Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts

23 October 2009

02 June 2009

19 February 2009

Crying in the Garden

14 February 2009

Hooray!

yaris

04 January 2009

Family Portrait

fam

17 October 2008

Orthogonal Mom

mom in judd chair
From '06

14 October 2008

Davis Mountains

jandr in davis mountains

limpia creek in davis mts

mts

mts2

15 August 2008

Cape

super dane

I need a new cape.

10 August 2008

Sheepish

sheepish at tierra wools

Little R at Tierra Wools in Ojo, New Mexico this morning. I want a bed like that.

07 August 2008

Looky Loo?

too many footlongs

I love these deeply skeptical looks. I get them all the time, but it's nice to know other people get them as well, not just me.

Or maybe he knew that I'd be the first one to see the picture. Man he's smart

04 August 2008

Baby Bear

raised by bears

In lieu of potty training, we've opted to have him raised by bears. Jens will leave him in Yellowstone next week, this is just an initial period of acclimatization.

03 August 2008

The Missing Smiles

more smiley

Rhus was just starting to smile for real the week before he was abducted by Mormons went on vacation to Utah. These are some of the smiles (and other events) I've been missing.

My word that sounds sappy. I think it's time to start another blog to separate out all the goo goo ga ga stuff from the art stuff.

smiley

w ggpa

chillax

new hat

grand canyon

lodge

27 July 2008

Gettin' his TV time

remote and root beer

Hanging out in cheap hotel rooms. Drinking (root) beer. Watching reality TV. And they've barely been gone a day. By the time they get back he'll be in college, asking me for help with tuition.

26 July 2008

VayKay

baby baby and baby deli meat

Everybody done R-U-N-N-O-F-T, leaving me alone with two houses and four cats.

Sigh.

They seem to be having fun at least.

08 July 2008

Foot Prints

bed born


On Rhus's 10 day visit to the birth center he had his footprints made on the wall in the stairway. He was pretty calm through the whole thing, much calmer than other babies we saw getting prints made during J's appointments. Also, above is a picture of J and R in front of the bed he was born in.

prints 2

prints 3

feet

25 June 2008

A Week and a Day


colic hold

A week and a day ago Jami had a rough night, having been kept up by some minor cramping, which later that morning turned into mild and irregular contractions. It was a stormy day, so I called and checked on her while I was hunkered down in the greenhouse out of the rain. The lights had gone out at the house, so J had scrounged up an old telephone that took power from the line. We both figured they were just warm-up contractions, or false labor, since J's due date was still three days away, and we'd been practically guaranteed that the birth would be late.

walking

During my lunch break I called her up to check on her again, and suggested that she call the midwife (Cherie, who I've know since I was a kid) just for fun, since we'd payed all that money after all, and they may as well know about the contractions. J called, specifying that it was probably just false or pre-labor, to which the midwife responded that she'd "turn it into real labor." I left work and picked up some things for J on the way home, dodging downed limbs and traffic accidents. When we arrived at the birth center we were told that she was at three centimeters, and that we should go for an hour-long power-walk. By the end of the walk she'd had two real contractions about eight minutes apart. Upon further inspection she was found to be at four centimeters, and during that further inspection her water broke, all over Cherie's hand. We were promptly sent home to get our things together, the midwife saying as we left that we'd have a baby around midnight. This was at about 4:30 pm.

labor

pushing

By 6:45 we were back at the birth center, where J immediately jumped in the bath. About two and a half hours later she was in transition, and then hanging off the bedpost pushing. And pushing. By the very end, a little before 11:30pm she was so worn out that they gave her a Dr. Pepper "for medicinal purposes." She certainly needed it. Her uterus quit contracting right as the baby was crowning, so they gave her a shot of pitocin, and then it was a real team effort to get the baby out. Cherie pulled on his head with a suction cup, Beverly the nurse attendant pushed on the fundus, and the rest of us held Jami's feet back. We tried that twice. Between the first and second times the scissors came out as though for an epiosiotomy, but then go back down for one more try. The second time out came a bumpy little head. The umbilical cord was wrapped twice around his neck, which may have prolonged the pushing stage somewhat by pulling him back up between contractions. Despite that his heartbeat was strong to the very end, never giving us any reason to worry for his sake. Once Cherie had unwrapped the cord from around his neck, I pulled him the rest of the way out, placed him on J's chest, and cut the cord. And there he was: Rhus Guy Larsen, 7 lbs 4 oz, 20 inches long.

out

cord

After Cherie and all the rest tended to Jami a bit they weighed him and measured him. Later on I got to give him a bath, and then we all slept for about two hours before filling out some paper work and going home around 6:00 the next morning.

weight2

bath 1

Since this was our very first child, neither of us quite realized that it was actually a difficult delivery until well afterward. Nothing was as hard as we thought it would be, and certainly not as hard as it's made out to be on TV, with women screaming for epidurals, snapping at their husbands, and swearing to high heaven. Jami was definitely somewhere else while she was pushing, somewhere pre-verbal. Cherie would tell her to take a deep breath, but it wouldn't happen unless I took one with her, coaxing her along. But once Rhus was out she was fully present, and smiling as though nothing much had happened. Now when she looks back at the photos all she can remember is how much fun it was.

dressed

10 May 2008

Happy Mother's Day

01 April 2008

Tummy

growing

I've been meaning to post this for a week now. I waited too long and now she's even bigger. Eleven weeks to go.

22 February 2008

Carving the Cradle


cradle

J took this a couple of weeks ago in Silsbee. Tien did an excellent job supervising me. Now Buibe, Louise, and Figgy supervise in shifts while Tien plays in the bushes.

05 February 2008

Baby Mocs




During our Silsbee interlude I've been hacking away at a piece of pine that blew down in the back yard during hurricane Rita. It rained today, however, so I wound up inside where I made some baby moccasins out of some old sheep skin I had left over from a rug I made years ago. I'm hoping they'll work for a 6-9 month old. The weaving they're sitting on is a hand-woven cotton blanket with a traditional Lanna (northern Thai) pattern.