Lucy: 2 years, 3.5 months.

South/ North/ South

Ives, this is the sea.  See how it smells like salt?  See how your skin feels different?  Do the sounds put you to sleep?  Ives, this is a cow, a horse, a goat.  See how peaceful the cow seems?  See, the big one feeds the small one.  They are related, just as you and I are related.  Ives, this is sand.  It looks like snow but is very different.  One is rock, one is water.  Ives, these are shadows.  This is the wind.  That is a cloud.  This is a tree.  Here is ice.

            Since Ives, life is sweeter.  And life was sweet before.  He is the cream of our hearts. The sweetness, I think, is partly in the ceremony of it all.  Before Ives, we had our small rituals and chores.  But everything has become more ritualistic.  Waking, rising, eating, washing, dressing, cleaning, sleeping, walking: all of these things involve more steps.  I have gotten to know my hands and arms better, as they are now used in more ways. It feels like working hard, but also like meditation - to establish the steps and repetitively take them, sometimes leaving my mind behind.  It feels healthful.  It is therapeutic and physical and tiring and it keeps getting better.

I ask Ives every morning of his dreams, but every morning I am left guessing. When he can tell me his dreams, if he wants to, I think my world will grow twice the size.  We are taking him, tomorrow, on a small trip south.  Back to another place that feels like home.  To introduce him to the sea. 

******

// 2nd photo: Ives at 7.5 weeks.
// 6th photo: by Christie.

"the presence of the child tied her body to the earth, the cottage, the fire."
- J. Urquhart

the shape of our thoughts are changing with the shape of our family.

this trailer (over and over and over)
10.5 months ago (when Ives had just begun to grow but we didn't yet know)
"i carry your heart.  i carry it in my heart."

fasting, for the coming weeks, from this space and from the internet.

blessings,
nikaela

We bathe him in the morning when there is light.  He opens his eyes wide and his breath deepens; his body shaped like a frog.  Sometimes in the middle of the night there are bedside lamps on, the whole family is awake and soft words are spoken.  There are so many new methods of communication Thom and I never knew.  Ives is heavier when he is tired.  His breath gives information.  When I feel scared, Thom knows before I tell him.  Before Ives sneezes his eyes get a little glassy.  The floor boards know our dance by heart: the choreography of steps rocking Ives to sleep.  The whole house feels alive and is learning along side us, a forth member of our family.   When Ives calls out, Thom thinks he sounds like a winged dinosaur.  We are all learning so much.  We need new words for happy, for love.  Suddenly all the old words feel insufficient. 

A thief has broken into my soul.  He left the windows open and the door ajar.  The wind rushes through now.  And everything that wasn't stolen is everything that is important.  

Ives Herbert Reimer
born December 30th


He fits into the ordinary world the way miracles do - at first not at all, and then so easily, so certainly, that the ordinary world itself becomes miraculous.  We are transfixed.  I feel like his life grounds me.  The fact that he exists makes me both stronger and weaker.  He has bound us to each other, and to our ordinary lives. "A world full of wonder."  

/star cookies for gifts
/39 weeks pregnant and our christmas tree

I have never felt this patient, this okay to wait.  Unwrapping time, watching it, but with no urgency.  Every morning I wake with the strongest kind of peace in my heart I have ever felt.
 

adventus; advent :  Latin: "arrival" or "coming"

the time, it has come. 

"I never had any questions except one about the moment when I could die.  I should have chosen the moment before the arrival of my children, for since then I've lost the option of dying.  The sharp smell of their sun-baked hair, the smell of sweat on their backs when they wake from a nightmare, the dusty smell of their hands when they leave a classroom, meant that I have to live, to be dazzled by the shadow of their eyelashes, moved by a snowflake, bowled over by a tear on their cheek.  My children have given me the exclusive power to blow on a wound to make the pain disappear, to understand words unpronounced, to possess the universal truth."

-Kim Thuy

I wonder, everyday, what being a mum will feel like.

Rollin, face against parlour glass. (reading the letters)
  

this weekend, overnight, and with strength, she came. 
dear winter.  

"Summer is the matrix, the lie; winter is the truth.  It might be bitter, but at least its real.  At the same time, if sweet winter is the season of intimacy, scary winter is the season of the imagination.  By stripping down nature to her underwear, we can project our fantasies upon her." - Adam Gopnik

what we ate to keep warm: 

-butter buscuits and scrambled eggs 
-pear, chicken and bacon pie with thyme 
-cardomom orange loaf 
-winter lentil soup 
-almond yogurt waffles