Photo shoot!

The talented parent in the family (hint: not me) held a photo shoot of our two little girls last week and they turned out beautifully.

Enjoy (and send donations to The Boss’s photography fund via me – I’ll, uh, see that she gets it).

Yes, we had a home birth

Nearly four weeks after Jace was born, people we haven’t seen in the meantime still ask, incredulously, “You had a baby at home? Intentionally?”

Well, yeah, we did. In fact, people have been having babies that exact way for thousands of years, minus the past 70 or so.

So, in hindsight, I don’t really see what the big deal is. Babies are meant to come out a certain way, and a woman’s body is designed to make that possible. At least, that’s how it looks from the sidelines.

But I’ll admit, I was a bit skeptical when The Boss first floated the idea of a home birth this past summer, early in her pregnancy. Having just moved back home and not loving the new family doctor she met shortly after discovering she was pregnant, she decided to explore her inner-hippie (which is always bubbling near the surface) and shun conventional medicine for the more holistic approach of midwifery.

Although part of Ontario’s health plan since the early-1990s, I’ve discovered through casual conversations that there’s still a misconception about midwives being cult-bound flower-children, living in communes and delivering babies in an unsafe manner. The anti-doctor, if you will.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Our midwife Sarah, who is in her mid-20s,  completed 120 births (with a prerequisite of at least 10 at home) during her four years of university. Doctors spend mere hours on childbirth during their extensive training. She was prepared with all the necessary equipment should a problem arise, and promised she would take extreme caution with both Amy’s and the baby’s health and not hesitate to call the ambulance to get us to Walkerton if things were looking dicey.

So, I got over my nerves about the home birth fairly quickly, and was excited when Amy had that first contraction in the early morning hours of Dec. 21.

Without getting into too many gory details – I don’t know what The Boss would approve of me making public, to be honest, so I’ll err on the side of none – the contractions hit high gear at 3 p.m. and, after just four minutes of pushing, Jace Ashlee arrived at 6 p.m. that night. The midwife – and her colleague, who came for the last hour to assist with the delivery – was awesome. Very laid back. She pretty much left us alone, allowing Amy to get into a zone, focus on each contraction and work through it in any way she felt comfortable – pacing the floor, in the tub, on the toilet, anywhere.

Without drugs, it was mind over matter, and being in the comforts of her own home and not tied to a hospital bed, Amy used everything at her disposal to do it in the way that suited her best, not what fit the hospital’s criteria.

Me? I provided comfort when asked, rocked with her, talked her through rough spots, relaxed and read my book while she was in another galaxy, and took pictures as Jace was making her triumphant entrance. And no, I won’t be showing you those pictures, because then I’d lose at least half my shit and be sleeping in a tent, if she let me take it with me.

The best part was immediately after Jace was born. At the hospital, babies are quickly put under a bright light, have gunk sucked out of their throats, are poked and prodded to make sure everything is in working order, and cleaned up, before being presented to Mom, probably at least five minutes later.

At home, Jace went directly onto her relieved mother’s chest, the baby’s eyes wide with shock. In fact, Sarah didn’t even do the ‘weiner-yes-or-no’ check before throwing her towards Amy. I guess she figured we’d find out sooner or later, and presenting her to Mom was more important. I managed to catch a glimpse and let Amy know through a brief spurt of tears, which could have been related to the joy of the moment or the realization I’m faced with another 18 years of Barbies, boys and Bieber.

And then we were left alone. Literally. We laid on the bed, staring at this wrinkly little miracle wrapped in a blanket, who looked exactly like her older sister did at birth. As Jace scanned the room, searching for our faces and voices, we cuddled her for the longest time. We forgot the midwives were still in the room, but they were there, sitting on the floor, out of sight, at the end of the bed. They did some paperwork, popped up the odd time to listen to her lungs and heartbeat, and check her temperature, and then disappear again while Jace gave eating a try for the first time.

They were like wallpaper, there but unnoticed, springing up only when necessary, and then fading into the background again. I couldn’t have imagined a better first hour with my new daughter and unbelievable wife, and hope other people get to experience that intimacy in a child’s first moments at least once. We certainly didn’t have the same experience in the hospital with The Hurricane.

And then, naturally, I went to get pizza for the four of us.

I had a beer too (hey, I earned it), although the midwives took a pass on a celebratory pint, while Mom and babe rested.

After three hours, they bid their goodnights and headed back for Owen Sound, leaving a happy but exhausted family to sleep comfortably in their own bed. After getting next to no sleep in the hospital after Layne’s birth, it was a fitting end to a perfect day.

But a midwife was back the next day, and Day 3, and Day 10 for follow-ups for Mom and Jace, and now, weeks later, with the novelty of having the first baby that we know of in decades to have ‘Ripley, Ontario’ on their birth certificate, and having answered numerous questions from friends and acquaintances about the home birth, we’ve made a pact not to get preachy about midwifery or home births. I’m told women have different comfort levels with pain, conventional medicine and drugs. Some think there’s no way they could do it without drugs or doctors (although they’re probably not giving themselves enough credit), and that’s fine. It’s their vagina, not mine.

So the only preachy thing I’ll say is that expecting women need to get on Amazon and buy (or lend from the Bruce County library, which we did after Jace was born because, well, the system is a bit slow) the documentary The Business of Being Born by Ricki Lake, the former TV talk show host. Here’s the documentary’s summary. Do it early in your pregnancy and then give it to your friends if you buy it, because it has some startling statistics that, while American, surely relate to Canada as well. In fact, did you know that America has one of the highest death rates of mothers and the second highest infant mortality rate during delivery in the developed world?

Seriously. The country – where only a few per cent of people use midwives – is nearly third world, while some European countries see a third of expectant mothers use midwives and have babies at home, with very few deaths.

So educate yourself about midwifery. Don’t just do what your friends, Mom or doctor says is right, and then make the choice that is best for you and your family.

We’re certainly glad we took the opportunity.

Picture day!

Some of my favourite photos from Jace’s first week.

Believe me, there’s plenty more where these came from!

A newborn pic of Layne beside Jace. There's a fair bit of resemblance there!

 

Welcome, Jace Ashlee Irwin

I started this blog post on Dec. 23, 2010.

That was two days after the 6 p.m. on the Winter Solstice birth of Jace Ashlee (in honour of Aunts Janine Ashley and Shantel Lee), our second beautiful daughter.

Every day since I have told myself that I should finally write a blog post about her arrival, the very unique way she got here (home birth), and all the, uh, fun we’ve had trying to keep Jace healthy while living through a Category 5 Hurricane 13 hours every day.

But the thought of a new blog post passes quickly, like breast milk through a newborn. Between family Christmases, sleep deprivation, general family life, shouldering (hopefully) some of the load in the household so The Boss doesn’t get too worn down, keeping The Hurricane occupied and out of Jace and Mom’s face once in a while, hockey, an unnecessarily nasty Jan. 1 hangover, and returning to work, I just haven’t had the energy, or motivation, to sit at the computer to do anything but look up tutorials and easy songs to play on the guitar, in my futile attempt to be cool and fulfill a lifelong New Year’s resolution of shredding the axe (see, I’m cool now, right?).

Someday I will probably feel guilty about not immediately documenting Jace’s triumphant arrival, when the adrenaline was pumping and I was flying high. That’s what I did for Layne, which I’m thankful for when I look back at her baby book, which was essentially my now-defunct blog from my former employer (which I cannot find a surviving piece of anywhere on the Internet when I am… uh… not… uh… Googling myself). Luckily, I printed all Layne-related material before leaving, so I have my post from July 3, 2007, when she arrived, and the dozens of related posts in the years to follow. Everything from her first couple of years is at my fingertips, in immense detail. I don’t need it now, but it will be wonderful to have someday.

So far, I have no such thing with Jacey. I don’t like that feeling. I know Aunt Shan over in England is none too happy about that either, as she keeps my blog hits existent by checking every day for a scrap of information or even a new picture of her newest niece, whom she’ll meet in a couple of weeks. I have to make time to write about the minutiae of our daily lives as a new family of four. And I need to do it for me, Amy, Layne and Jace, because I know, although ridiculous overkill now, these posts are our family history. How else will I tell embarrassing stories at their wedding, which, by then, I hope are paid for by the groom’s family – or, at the very least, after the dowry system has been reinstituted, since it appears I’m in the girl-making business.

Oh, and she was 6 lbs. 5 oz and 19.5 inches. And healthy. And gorgeous, like her Mom and sister.

Home Sweet Home

Forgive me Internet, for I have sinned.

It has been a month-and-a-half since my last post.

(And yes, I realize this prolonged absence came barely a month after my two passionate posts about my desperate need to write and preserve my family’s history via the Interweb).

But we’ve been busy. In fact, we – and by ‘we’ I mean highly-skilled tradesmen and my talented wife – turned this…

into this…

into this…

and finally into this…

and this…

So yeah, I guess we’ve been busy with the renovations, the move, the unpacking, the setting up, and the cleaning, with plenty more to go.

Plus, The Hurricane is skating, just finished swimming, and going a million miles an hour in anticipation of Santa’s arrival, as well as the arrival of her new baby brother or sister, which could coincide with each other.

But now that life is seemingly returning to ‘normal’, if there is such a thing, I hope to find some more time to write about our family and all the fun things we do, and all the trials and tribulations that are just part of life, whether we want them to be or not.

And, since it’s my blog, I guess I don’t need to make any more excuses!

It’s all happening too fast…

Life that is.

It’s flying by, whether I want it to or not.

Some things can’t get here soon enough – like the still unlaid hardwood floors in our new-to-us house, which is preventing us from moving in anytime soon – while other things can just fuck the hell off, like The Hurricane becoming too old to want to her Mom and Dad hanging around all the time.

Today was the first step on that inevitable journey – Junior Kindergarten registration day.

She’s three years and three months old, and more than 10 months away from actually attending class, but this is heavy.

She’s going to school next year.

For the first time, with at least another 13 years to follow, someone we don’t know is going to play a major role in deciding my daughter’s future, whether that be by encouraging her to embrace her free spirit and tapping into her obvious intelligence, or pigeon-holing her as a troublemaker because of that free spirit and deeming her not worth the hassle, and just pushing her through so she can become another teacher’s problem the next year.

Think it doesn’t happen? Take a stroll down memory lane and picture the kids in your elementary class who were the ‘bad-asses’. Were they stupid or unteachable? Probably not. In fact, the ‘trouble’ kids I grew up with are some of the savviest, most intelligent people I know today, they just didn’t have much love for books and classrooms. Despite their intelligence, they barely scratched their way through school, because their reputation always preceded them, and they played it up and eventually the teachers let them be, rightly or wrongly, on both sides, in hindsight.

I’m pretty sure The Hurricane will get along great at school – she’s extremely bright, plays well with other kids and will be a teacher’s pet, because she is such a ‘Mom’ and will end up babysitting her classmates more than learning beside them.

In fact, at registration today, the early childhood educator who will be assisting with The Hurricane’s class had a one-on-one chat with her at the meet and greet. The idea was to see where the future students are in their development, a year before class begins.

The woman asked, “What’s your name?”

“Layne,” came the reply. “L-A-Y-N-E.”

‘Nuff said.

So I think she’ll be OK, but it just doesn’t feel right. She’s my baby. She can’t be going to school next year. She can’t be growing up this fast.

The days are long and the years are short.

No shit.

Almost home…

A ‘regular’ life is on the horizon.

Barring an unforseen disaster during our home renovations – our carpenter is finishing up drywall, and The Boss is painting the upstairs like a trooper despite being six months pregnant – we should be moving our stuff into our new house on Oct. 1.

The flooring and kitchen are both slated to arrive late next week, although we expect to get nothing accomplished next weekend because it’s Ripley Fall Fair, the most wonderful time of the year. Except for the Sunday… for some reason it generally sucks, although no 3 1/2 hour drive to Port Hope this year makes it seem less daunting.

That means we’ll soon be able to unpack our boxes, bother to put up our bed frame, find our kitchen utensils and begin our life in the home we’re going to raise our soon-to-be larger family.

There’s a good chance this is the house our kids will graduate high school from, if I dare to think that far in advance. Of course, you never know, we may sell the house along the way, but that’s my thought process going into this new house. For the first time in my adult life, I will have a home.

Our first house in Edson, Alberta, was never going to be more than a stopover and a great investment, and it did both jobs very well. Our condo in Kincardine sufficed for our childless year there, but I knew in my gut we wouldn’t be spending too long there, and sure enough it was a year to the day when I started my new job in Cobourg. Our Port Hope house was simple yet perfect for our young family, but it never felt 100% like home to me, despite the wonderful time our family had while we lived there (led by The Hurricane’s birth, and first three years of her life).

It came close, but I never day-dreamed about Layne getting her diploma from Port Hope High.

But this time, it’s for real. And it feels right. As things come together and the house begins to look more habitable, I’ve started to think about things like the positioning of our streetlights and how they will affect road hockey games, or putting a rink in the backyard each winter, or walking Layne to school, or charting Layne’s height on an upstairs wall, or who in the neighbourhood will make a good babysitter for the next 10 years (and they MUST be within walking distance, because why get a babysitter if you have to drive them home? Am I right?).

I have always had a penchant for looking towards the next opportunity, instead of living in the moment and enjoying life in the now. I was too young to know any different when living out west – oh to have back those many Sundays spent on the couch recovering when I should have been hiking in the mountains! – and I spent a better portion of our time in Kincardine and Port Hope plotting our next move.

But no more.

Oh, I’ll still dream big, and long to see parts of the world many wouldn’t give a first thought, but now it doesn’t involve packing everyone up and relocating again.

It just feels right to be home.

Wrecking our new house

So we destroyed our new house on the weekend, just two days after being handed the keys.

This is how it looked on Friday morning:

And this is how it looks now, after the long weekend:

On Friday and Saturday, I had help from my uncle, my brother-in-law, my father-in-law, my Dad, and The Best Man (circa 2004) in tearing our 129-year-old church/home a new one.

We took up the main floor carpeting, saving enough to redo two bedrooms upstairs in the coming weeks. We took out the kitchen, stripped the lath and plaster and paneling off the walls of the kitchen and dining room (which was a den), pulled down the old ceiling tiles, removed an antique woodstove and the two layers of bricks supporting it, and took out a four-foot section of wall. We also removed about 8,000 tiny staples that held the former carpet’s underlay in place, as well as another 8,000 which held the ceiling tiles up.

And that’s just on the main floor. The Boss – a trooper, despite being 24 weeks pregnant – and her sister, my Mom, a friend and even The Hurricane did an awesome job stripping decades-old wallpaper off the walls of two bedrooms and a bathroom, setting us up nicely for painting within the next few days upstairs.

Luckily, we’re not living in this mess, and we hope to have all the renovations completed in time for October 1, but you just never know what you’re going to find in an old house. Although I’m knocking firmly on wood as I type this, we haven’t come across anything earth shattering yet, and that’s a testament to the care the previous owners took of the home in the 40-plus years they owned it.

While all this destruction was taking place, The Hurricane was just in her glory. She spent two full days running from the ground floor to the second floor and back  to make sure everything was on track, seeing if she could help out in any way, and chatting non-stop, even if nobody was really listening, which is hard to do with all that work and noise and dust and swear words going on.

We were worried she wouldn’t let us get as much done as we wanted, forcing one of us to be on parental duty at all times, but she really stepped up and let us accomplish everything on our weekend to do list, and then some.

So now we have to get our electrical roughed-in, and then our carpenter begins his task of drywalling and levelling out the floors of the old girl, before handing it over to the kitchen guy and then the hardwood floor installer. Although it looks like it’s a long way off right now, I’m pretty happy with the progress we made this weekend and can only hope the rest of the renovation goes as smoothly from here on out.

Oh, and I now know ripping down walls is as fun as it looks on TV (except for the dust and the crowbar-accelerated chunk of wood in the nuts, which made me a little more tentative for a few minutes, but gave the brother-in-law a good laugh so, uh, no harm done).

New house, another new start

On Wednesday we get our new house.

Well, our-built-as-a-church-in-1881-and-turned-into-a-house-in-1910, new house.

It’s our fourth house since 2003, and the second we’ve owned in The Hurricane’s lifetime, although she likely considers my parents’ cottage, where we’ve been living the past four months, as a third home.

It’s amazing how adaptable the young are. We tried our best to explain the move we made this past April from the only hometown Layne had ever known – Port Hope – to my and The Boss’s hometown of Ripley, about 350 kilometres away. She was familiar with Ripley, having spent plenty of weekends here at The In-Laws farm in her almost-three years, but she always pined to get back to her bed in Port Hope at the end of a weekend.

But once we actually packed our boxes and said goodbye to our place in Port Hope, she’s barely looked back. For the first month or so, she’d ask when we were heading back, and, once told we were living in Ripley now, she’d shrug her shoulders and start running at 100 miles per hour again, seemingly unfazed.

Gradually, she has quit asking about our old house, and her old babysitter, and our old neighbours, and Port Hope in general, although she’ll throw something out there from time to time, like how Carolyn (the sitter we all adored) would twirl her spaghetti, which came up when The Hurricane couldn’t quite figure out how to do so last night.

So another move, which likely won’t take place for a month or so after some extensive upgrades to our dated but sturdy new home, probably won’t faze the little one that much. Although the deal has only been done for a month, it was a month-long process prior to the final signatures for a variety of reasons, and in a town of 600 you can’t avoid walking by it from time to time, so she’s had plenty of chances to see where she’ll be living and get used to the neighbourhood. Luckily, it’s a block from the ball diamond, arena, day care and two blocks from where she’ll go to school in the fall of 2011 (yikes!).

So, besides moving her to a new town, having to explain to her numerous times about the baby in Mommy’s tummy that will come around Christmastime, and the new home, The Hurricane (and her parents) have had quite the summer. And, starting tomorrow, it’s about to get a whole lot busier, as every spare moment will likely be spent preparing to bring the house from a well-kept but still late-60s decor into 2010.

But whenever we are prepared to move, I know one little girl who won’t even flinch, as she chooses the colours for yet another new room.

A living journal

I honestly didn’t think writing that post yesterday would have such an uplifting effect (or affect? Ah, I hate those words!) on me.

Oddly, I feel lighter today. Some people need to yell and scream, or go for a five mile run (yeah, right) to clear their head, but I just needed to do some typing.

My cousin Derek summed it up perfectly in a comment on Facebook:

“Writing is like walking, for you, so just put one word in front of the other!”

I’ve never thought of it like that, but love the analogy. So yeah, maybe sitting on my ass spewing words is the equivalent to a nice, long run for me (think my doctor and her judgmental Body Mass Index will buy that? Mildly obese? I wrote 2,000 words this week!).

This morning, as we took a break from playing in bed with The Hurricane, who again slept in until a very-late-for-her 7:30 a.m., The Boss said I need to keep writing in the blog because it’s like a living journal. It documented, in too great of detail most likely, six whole months of our family’s existence. As she looked back through old posts last night, she found events (small in hindsight, but big at the time) that she had completely forgotten… like the time The Hurricane probably ate poo, or the time she landed her first two-foot jump. You think you’d never forget things like that, but you do.

But life moves forward, and memories stay behind.

Another pearl of wisdom I pulled out of that Happiness Project book was the quote:

The days are long, but the years are short.

It’s so true. So many things happen in one day when you have a full-of-life three-year-old that you’re exhausted by day’s end, but there’s so many memorable things happen (like her bang-on use of her… uh… mother’s favourite swears) that you think you’ll never forget them.

But in a snap, a year – or in the blog’s case, 17 months – passes you by and, at least in my case, those memories fade and will only be remembered if one of us happens to tweak sometime and bring it up. It’s a ‘Remember when…’ moment, instead of a fully-documented account of exactly what happened one day in the beautiful life of our first child.

I’m saddened I tired of my blog back then, because there have been so many unbelievably amazing everyday things happen in our lives since March, 2009, and I’d now struggle to explain any of them in great detail.

The days are long, and the years are short.

At least now I realize it though.