year, our Mazais Saimnieks will be enjoying his first Christmas - probably already pulling himself up on furniture and cruising around as we hold his hands, wide eyes taking it all in.
How can that thought alone not make you look at the whole world with a smile again?
