Today is Evan’s 18 month birthday! I wrote this post last night:
Time for a post. I’m chillaxin’ on the front porch at my inlaws while the basketball fans are all inside watching game seven of the Lakers and Celtics. Decided it would be a good time to catch up on my bloggin’. I just hope to remain calm if a June bug lands on me, because there sure are a lot of them flying around this lamp. I know they won’t hurt me, but I do have the typical creepy-crawlie insta-get-it-off-me reaction if they cling on as they are apt to do. We’ll see how long I last.
**Interrupted by the B-ball fans coming out on half-time break. Celtics are up.**
So, Evan turns a year and a half tomorrow. Half-way to two years old already!! Wow. Since he’s starting to really be interested in how things work and experiencing new things, I’ve been spending a lot of time researching cool, new activity and craft books for us to do together. It is SOOO fun to see some of the stuff we’ve been inputting into him for the last 18 months start to come out. Like just the other day, as we counted something for the zillionth time….I said “one,” and he said “tewwww.” Apparently, that is his favorite number, b/c he said “free” (3) one time, but usually our counting goes like this. Me: “onnneee” Evan: “tewwww” Me: “threeee” Evan: “tewwww” and so on. Ha ha. This gives me and Mike a cute attack, so now we are counting everything just to hear him say his new word. He still doesn’t say many words, and he’s abandoned some of his old faves…but suddenly in the last week or so, he’s busting out some new ones unprompted…like “shoes.” (today he said “cheese” when we held up a camera!) He still signs more than anything and is finally signing “please,” so now we can put an end to his whining when he wants something. He signs “more, please.” for everything now and gets REALLY angry if you say no. I’m sure he is thinking, “but I SAID PLEASE!!” The best part about this age is the endless conversations in fake baby language. I’m continually amazed at how good he is with inflections and tone so that you know exactly what he’s saying even though it’s total gibberish. He asks questions and makes statements quite fluently in Evanese. I can’t wait to see him with his 2 1/2 year old cousin who is learning Chinese.
Should be fun!
Here are some fun things we’ve done in the past month or so that are fresh in my mind:
1. Zoo for the first time. Not as mind-blowing (for Evan) as the aquarium, but still fun. He liked the Mommy gorilla statue best and sat in her lap and cried when we had to take him away. He loves kissing things he likes and was very sweet to her and her baby. We (me and Mike) got to see a real gorilla baby too, that was awesome. Evan pounds his chest like a gorilla thanks to a great Eric Carle book.
2. Spent a morning at the beach on Lake Allatoona with some mommy-friends and their kiddos. This was, sort of but not really, Evan’s first time at the beach since he doesn’t remember last summer and he had a blast. He is very brave and insisted on walking up to his neck in the water (following the big kids he could see out swimming) and did NOT want me to touch him. This place is a fantastic find, about 15 minutes from our house…nice beach sand, clear water complete with nibbly minnows and a shaded picnic area.
A couple cute Evan things I want to remember from the past few weeks:
1. One evening he brought his teddy over to the table while we were eating, and offered the piece of food we gave him to the bear. I said “oh is Teddy hungry?” I got him an empty bowl and spoon and he then wanted Teddy to sit in his highchair to eat. Then HE wanted to be in the high chair too. He then proceeded to feed Teddy spoonfuls of invisible food from the empty bowl. After that he wanted to feed everything including us and even insisted on bringing the bowl and spoon to bath-time where he fed all his bath toys.
2. Making his rubber ducks in the bathtub kiss each other. I always give him a big reaction saying “oh the ducks LOVE each other!” He then kisses each one and makes me kiss them. We all love each other.
K, if you are only interested in the fun side of our lives, stop reading now. The rest of this post is kind of depressing.
Not to change the subject from all fun things, but I just have to mention something that has been weighing on my mind so heavily these days, especially in light of the Gulf oil spill. Even before it happened, I was thinking about it, but now it definitely crosses my mind every day. I have a lot, A LOT, of friends who have chosen not to have children and many of them say it’s because they don’t want to contribute to an already overly populated Earth. I have always wanted kids and have made the argument that people like us (meaning smart, educated, caring, environmentalist, some of you are probably thinking crunchy hippie…yippee (yuppie-hippie), etc) should be the ones to have lots and lots of kids so that maybe someday one of them can solve the world’s problems (or at least outnumber/out vote those who don’t care or are too troubled to care). Sadly, I know this is a lofty dream considering most of the world is more worried about where their next meal is coming from or whether or not they’ll be safe through the night.
It wasn’t until I had a kid that I started thinking, will he live to see something really bad happen to Earth…some really horrible environmental disaster of global proportions…will his kids live to see it? I know that humankind and Earth will more than likely bounce back from something that could happen in the near future…but now I worry that my kids will live to see it, or worse suffer from it as so many people’s kids all over Earth are already suffering.
Will I be alive to see it? I kind of feel like we’re on this precipice where people are finally starting to realize how bad things are getting and trying to do something about it. Like, more and more companies (Publix, Target) are pushing their reusable grocery bags and more and more people are starting to use them, to try to do better, have less of an impact. But then I read about the swirling, Texas-sized, floating mats of tangled up plastic trash floating out in the middle of the ocean and I wonder, is it too little too late? Can we turn things around before something really bad happens?
Then this oil spill…one company, one drill, one pin prick in Earth’s crust and it is bleeding out like a hemophiliac. Will paying out $20 billion in damages finally be the wake up call to all these risky businesses that take chances and fail to plan ahead for disaster? That they could be wiped out of business and all their billions in profit in a single flash of unpreparedness? Please let it be. Please let it help be the harbinger of a new age of responsibility both social and environmental. I’m just so scared for my kid and his kids.
I had a happy childhood playing carefree in a creek near my home, with a mild awareness that bad things were happening “out there.” Even then it bothered me enough to try and do something about it. My only hope of making a difference is raising Evan to continue what few changes I’ve tried to make in my vastly over-indulgent American lifestyle and hope that those who can make a bigger difference do so for all the world’s sake. It is so depressing. I just want him to have a clean creek to play in and an enough awareness about the outside world to know that he is lucky and be thankful for that. I want him to care about those who don’t and want to help in whatever way he can.
I guess this oil spill is just getting to me. Especially, when people in power speak up and say it’s not really a disaster or apologize to those responsible because they don’t feel they should have to pay for the lives and environments they’ve ruined. When I hear these things, it’s just so discouraging and makes me feel helpless to do anything. BP should have to pay for the damage…if they don’t, then who will? Someone has to, and if not the company responsible, then who? The government and the American taxpayers. If half of America wants less government and less taxes and less people on welfare then when things like this happen, the company responsible is going to have to step up to the plate and cover the cost.
I’m just hoping that maybe some good will come out of this situation…that since its close to home, more Americans will realize how lucky we are and start moving forward in a better direction. My sincerest hope for Evan is that he grows up in a generation of revolution…that he can be a witness to a massive change in attitude towards the way humans impact the Earth and each other.
It is so hard to change how we’re used to living…I don’t know how it will work. All I know how to do is try in whatever very small ways I can. I know I can do better and make better choices, I will try harder. It’s just so scary to be such a small fish with no magic wand, and even more scary now that I’m a mom. K, I think I’m done. If you’ve read this far, thanks for listening. I just needed to write about how I am feeling.
“It’s not that we don’t care…we just know that the fight ain’t fair….so we keep on waiting, waiting for the world to change.” –John Mayer




this year as I was last year…right around 5:50am! That was when Evan finally decided to join us in the outside world (after 32 hours of trying to stay in!). This year I am up b/c Evan had a fever last night and so Mommy is on high-alert status. He made a very small sound at 5:30am on the monitor, which is behind a closed door with the volume turned up only slightly higher than normal, and b/c of my high-alert status…I’m insta-up. That’s ok…I thought it was kind of neat to lay in bed as the time ticked closer to the actual moment I became a Mommy and Evan changed our world forever. That is such a cliche thing to say I know, but is there really any other way to describe what happens when you go from your regular everyday self you’ve known your whole life to this new person? Sides of me came out in those first few weeks of Evan’s life I never knew existed. It is such a crazy time. I have two friends going through that time right now and reminding me just how emotional it can be.