Cage Free Family

I think this was the very best Thanksgiving evah.
So many things to be grateful for that I wouldn't know where to begin the list.
This year I am just so happy to be here with my family. I'm so happy to have the rest of my life still to live... to see my children's faces, to compare their eye colors, to hug and kiss them and know that I will be here to care for them.

Everything seems to be glowing these days... so sacred... so precious...

We're living the most simplified version of our life; the worries and plans put aside.
Even the big meal seemed to come off at an easy leisurely pace despite it's gourmet components.
Jeff and I have been cooking Thanksgiving for 10 years, working out the menu as we've gone. Each year we've repeated only what dishes were absolutely lovely and tried something new for those that weren't just right.
I think we've finally got it. Every single thing was so delightfully perfect that I can't remember a better meal.
This year we applied the Zuni kitchen method to our turkey and were blown away with the results. The Bird was so flavorful and looked like something of a magazine spread with it's crispy, deep mahogany colored skin. The gravy was even better. It was flavored by all the fresh herbs, as well as the white wine I added to the cast iron skillet we roasted it in, and was the same deep dark color of the turkey. Oh, so yummy on the turkey and the potatoes. Our next favorite was a recipe we've been using since 1999, a Pinot Noir spiked cranberry sauce spiced with crystallized ginger, curry and Chinese 5 Spice powder. Heaven.
With that we had Sausage, Apple and Cranberry Stuffing and green beans almondine.
And topped it off with the cherry pie we froze a few weeks ago.
Neeka ran commentary on the meal with an endless stream of "delicious" and "so good".

Unfortunately, Jeff got to clean up her meal later that night because it turns out she was harboring a stomach/intestinal virus that was to rear it's ugly head around 1am. Today she's eating her turkey in broth form. Luckily, Jeff started a stock with the turkey bones before going to bed last night. Her fever is hovering around 101, but she's in good spirits and drinking plenty. I don't think Nichola has slowed down this much since she was Simone's age though. She's slept most of the day, poor baby.
Please send her some healing thoughts if you would.

Truthfully, my favorite thing about Thanksgiving day is that it means that Christmas trees and garland, carols and popcorn balls, paper snowflakes and twinkly lights are just around the corner.
Though I worry that gifts will spoil the fact that our kids play happily for hours a day without ever picking up a "real toy," we are doing a few gifts this year. About a week ago Quinn and Nichola picked through their shelves, which hold the toys that we had on the RV with us, and put a good number of them in a box to donate in town. Though I am truly delighted that they can play imaginative games for a half hour with just a stack of baby hats, I feel good about the gifts this year.
Some of their favorite games center around the theme of cooking. They play restaurant and tea party, coffee shop and kitchen, utilizing props they make of paper and crayons, blocks and other things they find around the house. So, Shhhhh, don't tell: we're getting them a wooden kitchen set with pots, and plates, and wooden food.

Normally I don't care that much for the gifting part of Christmas, but I am excited for them this year. I feel like watching them play without their playroom full of toys (the ones that were donated back in Austin) has really allowed me (and I think them) to learn what they really like. In the past, Christmas was filled with endless gifts of plastic toys and other things that would wind up broken or untouched within a few days. Every year they would run out of enthusiasm for opening the mounds of gifts before they could all be unwrapped. It never felt right and I'm so glad to have taken a stand against that consumerist crap and found our ways to a simpler more abundant time of enjoying what we really dig about the holiday.

I'll leave you with a tid bit of a conversation held in the Target bathroom some months ago:

Quinn to me: Why is there so much stuff here?
Me: Because it's a store, Baby.
Quinn: No, I mean why is there so much junk from China and other places? What is it doing here?? Why is there so much of it?? It's all going to break really fast. I can tell.

He's one smart cookie.

Did you know??

Simone was born on 11-17
Jeff was born on 11-19
and Quinn was born on 11-20

All a few days before Thanksgiving!

It's a busy week!!

It is amazing how fully and immediately she became necessary in my world.

How a year ago I could not imagine who she would be, and very much less, how she was to fit into our lives, and what our lives would become at her urging.

I know this: Every new gift in our lives, our home, everything, is because of her. Because she said, Now.
I know this: At the moment I laid eyes on her I could no longer accept the world as whole without her.

I'm still processing, reliving, integrating the story of her birth. Two things, two points stand out equally to me and I am working to reassign their importance more correctly.

I had the birth experience that I wanted.... needed.

Free from assistance I delivered her into my own hands, in my own home, in front of the fire, in a world blanketed in snow.

Into my own hands.

I heard no instruction, only what my body told me to do.
My own knees held me in support as I delivered and lifted her into my arms... as I checked to see that she was a she. I rested in the pool as she nursed for the first time... All of her first moments happened just between the two of us. Belonged just to us.

I am woman. Hear me roar! ;-)

The second part of the story of her birth is what I am working to integrate... to understand. To accept how I could have manifested it, and to release the fear that it produced.
Some time after she was born, when we were settled into our bed and getting ready for sleep I began to hemorrhage. Nothing on hand was working rapidly enough to escape the 911 call. In the 10 minutes it took for EMS to arrive a team of midwives worked fast and hard. Painful shots of powerful drugs, IVs, manual removal of clotting blood and an angel of a midwife who used her hands to do what my body would not... contracting, contracting, contracting. More than 4x the normal blood loss.
She saved my life. K, if you're reading, Thank you.

I was perfect before we reached the hospital 15 minutes later.
I bypassed ER and was admitted straight to a private room in the delivery ward where my sweet new girl was placed back in my arms from the arms of the Daddy she never left. There we slept together until the sun set, and I met the doctor that would send us back home with a smile and assurance.

Home. Where we have been, hunkered down, together... ever since.
As if it where possible, these walls are now filled with more love... more peace... more in general.

Simone and I are living in the bed for the next couple of weeks while I recover. Though I am a busy-body at heart, and it pains me to be so still when I want to run through the world shouting, "Look at my beautiful girl!", it is a very sweet time. We watch the postcard like scene of wooded mountains change in the moving sun... dozing, nursing, visiting with Quinn and Nichola, gazing at each other in equal wonder. It's blissful. Really.
I'm spoiled anyhow. Placenta smoothie for lunch ;-) Yes, it's vitally important, and it tastes like berries, I swear! Meals and massages in bed. Dinner tonight was Steak, loaded baked potato and trout stuffed with garlic and herbs and served in a white wine reduction. Yes, Jeff Can Cook!

I'll leave you with this little funny:

Me to Nichola: Do you know who that is, Baby?
Nichola: It's our baby... my sister.
Me: Do you know her name?
Nichola: No. Yes. Baby.
Me: Her name is Simone.
Nichola: Oh, I don't like that name. I like Nichola.

:-)

I don't really have any pictures this time, but Jeff took this one a few days ago.
There it is!
I've become a spectacle in town.
Tourists point. Yes, seriously.

Locals hug, pray and crack jokes.
If this keeps up they're going to start taking bets!

So lets all say a big "Buh-bye" to the belly together... and hope that I have pictures of a baby to share with you soon instead. Going full term in uncomfortable enough... going over just stinks.

Around here WE ARE READY. I keep making promises to the baby, but so far s/he isn't taking the bait.

Light some candles... send some labor vibes... whatever ya got!

xoxo

We made soy candles tonight!
What a truly satisfying task.
We've been hauling around 10 pounds of soy wax for 2 years and never did get around to making the candles.
There was a time, before we left Austin, where we did not use electric lights much, opting for candles instead. We bought the wax to save money on this expense, but were a little intimidated - I guess.

Now, at a place where we are unwilling to pay for things that we can make, we finally had to do it.
I have always wanted to have candles during the labor and delivery of my kids, but it has never quite worked out. This time I was dang determined and we finally did it.

All it took was a pack of the kids used crayons, some soy wax, wicks, a straw, some chopsticks, a metal bucket from the hardware store, and a bunch of old glass jars we saved from honey and tomato sauce. Voila... candles!

I think the total cost to us was about $1.00 per candle. Major savings, ya'll. ;-)
I highly recommend this little venture.

In other news; Nichola has left behind the diapers just in time for me to start washing diapers for the new baby - WahooooOooo!
Quinn is beginning to read chapter books.
Jeff successfully made a water pump to empty the birth pool using the old water pump from our RV, some old hoses and a car battery. SO handy... I think I'll keep him ;-)
Our friend Ben (who took the pictures for the NYT article) is on his way to our little abode toting our much missed boxes of books, a camera (or two), and a photojournalism degree to assist in capturing the beauty of intervention-free birth.
Yep, there will be pictures of the new baby very soon.
And it seems that winter has been chased back by some lovely autumn weather.

Fun times!

xoxo