Calix Paul is born!

We finally managed to get up a post announcing the birth of our child, who arrived on February 12. For more, see the Morula Logs – http://morulalogs.wordpress.com/.

 

Marriage

For those who don’t know, Colin and I got married… a few months ago (uh, I don’t think I wrote down the date).

Marriage has never been something we’ve felt as emotionally important to us, and we already felt totally committed to each other (especially with a baby on the way!). But we decided to get married for a number of practical reasons. Basically, since Colin started his business in January and hasn’t been bringing in any income, it will make sense for us to file taxes jointly with me as the bread-winner this year. Secondly, we want the maximum protection we can have for our family now that little Calix will be joining us. Getting married makes things incredibly easy. Nobody will ever question what will happen if something were to happen to one or the other of us. Also, our finances are automatically jointly owned, so we don’t have to try to keep track of out of whose bank account we’re spending which expenses out or what will happen to the house I bought if something happens to me. And, it’s nice in some ways to think of ourselves as married.

This is all very convenient! And here is what we had to do. We had to go to a King County office near us on a Saturday and wait in a line with a bunch of other couples to get a marriage license. Then we had to not get married during the 3-day waiting period. Then we had to have a friend who had authority to perform marriages (by becoming a minister on the internet) and two witnesses around. We had to say “I take you to be my husband or wife.” Then we all had to sign a piece of paper and send it to King County by the United States Postal Service.

That’s it! That’s all there was to it. Colin and I have been together for over 6 years, but we could have done the same thing if we had just met. Our lives have become easier and safer in a lot of ways with that piece of paper.

But if anything, the ease with which we were able to execute the whole thing has made me even more seethingly upset about my sister’s situation. Here’s her story.

My sister and her partner have been together for about the same amount of time as Colin and I have been. On October 7, 2006, they had a beautiful wedding ceremony surrounded by a very fun wedding weekend. The whole family and many friends flew in to attend the festivities. My sister wore a gorgeous embroidered flowing white dress. A professional photographer took pictures. There was a fancy dinner and a big cake. It was a wedding.

Two years later, my sister and her partner have four-month-old twins! They balanced finances, planned the timing, and went through many getting-pregnant anxieties, just as Colin and I did. But the security and conveniences Colin and I got from a 5-minute signing and dropping of a piece of paper in the mail, my sister cannot have.

Everything is a comparatively huge struggle.

To use each other’s health insurance, they have to be lucky enough to be working for an employer who happens to offer domestic partnership benefits, or they have to have enough clout with their employer to convince them to do so.

In order for her partner to be considered a parent to their children, my sister has to give up parental rights to them, and then they both have to adopt the children. This involves a months-long engagement of a lawyer to deal with all of the paperwork. They hope to have this completed sometime next year. Lots of time and money.

Then there are all of the other papers and fees for having power of attorney and wills, and I don’t know what all else. And no matter how much money and time they pour into it all, they still will never have the situation that Colin and I do. Certainly, for example, they have no rights to any federal benefits such as filing taxes together now that my sister is staying home with the babies.

And as for security, they are always at risk of laws changing out from under them or homophobic family members challenging in court what they have set up for themselves.

Colin and I paid $64 to get married – the cost of the license. Everything is taken care of. Oh yeah, and $0.42 for the stamp.

I think the contrast between my sister’s situation and my own is a deplorable injustice in our country. I can only think that in future generations, our grandchildren will look back on this aspect of our times with shock and scorn. Until then, I suppose all we can do is to fight unfair ballot measures and bills and the people that support them, and to keep telling the stories of people like my sister, which point out this terrible inequality in our system.

 

Anniversary trip

Colin and I always take a weekend trip for our anniversary. This year, we almost ruled it out due to my back problems. But instead we decided to take a weekend at a cabin close to home.

We had an awesome time at the cozy little cabin in the woods north of Mount Rainier. The fall colors were beautiful.

On Saturday, we took a couple of short hikes to look at and photograph the tons and tons of mushrooms that were out. Then we spent pretty much the rest of the weekend just sitting around in the cabin cooking, playing games, feeling the baby kick, reading about Week 23, identifying mushrooms, and taking several hours to vote. And Colin brought us two fancy boxes of delicious chocolates, which we’ve been slowly savoring. It was just nice to be away from our normal routines and having a whole weekend dedicated to enjoying time together. Undoubtedly our last such trip without baby :).

Mammals

• Douglas squirrel (Tamiasciurus douglasii) (hopefully we didn’t run one of them over)

Birds

• House wren (Troglodytes aedon)

• Raven

Mushrooms

• Agaricus sp.
• Chrysomphalina aurantiaca (aka Omphalina luteicolor)
• Clavulina cristata
• Clitocybe subsquamosa (now Infundibulicybe squamosa. who knew?)
• Clitocybe spp.
• Coprinus comatus

• Cortinarius spp.
• Crepidotus sp.
• Cystoderma fallax
• Cystoderma sp.

• Floccularia albolanaripes

• Galerina sp.
• Gomphidius subroseus
• Gymnopilus sapineus grp.
• Gyromitra infula

• Hygrocybe conica

• Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca

• Hygrophorus bakerensis
• Inocybe albadisca
• Inocybe lilacina
• Inocybe pudica
• Inocybe spp.

• Laccaria bicolor
• Laccaria lacata
• Laccaria sp. (probably a very faded amethysteo-occidentalis)

• Lactarius deliciosus

• Lactarius luculentus
• Lactarius pseudomucidus
• Lepiota magnispora

• Lepista nuda
• Mitrula abietis

• Mycena adonis

• Mycena aurantiidisca
• Mycena pura
• Mycena spp.
• Oligoporus caesius
• Pholiota astragalina
• Pholiota sp.
• Pseudohydnum gelatinosum
• Russula bicolor
• Russula brevipes
• Russula laurocerasi
• Russula nigricans grp.

• Russula rosacea

• Russula spp.
• Stropharia ambigua

• Suillus caerulescens
• Xerocomus zelleri (aka Boletus zelleri)

Plants

• Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata)
• Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii)
• Hemlock
• Cottonwood
• Alder

• Vine maple
• Oregon Grape (Mahonia nervosa)
• Sword Fern

 

Twins visit

7-week-old Robert and Elizabeth came to visit us for 4 days last week/end, bringing with them their mom, Jenni, and their grandma, Mom. Mom and Jenni had made elaborate re-arrangements to be able to come out and visit us, after Colin and I had to cancel our week-long visit to Ohio, due to my fragile back. For a while, we thought we weren’t going to get to meet the twins until they were toddlers!

We all had a great time. As we had suspected, you don’t do much with two 7-week-old babies around. Or rather, you do a bunch of small things, and days just go by. We:

• fed babies

• burped babies

• watched babies sleep

• prepared bottles
• did dishwasher loads
• did laundry loads
• cooked
• ate and snacked
• talked
• coo’d at babies
• watched babies have tummy time, admiring their neck strength

• soothed upset babies by bouncing and rocking and using a bouncy chair and a swinging chair kindly provided by Sue and Michael (very helpful!)
• admired babies

And that was about the gist of most of it!

On Saturday, Anne and the Flynn family came over, which was great fun. Most fun was watching Flynn with the twins. Amazingly, he totally got that he had to be careful with them. At first he was a little upset that he had to wash his hands before handling them, but he got used to that. He pet Elizabeth’s soft hair so gently, and at one point hugged her. I thought he was trying to pick her up, so I told him he had to sit down if he wanted to hold her. He got all excited about this. I wondered what I’d gotten myself and Elizabeth into, but Flynn was wonderful. When I put Elizabeth on his lap, he looked very serious and held onto her very carefully. He touched her only very very gently, and if anybody looked suspiciously like they might take her away, he’d say “NO! I’m holding the baby!”

We had a picnic out in the backyard, enjoying the last of the summer weather (which persisted for Jenni etc’s entire visit!). Flynn swung on the swing in our backyard and climbed on the monkey bars. Our swingset came with the house, and it definitely looks old and weather-beaten, but it seem to be pretty stable after all!

We all went for a beautiful walk at Kubota garden, where Flynn of course enjoyed all of the ponds and bridges.

On Sunday, Jenni, mom, the twins and I we went blackberry picking in our neighborhood. It’s the end of the blackberry season, but between 3 blackberry patches, we managed to collect enough to make a yummy blackberry cobbler.

I think the only other time we left the house was to go grocery shopping and to go get the ultrasound for the twins’ cousin. :)

Mostly, it was all about getting to know the twins. It’s very interesting to see how different they are from each other, even though they are the exact same age. They’re both very sweet and totally cute.

Elizabeth is more easily smily and will seem to imitate some of your facial expressions, such as pursed lips when you blow on her face.

Robert is stronger and can lift his head up high during tummy time. He has a much more serious expression, which I found adorable and which I think may be part of why he reminds us all of grandpa.

Anyway, I’m so glad to have been able to meet the twins! Now when I see pictures of them, it’s totally different, because I feel like I know them.

 

The Morula Logs

Many of you know that we’re hard at work on making a baby!

Now that we’re well along and baby is doing well, we’re publishing our pregnancy blogs. If you’re interested in following our pregnancy, check out The Morula Logs.

 

Fishy outside!

Knowing so many kids of around the same age, it’s really easy to watch common developmental phenomena as they come and go. One thing that seems to be a favorite talent to two-year-olds is the ability to give two word commands in the form of “<person>, <action>!”, where action is something that the person is supposed to do with said two-year-old. If the action is not soon performed, the two-year-old follows up by a grabbing of the adult’s hand and dragging them toward desired action.

Verl’s desired action is definitely “sit”, as in “Mommy, sit!” and “Daddy, sit!”, which means, “I am playing with this toy, and you should sit down and play with the toy with me.

It’s interesting that they have learned to clearly desire the participation of others in their activities, and to request it.

Flynn’s favorite action is “outside”. When we were over there a couple of weeks ago to babysit, he kept saying “Fishy outside! Fishy outside!”, more and more insistently, and then grabbing my hand to drag me outside, since it was dusk, and the adults were hanging out inside for a while before mom and dad took off for their date. As I’ve mentioned, Flynn loves anything to do with water, including fish, so I figured there must be some kind of a toy fish or something outside that he wanted to play with. I was saying, “You have a fish out there, Flynn?” Finally, Owen chimed in, “No, I think that’s you.” Of course, the standard formulation! “Mommy, outside!”, “Colin, outside!”, and “Fishy, outside!”

So, yeah, I’m “Fishy” :). And very flattered to be so, given Flynn’s love of fish.

 

More pictures of my new family members

More pictures of Robert and Elizabeth and family are on Jenni’s blog.

 

Elizabeth Juliet and Robert Paul – Welcome to the world!

Colin and I am thrilled to have a new niece and nephew! From Jenni’s email:

We’re very excited to welcome Elizabeth Juliet and Robert Paul to NYC!

The twins came earlier than expected! They were born on August 11, 2008.

Elizabeth (left) pushed to be born first. She was born at 7:10 PM.  She weighs 6 lb. 1 oz. and is 19 inches long.

Robert (right) followed immediately after, and was born at 7:11 PM.  He weighs 6 lb. 15 oz. and is 19 1/4 inches long.

Jenni is thrilled and recovering nicely, Anna is extremely proud of all three of them!

Yay! I’m so proud of all 4 of them :). We are going to go spend a week with them in Ohio September 12-19. I can’t wait!

 

Birthday camping

We went camping for my birthday, at this awesome campsite called Pine Flats, on the east side of the cascades. We picked that one because it had a group campsite you could reserve. Only a few people were able to make it out camping with us – Noah, Amy, and Andrew – but I had a great time. It was just a beautiful site, very warm, and it didn’t rain at all while we were there.

The group site at Pine Flats was awesome, and it would’ve held way more people than we had. It had trash cans, a water pump, lots of parking, and a huge fire pit surrounded by logs for sitting. The whole area was covered by lodgepole pines, one of my favorite trees. It was totally quiet except for the Mad River, on which it is right on the banks. I loved having the river noise as background. I didn’t do much except lounge about and walk around. It was very relaxing.

The first morning, Colin and I slept in late, and when I got up to eat some breakfast, I discovered a piece of our firewood on the table with some scrawlings on it. At first I thought it might have been left over from a previous camper or something, but then I noticed a word that looked like “river” and a word that looked like “rock”, and I started trying to piece together if it could be a map of our campsite area. Then I heard some sounds down by the river. I picked up the firewood and followed the map down to the “dam” by which there was supposedly going to be a “me”. Sure enough, there was Noah. He had found a logjam partially spanning the river and spent a good amount of time trying to get a log to span the last portion of the river, so that he could climb the hill on the other side. The logs kept getting picked up by the current and carried downstream, though.

He had seen a crazy sight that morning. A bat had been out, in broad daylight, skimming the surface of the river, presumably for bugs. The bat dove under the water, then came out and sit on a rock to dry for a while. Then it seemed to cling to the rock upside down and drink out of the river! I wish I had seen it.

We saw all kinds of crazy animal life. On our drive in Friday night, Colin and I saw a skunk crossing the road. Colin said he didn’t think he’d ever seen one live. Colin and Noah got a glimpse of a Great Horned Owl, sitting in a tree, being harassed by smaller birds, like the bat another strange daytime sighting! I saw it flying away. I’ve never seen an owl before, so it was really exciting, although I wish I’d gotten a better look. It was pretty neat/strange-looking in flight. On the same hike the next day, we saw a mink, slinking along the steep bank across the water! We didn’t know what it was at the time, but googled different weasel-like mammals when we got home until we found it. There were Cedar Waxwings all around the campsite. I’ve never seen the before! On a walk by the river we watched them dive and swoop over the water, catching insects. We also saw Western Tanager. So many things I’ve never seen before, and all on a short car-camping trip!

The area was a really deep river valley, so there were incredibly steep hills all around that Noah and Colin climbed in occasion. They always came down hot, red, sweaty, and exhausted.

Amy and Andrew showed up on Saturday and stayed the night, even though Andrew hasn’t done much camping. It was fun hanging out with them!

Unfortunately, the drive and the camping somehow messed up my back pretty badly, and I ended up lying in bed for the next week unable to even get up and email :(. I have to say, though, I think that it was almost worth it! I just love being out there in the woods.

Mammals

• Striped Skunk – Mephitis mephitis
• Bat
• American Mink – Neovison vison

Reptiles

• Snake (2 kinds)
• Lizard

Birds

• American Robin – Turdus migratorius
• Western Tanager – Piranga ludoviciana
• Great Horned Owl – Bubo virginianus
• Cedar Waxwing – Bombycilla cedrorum
  

Mushrooms

• Cryptoporus volvatus
• Wolfbane Lichen – Letharia columbiana

Plants

• Western Red Cedar – Thuja plicata
• Douglas Fir – Pseudotsuga menziesii
• Douglas Maple – Acer glabrum
• Ponderosa (Lodgepole) Pine – Pinus ponderosa

• Thimbleberry – Rubus parviflorus
• Red Twig Dogwood – Cornus sericea
• Ocean Spray – Holodiscus discolor

• Bracken Fern – Pteridium aquilinum

• Oregon Grape – Mahonia nervosa
• Fireweed – Epilobium angustifolium
• Blackcap Raspberry – Rubus leucodermis
• Yarrow – Achillea millefolium
• False Solomon’s Seal – Smilacina racemosa

Arthropods

• Water bug
• Ants (at least 2 kinds)

Mollusks

 

Flynn is two, Flynn at the zoo

Flynn turned 2 on June 17th! Nicole and Owen threw him an awesome party.

Flynn and all the other kids thought that water balloons were the best invention ever, but that they ought to come in an essentially unlimited supply.

Then on Saturday, we got to babysit Flynn all day! After dinner and some playing around the house,

we went to the zoo.

We’ve been wanting to take him to the zoo for a long time, because he’s really into animals. We had a great time. Flynn’s at a really fun stage where he repeats basically any word you say. So a lot of the zoo time was pointing and saying animal names and listening to him repeat them.

It was really interesting to watch his brain work on the categories of animals. So many monkeys look so different from each other, and so many cats look so different from each other, but Flynn could tell that the gorilla was a monkey and that the lion was a cat.

Flynn was really interested in the toucans, with their remarkable beaks, and we stood watching them a while, Flynn saying “Be” (which means bird, due to Mum’s lovebird being named Be), “bird”, and “toucan”. About an hour later, we came to some flamingos. Flynn immediately said “Toucan!”, which made a lot of sense, because they’ve got some pretty big beaks too!

Flynn loves water and everything to do with it. Anytime there was a river or a lake or even a little puddle in a cage, we’d say “look at that animal”, and Flynn would say “AGUA!” and point to the water. Then he would start saying “fish! fish?”. Usually, there weren’t any fish in the water, although we did see a couple. Interestingly, when Flynn saw a duck, he said “Be! Bird! Fish!” :)

Flynn enjoyed the non-live-animal parts of the zoo at least as much as the animal parts, including milking a plastic cow, driving a stationary tractor, and climbing on the animal statues that were outside of most exhibits.