nose treasures

Harper loves boogers. Loves 'em. When we tried to suction this one out of her nose, she rebelled. Apparently, this one was special. Although we have yet to decipher baby wails, we kinda got the message that lil' Harp wanted to remember this special nugget. Who are we to deny her that right? Once the camera came out, Harp put on a real show for us and made that puppy dance. Now the precious nasal gem is forever immortalized on the world wide web, a fact that she'll really thank us for when she's 15.

you don't get into this gang for free

When Harper turned 7 weeks old, we decided it was time to initiate her into the family, so we started brainstorming for ideal rites of passage. What-did you really think birth was enough? Baptism came to mind, but given our religious affiliation, we decided that at 7 weeks old, it might not sit well with some. We thought of getting her wasted and having her run through a gauntlet of fire, but it's hard to find gauntlets in Costa Rica. Luckily, Rivers thought of the perfect initiatory activity, one that has been in the family for generations: Smooshed Face. It took some convincing, but she finally warmed up to the idea and took it like a champ. Welcome to the family, Harp.

Panamania

I'm always up for adventure, especially when it involves traveling to new countries and discovering beautiful beaches. Why should it be any different when 8 months pregnant? Well, maybe I failed to remember that I'm married to a man who is proportionally rugged as his beard is big, and I'm proportionally irresponsible as my post-pregnancy butt is fat. So, two months before Harper was born, we decided to plan a quick trip to Bocas Del Toro, Panama.

The 6 hour bus ride (I learned my lesson) to the Carribean coast was hot but beautiful. Once we arrived at the coast, we took a 45 minute, very bumpy boat-taxi ride to la isla Colon. I thought I was going to pee my stretchy pants the whole time, a phenomenom that my trampoline-fearing sister told me about but I never understood until that moment. After disembarking the boat and hastily finding a toilet, we checked into a little hostel and crashed for the night.

The next day we rented bikes and decided to check out the island. Unbeknownst to me, the paved road would quickly turn into golf ball sized rocks, thus sending me on a potentially labor- inducing ride around a deserted island. (Check 1 for fat butt/irresponsability proportionality.) Once my pregnant body grew numb to the constant tumult and did not go into preterm labor as expected, Rivers convinced me to keep going because he was sure there were beautiful beaches ahead. (Check 1 for rugged/big beard proportionality.) Well, being the obeisant wife that I am, I kept on peddling my little cruiser through mud and sand under the hot sun until we were miles away from the town. That's when I realized that I hadn't brought any water. (Check 2 for fat butt/irresponsability proportionality.) At first I tried to be stoic, but it was really hot and I was really pregnant. Naturally, Rivers shimmied up a tree (check 2), took out his hunting knife (check 3), and hacked off a few coconuts. He then whittled a stick into a point and opened the coconuts on the pointy stick, handed one to me and told me to drink. (Check 4, 5, 6, 7.) I was soon rejuvenated but decided I'd had enough adventure so we turned around and bumped home. Somehow I did not pee my pants.

The next day we decided to check out the less-inhabited island Bastamientos, so we took a water taxi and were dropped off in what looked like someone's backyard. We asked the boat driver how to get to the town in order to find a hostel to drop off our backpacks, and he told us to walk towards the "blue tarp" and we'd find the main street. He failed to tell us that the street was more like a dirt road, and there were in fact no cars on the street (or the whole island), and the town was comprised of about 20 houses, 3 restaurants and 4 hostels. After walking around the blue tarp a few times, (which was actually us unkowingly walking around town a few times) we gave up and asked an 8 year old girl how to get to the apparently beautiful Red Frog beach. The girl stared at us and, with a thick Carribean accent said: "you're gonna walk to rrrred frrrog beach?" Ummm... Yes? (Check...I lost count) Following her directions ("walk through about 10 people's backyards and you'll find a "street" that goes straight there") we set off for the beach. After about 20 minutes of walking uphill through thick Panamanian rainforest mud, I lost my ocean appetite. My flip-flops kept slipping off, so I was walking barefoot. I was carrying a backpack, a purse, 2 litres of water (lesson learned), and technically speaking, a small child. I was really, really hot. I had slipped and grabbed a hold of a poisonous, ferocious plant and my hand was swelling. We had just seen a poision dart frog, which, under the circumstances, was more terrifying than exciting. I think I almost cried, but with lots of encouragement from Rivers, we finally found the beach. Were we satisfied? Nope. We were told that just around the corner was an even more beautiful beach, so we set out to find it. About an hour later, after trekking through more mud, more dart frogs and more tears, we found the beach. I was over it.

The next day, our last day in Panama, we went back to isla Colon and decided to rent bikes again. I know... but I figured that if I brought water this time, things would be different. Well, things were different, but definitely not better. After biking over the golf ball rocks for a ways, I started to feel some pain in my abdomen. Hmm, peculiar, but I kept biking. It wasn't until the pain persisted that I realized-oh my goodness-I'm having contractions! We quickly disembarked our bikes and carried them onto a desolate beach. "I'm going to have my baby on the beach on an island in Panama", I thought. "I'm going to die." Heroically, Rivers fashioned a makeshift bed for me on the sand out of our towels and his T-shirt. He was so ready for this. When I frantically asked him what we were going to do, he calmly assured me that he had read how to deliver a baby on wikipedia, "just in case". Phew. And I was worried? Ha. Luckily, Rivers didn't need to put his skills to the test, and after a bit of rest, we hopped (okay, I more like waddled) back to our bikes and rode for a couple of hours until we found a beautiful, deserted beach. This one was almost worth it. Almost.

Don't play me like that, baby

I just have to interject something right here. It's midnight and I've been trying to get Harper to go back to sleep for the past hour. I've tried everything from rocking her, putting her in bed with me to actually trying to reason with her. You never know... Anyways, I was getting pretty frustrated so I put her in her bouncer chair and decided to check my email to pass some time. When I looked down to check on her, she gave me a series of huge smiles followed by a little coo. Okay, baby. You can stay up as long as you like...

Happy Annivirthday!

5 days after arriving in Costa Rica came the greatest annual celebration of all times. Christmas? Nope. Halloween? Warmer. National Librarian Day? Now you're really hot. You see, it was Rivers birthday in combination with our first Wedding Anniversary, and to make it extra special I decided it would be a great idea to rent a car in a foreign land and drive through the mountains to surprise Rivers with a beach vacation weekend. So, at 5am I coaxed Rivers out of bed with the promise of a "surprise destination". This proved to be a little anticlimatic as we ended up at the airport in order to rent the car, which resulted in Rivers thinking we were flying somewhere exotic, when in fact we were there to take a ghetto shuttle to rent a crappy* car and drive 2 hours to a dirty beach. Letdown.

Although the beaches weren't the most picturesque, we still had a great time. Driving in Costa Rica is like playing Mario-Cart except there's no happy cloud telling you when you're driving the wrong way up a one-way street (which happened not once, but twice). I quickly discovered that two lanes really means three lanes in Costa Rica because there is a mutual understanding between all drivers that when you are being passed, you automatically move to the right and let the passing car straddle the yellow line (thus creating a third lane. Genious, really). At first I was pretty freaked out by this new discovery, but I soon came out of my cocoon and had a love affair with this unspoken third lane, leaving the cars behind us in a plume of Pugeot smoke. Lata suckas.

The highlight of our weekend ended up being the drive up and through the mountains, which was really pretty beautiful. And even though I later found out that we could have taken a 2$ bus ride to get there, the $175 I spent on our little Pugeot rental was so worth it. Kind of. Maybe just a little bit. Okay, I felt like and arse when I learned this little morsel of information but driving across the bridge was worth at least $25, leaving me only $152 stupid.

* I'm sorry, little Pugeot. You're really not that crappy, I was just saying that for comedic alliteration.

Costa Rica or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love a Slightly Less Comfortable Lifestyle

About the same week we found out I was prego, I received my acceptance letter to study at the United Nations University for Peace to get a Masters in Media, Peace and Conflict studies in Costa Rica. Great, great timing. Being the post-modern, progressive man that he is, Rivers supported my academic endeavors by agreeing to take some time off school to be mommy for a year. So after his school year ended at BYU-Hawaii, we packed up (which included the digging of a 7 by 4 by 4 ft hole in a cricket field, some tupperware bins, duct tape, industrial stregth plastic bags and all of our belongings in said bags. Oh yeah, and a treasure map) and hea

ded to Costa Rica.

Costa Rica is an interesting place. It feels like being in perpetual liminality, hanging somewhere between rustic, Latin American life and North American affluence. I think Rivers appreciates the country more than I do, since he gets to see monkey

s, toucans and other fun creatures on his daily runs in the mountains. I've spent all of my time here either being uncomfortably pregnant or a new, hypochondriactic mother (in her 6 weeks of existence, I've been convinced that Harper has had Cerebral Paulsy, Toxicity of the blood and was dying of hunger, thirst and too much sleep. Seriously. I was afraid she was going to sleep to death, which Rivers has assured me is, in fact, impossible.) Oh yeah, and I'm in grad school.

The first place we lived was a little house on a huge farm. Rivers really lived up to his manly man beard by collecting fruit, chopping wood with a machete and reveling in the great outdoors. Then poop started to come up the shower drain whenever we flushed the toilet and I had to squat over the open-air septic tank in our backyard at 2am when I was 9 months pregnant because one more flush and the poop would have surpass the depth of the shower. Time to move.

The place we live now is a little noisier with a lot less foliage, but at least we don't have to wash the shower before we shower. School is demanding but I'm pretty into it. Rivers has continued his allegiance to beardom despite the lack of vegetation by starting a litt

le garden. And, despite my highest ho

pes and deepest wishes, our baby turned out to be a human and not a puppy, which ended up

being a good thing. Life is awesome.

Chazy Lake and I'm Fat

Okay. Back to the Future hoverboards are cool, but I can only go so far back because let's face it: we have a pretty exciting life. So, let's start with this summer and our third (yes, as in 3) wedding reception at Chazy Lake.

At 6 months pregnant, I wasn't particularly stoked to squeeze into my wedding dress (which turned out to be wishful thinking. I couldn't even fit it over my huge, massive, gargantuan rack.) So, to save me the humiliation and the general confusion over whether this reception was for a shotgun wedding, we decided to have a casual "wedding celebration", Chazy Lake style.

It was awesome. My mum worked so hard to organize such a fun party. We had tons of food (which didn't help my wedding dress situation. Or my rack situation. Boobs are made of fat, you know), tons of great people and so much fun. Rivers mum and 2 of his brothers even made the long trip from Oregon to celebrate with us. Bob and JoAnne were amazing and basically hosted the whole thing. I even took Harper water-skiing in utero. Probably not the most responsible decision, but come on, have you read my first blog?

So, despite the fact that Iwas a Fattie McFatFat,we all had a really, really great time.

This is how it's gonna be...

People have been bugging Rivers and I to start a blog for a long time. I kept procrastinating under the guise that I was much too busy to meddle with something as menial as blogging. Then I started reading other friends' blogs and realized that they're actually kinda cool. Then I wrote my first blog and actually enjoyed it. I mean, think about what blogging really is. Basically, I get to write about my life and people actually read it. How wonderfully egocentric! I'm hooked. Now I think of everything in terms of "blogability", just like I think of every photo taken of me in terms of facebook "profile pic-ability". All this to say that lots happened in the time before my blog enlightenment, so I'm going to go back in time and fill you in, little by little, about nothing but me*. And you're gonna love every minute of it.


*me now includes Rivers and Harper. Families are forever.

Good News: we love our baby!

I'll be honest. When we found out I was knocked up, there were no hugs, no tears, and no excited phone calls. Rivers did not smoke a fattie cigar. Wait-scratch that. There were tears (more the sobbing kind), and one hug that accompanied the sobbing tears in the back of the Coffee Gallery. I guess there was even a phone call (I had to ask my sister what "borderline pregnant" meant. A cruel trick that nurses pull to make the day pass quickly? Nope.) Rivers still did not smoke a fattie cigar.

Anyways, we basically spend 9 months in apprehensive fear. I mean, come on. I wrote a wedding song for Rivers which harbored the line "let's still wait 5 years 'till we have babies". Even my mom was overtly worried about my feelings towards the being growing in my belly. She tried to hide her concern, but I saw right through her "casual" comments in the days preceding D-day about how some mothers "really don't feel that attachement right away". Thanks mom.

Even as I was laying in the maternity ward hospital bed with petocin pumping into my veins, I was filled with doubt; is it possible to love someone you've never met? I'm a pretty busy girl. Don't babies take up a lot of time or something?

Well, turns out they do. Luckily, it also turns out that as soon as I popped her out, Harper became the love of my life (don't worry, Rivers. It's a different kind of love). I love her and I don't even care who knows it. Yes, to all those who knew me in the punkrock days, I've gone soft. Completely and utterly mushy. I love yellow, runny poop. I get excited when she eats 4 ounces. I practically pee my pants when I pull a long, stringy booger out of her nose. I think it's hilarious when she farts on my arm or pees when I'm changing her diaper.

Oh life has changed.