Hello! I hope you are having a great weekend. I’m peeking my head in to send my best to you and your family and also to share this video just released today from MANA in honor of International Day of the Midwife. I know their team has been hard at work creating this video and preparing for its launch.

As I watched, I couldn’t help but be reminded of why I chose midwifery care for all three of my pregnancies, births and postpartum care. A skilled midwife is a gift to an expectant mother and I look forward to a day when midwifery care is considered the norm and most (if not all!) women have access to midwifery care.

Take a peek at this video and be sure to share it with your networks too!

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My friend Erin Goodman has been running an awesome podcast series called Behind the Blog. I’ve loved listening to her chat with some fabulous blogging women and was honored when she asked me to appear as a guest on the podcast. I’ve always wanted to collaborate with Erin and I accepted without hesitation.

Erin was one of my earliest internet friends. In fact, we’ve known each other since before we started out blogs, so I was thrilled to connect. But it also rubbed a sore spot because as you’ve surely noticed, I don’t really blog anymore. As we discuss in the podcast, I never really decided to stop blogging, but rather the waters around me have been rushing so fast that I simply never get to writing the posts that live in my head.

I’m now working forty hours as week, telecommuting from home, as a social media and community manager, and at the end of the day I want to connect with my kids and husband – time for blogging has simply disappeared. But I don’t feel “done”. Not yet at least.

Nila is turning two in a few short months and Stone and I are constantly looking at each other in amazement wondering where the time has gone. I know that sounds trite, but I’m not kidding. Time is flying by so fast and we’ve had to reckon with so much in a short amount of time. It’s been overwhelming, and to be quite honest, it’s been stressful.

The good news is that for the first time in a long time I’m beginning to pick my head up and slow my breath down. The kids are a bit older and we’re a bit more experienced at being parents of three kids. Stone’s business is in its third season and finally gaining traction. And after being a stay-at-home for the past five or so years I’m finally contributing to our income which is a lifesaver at this point in time. All our hard work is paying off and things seem to be gelling quite nicely. Phew.

I was so thankful for my conversation with Erin. Not only was it a nice reflection, but it also brought me some closure and clarity. My life is different now: I’m not a stay-at-home mom anymore, my baby is almost our of diapers and there are snap-free bras in my future. Talking with Erin was a therapeutic look back and acknowledgement of just how much has changed. It also helped give me a fresh look of where I sit now.

If you have some free time and like listening to podcasts please check it out. I know I’ve been quiet here and it will give you a peek into why and what’s been going on. We talk about surprise pregnancies, freeing the NYS midwives, and juggling family life, careers and passions.

And maybe I’ll poke my head in here a little more often….

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There is nothing that feels better than helping out a good cause and today I want to tell you about an opportunity to help ensure safe births for mothers and babies in Fond Parisien, Haiti.

Last spring I was invited to a brunch to learn about Circle of Health International (COHI), a maternal health organization that provides reproductive, maternal and newborn healthcare in times of crisis and disaster. The event happened to be in my neighborhood so I walked over to learn about the work they were doing in post-earthquake Haiti.

I listened to COHI’s director, Leilani Johnson, present their work in Haiti and I was absolutely blown away. We’ve seen the pictures and imagined how terribly difficult it is for the people of Haiti, but imagine being pregnant? Or having a newborn? Imagine having a postpartum hemorrhage without a skilled attendant or trying to recover without clean water.

But COHI shows up in the most difficult of times. They are a small, tightly run, grassroots NGO with the mission of working with women and their communities in times of crisis and disaster to ensure access to quality reproductive, maternal and newborn care. COHI works to address the issues of access and availability of life saving measures such as trained birth attendants and access to Emergency Obstetric Care (EOC) in areas of war and disaster.

Yes, they are AWESOME and doing incredibly important work!

What I learned was that in times of crisis and disaster women’s health falls to the back of the line. Women themselves are busy caring for family members and access to healthcare for themselves is hard to come by. COHI is a unique organization that arrives and works with women and their communities to support women’s reproductive and maternal health. COHI also ensures that they are building a sustainable model. Instead of bringing in foreign practitioners to provide direct care they focus on training and supporting local practitioners so that when COHI leaves the women still have health care.

This is where I first met Karen Feltham — a certified nurse midwife and COHI volunteer. She also happens to be my neighbor! Karen volunteered in Haiti just weeks after the earthquake to help begin the process of providing supportive care for the women and babies in Fond Parisien and she is returning two years later to provide peer-to-peer support and training for the local Haitian midwives.

In the US, midwives rely on their support systems, but the two midwives at the Fond Parisien birth center work long hours and do not have access to peer support. Karen has three goals for her 10 day trip to Haiti:

One - Review existing protocols for managing emergencies and deciding when to transfer to the local hospital.  Provide clinical support and skill building where it could improve outcomes for Haitian women and their babies.

Two - Run emergency drills using improved protocol for complications most likely to be seen at the clinic, including shoulder dystocia and postpartum hemorrhage.

Three - Improve monitoring processes so that the clinic can evaluate their existing protocols and make improvements based on evidence, not just anecdotal understanding.

This is where we can help! Karen needs help covering the cost of travel and room and board — about $1000. I’ve pledged to help Karen get to Haiti so she can help provide the life saving support to the midwives serving the local women and I hope you’ll help too!

Little by little we’re making it happen! We’re almost half-way to raising our goal of $1000 and I hope you’ll help us get there.

As you know I rarely ask anything of my readers, but after meeting Karen and hearing about the important work she is doing with COHI I wanted to share the story because I thought we could help make a real difference!

We’ve set up an indiegogo campaign to raise the funds and there are tons of great perks including a COHI messenger bag and authentic Haitian metalwork. And if you only have $10 to spare that’s just the perfect amount!

So please head over and make a donation and leave a comment of encouragement! Also, please share the indiegogo campaign on your facebook page and on twitter! I would be so thankful.

I want to leave you with a quote from Karen’s Q&A over at Our Bodies Our Blog last week so you can get a feeling for who she is:

“I absolutely believe in the power of kindness and how it can be transformative, even revolutionary. Think of what women bear, here and elsewhere — assault, abuse, submission. I can’t change a country’s infrastructure, health care and education policies. But I can listen. I can provide the most gentle pelvic exam and the most respectful atmosphere.

If my touch is the first that a newborn feels, then I promise to make it a gentle one. If my voice is the first that she hears, then let it be welcoming. This is what I can bring, a reminder that excellent clinical skills are essential, but that kindness is life-changing. At least that’s what I think, and it’s the best that I can offer.” –Karen Feltham, CNM & COHI Volunteer

 P.S. There is an amazing group of bloggers supporting this cause! You can see everyone who is participating over at BirthSwell. And if you want to blog about this cause leave a comment and I’ll get you set up!

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I like this photo, but I didn’t want to post it.

I like it because it reflects a very real part of our everyday: messy and busy. If you look closely you’ll find Christmas in the photo, but you’ll also find Stone’s old He-man figures from when he was a kid and half-full can of unflavored seltzer.

I didn’t want to post it because it shows you how messy our life can be. It’s not zen, stylish or remotely organized. Then you’ll know that I don’t keep a home that looks like a catalog.

I like to take pictures that show off the beauty of my home. It makes me feel good to catch all that I like about my house, home and family in one frame. It’s also easier because just beyond that frame can be the mess that is life.

This table is where Solshine has spent the better part of the past three years. It’s filled with trinkets: marbles, legos, playmobiles, treasure he finds when he’s out and about. It’s messy and he’s busy.

I know there is an unintended danger that happens when we fill our lives with picture frames filled with only the “perfect” parts. It sets unrealistic expectations and leads to dissatisfaction with what we already have–even if what we have was enough before we saw pictures of something better.

I do it. I love to look at catalogs and pretty blogs and feel inspired and daydream about what I like and what I would do with this or that. At first it feels fun and then I start to look at my own stuff as not good enough. And another mom’s homemade curtains become a testament of my failure.

I think this is a good metaphor for the holiday season. We hold many romantic ideas about the holidays and what they should be like and feel like that it becomes almost impossible to live up to them. But when we stop being enchanted by the idea or the pictures we begin to notice what we have right in front of us–the everyday life that, while not perfect, is perfectly ours. And there’s really nothing else worth having.

Sure this holiday season is messy and busy, but at the same time it’s one of my favorite times. Just like the picture.

This post is part of Treadways’ December Photo Project. A photo every day to celebrate the festive month of December. My theme this year: Our Everyday Christmas

Oh, and today I’m over at Simple Homeschool talking about how our Christmas Bucket List is helping guide our learning this holiday season. Go on over and check it out.

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Joy to the world. The big world. And the little world that lives inside our tiny home. Where Lego adventurers boldly go where no little plastic (wo)man has gone before and a little girl clamors for an old school calculator and holds it up to her ear because she thinks it’s a smart phone.

Joy to our home and our world because it is where we live and the quality of our life here affects how we spread our joy and peace (or discontent or anger) out there in the big, big world.

Joy to our little world where a day stretches out in front of us like a lifetime (and sometimes I wish the kids had buttons that I could push and they would instantly go to sleep. I would probably push those buttons around 5 pm every day).

And joy to the years that have slipped away. Because it was just a moment ago–I swear, a blink of an eye, and we didn’t even know our children’s names. We couldn’t even imagine who they were and now we live inside a universe of family. And when I look at their newborn pictures I can hardly believe they were ever that little, but maybe more poignantly, that they never will be that little again.

This post is part of Treadways’ December Photo Project. A photo every day to celebrate the festive month of December. My theme this year: Our Everyday Christmas

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It’s been a little while and I’m so happy to be here today. It feels good–like visiting an old friend with a pot of tea on a leisurely afternoon.

I’d like to invite you to join me in participating in Treadways’ annual December Photo Project.

You can join yourself or you can simply come along as I share a photo every day until Christmas with the intention of slowing down and catching the little moments of this merry and bright season. (No matter that I’m starting on December 4th. Let’s just pretend I’m perfectly on time ;-) Last year, the project brought me such joy that I just have a feeling that this is the perfect way to reacquaint myself in this space.

I have some news and stories to tell. Life has been eventful with the inevitable ups and downs, but we’re here, together–healthy and doing our best to to practice unconditional happiness. And more than anything I want to celebrate our everyday Christmas. Because I’ve learned the hard way that building up the holiday season with unattainable goals and visions only hurts. And I’ve learned that life is very different with three kids. You have to let go.

Our everyday Christmas is completely imperfect–just like this photo. Seven Christmas’ into family life and I know this much is true: The very best parts of the season are the everyday moments.

Enjoy.

What are your favorite “everyday” holiday moments?

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My mom, me and my grandmother at my wedding shower -- 2003

In the most basic of physical essence she is gone. Her voice. Her hands. Her body.

She’s gone.

I could see that she was gone. I watched them close the casket.

I was at the cemetery, but that does little to convince me. A body, without the spirit is a startling reality. You see just how much of ourselves is made up of spirit, emotions and essence. It seems almost impossible for her to be truly gone.

I lost my grandmother and it is truly a heartbreaking loss. I miss her. The memories draw deep from the well of sweet nostalgia and the past seems so good it hurts.

But really I am lucky. I am thirty-one years old. For thirty-one years I had the love and support of my grandmother. She was a straight-shooter, no frills, laugh-out-loud kind of lady. She was better than great.

I’ve never spent a Christmas without her. Or a First Communion, graduation or any every-day celebration. She was there in the room when Solshine was born.

There’s this memory I have of her at my wedding. Stone and I were dancing to Etta James’ At Last and I looked over and saw my Grandfather and Grandmother come onto the dance floor and begin to slow dance. I started to weep, tumbling into the present moment of generation building upon generation. We slow danced our way over and hugged, the four us, while I cried and I remember she kept saying, “I understand.”

She understood. I was crying because time doesn’t stop and there we were–living out the moments of our lives. There would be photo albums to look back on, but in that moment we were alive and awake and together in our fancy dresses and shiny shoes. And it was pure bliss.

I loved that moment.

After I got the phone call I sat in my car and cried and it was all about me and my little girl life and feelings; memories of Easter egg hunts, summer cook-outs and a no bull-shit pep talk as I headed off to college.

Thirty-six hours later my family arrived at my parents house and everything changed, because yes, I lost my grandmother, but my mother……

My mother lost her mother.

(Pause out of respect.)

This thing we call Mother. This enormous tidal wave of life and experience tied up in emotions that run to the deepest of our core: Mother. My mother. Your mother. My children’s Mother. The Eternal Mother. She is vast; integral to our existence and wrapped up in home, religion, politics and more importantly–matters of the heart.

And the little girl in me, sobbing for my grandmother, grew up very quickly watching my own mother mourn for her mother. Her mother: the person who grew her, birthed her, bathed her, and cared for her. She lost the ever present foundation of love and support in her life.

It was suddenly not about me. I mourned with my husband, his family (who knew and loved her) and my cousins, but I couldn’t even begin to touch what my mother was experiencing. She didn’t want me to. In some ways, it was impossible. For almost a week, I lost my mother. She reverted to sometime in her youth before I knew her. She retreated to her seven siblings in a way I had never witnessed.

Our usual cadence disappeared and she became a stranger to me. I was left stunned. I wished I could have been inside that mourning with her; that maybe that would mean we were close; that it was me she wanted to cry and talk to.

It was within this process that I realized that my mother is more than just my mother. She had been a child. She was a person. And I can’t even begin to know the depth of her being because I am blinded to her person by my love for my mother.

And I thought about how one day I will lose her. And my children will lose me. And in the same way that I celebrate the lineage of my baby girl being born with the very eggs that may one day be my grandchildren; that the very egg that was to be me lived in my mother while she lived in her mother; in the same way that I am humbled by the way life unfolds and moves: I mourn in somber celebration of a life lived full circle.

A few days after the funeral I took my family up to Camp for a few days and when I returned, I, unlike my mom, got my mother back. Mom, I am terribly sorry for your loss. There is no one in the whole wide world who can take the place of Mother. And these words seem to pale in the face of your loss.

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I offer this hope for peace in remembrance of 9/11. May we never loose our hope for a more peaceful world and may our children know how to create peace in their world. Originally posted in August 2009.

“If we are to create lasting peace we must start with the children.” ~Mahatma Gandhi

In my heart, I know this is true.

Remembering this helps me to wake up in those little moments and savor the bliss that is love– to notice the way their hair smells when I offer a quick kiss as I lean over to tie a shoelace or to wipe up a spilled glass of juice. I know they will remember these moments when they are older.

Perhaps, they will close their eyes when they hear a certain song and remember how their mama danced and sang in the kitchen (to the old radio that used to belong to their great-grandfather) and the way she scooped them up to spin them around and around, and the memory will fade into whorls of colors and smells and leave them with a feeling that permeates through time.

I hope the feeling they remember is that of peace, security and deep comfort.

I hope they have these memories to lean on in times of challenges and crossroads.

I hope they might find comfort, inspiration and even insight from the foundation of a peaceful childhood; that they will be able to enjoy peace in their homes and in their communities, so that they may expect and contribute to peace in their country and on their planet.

A mother’s hope for peace begins within herself, moves through her children and ripples outwards to the world.

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We have no plans of slowing down summer, but the signs are everywhere. We’ve begun to close windows in the evening and I even thought about putting on socks early one morning. Officially, fall does not begin until the Equinox in late September, making these next few weeks the perfect time to soak it all in.

Here’s some link love for all you wonderful folks who grace me with your presence.

These three pictures remind me that the crazy mess I’m cleaning up all day is actually the amazing creative of childhood.

I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face: women taking to the blogosphere is nothing short of revolutionary. BlogHer ’11 made this women angry, but not for the reasons you might think.

Do you text at the playground? Or judge the moms who do?

A how-to-be happy post from Zen Habits that’s a great companion piece to my popular post “If You’re Not Happy Here, You Won’t Be Happy There”

Loved reading about how Our Bodies Ourselves helped educate this father.

Do we need to develop our emotional intelligence?

Do you remember friendship bracelets? I *LOVED* making these in grammar school and lucky for me here’s a tutorial so I don’t have to hurt my head trying to remember the how-to details. (Now if I could only find a spare moment to actually make one.)

Have an awesome Labor Day Weekend everyone!

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Did you catch my post up at Steady Mom about important life/work/family boundaries?

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Everyone has a hotspot.

(And no I’m not talking about my new iphone that is an actual wifi hotspot and allows me to take my laptop to my creative hotspot. Different hotspot.)

The hotspot I’m referring to is that certain mix of place, life circumstance and state-of-mind that opens space for your best ideas, brilliant revelations and unbounded clarity.

It’s your hotspot.

Now, my hotspot is a funny thing.

Warning: Lame Motherhood Confession

My creative hotspot is at the laundromat. (Shockingly, boring and lame, right? I know, but read on–I swear the creative sparks just fly.)

It all started almost four years ago when we were moved to Ithaca. We were in process of buying our first home and although there were many things that were perfect about the sweet downtown duplex, there was no washer and dryer.

“It’s the deal breaker” I told Stone. I agreed to the purchase the house ONLY if we immediately installed the hook-ups and a washer/dryer.

The agreement was made and soon after we moved in I made an appointment with the plumber and he came knocking on our door. He was not in our tiny home for more than fifteen minutes before he declared that the place would never see a washer/dryer. The pipes are old, too small and there’s no space to put a utility sink (which is how other people cope with the similar issue deal). He said we would need to do major renovations in order to see a washer and dryer.

I sulked. I complained. I couldn’t begin to imagine permanently using the laundromat with a newborn and a cloth diaper stash. (This is why we ended up going diaper-free for Koala, but that’s a story for another post). I was not a happy wife.

And thus began my first of many schleps to the laundromat.

At first the whole family would come along in attempt to try and make it fun, but I soon realized I preferred to go it alone.

In fact, I found having a bona fide reason for leaving the house SANS children for a few hours of relative solitude was a welcome relief. The fluorescent lights and toxic smell of powdered Tide could not dampen the exquisite delicacy of alone time.

I started packing a bag–some snacks, a kombucha, knitting needles, my notebook–and I found myself looking forward to my trips to the laundromat. As far as I was concerned, it was as close as an afternoon at the spa as I was going to get.

A small disclaimer: I’ve never minded doing laundry. I love sorting and folding my family’s clothes–it’s rhythmic and meditative. I feel nostalgic and reflect on how big (or little) they are; how a shirt Sol once wore is now adorns his younger brother; how hard Stone works for the family. (So hard he gets his own washing machine because we don’t need all that dirt in our clothes!)

It’s a healthy time of reflection. My hands are busy, my heart opens, my mind has some solitude and…..

BANG!

I get the best ideas ever!

I find solutions to my problems and I (almost) always come home with more clarity than when I left. It’s been almost four years and still, there isn’t a trip to the laundromat that does not garner at least one, creative rock-your-socks off idea. I come home refreshed and exhilarated.

I know this is odd–to find an afternoon at the laundromat endearing, but when I add it all up it makes sense: my hands are busy, my heart is open and I have mental space. It’s a winning combination. It’s my creative hotspot.

Someday I’ll have a washer and dryer, but who knows, if anyone’s looking for me you might want to check the neighborhood laundromat. Or actually, feel perfectly free to just leave me alone ;-)

What about you? Where do you find yourself teeming with creativity? What’s your magic combination of space, movement and mental clarity?

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