Home from Oregon tonight.  A lovely trip, lots of good time with old friends in Portland, yurt camping in Lincoln City, a pligrimage to the Tillamook Cheese Factory (Ramona was very excited, running around saying "CHEESE!" and stuffing her cheeks with cheese samples), and beach time in Lincoln City and briefly at the gorgeous Pacific City beach, where we had a very sandy picnic in the sun.  We made sauropods, triceratopses and dinosaur eggs with our sand molds, and Ramonazilla stepped on them all.  Every time we talked about the beach, Ramona talked about her toes, so we got our toes in the ocean a lot, and Ramona did an ocean dance on more than one occasion. 

Ramona tried to eat a strange berry (probably salal, probaby no big deal) and I freaked out and we talked about it a lot afterward, how we can never eat berries unless we're totally sure they can't hurt us.   She said "BLEAGH!" every time we passed the bush after that, to make it clear to me she knew we don't eat those.  My smart girl.  We had mostly good success using the potty seat on the camp-ground potty, and she forced us to make friends with very nice neighbors in the yurt across the way.  Ramona wants all of my time and attention when I'm around, though she does fine with my actual physical absence.  I came home looking forward to going back to work after a week of constant togetherness.  I am not a full-time mom, just as I am not a full-time worker.

It was very hard to leave the coast.  We want so badly to be living our life there, but it's not time yet.  Coming back home, there's the pressures of snack day at the co-op preschool, our serious need to rent some storage space, and a letter from my Congressional Rep thanking for my input about increased access to Certified Nurse MIdwives (which is great, but not what I was advocating).  I crave my own midwifery clients.  I want to be throught the hard work of being the apprentice, and ready to practice, but it's not time yet.  I have a lot to slog through first -- my school exam, 20 primary births, the rest of my CPM paper-work, another midwifery intensive workshop, and the extensive CPM exam.  I am dreaming and praying about finding women who come to the practice where I am apprenticing because they want to work with me.  I swear, I will make it happen.  But that's even more to do, getting myself out there...  But we went for a walk and saw ducks down by the Cedar River, changing their bright green heads for more muted fall tones.  And the first of the salmon are there, starting to spawn and die.  Fall is here, and here is beautiful and that is good.  

On the first harvest, celebrated as "Lammas" or "Lughnasad" in the first days of August, I picked basil from the container garden and made pesto.  It was the hottest it's ever been in Seattle that week, and we ate pesto sandwiches often so we didn't have to turn on the stove.  Now, we have finished that pesto, and I have more basil to throw in the food processor when nap time is over.  It is grey and cool and misty outside; this is the home that I know and love.  Even when the sun is out, fall is in the air; the days are cooler and there is a breeze.  I feel like this first harvest time flipped a switch bringing summer to an end, even though the equinox is not for several weeks.  I am about to go on birth call for the first time in quite a while.  I so look forward to bringing in the harvest of all my academic work, actually midwifing families at birth.  The wheel of the year, and of my life is turning. 

Ramona says more words every day -- door, goat, diaper, more, juice, baseball...  She was trying really hard to say "Let's go Mets!" yesterday, and didn't want to take a nap becuase she knew we were goging to the baseball game later that day.  When Jamie asked her what she needed as she fussed about nap time, she told him she wanted to watch baseball.  She loves her baseball cards; some days they are her first thought when she wakes up in the morning.  I miss her when I am at work, and love the happy reunions in the evening.  She is so much fun to talk to, and it's exciting to be more and more able to talk to her.  Watching her learn and unfold is another first harvest, of my work as her mother.  I pray that I will continue to teach her well.  

Last weekend I was feeling pretty crappy, and took a walk with the baby down by the Cedar River.  The salmon had started coming back, and I watched them from the bridge while she slept on me in the baby carrier.  As we walked further down the river, I saw the great blue heron, juvenile mergansers that must be this spring's successful  hatchlings, a humming bird in the fuchsias, and many many different water birds once we reached Lake Washington.  The park along the river looked like the landscapers had been thinking of autumn when they planted -- bright red bushes, red rose hips, purple blackberries, blue berries on an ornamnetal shrub.  It was beautiful, and I felt renewed by the beauty of the colors, and by the proximity to the more-than-human world of the birds and fish. 
I am the only one awake in the house now at 10pm, but Ramona is sleeping restlessly, and I'll have to take her to the potty and nurse her back to sleep soon.  The hardest thing about parenting is not getting to choose anymore what my days look like.  It's all about her needs right now, and I try to get myself on her schedule, avoid the things that I don't want her to be exposed to.  But sometimes I have to sneak grownup time, and hopefully our hour of watching the news tonight won't rot her brain too badly.  Hopefully public radio playing in the background all the time will not give her ADD.  Work is nice because there I can focus on accomplishing tasks, which can be so difficult on baby-time at home.  I am ambivalent about returning to birth work, which requires me to give so much of myself, like mothering also does.

I am so grateful to have been able to make it out to the organic farm to pick chard and blackberries.  The chard I froze, the berries I made into canned jam for Solstice gifts.  Now, I have apples and pears cooking down into fruit butter on the stove, which I picked from the orchard on the land where my father lives.  Participating in the journey of food from farm to kitchen and then to a friend or into my own body is satisfying and meaningful for me.  It connects me to the bigger cycles, to the wheel of the year, which just turned to autumn with the Equinox last week.  Certainly, I feel the wheel turn this year.  Ramona is saying "mama" and "dada," the first harvest of all the language she has heard and the love we have given her these past seven months.  I am reaping the fruits of the seeds we have sown, figuratively and literally, as big changes come down the pike for our little family. 

I am so grateful to have found a job back with my old employer in a new part-time position with flexible hours to allow for mothering and eventually midwifery apprenticeship.  Jamie and I will now spend just about equal time away from home doing paid work, and equal time at home with the babe.  When I told a friend about this, he gave me kudos for putting my gender equity money where my mouth was, but that's not why I wanted to do this.  Jamie's been miserable at work, and although being an at-home parent is no cake-walk, we both love spending time with Ramona, and I think part of Jamie's unhappiness has been missing his time with her.  We'll both have the joy of coming home to her after a day at work, along with the joy of waking up in the morning with a whole day filled with her ahead of us.  And the added bonus of saying fuck you to traditional gender roles. 

I am so grateful that I Jamie and I love mothering my daughter, but I'm shocked by the way my mothering is policed.  At my 10 year high-school reunion, another woman with a baby approached me and gushed, "Don't you just LOVE being a mom?"  Pushing the stroller with the sleeping baby in it the other day, lost in thought, a stranger said to me, "Smile when you do that, that's the joy of your life."  And I do, and it is, but what did they know about it?  As a woman, I'm supposed to be Joyfully consumed by my baby, and otherwise happily vacant.   Jamie, however, is not really supposed to be as absorbed with Ramona, but plagued by a general anxiety about financially supporting us.  He isn't expected to smile.  And then there are the people who are shocked to hear that she's a girl, just because she isn't wearing a dress or pink or ruffles.  There are people that expect us to introduce formula, have her sleep in her crib, follow the CDC vaccination schedule, put her in day care, and on and on.  I'm glad that we're strong enough to figure out what works for us as parents without paying attention to what everyone else thinks our parenting ought to look like.