Originally published at Michael and Jaspenelle. Please leave any comments there.

In these last few days before the arrival of our second child arrives, I have been looking at the early photos of Damian and rereading his birth story. He has grown so much in these past 17 months, I’m in awe. This is one of my favorite, he is just a couple days old here, he is definitely still Daddy’s little man.

Damian is standing beside me at the moment making lion noises (rwar, rwar, RWAR!) while holding his stuffed lion, which was assisting me in the tickle attack on Damian a few minutes ago. He has been such a big help lately, his developmental milestones being closer to that of a two-year-old. He helps me unload the dishwasher, put his clothes and diapers away, sweep (okay, he TRIES to sweep, good enough for me.) Damian’s greatest help as of late though is that he seems to understand that I am tired a lot and he will just crawl in my lap and relax and nap with me. I haven’t a doubt that he will be a fantastic brother but I do anticipate a bit of confusion in the beginning, as he is so use to my undivided attention.

All the birth supplies that I can prepare are ready and in a storage bin in our bedroom, all the newborn supplies are in their proper place too, clothes in the dresser, cloth diapers rewashed and stacked in the changing table, breastfeeding supplies in a bag (Lansinoh is my breast friend.) As much as the baby companies would like you to think otherwise, newborns really don’t need much. Well, that isn’t exactly true, they need a ton, they need your attention, your joy, your deepest love… and a heck of a lot of diaper changes.

I feel as ready for this birth as I can be and I know Michael is too. People tend to downplay the role of their partners during labor but I know I could not have gotten through Damian’s natural birth without Michael’s support (and the constant pressure of his hands on my lower back.) I truly believe he worked just as hard as I did and he will again for this baby’s birth. However, as ready for her arrival as I am, I know she will not come one moment sooner then her own schedule dictates. I just wish I could peek into her day planner!

Originally published at Michael and Jaspenelle. Please leave any comments there.

This past Saturday my friend Andrea held a Blessingway for me. It was so much fun to get together with my women friends and celebrate this pregnancy. Andrea took all these lovely photos of the occasion and there are more in a set on my flickr account.

After indulging in lots of delicious fruit (quite possibly one of the shortest ways to my heart,) opening a few lovely gifts and chatting it up, my friends did a belly cast on me. I don’t think I stopped laughing the entire time, with maybe a couple squeals from cold water running down my side (which was quickly rewarmed and the bowl placed on a heating pad.) Michael and Damian watched. Michael was as vastly amused as I was which was a comfort to Damian who was rather perplexed by what was going on.

I am undecided what I am going to paint on it and probably will not get to it until Ivy arrives either way. I am thinking maybe some design with lunar moths as they have been so prevalent in my dreams during this pregnancy (as have coyotes and shooting stars for that matter.) I have a feeling the birth will inspire me as to the design.

It was an exceptionally wonderful day and am reminded once again of how very blessed I am to have the friends that I do. I love you all.

Originally published at Michael and Jaspenelle. Please leave any comments there.

“In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.”

Several years ago, maybe when I was still in Spain, I saw this photo somewhere. It is of a soldier cradling an Iraqi child who was wounded in a suicide bombing. Every time I think of war this photo comes to mind instantly no matter what war is being discussed and it twists my heart and stomach into all kinds of knots. It reminds me that war touches everyone, from those who chose to go into harm’s way, through the most helpless who must survive its madness. I don’t need to witness war to have my dreams affected by it’s horror or know that it is ugly and brutal.

I hope that one day humans will reach a point where we no longer think that war is needed to protect peace. I think that the word’s of Eleanor Roosevelt reflect my desire for lasting peace most clearly, “When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?” Unfortunately I know that today is not that day so instead I send love and support to those who have and must endure war, both civilian and military and pray for an end to the violence for all.

Originally published at Michael and Jaspenelle. Please leave any comments there.

“I hope she falls, breaks her neck, becomes bedridden, gains hundreds of pounds, dies alone and burns in Hell.” — from my last entry

Wow, I can get pretty specific when I am upset can’t I? But you know what, that woman is not worth that much of my energy mental energy when I have so many wonderful things to focus on.

Today is beautiful and I am beautiful.

Originally published at Michael and Jaspenelle. Please leave any comments there.

A woman said something to me when I was at the park with Damian this morning that really hurt. I was sitting down for a minute to catch my breath after a Braxton Hicks (false contraction) and some woman just came up to me and informed me that I should get up and chase him around to loose “all that extra weight you’re packing and set a healthy example.”

Maybe I just look fat rather then pregnant in the Winter coat but that is no reason for her to have said that! I am measuring exactly where I am suppose to for this pregnancy. How is what she said even remotely helpful? Was it suppose to motivating? So bizarre form of tough love? Was she just trying to randomly hurt the feelings of a stranger? She succeeded in that last one.

I don’t understand how people can be so heartless, I’ve never had someone be so out-of-the-blue cruel to me before. I was having such a shitty morning and went to the park because it makes me feel better and I feel she stole that from me, and I let her. I’m angry that I feel this way and that the only thing I could sputter out was “What the hell is wrong with you?” and she shrugged smiled and walked off, and I let her. I should have grabbed her and slapped her smug bitchy face, I should have stayed in the park rather then coming home and crying.

I hope she falls, breaks her neck, becomes bedridden, gains hundreds of pounds, dies alone and burns in Hell. And no, I can’t even find it in me to feel sorry for her right. I just… I’m so upset. I miss my mom, she would have killed her with a look.

Originally published at Michael and Jaspenelle. Please leave any comments there.

This post is password protected. You can read it at Michael and Jaspenelle, where it was originally posted. Please leave any comments there.

Insert food here please!

Originally published at Michael and Jaspenelle. Please leave any comments there.

Michael brought these home for me the other day, orange chrysanthemums! I love the scarecrow head with the crow perched on him.

I really love mums but I have never had the greatest luck keeping them alive through the Winter. I heard if you get them earliest enough in the Autumn you can transplant them, but we are already having our daily hard frosts here so I doubt it would survive transplant. I’ve also heard the reason they don’t survive the Winter well is because most are greenhouse grown and not the hardiest varieties.

So do I just have bad luck with mums or have others had this problem? Has anyone successfully kept them alive and healthy through the Winter? I’d love to hear your tricks and tips.

Originally published at Michael and Jaspenelle. Please leave any comments there.

The night before Halloween we carved the pumpkin that Damian picked out at Harvest House in September. Michael drew its face under Damian’s close supervision.

Then Damian watched me scoop out the pumpkin guts. As those present at his birthday party already know, Damian is not a big fan of getting goopy, so he mostly watched. He did keep trying to put the guts back in the pumpkin though as I put them in the compost bowl. Future doctor maybe? Innards are suppose to stay inside you donchaknow!

Then he tried his hand at carving. Since Damian is not allowed to have a knife he just decided to chop at the pumpkin. Didn’t work out so well, so he watched me do that too while he colored on the pieces I cut out with his crayons.

And here is our Jack-O-Lantern as well as a pile of pumpkin donuts I made the same night. Pumpkin carving and pumpkin donuts belong together in my opinion (even if deep frying will always scare me a bit, I’d rather not have to use my fire extinguisher you know.) I used this recipe for the donuts which turned out really well, though I did not use buttermilk and skipped the whole donut shaping bit.

I had some last minute problems with Damian’s costume (I now realize why my mom started my brother and mine a month early!) but we did have a fall back plan. Last year Mom sent him a Winny the Pooh suit which was size 18 months. It was huge on Damian then and since I made him a Green Man costume, I tucked the Pooh suit it in our Halloween storage box. It fit him perfectly this year and he loved zooming around the house in it. And he was really zooming, we almost had liftoff a few times, granted his Sweet Tarts thefts probably partially accounted for said zooming and also his somewhat delayed bedtime.

All told we had about 30 or so trick-or-treaters. I loved seeing all the cute costumes. Almost all the activity tapered off my 21:00 and we turned off our lights at 22:00. Admittedly, I was annoyed at anyone who showed up after then banging on the door. They were all older teenagers and almost all of them were not even in costume! Luckily no tricks were inflicted on us because of my refusal to give out candy after we had put everything away. And luckily for them they didn’t wake up Damian…

Other then that nuisance though, it was a great night and I am looking forward to next year already. Michael and I have some fun ideas for how to expand our decorations into the yard. Mmmm aliens…

Now to go poke through the extra candy for a KitKat…

Originally published at Michael and Jaspenelle. Please leave any comments there.

I decided to try something new this month and try to take a photo every single day. I marked the new moon, full moon and Samhain on my collage just to make it feel more like a calender. These aren’t all great shots (I had quite an icky flu for part of the October which partly accounts for the blurry or the random shelves around our home) but I accomplished my goal! It kind of makes me want to try and do it every month for a year, just to see if I can. 365 photos? We’ll see… Make sure to check out the larger version of this month’s collage over on my flickr page (just click the image to get there.) This little version really doesn’t show much detail at all.

Anyhow, October, October… What happened this month?

• We harvested the last tomatoes and radishes from our garden.
• I received another few lovely vintage Countryside magazines from my grandma.
• It was sunny, rainy, foggy, windy… Snowy! We had our first snow of the season.
• Evening walks with my two guys, enjoying the Halloween decor in our neighborhood.
• Taking time to indulge my developing knitting addiction.
• Being knocked flat by the flu for a week but luckily no one else caught it.
• Witnesses Damian’s first strings of words… What’s this? Woke up! Thank you.
• Michael and I wonderful date night at Clinkerdaggers.
• Canning pluots, drying apples, storing squash. Preparing the pantry for Winter.
• Beautiful gift packages from my family. Halloween themed cookie cutters!
• Making chocolate sugar cookies with Damian with said cookie cutters.
• Sweeping the leaves of our porch and deck – very therapeutic.
• Carving our Jack-O-Lantern. Also very therapeutic! Stab stab stab!
• Decorating for Halloween, welcoming trick-or-treaters, embracing Samhain’s ghosts.
• And last but not least a continuing healthy pregnancy, week 35!

I hope your month was as lovely as mine and your family is as blessed. Now for November and I have a feeling it is going to be both exciting and incredibly hectic!

Originally published at Michael and Jaspenelle. Please leave any comments there.

Happy Halloween and Blessed Samhain everyone! This is our first year in this neighborhood so I am not sure how many trick-or-treaters we will get but I am looking forward to seeing them all. Now to go finish Damian’s costume, we’re getting down to the wire.

(I wrote about Samhain last year here for the curious.)

Originally published at Michael and Jaspenelle. Please leave any comments there.

I ran across this lovely photo on Chiot’s Run’s flickr page. I think that Autumn harvests and cats simply belong together, besides Halloween is tomorrow and I cannot resist the prowling black cat! Make sure to check out her wonderful blog (where you will find more black cat and apple harvest goodness.)

Originally published at Michael and Jaspenelle. Please leave any comments there.

Yesterday the sun was out for the first time in a few days and the deck had dried enough for me to sweep up all the elm leaves. I swear that tree has dropped 80% of it’s leaves in just the days. Damian thinks falling leaves are awesome, once I had swept them all into a corner Damian planted himself right in the middle of the pile with his kettle and stuffing them in it and throwing them in the air. Elm leaf tea anyone?

With our early cold shock this year and then our neighbor’s cat’s apparent addiction to carrots and kale greens, the Winter garden has not faired well. I have decided to retired it for the season and hope to have better luck with the help of chicken wire next year. I mulched it with leaves from the deck since I figured the deck leaves are most likely to be weed free, because let’s face it, I don’t like weeding!

I am glad that I swept the leaves up yesterday, today we are having our first snow of the season. It is not sticking but our deck is quite slippery when covered with soppy leaves. This afternoon I have another appointment with my midwife and then we are going to carve our pumpkin for Halloween. In other words, stay tuned for photos of Damian playing with squishy pumpkin guts!

I’m curious, are you celebrating Halloween? What are you (or your children) dressing up as?

Originally published at Michael and Jaspenelle. Please leave any comments there.

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.” - - George Eliot

Originally published at Michael and Jaspenelle. Please leave any comments there.

We made Halloween themed chocolate sugar cookies this evening. Damian got to use the new cookie cutters (the silhouette cat and pumpkin) that he got from Grandma Lorie this week. Mostly he ran off with them (he doesn’t quite understand the concept of the cookie cutter) but he was fascinated with the process.

He was also pretty interested in the cup I filled with flour to dust the table before I rolled out the dough. Michael noticed the theft.

An adult would not be nearly as cute getting this messy.

Pumpkins and cats and spiders oh my!

Do you make any special treats this time of year?

Originally published at Michael and Jaspenelle. Please leave any comments there.

Michael and I went on a date yesterday. He took me to Clinkerdaggers, which is in the Flour Mill in downtown Spokane. The Flour Mill was built in 1890 and is one of our historic buildings, it was renovated for the 1974 World’s Fair, to provide downtown space for eateries and retailers. Clinkerdaggers is a beautiful restaurant that overlooks the Spokane River. Michael and I both had the baby iceberg salad and filet mignon and we shared a cobbler for dessert. Yum! We walked around Riverfront Park after and enjoyed the Autumn foliage (which is being knocked down by the heavy rains and high winds today) and talked and talked and talked…

Damian seemed to have fun while we were out too, our friend Andrea babysat him (thank you!) and he was sad when she left. Granted, he refused to nap while she was here but once she was gone for a few minutes he lapsed into such a deep sleep he was drooling, only to wake up an hour later and be up till 22:30 (way past my bedtime lol.) It was worth it though. While children are always a joy, it is really nice to get away sometimes and have one on one time with your spouse as well as a real adult conversation.

Originally published at Michael and Jaspenelle. Please leave any comments there.

A surefire way to know that Winter is coming on fast is when you realize you are doing your shopping in the dark. I swear it was light at 18:00 just a few weeks ago…

Damian loved Jo-Ann though Michael and I were a little overwhelmed. They were having this great-big-until-midnight fabric sale and there was way more people then we expected. We got an absolutely fantastic deal on fabric though, red fleece for a bathrobe I am making Damian for Yule and yellow fleece for his Halloween costume. From Jo-Ann we drove on over to the General Store for a couple brackets and plaster plugs (interesting, I know!) Damian was thrilled that he got to keep track of the brackets while we briefly browsed around there. From there we cruised over to Yokes for the weekly non-bulk bits and ends that make our life happier (kale and icecream, what a combination!) Damian was still being so good through all the stores even though it was getting precariously close to his cranky time bedtime so we let him pick out something from the toy section. He chose a big orange stegosaurus. That’s my son alright, orange dinosaurs rock. The only thing we missed today was Costco, but we just left the house way to late for that. We are going to have to do that sometime after Michael gets off work this week, bleh. Halloween candy is a must though and I am sure as heck not paying the small store prices for it.

How do you do your shopping? Squishing it all into a few hours as infrequently as possible like us, spaced out through the month (or week) in a series of short trips or some other way completely?

Originally published at Michael and Jaspenelle. Please leave any comments there.

Originally published at Michael and Jaspenelle. Please leave any comments there.

This morning I realized that I have lived in Spokane, WA longer then I have lived anywhere else in my life, over 5 years now. My passport tells me that I am Canadian. I was born there and lived there for about 3 years. My mother and most of her family lives there but beyond loving Nanaimo bars and butter tarts (and really, who doesn’t?) I do not consider myself Canadian.

After my family left Canada we lived in Raleigh, North Carolina until I was 8, Poissy, France until I was 13, Indianapolis, Indiana until I was 14 and Sitges, Spain until I was 18. We always moved in the summer as not to mess with my brother and my school year. We spent most summers visiting my Grandma Mason in Canada we never had much to do with the actual packing, house hunting and moving though. While I don’t regret how much we moved, I always missed loosing all the friends I had struggled to make.

I left home a week or two after I turned 18 and lived in Indianapolis again for about 8 months before moving here to Spokane, WA. I’ve been here since September 11th, 2004, just over 5 years now. I think I have lived here the longest, give or take a couple months. I have most certainly lived in the United States for the largest portion of my life, about 12 years, (I lived in Europe for about 8,) so if anything I am more American then Canadian, even more European than Canadian. I don’t think I could even vote in the Canadian federal elections as I did not live there long enough, certainly not the provincial ones as I do not have a permanent residence in Canada. It doesn’t both me, if anything I considered myself a Washingtonian, which by default makes me an American in all but legal status. I fully intend on getting US citizenship when I am able.

Sometimes people are baffled or downright opposed to me becoming an American but I don’t think they realize how much I have invested in this country. My husband and my son are Americans, my daughter will be and in all likelihood any other children I have will also be. I am deeply proud of the diversity found in the United States and care about the issues of this country more then any other and yet as a permanent resident I do not have a say as I cannot vote. (I can’t vote anywhere, that just isn’t fair!) I cannot even legally sign a petition here.

Anyhow, I just wanted to share my realization more then anything. I remember someone telling me when I moved here I would be bored within a couple years and itch to leave, but after more than twice that time I still have no urge whatsoever to move. I love Spokane, I love the United States, and while I am for the most part grateful for the opportunities I had moving so much as a child, I am beyond happy to have found a place that I love so much to settle in and raise my family.

Originally published at Michael and Jaspenelle. Please leave any comments there.