A New Project

As Andy mentioned in his post above, this winter I am going to begin volunteering for a local nonprofit organization: the Nursing Mothers Counsel of Oregon. Among other things, the group provides free breastfeeding support over the phone from nursing mothers like myself. I am currently attending training sessions that cover things like telephone counseling techniques, common questions and concerns, and when to refer a mother to a lactation consultant or healthcare professional. It's a cause that is near and dear to my heart since I have been nursing Alton since his birth, and I am eager to help other new moms with their breastfeeding relationships with their babies. Breastmilk is the most nutritionally ideal food for newborn babies, and I think that all moms who want to breastfeed need and deserve the support from their friends, family and the community to make that happen. The Nursing Mothers Counsel of Oregon allows me to be part of that community support system for new breastfeeding families in addition to volunteering locally and giving back to Oregon. I feel very lucky to have had support all through Alton's life as I breastfed him from my loving husband Andy, our parents, our families and our friends. Check out the international symbol for breastfeeding! Off to go add that to my Facebook profile....

Minerva's New House - by Andy

So Minerva's new house has been finished for some time now. Matt helped me move it in place about 2 or 3 weeks ago. The last touch will be the little name plate over the door labeling it as Minerva's, but that will be a ways out. The roof needed a little modification to fit, but nothing too major. I'm surprised how well it matches the house and Minerva, as expected, completely ignores it. She'll go in it just fine when we tell her to, but we haven't seen any evidence of her going in on her own. We'll just need to work on that.... At any rate, here are some pics of the final construction.

Her house in it's new location. That's not HER air conditioner, no matter how much she wants it to be.


The interior. The foyer is on the right, carpeted with a piece of office carpet from work (yes, that's the carpet they make us live with at work). Her room is on the left, with her "kitty-cat bed." She's even got pink stripes for her little slumber party room.


It's hard to see it, but her little face is in that window somewhere... Proof that she's actually using it.


And finally , her using the door. As proof that I didn't just photoshop her face into the last picture. She's actually quite fluent at going in and out of her little door.

Thanks for reading,

Andy

Pumpkin Patch Baby

Feeding Frenzy

Alton would like it clear that he only eats solid foods under duress, but when so inclined he has deigned to ingest: banana, peach, plum, nectarine, pear, sweet potato, and finger food puffs. His favorite method of eating is to feed himself via the mesh bag of the self-feeder--he gums the fruit through the mesh and sucks on it. Yum!



Food in the nude! (or at least without a shirt...less to clean later!)

Rock the 'hawk!

Try to tell me he ain't bad to the bone!

Alton's Late Breaking News

Alton will be 8 months old on Sept 28 and what a big guy he is! About 19 pounds (Mom and Dad are feeling it in their backs!) and he is crawling like a champ, sitting up on his own, holding down a full-time job and wants to join the Peace Corps. He uses his pudgy little arms and army-maneuvers all around the floor, playing with toys and trying to terrorize Minerva.

The biggest piece of late breaking news is that he can pull himself up into a standing position! He completed this feat once yesterday with assistance from Mama, then proceeded to do it of his own accord several times this morning! Caught on video by yours truly...

Matt, Di and their boys were so sweet to give Alton a couple of BIG toys so that he has stuff to pull himself up on and play with. The round one has little balls that roll down a chute (see in videos above and below), and the other one is a big front door to a house with all kinds of fun buttons to push and little songs. He likes to use the round one to walk around and around....


He loooooves to hear himself roar. Sometimes in the middle of the night, especially first thing in the morning, he will unleash an "aaaaUUUUGGGGHHH" and smile in delight of his own sound.


He waves and gives high-five! A few weeks ago he started being able to look, smile, and open and close his little hand to wave at Mama, Dada, Minerva, the computer, a window, the coffeepot (you get the idea). The high-five we are still working on--he doesn't do it every time, but gets a kick out of slapping his palm against ours. Next up, blowing kisses....

Birthday Wishes

The following is the birthday email I received from my brother KC this morning. Enjoy...I sure did!


Happy Birthday Katie!

You're 28 today, and while you can already legally vote, drink and drive (although not all at once) there's one thing I bet you didn't know about turning 28. It is officially impossible for you to join the 27 Club. The 27 Club, as you may well know, is a group of famous people who died at age 27. It's something of a curse, let's congratulate your reaching 28 while we examine the life and times of the 27 Club.

Brian Jones was a founder and lead guitarist of the Rolling Stones. He died July 3, 1969 after drowning in a swimming pool.

Wow, all I can say is that I'm super glad you know how to swim. I mean, I know you're really embarrassed about the baby dinosaur picture (Katie note: at some point we will have to upload said picture...I am about one, in a pool, very VERY pink and fat) and kind of wish I hadn't put it up on facebook, myspace, and careerbuilder.com, but seriously, no drowning for you. Uh uh.

Jimi Hendrix was a pioneer of the electric guitar as well as a singer-song writer. He died September 18, 1970 and asphyxiating in vomit after the consumption of a large number of sleeping pills.

Yeah, that's right, you never have to hear, "way to drown in your barf, Katie!" Which I'm sure would be really annoying. You know, if you weren't dead already or whatever.

Janis Joplin performed the lead vocals and wrote songs for Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Kozmic Blues Band and Full Tilt Boogie Band. She died October 4, 1970 of a heroin overdose.

Have I mentioned how glad I am you never did heroin? You also never wrote Me and Bobby McGee, which I think is a major feather in your cap!

Jim Morrison was the lead singer and songwriter for the popular band the Doors. He died July 3, 1971 and while the official cause of death listed as "heart failure", as no autopsy was performed, the actual cause remains mysterious.

I haven't said it and you never will ever hear me say "That girl needs to do more peyote." I like you just the way you are Katie. I mean, people are strange, and they'll often do drugs when they're trying to break on through to the other side. But really, they're just not doing themselves any good. I mean, who really wants some L.A. woman running around saying "hello, I love you" to everyone she meets? At a certain point some cracked out chick on X telling you to "love her two times" and screaming "touch me" while she's waiting for the sun is just going to be weird, right? Alabama Song.

Kurt Cobain was the lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter for Nirvana. He died around April 5, 1994 of a shotgun blast to the head.

I think I speak for baby Alton when I say, "Uhreeeeeeee, uwehhh, uwehhhhhh, guh guh guh, muuuh, muuuh" and I couldn't agree with his sentiments more.

Happy Birthday from your crazy brother,
KC

Congratulations to Paul and Christa

Andy, Alton and I are elated to announce that our very good friends Christa and Paul just got engaged! They live in the Bay Area and during a very romantic getaway weekend to Napa, Paul surprised Christa by proposing. You may recognize Christa from such hits as "bridesmaid at Andy and Katie's wedding," "threw a birthday party for Andy and Katie in 2006," or "'please Minerva, stop licking my legs.'" Paul tops the charts with "DD'ed on New Year's Eve," "original Starbucks logo mug," and "guy who made one of my greatest friends so very, very happy." We have had so much fun with them and really miss them now that we live far away, but couldn't be more excited for their upcoming nuptials. Although they are both originally from California, the happy couple met when they were both in law school at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. They have only been engaged a few days, but already they are fronting a barrage of questions: "Where? When? Where will you honeymoon? Who are your bridesmaids? What are they wearing? What are YOU wearing? When are you guys going to have kids?" I may have taken a few tiny liberties there, but the gist is accurate. So I think that to help them out you should all take the poll in the upper right corner of the blog. It's open for the next week and at the end we'll let Christa and Paul know they have one less decision to make. We're hearing talk of a Central Coast wedding, so stay tuned for more details. Which I can provide for you because I am a BRIDESMAID, baby. Unless they jump that plane to Rio and elope. Which they won't do. Probably not. I'm like 90, make that 80% sure. I'll let you know how it goes down.

Footnote from Katie: Bridesmaid dress color poll results were as follows:
Each girl in a different color - 42% of votes
Black, and Minerva should be ring bearer - 28% of votes
Blush and Bashful - 14% of votes
Naked wedding!!! - 14% of votes
Green, to match Paul's eyes - 0% of votes

Camping, Part 1

So for this year's Labor Day weekend, Andy was going to be celebrating a big birthday (30!) so a trip was definitely in order. But where to go? A long weekend is certainly not a time to buy a pricey plane ticket anywhere, and I didn't get my act in gear until June to plan the trip, which meant that many places would be booked up already, anyway. Our first camping trip in the Pacific Northwest was the selection, and with their wedding (and mounting wedding stress) several months away, I was able to get Alexa and Brian, our Seattle friends, to agree to go on a long weekend camping trip the weekend after their nuptial date. (To their credit, I don't think they regretted it...or at least they didn't act like they did!) With nearly the whole state of Washington between our two homes to choose from, we selected a campsite based on two all-important factors: 1) a lake for swimming and 2) availability for the long weekend. We came up with Lake Sylvia state recreation area, a small freshwater loch west of Olympia in the town of Montesano (which I insisted on pronouncing with an Italian accent: Monte-SAH-no...seriously, within a state of unpronounceable Native American names, where did this name come from?), about a three hour drive for us and a two hour drive for them. Another "must" for the trip was that WA state parks allow dogs in their campgrounds, because I rightly assumed that after a few summer trips to CA and the big wedding weekend, we would be broke from paying exorbitant kennel nightly boarding fees for the Nerve (and broke from taking her to the vet when she got kennel cough afterward, blah) and want to bring her along. Plus, she likes to camp.
One of the crucial background details I must insert here is that Brian and Alexa (B&A) and we have very diverse camping experiences that we are bringing to the table. B&A are kind of like an REI poster couple. She was in Girl Scouts, he was in Boy Scouts. Mr and Mrs Hardcore Woodsman. They are backpacking campers, which means they own all that really cool camping gear that can all squish down into one tiny bag that you carry on your back for miles and miles before you set up camp, kill your own food, purify your own water, and use your boot as a pillow for the night. (Ok, I made up some of that but NOT the part about the boot. Brian says he did that. Alexa says that it must have been before he met her. The girl will go without a shower while out in nature but not so far as to use footwear as a headrest.) Their sleeping bags are rated down to at least 20 degrees, their therm-a-rest sleeping pads can fold up to the size of a paper towel roll, and Brian has a stove that's smaller than a Venti Starbucks latte. They are rugged mountain people.
We, on the other hand, are light packers when it comes to everything but camping. We are car campers. In California we had a regular camping crew with Chris & Brian, Charlie & Jesse, Peg & Bobbie, et al, and routinely that meant bringing at least four carloads of stuff, maybe five. Plus, we needed cars to tow our boats. No, that's not a typo; I said boats, plural. Our last trip to Glory Hole Campgrounds last year involved three cars, two dogs, a powerboat, a dinghy, and a two-man kayak. Which was perfect: a powerboat for the testosteroney boys to go wakeboarding/waterskiing, a gentle dinghy for Captain Charlie and her Chief Mate Preggers Katie, and a kayak for the dogs.
It's not so much that we couldn't have packed any lighter, it was just that with everyone's different schedules we were usually staggering our arrivals to the campsites in different vehicles, so you might as well fill up said vehicles with stuff, right? That's the kind of rationalization we were looking for, anyway, with our taste for morning campsite mimosas, eggs and french toast courtesy of Chef Chris, habit of appetizering the day away with fixin's by Peg and Bobbie, savoring dinner of pasta salad, special recipe of yours truly and, once, a deep-fried-organically-farmed turkey from Charlie. We weren't really so much camping as much as we were spending the weekend at a bed and breakfast that happened to have been turned inside out. But that's how we liked it, with 75% of our calories coming from carbs.
This was even streamlined down from our first year, in which we had planned a hearty breakfast fit for a starving longshoreman, a lunch that an army of schoolkids would have trouble with, and dinner of bleu cheese burgers, daiquiris and s'mores. From then on we cut out the lunch and feasted through the afternoon on homemade pepper jelly over cream cheese on crackers from Peg and Bobbie. If you've never tried it, I highly recommend it. P&B have gotten car camping down to such an exact science that their "camping box" spawned at least two copycats from within our group: running out to Target to purchase a rubbermaid storage box and fill it with the camping essentials so that on a moment's notice you can throw the box in the back of the truck (along with your tent, sleeping bags, chairs, pads, coolers and, in Bobbie's case, parasol) and hit the highway. They became such camping goddesses to us that they were known as WWPBD: What Would Peg and Bobbie Do? When we were stuck with such scenarios as whether to throw away the grungy hair tie that we found on the picnic table of our campsite, we said WWPBD and realized that the Wisconsin sisters would turn that hair tie into a clothesline, nay, into a shower hung from a tree with just a mere flick of the wrist. "Leave the campsite nicer than the way you found it" was their motto. They grew up on a dairy farm: they recycled before it was cool and taught MacGyver everything he knows.
The other key thing to note in our camping past is that we always camped in NorCal, i.e., where it was HOT. In 2006 we camped over what was literally the hottest weekend of the entire summer, and it was around the mid-90s in the middle of the night. People were creeping from their sleeping bags to go jump in the lake. Andy and I, who had feared that we would spend the weekend in our teeny tent shoving a suffocatingly hot Minerva off of our air mattress (yes, we used to camp with an air mattress until last year), found that she was thrun out in a corner of the tent, as far as she could get from us, panting all night long. The heat meant that we always chose our campsites based on awesome car camping and a lake that allowed boats, swimming, and dogs. California mountain sunshine beat down on our shoulders as we sat in the lake, buoyed by a life jacket and clutching a slippery tow line as we shrieked "hit it!" to whomever was driving the boat.
With this thusly-described camping experience under our belts, Andy and I prepared for our first camping trip up in the PNW and our first camping trip with baby. In Hillsboro the regulation summer lasts from July 4th to Labor Day (ok, maybe a few days longer than that since it will be in the 80s this weekend), so for the last two months it's been in the high 70s and low 80s with maybe 3 days of rain in there somewhere. So for some reason, reading weather.com's prediction that our campsite at Lake Sylvia would be getting highs in the mid 60s and lows in the high 40s didn't sink in, and we blithely began packing as if we were spending the weekend on our front porch in sunny Hillsboro. We threw in a couple of fleece jammies and a sweatsuit for Altie, saying, "ah, sure, he can just sleep between us on a comforter! If it gets cold we'll put a hat on him." We had been flipping and flopping about buying a bigger tent (our tried-and-true tent was busting at its seams with a queen-size air mattress in it, let alone two people, their clothes, a dog and a baby) and decided we could squeeze together for one more season. The tent, however, had different ideas and a pole busted when Andy started putting it together at home for a trial run, so a new tent had to be purchased. We decided to go with a tent that we would "grow" into, so we got a behemoth big enough for us to do jumping jacks in, host a cattle call for A C horus Line in, and give Minerva her own boudoir in.
This year we also came ready with our own stove, a foam puzzle floor for baby to play on, and all the meal food. Strangely, the truck was less full than it had ever been on a previous camping trip. Including the trip where we forgot the duffel bag full of our clothes and toiletries and had to leg it to the nearest podunk town in search of a store, gnawing our fingernails as we passed convenience stores that sold garments that included oversized t-shirts screened with an image of a cartoon bikini-clad body over your body. I've never been so happy to see Wal-Mart. So laden, we set out for Lake Sylvia...to be continued. (Part 2)

Camping, Part 2

(Part 1)
How much does Andy love Alton? Enough to ride in the backseat of his truck for three hours on the way to and from camping. Luckily, Andy is thin and does not have claustrophobia or motion sickness. We did this same auto configuration once before on the way to camping, but Chris was driving his Tundra, I was in the front seat, and Andy and Minerva were in the backseat. As we neared the campgrounds, Chris opened the tiny rear window and we pulled up next to Charlie and Jesse and their dog Mac, at which point Minerva went nuts, jumped out the rear window, scrabbled over everything in the bed of the truck and landed on the ground. That will WAKE YOU up.
Anyhoo, Andy has a Dakota, not a Tundra, so the backseat is smaller and more cramped, and made even more so by Alton's ginormous car seat taking up the front passenger seat (with airbag turned off). Minerva got her scrap of seat behind Katie, the driver, and we were off. I had noticed online that sunset was supposed to be at 7:59pm that night, and was trying hard to make it to the campsite before it got completely dark. We pulled in at around 8:03 and scrambled to start figuring out what was where before we lost all light. Andy pulled out tarps and hammer and began setting up the brand-new, never-been-put-up-before behemoth tent with only the light from his headlights. Minerva stood guard in the truck while I rummaged through our duffel bag and began layering clothing on top of our shorts-sportin' summer baby because it was getting a little cold to be standing around outside.
**Auntie May Disclaimer: from this point on, Alton was wearing a hat on his head for the entire duration of the camping trip.**

I popped him into the Ergo frontpack carrier so that we would have the additional ease of body heat, and did my best to help Andy with the tent, holding a pole here, a pole there, and running the rainfly over the top. I had thrown two fleece feetie sleepy suits in for Alton, but when I put the smaller of the two suits on and managed to zip it up, Altie whimpered when he found that the suit was so small he couldn't raise his arms up! He looked like a fuzzy, green flightless bird. So his clothing got re-layered and rearranged and Andy held him while I set up the sleeping pads and bags in the tent. The original plan of Alton sleeping on a comforter was abandoned in favor of a much warmer big 'ol family bag. We got everything unloaded from the truck (Alexa and Brian were arriving in the morning) and were finally able to crash.
We got a nice early camping start and Andy took Minerva for a little walk and went to give her her breakfast when he noticed that her food was missing! In the absence of bear boxes at the campsite, we figured that food thievery must not be much of a problem and put our large coolers and rubbermaid boxes of food underneath the picnic table of the site. Minerva's food was in a big ziploc bag with her plastic measuring cup inside of the smallest rubbermaid box on the top of the pile. Andy found the muddied rubbermaid box with Minerva's dog dish still in it tossed in some bushes next to our site, but the dog food was nowhere to be found. Kids? Punks? Drunks? Andy told me the long and short of the situation and I saw red while I changed the baby's diaper, all the while mentally boiling in oil the jerks who thought it would be funny to steal from someone else's campsite and throw away food for a dog. As many of you know, we don't feed Minerva "people" food, and 6:30 in the morning was not about the time to start by giving her a breakfast of Costco muffins and diet coke, so Andy drove into town (which was literally about 2 miles away--this was not a country/mountain campsite) and bought some dog food for the poor hungry pooch. I did some investigative work and found that the mud caked all over the rubbermaid box had been hiding some deep scratches and gouges all over the side, and the ziploc bag containing the food was under a nearby tree with holes torn in it and the measuring cup still inside, even though every single scrap of kibble was gone. Not goons, RACCOONS! We were impressed that the little bandits had managed to open the plastic box (it was one of those kind with the clicky handles on the sides, very secure) and that they had the chutzpah to steal Minerva's food right from under her nose when the whole campsite smelled like dog. Little did we know that these were streetwise raccoons, accustomed to car campers and bold enough to charge into any campsite regardless of how many dogs there were. From then on we kept the food locked in the trucks at night since bears were apparently not a problem (although ask Pam and Steve for a story about bears going for coolers in the car next time you see them), but those 'coons didn't give up. They visited us each night (never got anything after that first night), even going as far as to come to the campsite on Sunday night while Alexa and Brian were still up and sitting around the campfire! Brian saw them and made a few assertive, dog-whisperer-style "cccchhhhh!" noises and they went away, although Alexa didn't see the raccoons and thought that her new husband was having some sort of fit.
Soon after the morning dogfood shenanigans on Saturday morning, Alexa and Brian arrived and the fun could begin. They brought their two-man kayak and Lake Sylvia beckoned her chilly ripples for us to paddle around. We enjoyed a short hike and Brian saved a fish! We were cruising on a path overlooking the shoreline and Brian spotted a very large salmon in the water, lying near the surface on its side and plaintively popping its mouth open and shut. Benevolent woodsman that he is, he crept as close as he could to the waterline (there was no real shoreline here--the hiking trail was above the water at least six feet with a pretty crumbly cliff edge leading down to it) and got a big stick and gently turned the shiny, scaly beast over. We cheered as the fish righted himself, then slowly eased back onto his side and resumed his bobbing mouth. Sick...old...a goner, we pronounced, and Brian offered to catch it for dinner and scale it with a butter knife. Something in the fishy's eye made a connection with Brian (nicknamed Dr Doolittle for the duration of our hike) and he prodded further with his stick, clearing out some low brush and making a better path for the fish to swim. A few moments later, Brian's stick came up out of the water with some fishing line tangled on the end of it! Aha! He wasn't a sick fish, he was all tangled up in the line! The fish gave an athletic stroke of his tail and, I kid you not, jumped out of the water to thank Brian for doing him this kindness before swimming away. I considered asking the fish for a few wishes, but based on what happened to those Grimm boys, I decided not to. After the hike, Alton had some naps, the kayak was taken out a few times and we enjoyed a cheese & cracker appetizer hour while B&A told us about their honeymoon road trip to Olympic Peninsula B&Bs (including a trip to Forks, which we discovered is the site of the Twilight books! Guess we'll have to make a trip to the library for those!). We had burgers, cupcakes and s'mores and the evening passed without incident.
Sunday we took our sweet time getting in gear. We made breakfast, and hung out by the fire (the tall trees covering the sun made it chilly enough for a campfire just about any time of day), Andy and Brian tossed around a frisbee and football, and Minerva decided to go for a swim, charging and belly flopping into the water like she's some kind of Labrador or something. She was impressing the pants off of a little boy and his dog, who was a border collie extremely reluctant to get in the cold water and fetch anything. The little boy was a sort of mascot of Lake Sylvia--he had a razor scooter and was motoring around the whole campgrounds talking to eeeeeeeveryone. We suspected that whenever his parents needed a break to cook dinner, break down the tent, or just rest their eardrums, they told Chatty Chatterson to "just ride around and talk to people." We called him Scooter Boy, or Scooter for short, and cracked up listening to his conversations with other campers. "I'm six." "Oh, you are, are you? Are you sure you're not sixty, little boy?" "I'm NOT sixty, YOU'RE sixty. I can tell by your mustache!" Scooter took a particular shine to Brian and regaled him with stories like how his dad likes to cook meat and them give him the fat from it. Ooooo-kay.
Sunday we also had a downpour! Even though the weather report said that it would only be partly cloudy, no rain, we had some clouds and thunder rolling in over the afternoon that galvanized us to put stuff (like firewood!) under cover and take a final trip to the bathroom just before the skies opened up for about an hour. We amused ourselves in the ginormous tent playing 20 questions and charades (thank goodness for the big tent!) before the rain ended and we amused ourselves by looking at how much stuff the people at the neighboring campsite had left out (and was now waterlogged) before taking off for the entire day. tee hee, we're mean. With our dry wood we started a nice crackly fire in the firepit and roasted hot dogs, ate cupcakes for Andy's birthday, and polished off a few more s'mores.
All in all, it was a cold but very fun trip and we arrived home dirty and exhausted, just like every other camping trip. All three of us (not Nerve) took a turn in the huge soaking tub in our master bathroom and the following day we celebrating Andy's actual birthdate like rock stars, with pizza and champagne. A great start to September.