Last month of the year

This poor post will carry the weight of the entire month, and yet will be published in January.  This is likely to be the fate of this poor blog. Perhaps Tertius' arrival will change that. But I do not blog very much, or tweet very much, anymore.  Do you know what I do now? I Marco Polo my closest women friends, and I write fanfiction.  I have been quite prolific at both of those occupations this month. 

Here are the other things we did this month. 

We celebrated Advent at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Brighton, which has become our home church.  I taught Children's Chapel twice.

On the second Sunday of Advent, as is our tradition, we picked out our tree.  Gro-Moore's being closed (lamentations abound), we went to Powers Farm Market in Pittsford. They had the advantage of being a proper farm that also has animals!

We add the ornaments during Advent III

I also got to check out the ROC Holiday village before Christmas this year! Ok, we still just went ice skating and did not do any of the other myriad activities the event actually offers.  We have to leave something for the future, after all; we plan to be living here for roughly forever now. 

The kids have made massive improvements in their skating abilities! Miles can just about always go without his little skate helper. On the earlier trip, Adele was not able to go without it, but as of Tuesday the 31st, she can! 

There's been quite a lot of snow in December . . . until Christmas, at which point we had a violent thaw and it's stayed green to this day. But it was gorgeous while it lasted.

December 7th we went to the RH Singers Pancake Breakfast, which is our new tradition.  I love having local events to attend every year; in each place we've lived, we've found splendid new traditions like this.  I love this one because it's in my high school cafeteria, it's less than a mile from home, we get to hear that year's crop of RH Singers do some songs from their carol book, we can see Santa and get photos, pay less than we would in a mall for the experience, and money all goes to RH Singers' budget. 

Miles' Winter Concert was December 18. He did a great job playing French horn and singing in the choir.  They did A Whole New World, which was a bizarre throwback to my 5th grade year, when the first Aladdin was released and we were all obsessed with the soundtrack.  

On the Solstice, we invited friends to the house for dinner, spiced wine, and rainbow flames in the fire pit. It was glorious.  

The Soule family and Allie were there for the fire, and Chris & Jackson joined the party for dinner.  A perfect way to celebrate the shortest, darkest day: light that we make ourselves.  

Advent III

Adele's artistry only increases 

I was a narrator for the Christmas Pageant again.  Miles was Joseph again.  But in a new turn of events, Adele got to play Mary!

She's been gunning for that role for years, but she's always been too small and short.  This year, they were the most believable Holy Family ever in some ways, because of all the sotto voce bickering they were doing almost throughout the pageant. 

Just before Christmas, Jon was diagnosed with pneumonia!  He was feeling fairly terrible on Christmas Eve, so the kids and I went to the Nickoloff's for Christmas Eve dinner (Jon still prepared pozole and tamales as usual! bless him). We enjoyed the Christmas Eve service at South Wedge Mission, as is becoming another tradition.  And the kids, as we have done for many years now, posed for a Christmas photo.

At home, they wore their new pajamas for bed and wrote their letters to Father Christmas.

Christmas Day

Photo of Miles & Adele after discovering that they  unknowingly got each other the same gift for Christmas.

Adele's artistic ventures have been fabulous lately! If you see us, ask about her "Parents As--" series 

At Christmas, I was almost 35 weeks pregnant. 

If you're wondering, I'm feeling sore, tired, short of breath, weak, and generally unfit for most physical things.  When I can get enough sleep, I'm usually pretty happy, particularly now that I've gotten my to-do list nearly done for the baby's arrival. I pushed myself rather a lot over the break to get the laundry and shopping done, and to keep up with the family's laundry as well.  This was very successful, and I even had some time to relax and play the new Nintendo Switch we got for Christmas.  I'm falling back in love with Dr. Mario. 

At this point, there are just a few purchases left to make.  The car seat is installed, everything is assembled, and we're just waiting.  I'm back at work, and will remain at work until labor starts.  However, as walking is increasingly physically hard, and as I'm increasingly sore and breathless, I'm a bit more impatient for labor to start than I was with the others.  It's been a blast.  And now I'm ready, and now I'm done.  So, I'm going to try to add as many social experiences as I can in the next weeks. I'll need some help passing the time. 

We did a reprise of our ROC Holiday Village visit on Tuesday!  I didn't realize there were musical instruments near the murals at Manhattan Square:

I watched. I wouldn't trust myself even to walk on ice just now (besides, putting on SOCKS is a challenge these days). It's a little sad for me, because I love ice skating.  But I will have, I hope, many many years in which to use my own skates, and only just now to be on the crest of this miracle. 

All in all, it was really a perfect end to a year which has been decidedly mixed.  Last year at this time we had just had the second of our three miscarriages, and I was recovering from the second surgery.  I'm at almost the one-year anniversary of having begun my fanfic (ask me, if you want to read it.  HP fans only), and I think I'm about four chapters from finishing it.  

This morning, I applied for my NYS teaching certificate, having finally met the requirements, after about 13 months of hard work.  

I think I need to keep up with blogging more, if only because it helps one to see how very much one has done with one's time.

Here we go, 2020.

Welcoming The Strongest Baby In These Islands

On November 23rd, Leah & Agnes threw us the perfect shower to welcome Tertius.  Everything about it felt right.  It was held at one of the Henrietta Town Park cabins, the scene of countless church, school, and social events I've attended.  My department at RIT even held a day of meetings there once.  That wood paneling and I go way back.  

 The theme of the shower was woodland animals, perfect for a baby whose gender is unknown, born to parents who hate the overly cutesy and gendered.  We had a mixed gender, family friendly shower, because the baby belongs to both of us, and because we want to see and celebrate with everyone!

 I loved having children there to celebrate with us! 

Kids fill out the trivia activities for a bribe prize!

 So many close friends came, people whose company I've been enjoying so much since I moved home, came to share in our joy. 

Sarah even let me cuddle her baby for kind of a long time. Bliss. 

We filled the tables with simple, classic games to give people something familiar and friendly to do.  

There was strong family representation!

I wanted to throw a party, not just a shower.  

Family resemblance much? 

Leah knew just what to put on the cake! 

basically the vibe in the second half.  

 We received so many perfect gifts, from adorable clothes to a car seat & stroller to toys, books, a carrier, and other necessary bits which we needed! I'm so so grateful. 

Adele took a lot of gorgeous portraits!  

So much joy. I still can't believe I'm home. 

Fall 2019 in Review

This has been a beautiful fall. 



This will not be a terribly literary blog entry.  I'm trying very hard to keep some sort of presence on here, particularly as I'd like to be able to look back on Tertius' early days in some other way than in scrolling on my Instagram.  But it hasn't been easy!  I finally bit the bullet and just bought some google storage, because after 15 years with this email address I've really just run out of space!  For a long time I was not able to update.  I ruthlessly chucked out photos and videos and documents but to no avail. So I hope that by bribing the evil empire, I will be allowed to continue to document our little family doings here; I'm too old and too tired to transfer to another medium! 

Autumn is the only season that I think Rochester does better than any other state I've lived in.  The colors are more vivid, the chill comes sooner, and the bite in the air feels real and invigorating where elsewhere it has often felt muted to me.  Look at this crimson! (No filter)

The kids continue their silly, creative selves.  I'm often astonished to find how much they really still like each other.  They're the best of friends:

And we're so pleased to be New Yorkers at last, and (I fervently hope) for good.  Just the other day Adele said, "if we'd never moved here, I'd never have met all my friends!" I'm fairly sure she'd have made friends wherever we ended up; she's got a great deal of social efficacy. But I'm so glad to think she's happy here that I won't tell her that.

I'm 32 weeks pregnant at the moment! Here I am at 25 weeks;

At the end of October, we attended Ithaca's Wizarding Weekend. What a blast for a family of nerds and their HP fan friend Norah from church:

There was a Quidditch workshop and a scrimmage!  

The Dinos got up to their usual antics for DiNovember:

We observed Halloween properly with pumpkin carving & neighborhood trick-or-treating. Miles went as Jason Grace from some of his Rick Riordan books (one of the spin-offs of the Percy Jackson series):

Adele went as Captain Marvel, complete with Flerken.  She's a huge CM fan: 

I wore my traditional Halloween maternity shirt, made in 2011 for Adele. I was rather bigger last time I wore it . . .

In news that really deserves its own post, Jon finished his dissertation and defended it in October.  He got his taxidermy tattoo after he passed his defense.  He expects his diploma sometime in December! 

It's been a long road since he started at Virginia Tech in 2010. Miles had just learned to walk when he began.  It feels appropriate  that he's finished just before the birth of this, our third child. 

Finally, my darling Adele has turned 8! She continues to be independent, opinionated, social, intelligent, a voracious reader and a passionate lover of animals.  She cannot wait to become a big sister, but I'm not sure how I'll ever stop thinking of her as my baby.  

Coming soon: pictures from our November 23rd Baby Shower!

The Strongest Baby in These Islands

Well, hello.  It's been a while.

I haven't gone so long between posts since I started this blog in 2008. There are several reasons for this.  For one thing, I've moved home to Rochester, and I kept this blog at least in part so that people in Rochester could keep up with us.  I'm now seeing a lot of the people I was trying to keep in touch with on the regular!  Of course, there are other readers in other states, and there are other reasons I haven't kept up with the blog.

For another thing, in transitioning to a new state and a new job, we've been focusing on building that new life.  And, I've started writing in a new vein in the past six months with my multi-chapter fanfiction project 😁 so that's been getting a lot of my creative energy.

But the main reason, honestly, that I haven't been keeping up with the blog? I didn't feel like writing about the three back-to-back miscarriages I had in the last year.  I still don't feel like writing about it at length, to be honest.  This seems uncharacteristic. I want to write and talk about everything, in the main.  I can't explain it, I just felt I wanted to hide and lick my wounds after each successive loss.  Each time I become pregnant (in August 2018, in November 2018, and in January, 2019), I would plan to write a blog entry announcing the pregnancy, and each time my plans would be dashed.  Each time I went in for an ultrasound and learned that the heartbeat had stopped, or that there had never been a heartbeat to begin with, I was crushed. And yet, the last thing I wanted to do was share this with the outside world.

I had to do what I had to do to cope with last year, and I don't regret taking a year off blogging.  My closest friends knew, and that was enough for me.  And I need to give a shout out to those people who knew what I was going through and who let me do what I needed to do to cope with it.  They listened to me, they sent me gifts, they invited me over, they let me lean on them when I was hobbling and cheered me on when I recovered my steps.  I am profoundly grateful for my friends and family this year.

In 2018-2019, Jon worked at Geneseo, I worked at RIT and for VIP Kid; Miles went to fourth grade; Adele, first.  I will post a few entries with summaries of the seasons we've spent getting accustomed to life in Rochester.  But today is for some good news that couldn't wait any longer.  I'm finally confident enough to say that we're expecting baby number three in late January or early February! I'm twenty weeks pregnant today.

(Oh, yes, by the way, Dad got married to Agnes McClear this August.  It's been an eventful year).

Anyway, say hello!

The children are SO excited.  Below is a video of them finding out about their brother or sister in July.

I had so many hopes for the third pregnancy.  There is a helpful saying, after all, that the third time's the charm.  It seemed a fortuitous number.  When I lost the third baby I was crushed.  But when the fourth pregnancy proved different, I wondered.  Where did I remember the 4th iteration of something being successful?  And it hit me.

The fourth one stayed.  So, may I present, The Strongest Baby in These Islands.

We will not be finding out the gender before birth! Sorry/not sorry! As, it's probably our last time at this and we want to savor one more surprise.

We usually give our babies the names of Lost Boys before they're born.  Miles was Tootles, and Adele, Pockets.  But we used Slightly last fall, and Nibs in the Spring, and we weren't having twins and Curly makes me think of the Three Stooges.  So this one is dubbed Tertius, for Third. However, you should know that Miles is calling his tiny sibling "Trillion" and Adele is calling it "Sharkey." I'm still not sure why.

I hope to resume blogging at least twice a month now that we will again have the fast-changing landscape of pregnancy and infancy ahead of us.  Stay tuned!