New Moon Wishing

Texas winters can produce the most perfect spring evenings.  Tonight, the second day of Christmas, we sit with the door open. August says the new moon is smiling like a Cheshire cat. While we wait on laundry, August does a puzzle and we listen to Sinatra sing to Dorsey.

August and I  did some walking about under the new moon, both of us looking up at one point and tripping over each other. It's time for some moon wishing. I have never wished on a new moon, only the giant full ones. So up we looked and I wished away...
solutions to problems that don't seem to have resolution
wishing for future happiness and wholeness
wishing to be forgetful
wishing to find those rose colored glasses that have been misplaced too long
wishing away hurts
wishing away complications
wishing for simple, love song narratives
wishing for timing

The new moon's immediate reply was to open doors and to listen to Sinatra before his heartbreak, when he was just a starry eyed, boy singer in love with his Nancy from his old neighborhood. The songs are so perfect for him at this time in his life. I wonder if he knew what was in store for him: Ava, Mia, hitting rock bottom, Rat Packs and Presidents...and he is singing, at this moment:

Have a little faith and trust in what tomorrow brings
You'll reach a star because there are such things

The sad story of August's gingerbread man...

Early Friday morning, before the moon went to bed and the rooster crowed, a little gingerbread man was born along with dozens and dozens of others. They would all taste the same because they were made out of the same ingredients but each one looked slightly different from the other. As they were placed in their new temporary homes behind glass in the bakery, these little brothers, all from the same bowl of sweet, gingery batter were about to embark on the only adventure they'd have in their short lives. This is the story of August's gingerbread man.

August and her family went to the bakery on Friday afternoon looking for a pastry to eat the next morning. There in the display case were dozens of beautifully decorated Christmas cookies. Mommy thought August would love to have a gingerbread man since she never had one before. The man behind the counter picked him out. Only one. The little gingerbread man said goodbye to his friends and wondered if he'd become a Christmas decoration, hanging on a ribbon well past the new year, becoming too hard and stale to eat and thrown away. This was what most gingerbread men had hoped for, to harden and have a life beyond Christmas where they'd get thrown away and could have more than one adventure in heir short lives.

August fell in love with her gingerbread man as soon as she took him out of the it's little brown wax bag. Mommy smelled him and suddenly all the Christmas gingerbread men she knew were dancing in her head and reminding her of all her childhood Christmases. She said he even looked like the gingerbread she use to know with five little raisins: two for his eyes and three lil buttons. 

August smelled her little gingerbread man and then gave him a kiss, then another and another. August was falling in love with him and the gingerbread man began to imagine a life past Christmas filled with adventures, becoming too hard to ever be eaten. He settled into August's soft, little hand and looked into her eyes making her fall more and more in love. Papi asked August how her gingerbread man tasted but she only kissed him. Mommy asked if the gingerbread man was yummy but August only kissed him some more.

August sang to her gingerbread man Christmas songs she knew and made him dance on her lap. She smiled at him, held him tightly and kissed him. But she held him too tightly, suddenly her gingerbread man lost part of his arm. August picked it up and looked at Mommy sadly. Mommy said it was okay he was a cookie not a broken doll. When the gingerbread man heard this he knew he would never live past Christmas now and prepared to become a future Christmas memory. He thought of the hot oven where he'd been only a few hours ago and that was the last thought this little gingerbread man ever had and he quickly became a Christmas memory.

Corner View: Bathroom and Shower

I remember August's first ever bath. That bath is so vivid and clear in my mind. I remember her Papi's giant hands holding her and delicately placing her into the warm water. Her eyes got so huge and she looked at us and trusted us. Her eyes, my heart, his hands. I can still be there, and I hope that I will always have this memory swimming in me for as long as I live. Only a few weeks before, the hours I spent laboring in that bathroom. While taking one hot shower after another and wondering what would happen next and next and the second after that, and would I be holding her by nightfall or the next day or suddenly now, now, now? The footprints left on the floor of my wet feet coming out of the shower still there when I returned again and again.

The bathroom now has two tiny pieces of "furniture":  a wooden potty chair and wooden stool. In the tub sits a smaller tub that will soon be just too small. Then there are the toys and growing collection of plastic containers that miss the recycling bin and instead become tub toys.

It was this bathroom in Indiana that I first discovered I was pregnant. The road from this bathroom in room 19 to the current bathroom is quite a tale. If I only went from bathroom to bathroom...

This bathroom in an old surplus store in the oldest part of Baltimore. The building had many lives but the one that still lingered was when it was a bowling alley where GI's would dance and relax. I was almost four months pregnant and really had to use a bathroom and this was all I had available.

This was the bathroom at a cute motor lodge in Pennsylvania on our way back to Texas. It was December and I was going back and forth with the idea of a baby not born in Texas. It just didn't sit right with me.

The bathroom at a motel somewhere near Ohio where I spent my grouchiest and only uncomfortable night of my first trimester. It was cold. I never warmed up and was wearing my heaviest wool sweater under the covers.

August was supposed to be born at home. In the end my true feelings for my midwife exploded and I didn't trust her enough to birth at home so I asked to be taken to a hospital. I missed that part of the planned birth story where mother and child rest in a herbal bath together as they bond. That special bath happened months later in the shiny tub at a travel lodge in Del Rio. August was three months old when I made the special mother and baby tea soak.  It was summer and I held her in this warm bath taking in the lavender and rose scents. I used the other half in a bath taken at the duplex we rented in Oklahoma just before her first birthday.

I truly had no idea I had so much to say about bathrooms nor did I realize I had quite a collection of photos of bathrooms from my past.

Jane's corner view, Francesca hosting, thank you, Nadine, for suggesting this theme.

Mothers are the record keepers. Father's are record keepers too but I know mostly mothers who are the record keepers. I have to admit that I do an eye roll when I hear of how photo shooting and video taking take a person out of the moment and it's better to live it than record it. Maybe. As a mother, I can now say, that it is only in being completely present that you can capture most of what you capture. It's something we find in the art of many photographers. This is not to say that all photos mother's take are museum worthy images, what we choose to write about, not of much interest maybe to those out of the inner circle but it's not for anyone else, it's for us. 

These days, when I read what a mother has written about her day or see photos of a child through his day, I am interested and grateful. These are baby books, family films, Christmas letters all given away. While I have heard and read how harmful, annoying, boring, even dangerous it can all be, I stay interested because I always have been. I read and re-read my baby book and wanted to see my husband's when I discovered he had one filled. I once collected vintage 8mm and super 8mm films of family vacations that happened long before I was ever on earth.  I will stop and listen to anyone's family stories and a family tree is always fascinating to me. 

It is a generalization but... it seems that mother's can be counted on to write and save {things}while fathers will photograph and capture the sounds, movement and images on any device that is available to them. Trying to save a moment in time that will never come back of the person who carries your own heart. It's not an easy job to be the record keeper. I go over the day in my head before I fall to sleep. Like a mint after a satisfying dinner, a little explosion of sugar. But our minds go, media fades, the stories become lost, the family trees end...but I find pieces of some here and there and save it, read it, listen, watch someone else's memories for them. Babies, families, struggles, love, life. How can I not be interested.

Corner View: Attendance

Just a photo of me. A rare photo. I love all the photos I have with August in them. Priceless.

I am trying a bit harder to get some of these in though.

It isn't often that I am without August. This past Sunday I was as I went around browsing and window shopping with a friend. I felt so light, like I had forgotten my purse. My friend and I joked around and I forgot that I was no longer 26 years old. The Blake Babies played loudly as we drove from one place to another attending crafty Christmas markets. Five hours later, we finally hit shopping centers, having run out of places to go. As we walked around beautiful, pricey party dresses, taking turns telling each other sordid stories from our past, we decided it was time to get home. We missed our babies. Driving home in the dark to Nico's The Fairest of the Seasons, passing through the many phases of me through the years in my mind. I walked into a warm home, dimly lit for the holidays and a sweet toddler playing under the Christmas tree. Where I belong.

Advent

I would consider myself a lapsed Catholic because I have not made it to church with any regularity in several years. I am picky about my homilies. I look an intelligent and practical homily, one I can relate too, one I can apply to my life without even trying. A good homily is slightly Buddhist, looking for inner peace within ourselves.

Let's sniff trees!

I love to smell Christmas trees and if I cold I'd start in September.