The Chickadee just rolled over for the first time (the first three times, actually) this evening!  She rolled from her back to her tummy.  Locomotion, here she comes.

Before I start, did you know it’s International Babywearing Week?  Click this link to watch a 1-minute video about babywearing, and visit The Babywearer to learn even more.  If you live near me and are interested in learning more about babywearng, leave me a comment and I’ll put you in touch with our local babywearing group (we have get-togethers and a mailing list).  The Chickadee and I babywear every day and I don’t know how I’d parent without it!  Mr. B. loves to wear the Chickadee too.

I’m scared to even look at how long it’s been since I last posted! Here’s what’s been going on: I was working two jobs from home while being a full-time mom and trying–and failing–to also be a writer (now down to one job, soon to be no jobs, which hopefully means actually being a writer again).  Mr. B finished his master’s degree in English, took a grand total of 2 days off, and started his Ph.D (also in English).  And the Chickadee?  Well.  She can now:

• find, grab, and eat her feet
• reach for, grab, and chew on anything that gets within a foot of her
• roll over onto her side from her back, plus a little further (then she gets stuck and just hangs out like that)
• make traumatized faces when I give her tastes of banana
• make surprised and then happy faces when I give her tastes of strawberry
• happily spend 4.5 hours in her woven wrap while we hang out with friends, take the bus around town, and do errands
• sleep 12-14 hours per night without waking up, every night–all by herself (no “sleep training” here!)
• make an incredible variety of sounds
• smile all day (unless she’s hungry or needs a nap or diaper change) and laugh from her belly
• recognize some of our friends and relative (we think)
• eat 8-oz bottles at every feed
• sleep without being swaddled
• somehow triple the amount of laundry I do (and that’s not counting her cloth diapers!)

She’s smack dab in the 50th percentile for weight, length, etc. (I tease her that she’s “average baby!”), has interesting eyes that are steel blue-grey with gold in the middle, striating (is that a word?) out from the pupils, and has a miniscule amount of generic Caucasian non-colour baby hair that my mom claims is getting longer (I can’t see it).  She loves her nightly bath with Mr. B and can recognize her bottle from across the room when she’s hungry.  Trees are still her favourite thing in the entire world, and she’s in heaven when we go walking in the forest.

She’s the sweetest, happiest, most engaged, loving and fun baby I’ve ever met.  I have no idea how I got so lucky but I love every minute of it.

I know I need to post pictures… give me 10 extra hours every day and it’ll be no problem!

I may not have given birth, but adding the Chickadee to our family has definitely led to some less-than-ideal physical changes for me.  I’m carrying some extra weight, feeling pretty tired most of the time, not eating as well as I’d like, and not always fitting in daily exercise.  I’m very interested in health and nutrition, and it doesn’t feel good to let those things slide.  So, Sara’s Green Smoothie Challenge 2009 comes at the perfect time for me (I do want to note that Sara recommends the book Green for Life, which, like most raw food books, is packed full of woo, in my opinion.  It makes a few good points, but I don’t recommend it).

The challenge items are pretty simple:

• Drink at least 16 oz. of green smoothie per day (a quart would be even better!)
• Do some sort of activity every day. This could be an intense workout, or just dancing with your kids around the living room. It could be a 15 minute yoga session or a walk around the block.
• Add a green leafy salad to your lunch or supper (with light dressing…stay away from the creamier sauces).
• Stop drinking pop.
• Cut out all white sugar.

I already drink a green smoothie almost every day and have for over a year.  We all need more leafy greens in our diet!  Did you know that leafy greens, along with tropical fruit,  make up the vast majority of the diet of all of our closest relatives, the great apes?  A green smoothie is just a bunch of fruit and water blended with a green, such as spinach (my preference).  It may sound hard to believe, but you really don’t taste the greens in the smoothie at all!  It’s amazing.  Here is my favourite recipe, which makes 1 blenderful or about 2 quarts:

1  peeled banana
3-4 big handfuls spinach
1 peeled orange
4 or 5 frozen strawberries
1 handful frozen pineapple chunks (we cut up pineapples and freeze them for this)
1 dropperful liquid stevia*
About 1/2 T maca powder*
1/2 T raw virgin coconut oil*
Enough cooled green tea* (or water) to fill the blender 3/4 full when poured on top of other ingredients

Blend until very smooth and drink within 24 hours.

About the weird starred ingredients (all of which are optional–if you leave them out it won’t affect the taste of the smoothie in any significant way):

Stevia is a calorie-free, extremely concentrated natural herbal sweetener.  I like my smoothies to be quite sweet, so I use this instead of sugar, honey, agave, etc.  I do not notice any “stevia aftertaste”  in my smoothie and neither does Mr. B.  He is very sensitive to the weird flavour that stevia adds to some food, and since he doesn’t notice it (he probably doesn’t even know it’s in the smoothies I give him!) I feel confident that you would like it in your smoothie, too.

Maca is a “superfood” that helps fortify the adrenal glands and does all kinds of other cool things.  It’s a relative of the radish that grows in the Andes and has been consumed for thousands of years.

Raw, virgin coconut oil (and only raw, virgin coconut oil–all other kinds are very unhealthy) is an extremely beneficial fat that also adds a bit of richness to the smoothie and actually helps the body to burn fat instead of storing it.

Psyllium husk is just a way to add some more fibre.  I have a bunch that I got to use in a raw recipe that I ended up hating, so now I need to use it up!

Green tea is full of antioxidants.  It’s most beneficial if you allow it to brew overnight.  Add a bit of ginger along with the tea bags to prevent bitterness if you want (I don’t do this as I don’t notice any bitterness in my smoothie).

These things may sound a little nutty but they’re all actually very basic foods that have been consumed for generations–none of them are extreme or at all dangerous.  And they make for a ral powerhouse of a smoothie!

Mr. B and I prefer to have green smoothies for lunch, either on their own or with a piece of good-quality bread.  I find I feel better if I have a more substantial, savoury breakfast–usually a poached egg, a hashbrown (just a grated potato with skin on fried patty-style in a bit of olive oil), and half a grapefruit and/or a small salad, or else raw granola and yogurt with fruit, instead of having the smoothie for breakfast.  This seems to be a blood sugar thing.  I almost always have a salad with dinner, and I rarely drink pop except when I’m out somewhere, so those two aspects of the challenge shouldn’t be too hard.  I’ll just be making a focused effort to do all those things every day for a month.  Cutting out all white sugar will be the most difficult.  I don’t have a huge sweet tooth, and sugar wreaks havoc on my overall equilibrium, but it’s pretty all-pervasive and is especially hard to say no to when I’m out or with family.  I will make two exceptions for small amounts of dark chocolate, which I love and never eat more than a square or two of at a time, and the Tofutti Cuties in my freezer that will otherwise end up freezer-burned and useless (there are only about 6 of them left).  I will also be making a few other experimental tweaks to my diet, but I’m not going to blog those unless they stick because they’re just experiments and I’m not going to commit to them for the full 30 days.

Wish me luck!

As you can probably surmise from the distinct lack of post-age here, we are insanely, incredibly, ridiculously, amazingly busy right now.  However, I have a spare second and wanted to point you in the direction of these two blog posts by Dawn Friedman, a writer and adoptive mother, which touch on a few of the ethical issues surrounding domestic newborn adoption.  Often, when I mention something about adoption being ethically fraught, people are confused or even disbelieving.  Isn’t adoption just a wonderful thing for everyone?   It’s not that simple, and the moral and ethical dilemmas present themselves long before any adoption actually takes place.  That’s what Dawn addresses in these two posts:

Normalizing Adoption Grief (the first half of this is more USA-specific, but the second half applies to all domestic newborn adoptions, here and elsewhere)

Pre-birth Decision Making

When Mr. B and I were thinking about adoption, choosing an agency, and going through the application and adoption process, these issues and many others were constantly on our minds.  We spent a lot of time reading, thinking, talking, and agonizing–and still do, to a certain extent.  We deeply questioned whether participating in adoption was ethically acceptable, and seriously considered the possibility that we would decide it was not.  Once we decided to go ahead–recognizing, as we did so, that no adoption situation is ever absolutely black and white, good or bad, ethical or unethical–we did our best to choose an agency that we felt would not pressure or coerce pregnant women into choosing adoption, and when our actual adoption situation arose, we asked very specific questions of all the social workers involved to confirm that the Chickadee’s birth mother was counselled thoroughly and clearly about the possibility of parenting, and that the choice to place her child for adoption was made freely–as freely as any choice can be made, that is, considering all the social and cultural factors at play in any human situation.  Obviously we weren’t there for any of this counselling or decision-making, but we tried hard to do our part, and hope and trust that everyone else involved did theirs as well, while recognizing that we are all falliable, imperfect human beings who don’t live in a vacuum.

This is another article that I recommend frequently when people ask me about adoption ethics.  It’s not an easy read, but I think it’s an important and rarely-heard perspective.  It also tosses an interesting wrench into the pro-choice/pro-life debate because it challenges the pro-life rhetoric that it’s emotionally easier in the long run for a woman in a crisis pregnancy situation to choose adoption over abortion (for the record, I am progressively pro-life AND a Christian AND a feminist, which is kind of a whole other topic):

Breaking the Silence: On Living Pro-Lifers’ Choice for Women

There are a zillion other things I could touch on here, but that’s probably more than enough cans of worms to open in one post.  Cute baby pictures and/or videos coming soon!

The Chickadee is two months old today!  She already looks like a baby and not a newborn anymore.  She smiles and smiles all day long, especially in the morning and when one of us goes to pick her up after a nap.  Trees are her favourite thing in the world right now.  She loves to stare up at them against the sky.  Mr. B rigged a hammock up in our garden and she likes to lie in it with us, looking up at the Japanese maple overhead.  She also still adores the Infant Stim-Mobile that I found at a thrift store for $2.  She squeals and smiles and tries to talk to it.  She’s trying hard to figure out how to get her fist to her mouth and keep it there, and her head control gets better every day.  She got her biorhythms sorted out early on and for the last 4 days she’s included a 6- to 7-hour stretch of sleep in her nighttime slumber.  We approve.  She’s been in cloth diapers for over a month now and we all love it (we use a diaper service because we have shared coin-0perated laundry in our apartment building).  She eats between 3.5 and 5 ounces at every feed, and we found out from our pediatrician that Costco makes an excellent DHA and LHA (I think) supplemented formula, so that makes feeding her well a little more affordable.

The highlight of this month was her baptism at the church where I was baptized and confirmed and where Mr. B and I were married.  We were thrilled that our priest was available to perform the sacrament (in his Birkenstocks, of course), especially since we’re attending a Baptist church in the city where we live, and Baptists don’t baptize infants.  She wore the gorgeous hand-embroidered christening gown my granny made for my Dad and she was very patient through the whole service.  She also got to meet my granny (her great-granny, whis is 92!) that weekend, as well as many of our friends at a tea my mom hosted in her gorgeous backyard.

I’m working away from home during the day for the next 11 days, so it will be Mr. B’s turn to be the primary caregiver.  Wish him luck!

Today I’m alone with the Chickadee–Mr. B. is in the States, doing a poetry reading (and picking up cheap formula and Diet Squirt at Costco).  She was happy earlier today, when we ate lunch at the beach with Auntie J. and Uncle A. and then walked around the neighborhood doing the shopping for the week.  Since we got home, though, it’s been all fuss, all the time.  I think–knock on wood–that she’s asleep now, but it took 3 bottles, 3 diaper changes, lots of cuddling and burping, and finally a long walk along the beach at sunset in the CuddlyWrap to settle her down.

The turning point on this particular walking route is where the trail along the beach runs out and turns into just beach.  When the tide isn’t high there are lots of big West Coast rocks to sit on.  The beach was busy tonight, and the rocks were still warm from the summer sun.  The Chickadee was asleep by this point, so I found an empty spot and looked out across the bay at the city of glass and the blue-green mountains behind it, still with a narrow border of snow.  A few feet away a ridiculously fit and attractive couple were doing rather suggestive yoga (he kept grabbing her butt as he helped her go deeper into her poses!) on a flat, wide rock.  Just past them, two young guys were swimming in the ocean (which weirded me out a little, because it’s not the cleanest water) and arguing about whether or not it was too cold.  An older man was taking photographs, and a curly yellow poodle ran up and sniffed the Chickadee through her wrap.  The owner said he thinks the dog was a midwife in his past life, because he loves babies so much.

I’m slowly finding my way back to bits of my before-the-Chickadee life.  I went to Thursday night yoga this week, and on Friday Mr. B and I stayed up way too late on our patio with candles lit, while I had a glass of champagne and he had a gin and tonic and we talked about poetry and language and other grown-up things.  I realized I have everything I’ve ever really wanted in life (emphasis on the really, because there ar always more things to want, but some things are much more deserving of italics than others, and those are the things that matter):  a handsome PhD-candidate husband who writes poetry, bakes cookies, gives me great haircuts, and amazes me daily; a beautiful, miraculous, wise and mostl-happy baby who is easing me into parenthood with grace; a cozy and lovely apartment with a herb garden and a patio, in a fantastic, walkable neighborhood in one of the two most beautiful and fun cities in Canada; an MFA and a completed manuscript of poetry that I can send out to publishers as soon as I get my feet back under me; flexible part-time employment that’s related to my training and that gives me the time and space to enjoy the rest of my life while also giving me balance, income, and a professional life; a church that’s passionate, intelligent, warm, and truly Jesus-following; and friends and family who surround us with love and support.

It’s good.  It’s really good.  Even when the Chickadee’s having a fussy night, it’s really, really good.

Our Chickadee is a month old today–can you believe it?  Today also marks 31 days since she was born.  Yesterday at midnight was the last chance for her birthmother to change her mind about relinquishing the Chickadee for adoption.  Since we didn’t hear anything yesterday or this morning, we assumed all was well, but I stopped by the agency today on our walk and checked with the birth mom’s social worker (our social worker is on vacation) just to make sure.  The social worker confirmed that the Chickadee’s birth mother has not changed her mind.  The Chickadee is here to stay!  Mr. B and I celebrated the end to our wait with a bottle of sparkling Shiraz tonight.

Adoption is such a complex thing–in the midst of our joy and relief, I’m also feeling very emotional thinking of the Chickadee’s birth mother and wondering about her and how she is.  Every night when I put the Chickadee to bed, I sing to her, and then I say a little prayer and I always include her birth mother.  I tell the Chickadee that she  is a very special little girl.  She doesn’t have just one mom who loves her–she has two.

We’re pretty sure that the Chickadee shared her first real responsive, social smiles yesterday and today!  They’re still small and a little tentative, but she really seems to be smiling!

Does anyone remember these Magic Grow foam expanding animals?  They’re little capsules that you put in water.  They expand and turn into foam animals–giraffes, lions, butterflies, whales, you name it.  I loved those things when I was a kid.  You can’t know what the capsule will reveal in advance, but its contents are already complete and fully formed; to find out what the tiny, obscure little pill will reveal, you  just need time, patience, and a child-like sense of fascination and wonder.

Raising a baby is the same.  Yes, I compared my child to a cheap novelty toy from the 80s.  Seriously, though, doesn’t it make sense?  Right now, the Chickadee’s just a baby.  She eats, sleeps, creates a lot of laundry, stares at the wall (and sometimes at me), makes funny noises, gets really mad when I don’t feed her immediately, and seems to like being outside.  She’s gradually showing us teeny tiny hints of who she is–she has surprisingly good head control already, she has a clear sense of what she needs and never equivocates when it comes to expressing that, she likes the cross front carry in her CuddlyWrap but not the cradle carry–but we strill really have almost no idea of who she truly is and will be.  Nevertheless, all of her fundamental self–her heart, her mind, her personality–already exists inside the Generic Baby capsule.  And that’s probably the most exciting, amazing, humbling and magical part of parenting.  I can’t wait to find out who my Chickadee is.  Will she like to sing, to dance, to play competitive team sports, to walk in the woods, to look at bugs, to cook, to eat chocolate, to play pranks, to ride horses, to climb trees?  Will she be an introvert or an extrovert?  Will she have lots and lots of friends or just a few really close ones?  What will her weaknesses and struggles lie?

Adoption, of course, adds another level of mystery and wonder to this process.  The Chickadee won’t look like us or act like us in any biologically determined way.  Nurture, I believe, plays an enormous role in the development of a person; nature, of course, does as well.  The Chickadee won’t have my hair (thank goodness) or my sister’s (unfortunately), or Mr. B’s nose, or my mom’s laugh, or my Granny’s excellent health.  She won’t have inherited the shaky hands my dad and I share.  She carries the genes of two people we don’t know, two people who aren’t biologically related to us at all.  This is just another reminder that the Chickadee is herself, a whole person–not an extention of us, although, developmentally, she doesn’t know it yet.

Mr. B. and I have always agreed that our number one goal as parents is to help the Chickadee, and any other children we may have, grow into the healthiest, strongest, happiest, and most integral self she can be.  It would be deeply wrong of us to try to mold her into a miniature version of ourselves, or to try to live out our own unfulfilled hopes, dreams, goals, desires or expectations through her.  Her job is to be herself, and our job is to help her learn–by nurturing her spiritually, physicaly, mentally, and emotionally–to love, value, understand and develop that sacred and unique self–the self God created, which is the self that already exists in her, slowly unfurling its limbs and veins and synapses and cells day by day, before our amazed and loving eyes.

Kristen, a dear “friend in the computer,” once wrote about how, as Christian parents, we should see our children not just as children but also as our sisters and brothers in Christ.  We teach them, gently discipline them, and lovingly provide rules boundaries for them, but we also serve them, as Christ served and continues to serve us.   This is probably the most profound piece of wisdom I’ve ever heard about parenting, and it’s stayed with me through the years.  I pray for the grace to remember this and to put it into practice as the Chickadee and I grow together.