Happy Memorial Day!

8 weeks: Baths, Smiles & Swaddles

Thursdays at Grammie and Papa Al's house.

Juniper finally reaps the benefits of a good swaddle.

Bathtime's lots of fun.

Juni & Daddy.

Smiles in the morning.

The girl who stole our hearts.

Miss Squiggles

Andy says you can set this video to any music you'd like and it works. 

So pump up the volume, baby. 

What Juni Does When Mom's Away

Last week was one of major change for Juniper. I went back to work. Andy began his experience as a stay-at-home Dad two days a week. Juniper began her weekly Thursday sojourns to Grammie and Grampie's house in the 'burbs. And she met Raluca & Marius, her caretakers for the other two days a week. As if that wasn't enough, Juni also had her immunization shots so she can explore the world freely without worry of catching the plague.

Sadly, the shots don't protect her from everything, and the weekend was overshadowed by a minor stomach virus on Saturday. Guess what Mom (& Dad) got for her first Mother's Day!? Needless to say, we were all pooped! Bad-dum-chi! (Drum noise to accent bad joke -- sleep deprivation makes life so much more interesting!) We were still able to visit with Susie & Al on Sunday, who made a delicious meal for us. What a lovely gift. Yay! Happy Family. Zzzzzz. What was I saying? 

Anyway, here's some Juni shots to make your day beautiful (and a mommy back at work, cry).

The perfect Spring day

Her first day at daycare. Image courtesy of Raluca & Marius.

Her second day at daycare. Yay! Smiley baby! Image courtesy of Raluca & Marius.

Belly aches aren't any fun. 

Sleepy Mom's Day snuggles. 

On Being a Mom by Anna Quindlen

In prep for Mother's Day, I put a call out on Facebook for great poetry about being a parent or a child. A lovely friend came back with this essay and told me how much it helped her through the newborn "boot camp" years. Enjoy.

On Being A Mom
By Anna Quindlen


All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. Itake great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like. Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves.

Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.

Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton., Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, all grown obsolete. Along with "Goodnight Moon" and "Where the Wild Things Are," they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories.

What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations --what they taught me was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all.

Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One boy is toilet trained at 3, his brother at 2. When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow.

I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month-old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China. Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too.

Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the Remember-When-Mom-Did Hall of Fame. The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language - mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, What did you get wrong? (She insisted I
include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons. What was I thinking?

But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.

Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity.

That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.

March 25th, 2014 at 6:14pm

Juniper Maya Rohr's first moments. 

Juniper Maya Rohr was born at home 12 days past her due date and after 23 hours of labor. She arrived weighing 7 pounds, 12 ounces, and measuring 20 inches long. She is a strong, healthy baby with a perfect round head and a beautiful, bold cry that rips our hearts apart every time we hear it. 

On her name: 

The name Juniper came from a dream Andy had one evening several years before we were married. He said he saw our daughter running down a hallway. He yelled after her "Juniper!" and so it became the name we used to regularly refer to the daughter we might have one day, until the day came that we were ready for her to join us. And so she has. 

Selecting her second name was more involved. One day in looking at Hebrew names (in anticipation of her naming), we came across the name Maya (or Maayan) which means "brook" or "spring." As we looked into the name more carefully, we found that Maya has a great number of meanings across many faiths and cultures: Divine Goddess, mother of Buddha, power and wisdom, spirit, magic, sleep, and so on. We had a few middle names selected prior to this discovery and my last name thrown into the mix, making for an exhaustingly long name. I kept having the vision of Juniper struggling to write out all of her names, and later in life becoming frustrated by the lack of focus in our choice. One day, on my way home from work, I kept thinking "Juniper Maya Rohr" until suddenly I found myself crying. A sign I couldn't ignore. It was so beautiful and simple, so fitting. I ran home to Andy and a week before she arrived, we settled on her name. 

On Children by Kahlil Gibran

On Children
Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Little Sleep's-Head: Poem from Pregnancy

When I was pregnant, and feeling all of the potential joys and fears of being a parent, I stumbled upon this magical, dark, sad, and lovely poem. It articulates so much about the cost of loving another as a parent loves a child. Try to read it without crying. I dare you.  

Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight, Galway Kinnell

1

You scream, waking from a nightmare.

When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.

2

I have heard you tell
the sun, don’t go down, I have stood by
as you told the flower, don’t grow old,
don’t die. Little Maud,

I would blow the flame out of your silver cup,
I would suck the rot from your fingernail,
I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light,
I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones,
I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body,
I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood,
I would let nothing of you go, ever,

until washerwomen
feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands,
and hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades,
and rats walk away from the cultures of the plague,
and iron twists weapons toward the true north,
and grease refuses to slide in the machinery of progress,
and men feel as free on earth as fleas on the bodies of men,
and lovers no longer whisper to the presence beside them in the
dark, O corpse-to-be …

And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry,
this the nightmare you wake screaming from:
being forever
in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.

3

In a restaurant once, everyone
quietly eating, you clambered up
on my lap: to all
the mouthfuls rising toward
all the mouths, at the top of your voice
you cried
your one word, caca! caca! caca!
and each spoonful
stopped, a moment, in midair, in its withering
steam.

Yes,
you cling because
I, like you, only sooner
than you, will go down
the path of vanished alphabets,
the roadlessness
to the other side of the darkness,

your arms
like the shoes left behind,
like the adjectives in the halting speech
of old men,
which once could call up the lost nouns.

4

And you yourself,
some impossible Tuesday
in the year Two Thousand and Nine, will walk out
among the black stones
of the field, in the rain,

and the stones saying
over their one word, ci-gît, ci-gît, ci-gît,

and the raindrops
hitting you on the fontanel
over and over, and you standing there
unable to let them in.

5

If one day it happens
you find yourself with someone you love
in a café at one end
of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar
where white wine stands in upward opening glasses,

and if you commit then, as we did, the error
of thinking,
one day all this will only be memory,

learn,
as you stand
at this end of the bridge which arcs,
from love, you think, into enduring love,
learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come – to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
the mouth
which tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

6

In the light the moon
sends back, I can see in your eyes

the hand that waved once
in my father’s eyes, a tiny kite
wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:

and the angel
of all mortal things lets go the string.

7

Back you go, into your crib.

The last blackbird lights up his gold wings: farewell.
Your eyes close inside your head,
in sleep. Already
in your dreams the hours begin to sing.

Little sleep’s-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,
when I come back
we will go out together,
we will walk out together among
the ten thousand things,
each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages
of dying is love.

Eight and a half months pregnant.
Portrait by friend Jordan Schulman. 

Five Weeks

The sudden occurrence of eyelashes

A visit with Caterpillar