ode to the moons

garden, originally uploaded by Kristy and Eva.

just minutes ago, eva sang the following bit of toddler poetry as we drove home in the dark from a late dinner. the moon is rising late now, so she can't see it in the evenings. she's been thinking about this a lot. this was no performance; it was sung purely for her own joy (and that of moons), but larry and i were lucky enough to overhear it. i had to record it right away before it disappeared, falling through my fingers like so many of the glowing but slippery moments of our days.

there's no moon at all.
we can't see it, it's hiding.
papa moon and mama moon and baby moon.
they are hiding; they are taking a nap.
mama moon and baby moon are taking a nap
and having side of milk
together.
mama and baby moon are sleeping.
papa moon and mama moon,
mama moon and baby moon,
today there is no moon at all.

i don't know if others can really, truly see it there, or if such things are just for a mama to know, but hiding behind those words is a glimpse of what makes me love her so desperately.

monologue

ringlets, originally uploaded by Kristy and Eva.

i owe entries about our trip to north dakota and still owe entries about our alaska trip and eva's second birthday... so of course i write less instead of more.

instead, here's a conversation eva and i just had during the time in which she was using the potty, as best i can remember it in her own exact words. i'll leave out what i said in the conversation, since it was a lot of "oh really?" and "hmm, then what happened?" -- just probes to encourage the monologue, but i didn't introduce any words or topics, just to see how it would go. (oh, i'll also leave out the potty commentary. i mean, really...there are limits.)

"panowah and bohp [her imaginary sisters] are at auntie lora's house. they're lying on the floor because they're so sad. they're so sad because auntie julie and tito went away. panowah and bohp miss them sooo much. auntie julie and tito went to auntie julie's house. auntie lora is making panowah and bohp feel better; she's singing them a song and snuggling them. they drove there in auntie lora's car. did you know that, mama?

mama, i want to see your funny bone in your back? yeah, your spine. move your shirt up please so i can look at it. haha, it's so bumpy! mama, your spine holds your head up and helps your body be so strong. and papa and eva have a spine, too.

mama, who bite a hole in that brown chair? lemma did it. and mama feels so sad. and papa said 'nooo, lemma, don't bite it!'

mama, you please sound like maggie [the alaskan elephant]? mama, you feel a little bit lonely because you don't have an eva to play with. mama, you pretend to cry and i will make you feel better. [i do, she does.]

mama, you have green eyes. eva has blue eyes like grandpa marty and auntie julie has blue eyes. papa and lemma have brown eyes. [she smiled at me and i kissed her forehead.] mama, i like your green eyes, they are so pretty. i want to give you a hug mama [she does] and a kiss [muah, then touches my cheek]. [another hug] i love you mama. i love you so much!"

we're having a lovely week and the three of us are just about as in love with each other as we could be. it's nice when you can let everything else fall away and just be, and soak up what's right in front of you.

missing papa

we've been traveling a lot. it's been really fun, and eva's had all sorts of great experiences this summer. however, i think having been away from her papa for three of the past five weeks is starting to take its toll on my sweet girl. here's a conversation we just had (as she was supposed to be going to sleep -- as i type this it's 11:15 and she's still awake... apparently travel also takes its toll on bedtimes).


(enter mid crazy-long sentence-o-fatigue:) "...and go see papa and lemma."

eva, do you miss papa?

"yeah."

what things does papa do that you miss?

"play bunnies and play bowling!" [both wii video games]

haha. what else do you like to do with papa?

"um, read stories. papa read me the counting book... the counting ladybugs book."

oh, that sounds fun. what else?

"and eva and papa make a mess! and then papa clean it up and eva help clean up."

yeah, that's true. anything else that you like to do with papa?

"papa sing songs to eva. and make eva feel better."


enough said. this should be obvious, but i forget sometimes that she's not a tiny baby anymore, it's not all about mama all the time. she needs her papa, too. and unlike me, a grown-up, she can't necessarily understand why papa is sometimes not with her for a long time.

papa, we miss you...


ps> i mentioned eva's imaginary sister, bohp, last time. well, we apparently have a new addition to the family. eva now has a second imaginary sister: panowah (emphasis on the "wah!"). we had a big conversation between all of us over coffee while camping. later, eva had violet under her shirt -- "mama, i have a baby in my belly, and now it came out, look, it's violet!" she then put violet in her carseat "so she can be safe". eva does lots of caring things for violet (asks her if she's okay, sings her songs, gives her mama milk, snuggles her, puts her to bed), so i'm not surprised to find out that she's violet's mama after all. that seems about right.

ttc

trying to conceive. and still trying.

what follows is something i wrote a month ago and never posted, because i wanted to wait and see if i could rewrite it from a better emotional place. now, rereading it, i've decided to post it anyway, because it points out to me how rapidly my emotions and perspectives shift (trying to catch a representative snapshot of my thoughts about it isn't likely as it's a moving target). a month ago, i felt frustrated but not terribly worried. this month, i'm taking it more in stride and have calmed back down, despite feeling a far greater concern. here's last month:

. . .

i've been meaning to post about this for a long while, but it's a fine line between talking about something and flat-out whining about something you can't change, so that probably explains my limited comments on the subject thus far.

we started trying in december. should i get pregnant next month (this month, it seems, is yet another no go), that will have been nine months since we started. enough time to have gestated an actual baby, which seems like an awfully long time all of the sudden. somehow the nine month thing is messing with my head, and i'm losing my resolve to be patient and just wait.

at first i had that giddy impatience, not really bothered that it didn't happen immediately, but kind of hoping it would (as it did with eva). that moved into actual impatience, long before such a thing was justifiable, yet there it was. i then came around to some semblance of resolve to be patient after i realized (despite all the signs) my body was only going through the motions of ovulation. i gained that resolve because it seemed ovulation would not happen until i weaned eva, and i wasn't ready to accelerate that process yet, so i had no choice but patience. now, however, that resolve is waning as i start to feel beat down by the months and weeks and days of waiting and waiting. approaching nine months in, i'm starting to feel betrayed... i guess maybe by my own body and even by my own emotions.

i hesitate to even say such things, since i know there are countless people who long for a baby they'll never have and here i sit with my beautiful little girl. and there are people who try much longer and have to go to greater lengths to end up with the children they have, so my relatively short amount of waiting is no big deal in the grand scheme of things. but it's still a big deal to me, in my life. (try as we might, i think we all have to fess up to the fact that knowing someone somewhere has it worse than you do doesn't in your heart of hearts make you feel all that much better.) i have more sympathy than ever for people with *actual* fertility problems. and in the mean time, i'm feeling more than a little bit sorry for myself.

so there we are. i'm mad at my body for deciding that nursing eva once a day means i don't have the resources to foster a pregnancy, and i'm mad at myself for having emotions that are at best counter-productive to creating a new life. i'm struggling with my own impatience, jealousy, fear, self-pity, and guilt over feeling all those things in the first place.

i know a lot of mamas (really, a lot) -- relatives, friends, acquaintances -- and literally every single person i know with a first kid eva's age is pregnant (barring the people who are having no more children). hell, even mamas who were trying *not* to get pregnant yet are pregnant. mamas with first kids significantly younger than eva are pregnant. i'm starting to feel like i don't know anyone who *isn't* pregnant. (my apologies to the 5 or 6 of you pregnant mamas who will be reading this. by no means does your happiness diminish my own, i just don't know how else to explain my frustration. but i promise, this is my own issue and it's really not about you. :)

all this emotion, and i don't even have a legitimate right to be worried yet! i guess i'm just disappointed that it's taking so long, and also disappointed that i'm not handling it with more grace and calm. it's hard, among other things, to let go of the false sense of control we all have over our lives when it comes to such things. we all know intellectually that we have little to no influence over our child's gender or our child spacing or whether we'll even have children at all, but how this plays out in reality is more trying than i had anticipated.

. . .

i feel differently now. all that emotion is still there in my darker moments, but i feel more open and accepting of the situation. that said, the real worry sets in. it's becoming extremely unlikely that nursing eva once a day is preventing ovulation and that begs the question, what else could it be? many of the "simple" things that are easy to fix don't apply to me. that leaves me with a big looming void of a question. basically, i've moved from "when will i get pregnant" to "will i get pregnant". and actually, that's okay. i think that's how i mentally prepare, just in case. (ever the planner, my wandering thoughts have already taken me past the fertility treatments i don't want and on to wondering how one explores adoption possibilities... i know, i know, that's premature, but that's how i process. with brute force preparation!) who can say where this journey will take us? it's still trying, don't get me wrong, but i'm feeling a bit more calm.

here's a cute exchange from a few weeks ago that made me a little sad. eva sat at the table having a snack while i finished making dinner.

"i sharing my food with my sister. my sister eating tomatoes with me."
oh really? what is your sister's name?"
"bohp"
where is bohp?
"she sitting right there. here ya'go bohp. here's your tomatoes. you like them?"
(then, 30 minutes later, she ran around singing "yea! bohp bohp bohp! bohp boooohp...")

eva is so very interested in her friends' baby siblings, and she talks about mamas with babies in their bellies, and how the baby grows bigger and bigger and then comes out. it's not like i drill her on this, she just clings to the information. i think a part of her knows she's ready to be a great big sister. hopefully soon...

10 things eva learned in alaska

1. How to go night-night in broad daylight, and then to wake up whenever it's time for fishing.
We arrived in Alaska less than a week after the summer solstice, so there was about 20 hours of daylight each day. It looked roughly like "dusk" sometime just before midnight. We aren't much for strict schedules around our household, but this proved a bit of a challenge.
On the other side, Eva had to adapt to things like everyone getting up to pack up camp at, say, 2:45 a.m. to head out fishing. Despite all this plus naps wherever she could find them some days, she was amazing right up until the end of the trip. (It's only now that we're home -- where her bedtime would be the equivalent of 2 a.m. -- that we're having some struggles.)

2. How to get skeetos.
Oh, the mosquitoes. They really weren't bad for almost all the time (turns out with all the rain in Texas they're actually worse here, weird). However, any mosquitoes are enough to attract the attention of a kid. She started randomly hitting herself or others, offering the explanation "I'm getting skeetos. Go 'way, skeetos, don't bite me!"

3. To say "lah".
Either by random coincidence or because of the way Grandpa or others of us pronounce "yeah", Eva took it up with a passion while we were in Alaska. Previously, she habitually said "uh-huh" (like mama says :), but now she says... "lah." I wouldn't mind if she said "yeah", but it sounds very much more like "lah" or sometimes "nyah" (the latter of which is a very ambiguous answer to a yes or no question). So, we all took to encouraging "yes" (with an emphasis on the final letter) as a response, and she occasionally does say that, landing hard on the "s" with a snake-like hiss at the end, "yessss!" Lah, Eva, lah.

4. How to eat her weight in cherries.
I've never seen anything like it, but cherries went on sale for $1.98/lb. So, we bought several pounds. Then we went back for several more pounds before the sale ended at the end of the week. But, lo, then cherries went on sale at another store, and again the following week. For three weeks, we ate and ate and ate cherries. As far as I can tell, Larry prefers cherries to all other foods, and it seems Eva takes after him in that respect. Collectively we ate probably 30-40 lbs of cherries and Eva kept up with us. It was ridiculous.

5. Where the fish on her plate comes from.
They come from the ocean or the river, then you catch them with a pole or a big net. Then you hit them with a stick and cut the sides off. Then you beg Grandpa to cook salmon so you can eat it for dinner.
(Grandpa fashioned a fishing pole for her, complete with hand-carved walnut hook, and she had fun fishing for things -- bags, pails, Grandpa). She had fun while we went dipnetting at the ocean -- until her little hands froze playing in the cold, wet sand -- but she did often ask "what's that man doing with that fish?" Well, now she knows. It's the cycle of life.

6. That bears can be found really close to you, several times a day, while camping.
The day of bears: First thing in the morning, while Eva and I were still in the camper, Mom watched a black bear stroll right down the little winding road through the campground, directly in front of our campsite. This is, apparently, not unusual. It's Alaska. Later that day, while rafting down the Kenai River, Dad and I came across three brown bears, a mama sitting in the water eating a fish along with her two cubs frolicking on the shoreline nearby. We paddled over and watched them, but kept our distance. Then, on the drive back to the campsite, Dad spotted a bear in the bushes along the little road just outside the campground. It was a fairly young black bear and it sat there munching on red berries for quite some time as we sat and watched it. Eva sat on my lap, face pressed against the window, maybe 10 or 15 feet away from a bear in the wild. How often does that happen? Those were some pretty amazing bear encounters, all in one day.

7. What a "poopitz" is.
If you ask Eva to identify her belly button, odds are she'll tell you it's her "poopitz" (sorry, I don't know the correct transliteration). In fact, in true two-year-old fashion, if the dog casually walks toward her while Eva is in a certain mood, she'll semi-shreek, "oh no, Lemma, don't get my poopitz!" She learned this new word, of course, from Grandpa.
I grew up half-knowing various phrases in Ukrainian (like how to jokingly tell the dog "I'll box your ears"). I didn't know this until after she died, but my Grandma Eva spoke only Ukrainian until she learned English in school. So, on many levels, it's only fitting that Eva learn some random things in Ukrainian. (Meaning, something other than how to eat pudaheya until you can barely move.)

8. How to frighten her mother clear out of the bathroom.
People talk about how the poo of breastfed babies doesn't really smell, at least in comparison to formula fed babies or to toddlers who have begun to eat solid foods. Well, I can't say that I noticed much of a difference once she started eating solids (yet I knew other kids' diaper changes could run me out of the room) -- and now I know why. It's because she doesn't eat meat! How do I know this? Well, she began to eat salmon, her first meat in meaningful quantities, while we were in Alaska. And though I'd forget every time to steel myself as I went to help her at the potty, I'd immediately be reminded with unmistakable force. Yikes. I guess it's all what you get used to, but I'm glad I don't have to deal with that daily. A perk of vegetarianism they don't tell you about at Training Camp. :)

9. To know she must be really having fun when she can no longer recognize the original color of her shoes (and/or socks, pants).
She climbed, she hiked, she sat in the dirt. She helped me collect twigs for the fire, she rode around on a hand truck. She drug her poor green jacket around by the sleeve (as though she was walking a dog) for hours on end. She never stopped moving. At the end of the day, her green socks and black shoes both were brown, and she was very intrigued.

10. The concept of instant replay.
Immediately upon returning home from camping, we all would sit down and watch videos and look at photos of Eva. It's tradition. Plus, we can't help it. While this goes on, Eva says "what Eva doing on the TV?" As far as she knows, it's totally normal to watch yourself on TV at the end of a fun day. Why not?