Saturday morning at 6AM: the alarm goes off and I start to get ready for the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer walk that I’ve signed up to participate in - a 5 mile walk in Golden Gate Park. The weather was gorgeous. There were tons of people there. Josh, Matthew and I headed out on BART.

The bus ride out to the park was packed; thank goodness San Francisco is only about 7 miles wide, so it wasn’t too long before we were there. We got checked in and headed out!

There were TONS of people - men, women, children, dogs - oh, the dogs! So many adorable pooches - Matthew pointed to all of them with his stubby little fingers and we marveled how they all differed from Ava - well, I did most of the marveling. Matthew was quite taken with the volunteer cheerleaders - they cheered him on for strolling against breast cancer, and a minute or so later, after we’d passed them, he’d clap wildly. Hee.

Halfway there!

Home stretch now - almost to the finish line! Near the finish line Matthew hopped out of the stroller and the two of us walked together while Baba pushed the stroller behind us.

We did it! We walked the 5 mile course in about 90 minutes, I think - I didn’t check my time. Since it was noncompetitive, I wasn’t obsessively counting it down to the last second!

After the walk, we went to catch a bus… and had an irritating MUNI experience where the bus driver asked us to fold the stroller up and as we were doing it, drove off. Bah! We finally got on a bus and headed out to Oakland to meet Josh’s grandmother for lunch (dim sum) and by the time we got home, it was well after 2. Matthew conked out in the car.

And then woke up 20 minutes after we got back home, wailing. The only thing that settled him was lying on top of me, so we cuddled, and then he fell asleep. Then I fell asleep. Then Josh fell asleep. It was quite possibly the best afternoon nap I’ve ever taken.

We got up at around 4:30 and not too long afterward headed out to do the grocery shopping, and then after that to my new favorite Korean restaurant. My mouth is still tingling from the spiciness of the food. It was a perfect end to a very close to perfect day (there was a dishsoap incident resulting from incompetent bagging skills from the Safeway, but I am putting that out of my mind).

A rough start to the morning, complete with bus delays and other assorted annoyances, but I have a latte and just had a chocolate chip muffin. Later on today, Josh and Matthew are taking me out for sushi. I can think of worse ways to spend my entry into age 31.

Dear Matthew:

Today you are 15 months old. This time a year ago, I had just returned to work full-time. I look back on photos of you from that time and marvel at how round you once were!

Today, though, you are a solid little boy. Your Great Grandma P says it’s like we poured a ton of cement into you. You are tall and stocky. You are no longer content to just walk or stumble around - much of the time you run, as fast as your chunky little legs will carry you - often in the exact opposite direction from where we want you to go! You are your very own little person too - you have your likes and dislikes and are not afraid to express your emotions! We hold your hands when we walk around and sometimes if you don’t want to go where we want you to go, you do what we call “passive resistance” - you let your body go slack and essentially stage a silent protest.

I have a feeling your teenage years are going to be great fun.

At any rate, this month we had a few firsts - you got a haircut, which was sorely needed, but it made you look more like a little boy than ever before. I have an envelope here with a snippet of your hair. It’ll go into your memory box I’ve got here, and when you’re 18 you can gaze lovingly at the items in the box while simultaneously wondering at which mental institution to deposit me when I’m not looking.

The other big thing that happened is that, for a variety of reasons, stopped breastfeeding. (If you are ultraearthy or have some blinding desire to tell me what a mistake I am making, feel free to close your email client. I won’t read what you have to say, and I’d hate for you to waste your time crafting an email that will only make you look a little lame when I post it here). When I was first pregnant, I wasn’t entirely certain about this whole nursing thing. No one I knew breastfed, while your baba came from a long line of nursing Berkeley hippies. He never questioned me or asked me about breastfeeding - he always considered it the way babies were fed. We went to a course at the hospital on breastfeeding techniques and I had to keep telling myself that it’s more often than not our nursing relationship will be just fine. And it has been.

You were born with a textbook latch that could rival anything Hoover would produce. Despite the textbook latch, it wasn’t a piece of cake - I experienced a lot of toe-curling, blinding pain, every time you latched on, until your mouth got a little bigger. We’ve nursed everywhere - at home (our many homes), at work (Baba used to take you to work with me on a weekly basis so I could get some baby snuggle-time in), on planes, on trains, in automobiles (stopped, of course), in parks, in playgrounds, in museums - everywhere. It makes me swell with pride that you’ve been able to thrive so well on my milk - I look at your tremendous growth, your every fat roll, and I think, I made that! We donated 266 ounces of milk to another infant who needed to put some weight on. I pumped at work until you were 11 months old.

For the first nine months of your existence in utero, I provided your sustenance. For the next six months (exclusively) and since then supplementally, we nursed. Up until you were really able to communicate with me, the only real link I had to being a mother - not just any mother, but your mother, was our nursing relationship. I have enjoyed every minute (well, mostly every minute) of our nursing relationship. I’m all schmoopy and wussy about our weaning. In true Matthew fashion, though, you’ve not noticed it a bit. We went from nursing in the morning and evening to just in the morning, and then we stopped all together. You haven’t skipped a beat.

Anyway - that was a long ode to our nursing relationship. Thanks for making it a great one.

Love,
Mama

More month 15 pictures.

So, I took a trip to St. Louis for a conference, and by and large the conference was mediocre. My experience there was very biased and colored by two experiences: one, lack of Joshes and Matthews to look forward to. I think my limit of not seeing those two guys in my life is about 10 hours, and this trip had me out for effectively 4 days; two, I kind of hated St. Louis, what little I saw of it. I think I’m totally spoiled by life in large cities like NYC, CHI and SF (I was on a roll there) where I didn’t need to have a car. I needed a car in St. Louis. I was at a conference with primarily men (my field right now is heavily male-oriented) and I didn’t know a soul other than me. I’m outgoing, but not that outgoing.

Still, I am trying to be positive about my trip - I got to stay at a fairly nice hotel, I got a manicure and pedicure to treat myself, I watched a lot of Law and Order, and I ran every full day I was there (week 3 of couch-5k plan). I won’t mention missing my guys so much I sort of lost it and burst into tears on the phone with Josh on Saturday. Oof.

And I took a fun picture at the parking lot of the hotel:

Anyway, I am home! I went to pick up Matthew at daycare, in the rain, and he was so excited to see me, and then refused to let me go - Dixie gave us a ride home and I was fiddling with the carseat in Dixie’s car, while Dixie held Matthew, and he sobbed as if I were jamming rusty spikes underneath his fingernails. Ah, the love of a babe. We’ve cuddled lots. I love that boy.

Speaking of that boy, he’s now 15 months old. Amazing. His 15 month letter will go up soon - but look at him. He’s stocky and tall and made of cement. When did he stop being my baby and become a real, live boy?

I’ve tried to write this a thousand times, but it hasn’t come out right.

I am in St. Louis for a conference. Josh and Matthew are home in the Bay Area. I am incredibly homesick and cannot wait to get home to my two honeys. BAH. BAH.

Matthew’s first painting.

The Berkeley Bowl is like manna from heaven if you are into things like organic EVERYTHING and fresh fruit and produce and gorgeous meats and fish. Holy crap. Everyone in the world needs a Berkeley Bowl.

In other news, I’m down 1.2 lbs for a total of 5.6 lbs. Woo! Too bad a lot of that was due to the stomach flu sideswiping me this past week. Bah. Tomorrow, I am slated for a run, and perhaps, just perhaps, I will drink more water than I did today, which was… zip. On the docket: the farmer’s market, a run to the Apple Store so I can finally put in motion what I need to get my stupid computer fixed, and a mad cleaning of the apartment, including under our bed. You can see crazy drifts of dust and dog hair gathering in the middle of the floor. Ech. And Ava, the amazingly hairy dog, continues to impossibly shed all over the place. I dread sweeping because as soon as I dump out the dustpan I know I’m going to see another coat of hair on our floor. Agh.

In sixteen days I turn 31 years old.

It’s kind of funny, in some ways; I think of my age now and I can’t imagine being any older than I am, yet sometimes I still feel like I’m 16 and in high school again. This is bolstered by stupid facebook; I recently got connected with some old friends from college and high school and it’s making me feel old and young again, all at once.

This past weekend was pretty bad. Well, I take that back - not all of it - we had dim sum and met up with friends, but then Sunday, oh was Sunday ever bad. Sunday night, Matthew had a hard time staying asleep at some ungodly hour (I later spied a couple of molars and o, molars, how I hate thee), so in our household, if Matthew doesn’t sleep, none of us sleep. All of us came down with a cold, starting with the little one, and for whatever reason, the damn thing hit Josh and me harder than it did Matthew. We were pretty much zombies for the entire day. At one point I locked Matthew and me in the bedroom, laid on the bed, and talked to him occasionally while he methodically opened and closed the drawers of our dresser, “sorted” my shoes (the kid has a shoe thing already - zappos, watch out!), and occasionally came over to lick my face give me a kiss. Then the stomach issues started Monday and wrapped up on Tuesday. Not a good scene! Yesterday afternoon I thought I was feeling better, but I wasn’t. Turned out I didn’t eat nearly enough yesterday to keep me going. Duh.

Anyway, we’re just about healed, thank goodness. I can’t take much more of sick.

In other crazy news, our bank was closed - for good! We were already in the process of getting a new bank account and moving things over and such, but there were momentary freakouts nonetheless. I went out on Monday and ended up opening an account at a credit union and after years of doing banking online, it was a pleasure to interact with a person. The first question I asked her was, “Are you guys financially solvent?”

The experience was so good and smooth that I ended up opening Matthew a savings account too, that comes with an accumulator account (sort of like an old-skool Christmas Club account) where money is automatically withdrawn for 12 months at a high interest rate and then you can roll it over into a CD. I figure that’ll give us enough time to really try to figure out what to do with his future financial situation.

Age 1 and already I’m worried about his financial solvency.