Maine Museum, Rockland, Natural Birth Dollhouse

Some new photos...

A vacation week trip to the Penobscot Marine Museum...

Dada and Willa playing skittles.

A trip to Rockland, on which Willa fell asleep in the car...

And then we went to an excellent Japanese restaurant and Willa enjoyed sorbet made from local blueberries and a Japanese fruit.


Willa is on board with the family philosophy of homebirth and lactation:

A Playmobil family has a homebirth attended by midwives in a Fisher-Price dollhouse.

The mama nurses her baby directly after birth, with big sister standing nearby.

Sad news

We had some very sad news about a dear friend last night. It's not my news to share, and most of you reading this don't know our friend, but it is affecting us deeply, as it is news about fetal loss.

Feeling anxious and sorrowful this morning, and in deep mourning for our friends.

It's been a dark winter in some ways. Too much death. I am hopeful that the spring will bring with it new life in the form of our baby, but sometimes it seems too great a wish to have come true.

Intentional communities!

I'm all hopped up on intentional communities because we went out to the JED Collective today to interview some folks there and had a great time. I came home and did some research and found out that there's a great online directory of international communities where you can search and see if there is one, or one forming, in the place you want to live. I was happy to know that there is a cohousing group forming in Chicago.

Rob is out tonight interviewing yet another back-to-the-land family, in the appropriately named Freedom, Maine...

Willa's in the paper...again

The photographer for the local paper seems to looove Willa. There was a big photo of her at the MLK Day celebration in the paper a few weeks ago, and now here's another one of her making valentines at the Cohousing open house last weekend.

On tap for this weekend: having Jewish friends over for shabbat tonight; the Camden farmer's market; postering for some upcoming birth films I'm helping organize for the Maternal Wellness Center; another back-to-the-land interview we're doing as a family; and horse-drawn sleigh rides on yet another farm. Maybe some prenatal yoga and knitting with my friend Sara, too. Hopefully we'll have some photos from all this to share soon.

Oh, and:

Rob conducted our first new back-to-the-lander interview out on a farm this morning with our new lovely voice recorder, and it came out great!

And I got tenure!

And my sabbatical got approved by the sabbatical committee (it still needs approval from the Provost)!

And a publisher wrote to ask if I have an agent for my midwifery book and indeed I do and they're going to meet soon! And I'm getting the proposal off to the agent very soon!

Big week. Meanwhile, I'm hitting a wall pregnancy-wise, starting to feel a lot slower and more tired and muddle-headed. I better get while the getting's good.

This weekend

This weekend included the following only-in-Maine activities:

• Shabbat in the Wild on the land of a shamanistic couple who led singing and drumming in their hand-built yurt (a beautiful round structure with a skylight and woodstove), followed by a snowshoe hike through the woods on their vast land with stops for songs and prayers and a potluck Tu B'shvat (tree festival) lunch afterward back in their farmhouse, with apple-pear juice they pressed themselves. Three different folks brought kinds of coleslaw, for some reason. And of course there were lots of dates and figs and citrus fruits in honor of the holiday. We met some really cool people.

And then today

• A CSA (community-supported agriculture) fair. They're happening in towns all over Maine today, and you go and get info about all the different farms in your area offering this amazing option of getting fresh produce, eggs, flowers, bread, meat, etc. straight from the farm throughout the growing season. We have a CSA we love (a kind of famous one--there's a documentary film about it and a cookbook from it) in Illinois but even with Chicago as big as it is, there are only a few CSA options there. At the Belfast fair alone we met at least six or seven different farm families (all about our age, with kids the same age) offering amazing-looking CSAs. We don't know how we'll choose! (Here's one typical website.) But it was a great opportunity to meet folks for our oral history project and we got a lot of names and are going to try to start setting up interviews next week.
• A make-your-own Valentines workshop at the arts center sponsored by the cohousing community that we've spent a lot of time with. Beautiful art supplies and decorate-your-own cookies were great activities for Willa, and a guy was there playing guitar and took all of her requests. The local photographer who took a picture of Willa at the Martin Luther King Day celebration we went to that was in the paper also took plenty of her today, so she may well show up in the paper again!
  

Local news, volume 2

A local radio show will start broadcasting a show by a local woman called "Positively Moody Blues." The show will feature only music by the Moody Blues, along with astrological information about the band, an astrological forecast, and the weather.

She can't start broadcasting yet, though, because Mercury is in retrograde and she doesn't want to be plagued by technical problems at the outset.

Pictures of the house, finally

At long last, I took some shots of the place we're living right now to share with you all. Here's Willa in her room, with french doors that open to the living room.


A view to the street from a window. That's our little table in honor of Day, a kind of altar.



The living room. Note the wood stove.


The front hall.

The dining room part of the kitchen. Note big deck, currently covered in snow, but overlooking the harbor.
The kitchen.


Our bedroom, with a tiny deck and view of the harbor.


The belly, at 25 weeks (yikes!).Gratuitous cute dog shot.

Prenatal, 25 weeks

Just got back from our second prenatal with Donna and Ellie, a nice loooonng talk about all my fears and hopes, plus of course the regular midwifery appointment gossip about real estate and mutual friends and stuff like that. And Anna, the new midwife on board, gave me some good herbal advice and is looking up some other ideas for me related to the (very minor) issues I've had related to this pregnancy.

Anyway: blood pressure normal; pee stick looked great (it never looked this good with Willa, so I must be eating better this time around); nice loud baby heartbeat heard on the Doplex. In other words, I'm a regular old pregnant lady.

And I've been feeling really well, if occasionally battling the feeling that I just don't quite believe there's a live baby for me at the end of this journey. I am very hopeful and cheerful, but part of me just can't totally buy it. As Ellie said, this is probably not a bad self-protection strategy.

I also told the midwives my goal for this birth, which is to enjoy it. I really love giving birth and this will probably be my last time out and I want to savor it, have it feel fun and joyous and just like a good time.

All signs are pointing to Girl--this pregnancy closely resembles Willa's in many ways, much more so than Day's, and the midwives are also guessing girl based on some stuff I won't go into here about conception...and all this probably means it will be a boy. I'm fighting the urge to find out.