Getting pregnant the high-tech way

Alice Waters and Maria Montessori

About two weeks ago at the Philadelphia Flower Show I saw a recreation of Dr. Maria Montessori's children's garden.  I was inspired.

Since we moved here to this suburban home with a half-acre lot I've had big plans for what I want to do with our landscape and our garden, but my lack of experience (have never had a sunny patch of dirt before) and my lack of time (pregnant or with a newborn during the spring/summer) made getting started a daunting task.

But I loved the Montessori garden display at the flower show. It's so much of what I've wanted to do -- a kitchen garden. This one had chili peppers, tomatoes, swiss chard, and grape vines, among other edible crops.

And I remember back at our old Montessori daycare in California that part of the program for the children was gardening and growing food, and then participating in the preparation of the food, and then eating it. I loved that.

And then I just saw Alice Waters on 60 Minutes. Now, I spend a lot of time in my high tech fog a lot of the time, so probably everybody in the world is familiar with Alice Waters except for me. It's especially embarrassing since she's such an icon in Berkeley, Calif., just a car drive away from where we lived in Silicon Valley. I mean we could have gone to her restaurant. We could have seen this cool cool project that she funds called The Edible Schoolyard where middle school students learn about organic gardening. The second part of The Edible Schoolyard course is preparing and eating the food -- very very much like the Dr. Maria Montessori garden.

Waters talks about how people don't know how to cook anymore. So true. We buy so many convenience foods. We eat more cheese doodles than spinach. We don't know how to prepare beets. This, she says, is related to the obesity epidemic.

She talks about how foods should be grown locally, and she uses only in season food at her restaurant, Chez Panisse.

I love and agree with all these things, and they just make me more inspired about gardening this summer in the beginnings of my Montessori children's garden that I will share with my little boys.

Now, my schedule continues to be relentless -- a full time job, two young boys, going on 4 and going on 2 (I can hardly believe Jack will be 4 and James will be 2), and a house we are still trying to remodel, slowly.

Waters has no microwave in her kitchen. (She made breakfast in her own home kitchen for Leslie Stahl during the 60 Minutes piece).  Nothing is frozen. Everything is from a farmer's market.

While I think this is great, and perhaps this as my ultimate goal, the way she does things is incompatible with my life right now.  But that doesn't mean I can't be inspired by her way of living, her philosophy and her dream. That doesn't mean I can't apply the things I can apply now, and add more in as I go along.

So step one is making a garden with my two boys this summer. And I'm thinking one of the set of crops I want to make sure we have is tomatoes, peppers and cilantro -- a salsa garden.

Recovering infertility patient

We are done with having babies, done with IVF, done with trying to get pregnant. And yet I pay attention to the quality of my cervical mucus. I note the timing of my cycles. I still know when I'm fertile -- or as fertile as a 44-year-old woman can be.

I'm a recovering infertility patient. Since 2002 my whole life has revolved around getting pregnant, staying pregnant, having a pregnancy with a happy ending, establishing breastfeeding, and then getting pregnant again.

You'd think when the goal of two living babies had been reached, that I would have flopped into an exhausted heep of contentment. But there's a certain momentum going that keeps me focused on my fertility signs, and there's a certain adrenaline that has kept me from relaxing entirely.

We are done with having babies, though. We are enjoying our two boys who are growing older. James, who was conceived a few months after I started blogging here, is now saying words like "circle" and "purple."  Baby time is over for him, and baby time is over for me, which certainly makes me a bit wistful.

But it is the recent sojourns that I have taken into the land of adults that have pushed me more into the mind of we-are-done-with-having-babies. It is lovely to spend an afternoon in conversation with other adult humans about their lives -- the ironies, the victories, the battles, the steadfastness in the face of defeat.

And I'm wondering what person I will create when I give birth to this new me -- mother of two, recovering infertility patient, who is looking to rediscover what she was passionate about before she spent all her time thinking about cervical mucus and Repronex dosages.

Holiday parties, and other stuff

You know, I never wanted to be the one to "out" myself regarding my pre-existing relationship with Cecily and her husband Charlie because, well,
a) it felt like it would be a cheap attempt to get a lot of traffic that I didn't deserve, and
b) it didn't seem like my place.

But I've admired Cecily since I tripped over her blog in the spring of 2006, a few months before Tori was born. I'd never really been a blog reader before, but I devoured her blog quickly.  It was interesting to me because of the shared history, but as I read more and more of it it, I knew there was more to it than that. Cecily lives and writes bravely and nakedly and that makes her an outrageously entertaining writer.  And she also felt like a kindred spirit to me, because she and her husband had also been on a journey of infertility and loss (and I'd learned via brief emails with Charlie about some of it -- and shared some of my own with them -- before I even discovered Cecily's blog )

Cecily's blog soon led me to dozens and dozens of other awesome blogs and I felt as if I'd discovered a whole new world -- a world of great women writers, and a world of subfertile sisters documenting their journeys, pain and triumphs.

And Cecily's blog and the blogs of these other women ultimately inspired me to start this little place of my own over here. It's not much, and it's surely neglected lately as I try to figure out what's next (and try to find time in the midst of a lot of career angst due to the craziness in my distressed industry, not to mention a one-year-old and a three-year-old).

Cecily and Charlie were brave enough to invite me, my husband and our boys over for their holiday open house. Although I hadn't seen either of them in more than 12 years (not really sure how long it's been past that), I was not surprised by their graciousness, which really comes through in what they write and post online too, as you know.  They are just the same in person, and Tori is just as adorable and beautiful. It was a lovely evening for David and me and the boys.

And someday, when we finally get our new house together (nearly two years since we moved now), we plan to have them over here as well.

The whole experience has added to the whole holiday good will/happy spirit feeling, and I'm grateful to them for that goodness.

Hope it doesn't freak anyone out too much :)

Palin versus Biden on family values and choice

John McCain's VP choice Sarah Palin's Downs baby is just 4 months old.  Personally, I was bereft to go back to work when my boys were just 3 months onld. I would have stayed home for 6 if I could have, and begged off from travel for longer than that.  I couldn't see myself running for VP if I had a 4-month old infant who was ill on top of it all.  I wonder if she's breastfeeding. I wonder if she's pumping. Still, I think it's a woman's right as well to decide if, when and how she will go back to work.

Yet I hear a disconnect here between Democratic VP candidate Joe Biden saying "Delaware can always get another senator, but my boys only have one father," (after his wife and daughter were killed in an auto accident that left his two sons in the hospital), and Sarah Palin running for VP of the US when her chronically ill baby is only 4 months old.

Her baby's Downs was diagnosed during the pregnancy and she chose to take it to term, which is every woman's right to choose. I'm glad that she made the decision that she felt was right for her family and for her faith. But I wonder what she will say when the pro-choice question comes up during the campaign, as you know it will.  Does she understand other women in her place making a different decision than she made?

What Mark Twain said about San Francisco (or so the urban legend goes)

Just going through my RSS reader this morning and noticed some favorites are going to San Francisco to the BlogHer conference there.  It only occurred to me this morning that these folks may not have been to San Francisco before in July. (This blogger not included since she lives there already) That made me think of the first baseball game I attended at Candlestick Park after moving to the SF Bay area.  It was 90 degrees in San Jose, just a few miles south.  So I wore my shorts and t-shirt to Candlestick, against the advice of my then fiance. It was in the high 50s and windy at Candlestick.  I nearly froze my ovaries off. Which makes me want to turn the clock back to yesterday so I could tell my friends who are going to BlogHer to PACK SOMETHING WARM TO WEAR! You gonna FREEZE if you pack just summer clothes!

There's an old quote attributed to Mark Twain (that folks now say he actually never said)  But it sounds like him nonetheless:

"The coldest winter I ever spent was the summer I spent in San Francisco."

Godspeed, BlogHer attendees. Godspeed.