the other side of me

So my new camera has arrived. Along with it came some inspiration for my writing, so it’s best that I stop the long posts on times past for now and get back to work. It’s fitting that the last of the the “floppy” pictures I post is one of the last ones I took with the infamous Sony Mavica camera.

The summer of 2002, just a few months before B turned three, we took our first serious road trip. I - and I’m not sure how I convinced myself this was a good idea but I think I was high on the “indepedent divorcee” thing - packed up a used Jeep Cherokee that I’d just purchased to replace my 1974 VW Bug and drove from Tucson to Seattle, just me and an almost three year-old Mr. B.

The car over-heated the first day and blew some important pump, but we made it to Ridgecrest, California (the gateway to Death Valley, they say), where I luckily knew a mechanic who fixed my car at cost and got me back on the road. We made it to San Francisco, then Redding, then Portland, and then Seattle without incident (save one of my worst parenting moments in a parking lot in Portland).

We did a lot of great things in Seattle that year. My parents had just sold their house in the suburbs and moved into a fabulous condo downtown. We were walking distance to the market and the aquarium and Ivars and a short bus ride to the Seattle Center and other fun places. We even took a little trip to Snoqualmie Falls “The Island of Sodor” and met Thomas, Sir Top’em Hat, and others of Thomas’s friends. It was a fabulous time.

The last pictures, though, before I dropped the camera, were at the Woodland Park Zoo and this one has always been one of my favorites. I adore this kid and the picture captures many of the reasons he’s so special to me. How could you not love this guy?

Some of my favorite “firsts” follow.

Finding his thumb (little did I know, I’d rue the day years later when I had to get him to unfind it). January ‘00:

Learning to blow raspberries (which was much cuter when he wasn’t supposed to be eating). February ‘00:

Learning to crawl (and get into EVERYTHING). May ‘00:

And entirely too soon after that, he learned to walk. This has to be the source of the phrase, “Be careful what you wish for because it just might happen.” Life was never the same. June ‘00:

Four months after Baedyn was born, we moved from Rock Hill to Tucson. It was only late January and I wasn’t set to start graduate school until the fall, but we decided to get a head start and settle in long before that transition.

The move itself was rough. A snowstorm hit the week we left and made us continuously detour further and further south as we headed westward. I spent most of the ride sitting in the backseat of a 1997 Honda Civic with a carseat, a baby, and a staff. We arrived thinking it would be warm in Tucson (we were wrong) and had no heat or hot water for the first few nights. We had no furniture for the first week. You know those windows that the movers give? Well, for us, February 3rd-9th meant the ninth.

The first night we roughed it on the floor in sleeping bags. The second night we went to a hotel. On the third day we bought an air mattress. Sometime in those first few days we also bought the only other piece of “furniture” we would have until our things arrived - the Super Saucer. It was a life saver!

My midwife originally gave me a September 12th due date, but based on B’s growth at the 20 week ultrasound, she upped it to the 9th - 9/9/99 - saying they’d likely miscalculated.

The ninth of September rolled around, and then the twelfth. I was in agony and at my appointment on the 12th, I begged the midwife to induce me. She wouldn’t. She guessed that the baby was likely only 6 pounds, tops, and we’d give him a little more time to grow before he faced the world. Famous last words.

A week later, he was finally ready to make his grand entrance. My water broke in the middle of the night, more serious contractions started, and we were on our way to the hospital. With the water gone, it was easier for the midwife to gauge the baby’s size. Now she was guessing he was more like 8 pounds. Uh huh.

Twenty one hours later when I heard a nurse say, “We’ve got a linebacker here,” and another voice in the room start taking bets on if he was 11 or 12 or 13 pounds - I knew that he’d surpassed expectations.

Baedyn Elijah was born 9/19/99 at 12:45am weighing 9 pounds, 14 oz and 21 inches long, earning him the nickname - Ten Pound Brown.

Here he is at one week:

A lot of people ask about his name. We had four names picked out - a girl’s and a boy’s for each of us. Mine were Bayden Elijah and Julia Wisdom, Ben’s were Finnean Xavier and Alana Wren. We tossed coins. Ben got the girl, I got the boy. So when B was born, it was my call. But then, as we were filling out the birth certificate, we had a disagreement on how Baedyn should be spelled. Ben won that one.

Ever since I started here two years ago I’ve had the same desktop image - B being Marilyn Monroe. Today I decided to mix it up. I use the Cozi family scheduling tool and part of it’s very cool features is an automatically-generated, constantly changing, collage of photos and when one strikes you as particularly cool you can click “s” and send it to someone. So I sent myself this one and made it my desktop image:

My trip down memory lane continues with the story of Tiramisu - the cat, not the dessert.

You can’t really tell the story of Tira without starting with the story of Emma. Emma was my first pet as an adult, a beautiful light gray tabby that we brought home from the animal rescue. I will never ever forget the way she reached her paw out of the metal cage to pet my shirt. I knew that she was the one we were taking home.

Other than her incessant purring and the kneading of my hair while I tried to sleep, she was the perfect cat. She loved to play fetch with a little stuffed cow named Moo-Moo. She had absolutely no fear. She’d visit our neighbors and lived for chasing our neighbor’s beagle around the parking lot of the apartment building.

When I went to leave for a semester in England in January of 1997, she was nowhere for be found. Every time I called home I would ask Ben if he’d seen her and every time he’d sigh and say he was sorry, but he thought she’d run away. I came back that summer and I would walk the neighborhood looking for her. I was pitiful.*

My friend Kelly, another exchange student who I’d met in England, took pity on me and brought over one of her new kittens to replace Emma. I named that kitten Tiramisu, after my favorite dessert from a restaurant near Nene, where Kelly and I had studied. And so began my life with Tira.

She was the opposite of Emma. She hid in the bread basket on the fridge most of the day, only coming out to use the litterbox or eat. She didn’t like people. She didn’t sleep with us or play with us. She just existed. She played with Athena, the ferret, a bit. She also got the passenger seat in the Honda Civic when we moved to Arizona, while I shared the back seat with a carseat and a magical staff - not my most comfortable four days.

In retrospect I feel bad for Tira as it was impossible to live up to Emma’s legacy, but she always was a part of our family. I would love to have a cat like her today. After all, I’ve got a kid to bother me while I try to sleep or to play fetch and chase dogs. Now I long for a quiet soul like hers.

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* It is worth noting here, too, that this was a benevolent fib on Ben’s part, as Emma had been mauled by a dog, dragged herself to our front step, and when Ben found her he took her to the vet to have her put down. He returned home to destroy all evidence. I only found this out when I accidentally killed his ferret three years later.

The bad news is that my camera drowned.

The good news is 1) that I found a great deal on the same camera and it is SLOWLY on its way via free shipping, and 2) that I have all those photos I downloaded from floppies to keep us company as we wait.

So here’s the first in the walk-down-memory-lane collection. This is the first house B’s dad and I ever lived in - 526 Union Ave. in Rock Hill, South Carolina if anyone is interested in visiting.

We lived in an apartment a few blocks away and we’d drive by this house occasionally and every, single time I would say, I want to live in that house. If it went up for sale, we’d buy it. If it was available to rent, we’d move. Imagine my sheer and utter surprise (and JOY!) when one day we drove by and there was a for rent sign in the yard. We called that day.

The rent was steep for us - $600 a month. - but we filled out an application anyway. And we waited, and waited, and waited. It seemed like an eternity. Of course that could have also been because I was enrolled in a summer school Logic class with Houston Craighead at the time and that made the month drag. At any rate, we got it. Man I loved that house. We both did. It exuded something.

One day we were exploring the attic and we found a street sign that said Goodplace. We pulled the sign out of the attic and hung it in the halllway and, from there on out, that’s what we called the house. Lots of wonderful things happened there, including the arrival of Mr. B. It certainly lived up to its name and we were very sad to have to leave it when we moved to Arizona.

Baedyn and I drove by last summer when I was in town and it looked so small. I hadn’t noticed how life gets bigger with time. Don’t get me wrong, I would move there in a second if my life would allow it - it’s still Goodplace. It’s just that life has changed so much in the last ten years and I hadn’t quite realized how much so until I saw Goodplace again.

Omar’s idea of celebrating:

And mine:

It’s hard for my students to believe that I ever skipped class, offered lame excuses, pretended to have read, or toyed with margins. They can’t imagine that I know what it’s like to go to school full-time, or to work, or to have a life outside of classes.

Last week, as I was searching for a different piece of history, I stumbled across this gem. Look at me. I actually was an undergrad once. I didn’t make that (or any insights I gleamed from that experience) up:

It’s been a busy weekend around here, but I haven’t documented it with pictures. B leaves tomorrow for some time with his dad and extended family in South Carolina and we’ve been stocking up on time together. Some of the things we’ve done - without my camera - have been:

A Mario Kart party:

A walk around St. Joseph lake on Notre Dame’s campus (we were hoping to rent a paddle boat, but they were closed):

And a Silverhawks game at The Cove on a beautiful spring day: