In the process of unpacking, I found our stash of videos of the kids from birth to now. We really need to copy them all to DVDs so that we have more than one copy, because right now we have only the originals. Must make a mental note to do that!
Anyway, the kids and I, and later Sacha, spent some time watching the videos we took immediately after their births. It was really neat to see those moments again, as well as to experience them with the kids for the first time. Well, Mateo may have seen them before, but now he actually has a shot at remembering them!
I think the moments right after our babies were born were some of the most powerful and transformative of my life. There is something about that experience that is absolutely unique and full of elation. I feel so lucky to have experienced it three times! Of course, Tali threw in a jolt of pure terror when she was first born, but thankfully she was soon fine and that just made us even happier to meet her! To have have each one of those meetings on video is something that Sacha and I will always treasure.
In fact, speaking of birth, my parents recently transferred all of their home movies onto DVDs and are going to send them to us. I hear that there is some footage of each of me and my siblings as infants. I can't wait to see it! I imagine that the kids will get a kick out of seeing me as a baby, too. Fun stuff!
Coming soon: a real eight-month letter for Rosie, once we have an Internet connection, and photos of our new place. We have been unpacking like maniacs! Now, to bed...
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Monday, November 28, 2011
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Home sweet home
I bet you can guess where we are sleeping tonight! We spent all day moving into our new house with the help of movers and family. We are filled with gratitude for all the help we received. It made the process quick and as easy as possible.
The kids are asleep and we are soon to be asleep. More to follow after we have a real Internet connection.
Night night!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
The kids are asleep and we are soon to be asleep. More to follow after we have a real Internet connection.
Night night!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:New house!
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Thankful
I am thankful on this Thanksgiving, and every day, for these guys and for my beautiful wife. And, for the boisterous Thanksgiving dinner we just attended with many family members and friends in attendance. Happy Thanksgiving!
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Comparison
Two kids, same fascination with the same wallet. First, Mateo at about 7 months old, and then Rosa just a few days ago. Cute!
Monday, November 21, 2011
Change is coming
We're moving to our new house this Saturday. Yes, right after Thanksgiving! We're going to have family in town who can help out and also spend time with the kids, so we decided that this was a good weekend to do it. We did decide to hire movers to do the loading and unloading and are very much looking forward to not having to maneuver all our furniture out of our tiny 1906-era doors.
All the logistical stuff aside, it feels very surreal to be leaving our current home. Aside from the two months we spent in an apartment when we first moved here in 2004, we have lived in this house for the entire time we've been in Portland. We looked at many, many houses before we decided on this one, and we knew it was our house within minutes, or even seconds, of walking in. We just knew that this was the one, and boy were we right. Not only has the house seen us grow in many ways, but the neighborhood around us has grown and changed, too. When we moved in, for better or worse, the neighborhood had just begun to gentrify and it was still pretty rough around the edges. If anything gave us pause when we first made the offer on this house, it was the crime statistics for the neighborhood.
Today, again, for better or worse, the neighborhood is like a different place. There are upscale shopping and restaurant-ing streets within a five to ten minute walk in opposite directions from our house. Most of the overt gang activity and crime has moved on (although not all of it), and many of the houses around us have been remodeled or at least repainted! I feel perfectly comfortable walking at night now, which is a nice thing to be able to say.
All this is to say that we have so loved living here. We have had some of the most eventful years of our lives here, having moved in as a newly married couple and moving out as a family of five! This house has been good to us, even with its 100-year-old maintenance issues. We have been cozy and comfortable here for a long time. Of course, there have been rough patches and things we didn't like about both the house and the neighborhood, but those have paled in comparison with the things we did like. I know we will love our new house and neighborhood, too, but I think we will always look back on this house with a healthy dose of nostalgia. A lot of good things have happened here.
When we first moved in and were checking things out, I went down to the then-unfinished basement and, for some reason, happened to look up at one of the beams. There, in permanent marker, the house's previous owners had written "Thank you, house. Love, J and J" I thought it was sweet at the time and I still do, now. This is my version of that. Thank you, house, for everything. We're going to miss you!
Here are some photos I took yesterday of the house as it looks right now, in transition between being lived in and being moved out of. I also got some great shots of the kids doing a very typical thing for them - huddling around the heating vent, completely naked. They love to be naked and they also love the heating vent. I think they are going to love having a real fireplace in the new house! Anyway, these photos may not be the most interesting, but I'm putting them here for posterity.
All the logistical stuff aside, it feels very surreal to be leaving our current home. Aside from the two months we spent in an apartment when we first moved here in 2004, we have lived in this house for the entire time we've been in Portland. We looked at many, many houses before we decided on this one, and we knew it was our house within minutes, or even seconds, of walking in. We just knew that this was the one, and boy were we right. Not only has the house seen us grow in many ways, but the neighborhood around us has grown and changed, too. When we moved in, for better or worse, the neighborhood had just begun to gentrify and it was still pretty rough around the edges. If anything gave us pause when we first made the offer on this house, it was the crime statistics for the neighborhood.
Today, again, for better or worse, the neighborhood is like a different place. There are upscale shopping and restaurant-ing streets within a five to ten minute walk in opposite directions from our house. Most of the overt gang activity and crime has moved on (although not all of it), and many of the houses around us have been remodeled or at least repainted! I feel perfectly comfortable walking at night now, which is a nice thing to be able to say.
All this is to say that we have so loved living here. We have had some of the most eventful years of our lives here, having moved in as a newly married couple and moving out as a family of five! This house has been good to us, even with its 100-year-old maintenance issues. We have been cozy and comfortable here for a long time. Of course, there have been rough patches and things we didn't like about both the house and the neighborhood, but those have paled in comparison with the things we did like. I know we will love our new house and neighborhood, too, but I think we will always look back on this house with a healthy dose of nostalgia. A lot of good things have happened here.
When we first moved in and were checking things out, I went down to the then-unfinished basement and, for some reason, happened to look up at one of the beams. There, in permanent marker, the house's previous owners had written "Thank you, house. Love, J and J" I thought it was sweet at the time and I still do, now. This is my version of that. Thank you, house, for everything. We're going to miss you!
Here are some photos I took yesterday of the house as it looks right now, in transition between being lived in and being moved out of. I also got some great shots of the kids doing a very typical thing for them - huddling around the heating vent, completely naked. They love to be naked and they also love the heating vent. I think they are going to love having a real fireplace in the new house! Anyway, these photos may not be the most interesting, but I'm putting them here for posterity.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
The Miracle of the Mason Jar
I don't know what made me think of this, but it came to mind recently and I thought I would share it.
We get some questions from people about how we went about creating our family, but Apa gets many more. When he tells people about our arrangement, they are inevitably fascinated and want to hear all about it. One question that he gets all the time and that we never get (although I'm sure people wonder) is whether he had, um, relations with us in order to conceive the kids. The answer to that one is a resounding no!
In fact, when we were trying for Mateo, we made several attempts that involved FedEx, a fancy kit that kept sperm alive for 36 hours, a centrifuge, and Sacha learning how to do an IUI at home. We had quite the little laboratory going for a few months there! We did all this because Apa lived across the country and we were saving the possibility of flying him out here for if things didn't work out the FedEx way. However, after about six months, nothing had happened, and so we made arrangements for him to visit the next time I would be ovulating.
This is where the Miracle of the Mason Jar story starts. Apa arrived in Portland and found us ready and waiting with every sterile thing we might possibly need. We had a sealed sterile cup, a sterile syringe, and that's all I can remember, but I'm sure there were other things. We were taking things very seriously and wanted everything to be perfect. As it turned out, we only had to fly Apa to us one time, because I got pregnant on that cycle and Mateo was born the next fall.
In the fullness of time, as my dad would say, and not very much time at that, we decided that we should start trying for child #2. This was when Mateo was about ten months old. We knew Sacha had irregular cycles and we thought it might take awhile for her to get pregnant, so we wanted to give ourselves plenty of time. As it happened, Sacha got pregnant right away and we ended up with kids 19 months apart! But, the funny part of it was how we handled the inseminations the second time around. We had decided to start off by having him visit us in person and then thought we would figure things out from there, depending on how long the process took.
As Apa likes to tell the story, he got off the plane, met me at the car, and I drove him to our house. Sacha was ovulating right then, so we needed to get things going that night. We didn't have any of the sterile equipment from the first time, and we were both sleep-deprived and much more experienced by that point anyway, so I had run the dishwasher through its sterilizing cycle and had left it open to dry while I went to the airport.
When we got home, I just handed Apa a mason jar out of the dishwasher and left him to do what he needed to do. He thought the whole thing was hilarious (sterile routine for the first time, mason jar out of the dishwasher for the second) and we have been laughing about it ever since. And, luckily for us, Tali was born just over nine months later. He told this whole story to my aunt one Christmas Eve and offhandedly dubbed the whole process "The Miracle of the Mason Jar," which we have been calling it ever since.
I think the funniest part of the whole thing is how we conceived Rosa, which took the Miracle of the Mason Jar to a whole new level. She was conceived on Orcas Island in the San Juans, where we were at camp and where Apa visited for the weekend to help conceive a baby, going totally above and beyond the call of duty! We brought the requisite mason jar, but had no dishwasher, no sterilizing, just hand soap from Apa's hotel and good, old-fashioned water to clean it with. By this time, we all knew quite well that this would be more than fine, and, in fact, our Rosie arrived just about nine months later, keeping The Miracle of the Mason Jar alive and well!
Now that we have our three kids, we'll have to retire the mason jar routine, but it served us extremely well and will remain a part of our family lore for many years to come.
We get some questions from people about how we went about creating our family, but Apa gets many more. When he tells people about our arrangement, they are inevitably fascinated and want to hear all about it. One question that he gets all the time and that we never get (although I'm sure people wonder) is whether he had, um, relations with us in order to conceive the kids. The answer to that one is a resounding no!
In fact, when we were trying for Mateo, we made several attempts that involved FedEx, a fancy kit that kept sperm alive for 36 hours, a centrifuge, and Sacha learning how to do an IUI at home. We had quite the little laboratory going for a few months there! We did all this because Apa lived across the country and we were saving the possibility of flying him out here for if things didn't work out the FedEx way. However, after about six months, nothing had happened, and so we made arrangements for him to visit the next time I would be ovulating.
This is where the Miracle of the Mason Jar story starts. Apa arrived in Portland and found us ready and waiting with every sterile thing we might possibly need. We had a sealed sterile cup, a sterile syringe, and that's all I can remember, but I'm sure there were other things. We were taking things very seriously and wanted everything to be perfect. As it turned out, we only had to fly Apa to us one time, because I got pregnant on that cycle and Mateo was born the next fall.
In the fullness of time, as my dad would say, and not very much time at that, we decided that we should start trying for child #2. This was when Mateo was about ten months old. We knew Sacha had irregular cycles and we thought it might take awhile for her to get pregnant, so we wanted to give ourselves plenty of time. As it happened, Sacha got pregnant right away and we ended up with kids 19 months apart! But, the funny part of it was how we handled the inseminations the second time around. We had decided to start off by having him visit us in person and then thought we would figure things out from there, depending on how long the process took.
As Apa likes to tell the story, he got off the plane, met me at the car, and I drove him to our house. Sacha was ovulating right then, so we needed to get things going that night. We didn't have any of the sterile equipment from the first time, and we were both sleep-deprived and much more experienced by that point anyway, so I had run the dishwasher through its sterilizing cycle and had left it open to dry while I went to the airport.
When we got home, I just handed Apa a mason jar out of the dishwasher and left him to do what he needed to do. He thought the whole thing was hilarious (sterile routine for the first time, mason jar out of the dishwasher for the second) and we have been laughing about it ever since. And, luckily for us, Tali was born just over nine months later. He told this whole story to my aunt one Christmas Eve and offhandedly dubbed the whole process "The Miracle of the Mason Jar," which we have been calling it ever since.
I think the funniest part of the whole thing is how we conceived Rosa, which took the Miracle of the Mason Jar to a whole new level. She was conceived on Orcas Island in the San Juans, where we were at camp and where Apa visited for the weekend to help conceive a baby, going totally above and beyond the call of duty! We brought the requisite mason jar, but had no dishwasher, no sterilizing, just hand soap from Apa's hotel and good, old-fashioned water to clean it with. By this time, we all knew quite well that this would be more than fine, and, in fact, our Rosie arrived just about nine months later, keeping The Miracle of the Mason Jar alive and well!
Now that we have our three kids, we'll have to retire the mason jar routine, but it served us extremely well and will remain a part of our family lore for many years to come.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Tree
This tree is right outside our new house. It is a huge Japanese maple and it is just glorious right now.
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