Hawaii

Last week we returned from a trip to Hawaii. It was a trip with my family to celebrate my mom's sixtieth birthday. It has also been ten years since Jeff and I were in Hawaii for our honeymoon, so it was a special trip for many reasons. Here are a few pictures from our trip:

Maren's first  venture into the ocean

A family picture after having breakfast at the hotel where Jeff and I had our honeymoon

At Akaka falls on the rainy side of the island

One of the most exciting parts of our trip was Maren starting to crawl! We had a long layover in the Seattle airport on the way to Hawaii, and we found an empty gate to hang out at for part of our wait. While Jeff was off getting some food for us, Maren suddenly started to crawl (toward some garbage that was under the chairs). It has been lots of fun watching her explore :-) Here she is at the house we stayed at having a nice crawl under some stools:

9 months

Today Maren is nine months old.

I know I say this a lot, but I can't believe she is as old as she is. In some ways I still think of her as a newborn, but we visited this past week with some friends who just had a baby, and I was reminded of how different Maren is now from what she was like when she was really a newborn.

She isn't crawling yet, but she is definitely moving! We can no longer set her down and expect her to be in the same place if we leave her for a minute or two. She is a rolling all over the place, pushing herself backwards at a very fast rate sometimes, and sometimes gets from one place to another in ways that I don't fully comprehend. It seems that sometimes she wills herself in a certain direction if I look away :-)

Sleep is a common topic of conversation, has always. She has had ups and downs, but is generally a reasonably good sleeper. We never really have trouble getting her to sleep for the night, and although there will be some interruptions for feeding, she does sleep for about eleven hours at night. Naps have been more challenging, as she is currently only sleeping in the carrier worn by me or Jeff, or sometimes in her car seat. I can take her out for a scooter ride or bike ride and she almost always (or maybe always) falls asleep. Sometimes it takes a while, but it is generally nice for me to get out and go for a ride anyway on the nice path system that we have here, so I don't mind. It is harder for Jeff, as he sometimes has to do deep squats to get her to sleep. He also sometimes has to move kind of erratically in order for her to calm down, and he has joked that he has to move like Elaine from Seinfeld does when she is dancing. We would love it if she would take two hour naps in her crib like some babies do, but she is not that baby.

Maren at nine months is still a joyful little baby. She continues to be strongly aware of her wants and needs, and is becoming more able to express them. She has strong opinions and preferences sometimes, and although it can be a bit tiring, I also love seeing her personality developing :-) She is getting really good at eating, and at different times will have a preference for different foods but generally loves cheese, grain-based foods like crackers and pasta, yogurt (though she is still somewhat ambivalent about spoons – fortunately spoons have been "in" the last couple of days), raisins, prunes, peaches, and Cheerios. She at least tries everything we give her, but these seem to be her consistent favorites for now.

She is starting to understand more, and we are starting to think that she may understand some of the words that we say, though we are not quite sure about this yet. She laughs lots, and on a couple of occasions has given me "kisses" – putting her open mouth on my face – which until now has been reserved for certain stuffed animals. She loves cats, and Maddy in particular. We love our little kiddo, and love that she is becoming more and more interactive :-)

Happy Father's Day :)

This Father's Day, Maren gave Jeff a dental exam:

We have had a very busy week, with many appointments and lots of stuff that has not felt particularly interesting or fun. On Friday Jeff was commenting that he felt like we hardly saw each other all week. So this weekend we focused on spending lots of family time together. Yesterday we took a scooter ride/bike ride to a local ice cream shop. We have not gone out for ice cream since Maren was born (except when we were in Oregon, and had extra hands), and since she has started eating and become very grabby I was thinking it would not be possible for a while. However, we realized that we could get just a plain cone (no ice cream) for her, which would keep her busy. We tried it and it was a great success – she enjoyed the cone greatly.

June 13 was the four year anniversary of my surgery. It has been interesting to reflect a bit on it with a few years of distance. I have not made any significant gains in physical abilities for the last couple of years, but I have definitely seen functional improvements related to adapting better to my limitations. The trip out for ice cream was a way to mark the anniversary in a positive way – whereas in the past I might have taken a walk to go out for ice cream, now I ride my scooter. I can wear Maren in the carrier, and she has a great time.

I was reminded recently that not everyone who reads this blog knows everything about what has happened in the past four years. So here is the short story: I had something called a cavernous malformation in my brainstem, in the left pons region. It was first discovered in 2010, and in 2012 after leaking blood into my brainstem twice,  it was recommended that I have it removed surgically. Going into the surgery I basically had no deficits, but coming out I had extreme deficits. I have worked hard at my rehabilitation, but I am still left with a number of disabilities. The basic rundown is that I have global problems with coordination, which affect my ability to do things like type, speak quickly, and do just about all types of fine motor and gross motor tasks. I also have problems with balance, and these two things in combination make it very difficult for me to walk long distances, and make it impossible for me to do things like go up and down stairs without support. I used to run long distances, and now I really can't run at all (except for awkwardly, with great effort, for a few meters). The entire right side of my body has sensory impairment, meaning that I cannot feel most types of sensation on that side, I have hearing impairment in my right ear, and I have chronic pain throughout the entire right side of my body.

Despite all of this, there are many good things that have happened in the past four years. I have learned, and continue to learn, ways to adapt to these disabilities. The strength of my relationship with Jeff has proven to be immense, as he has had to assist me in so many ways, and continues to take care of most of the things that keep our household functioning. And we have had Maren, which has been the most amazing and wonderful thing to happen in my life so far.

Today we went out for lunch to celebrate Father's Day, but there is no celebration, and no gift, that could adequately thank Jeff for being the wonderful husband and father that he is.

Camping

This past week we went camping. We went to a provincial park called Echo Valley, where we camped a couple of years ago. When we went the first time, it was insanely busy, and very noisy. Despite that, it was a nice park, and we decided to go back on a weekday trip.

The campground was almost completely empty when we arrived, and we were quite pleased knowing that it would be very quiet. However, when we arrived at our site we were greeted by hordes of tent caterpillars, and the ground and picnic table were covered with little black dots which were tent caterpillar poop. I had heard that they had been bad at campgrounds this year, so I was sort of prepared for it, but I find tent caterpillars to be pretty gross. I had to just keep thinking of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and reminding myself that caterpillars are cute.

The major problem for me was that they sometimes fall out of trees and land on you. So you never know when a tent caterpillar might show up on your leg or on the back of your neck. But through all of this I was trying to put on a brave face and suck it up because it is rare that we get away from basically all people and have a chance to enjoy quiet and nature. By the time we were roasting marshmallows by the fire, I was getting into the whole camping thing.

Maren was a great little camper. She loved the tent, enjoyed watching the caterpillars crawling, and generally didn't make camping much harder (other than the fact that one of us had to hold her constantly, because we couldn't set her on the ground for fear of her eating a tent caterpillar).

When we have gone camping here in the past, every single time I have woken up hot. We have sleeping bags that are made for camping in the mountains of Oregon, and here it never really gets that cold overnight. So I thought I was really smart when I suggested that we leave our sleeping bags at home, and just bring a thin blanket. Unfortunately, even though it wasn't very cold, I ended up being freezing and not sleeping well. At some point Maren no longer wanted to be on her own little foam pad, and joined us on the air mattress. Having her sleeping right next to me always makes it hard to sleep, but I was having an extra hard time sleeping because I was cold.

Then, at 5 AM I was awake to nurse Maren, and I found a tick attached to my arm. I was pretty well freaked out, but remained calm, woke Jeff up, and got some help from him in removing the tick. I had a serious case of the heebie-jeebies, so I started inspecting the rest of my body for ticks, and I found another one attached to my leg. At that point, I was done. Even though we were supposed to stay for another night, when Jeff said we could go home early, I said sounds good. I felt like a bit of a wimp for not sticking it out, but when we left that day, we were literally the only people in the entire campground. No one else was camping with the tent caterpillars and ticks either.

Fortunately, the ticks here don't carry Lyme disease, and also fortunately, Maren didn't get bitten (and neither did Jeff). But I didn't particularly care about that, I just wanted to get the heck out of there before things got worse.

We didn't take any photos while camping except one after we decided to leave. Maren was apparently ready to drive home by herself if we didn't take her there:

Actually, she was perfectly happy to keep camping, and would have been fine sticking around. We have another trip planned for August, and by then the tent caterpillars will definitely be gone, and hopefully the ticks will be less prevalent. By then the mosquitoes should be pretty bad, but honestly I would take mosquitoes over tent caterpillars and ticks any day :-)

A few photos from Oregon

I had hoped to post about our trip to Oregon, but I ran out of time, so here are a few photos of our trip!