I guess July was the month of infidelity then, because I’ve finished the three books I set out to read and am moving on.

I wish I could tell you that Madame Bovary was as wonderful as I remembered it being. I can’t tell you that. As you already know if we’re friends on Goodreads (and if we aren’t yet, feel free to send a friend request), I did not enjoy Bovary on this second reading. It dragged. All the characters were irritating–Emma Bovary most of all. I cheered when she died. I don’t remember ever before cheering a character’s death. Awful. I have no idea what it was that I loved about it when I was eighteen.

The Scarlet Letter was equally surprising in that I enjoyed it much more than I expected I would. I liked it when I read it as a high school freshman, but I hadn’t given it much thought, if any, in the past 22 years. Then a neighbor told me she loved it and reread it all the time, that it was so much better as an adult. She was right. It’s a great book. Beautifully written. Give it another try if you haven’t read it since high school either.

I’ve got a few more classics that I downloaded to my Kindle for free, but I’m craving something contemporary next. There’s no room in the budget for something new on the Kindle right now (if only I could somehow cram my shelves full of already purchased paper books onto the Kindle!), since we’re saving to replace my poor dead laptop. That means I’ll have to cowboy up and read a regular old paper book or two one-handed while nursing, risking a sore wrist to do so. Yes, I’m very brave.

Next up, I plan to finish Already Dead by Denis Johnson. I started it ages ago–maybe even a year ago–but life intervened and even though I loved it, I never got past the first 100 or so pages. I’m going to start it again. After that, I’m thinking I’ll finally finish Gilead, which I’ve started and stopped twice already. Life was weird for the past two years, what with all the pregnancies and miscarriages, and I think that affected my reading, so I’m not going to automatically dismiss any book that didn’t hold my attention during that time.

When I can buy a new book or two for the Kindle again, I’m got my eye on this and this.

What are you reading this summer? I’m always open to suggestions.

So, those birth photos I posted a while back… It wasn’t to shock you. And it wasn’t an urge to gratuitously share images of someone’s gloved hands inside my abdomen. Really. I thought the photos spoke for themselves. They did, quite clearly, for many of you–particularly those of you who have also had c-sections. But some folks didn’t get it, were disturbed or offended. I’m fine with that, actually, if you were, but it’s been nagging at me since then, the idea that my motivation in posting them wasn’t clear.

Here’s the thing. We all know what a vaginal delivery looks like, right? We’ve seen plenty of images of them, plus it’s as natural an event as you can get so it’s not hard to imagine how it works.

A c-section? Not so much.

I was born by c-section. My two children were both born by c-section. Even so, I had no idea before I saw these photos–taken by Billy, at the wonderful anesthesiologist’s urging, during Ladybug’s delivery–what a c-section looked like. I didn’t give much thought to the particulars of the surgery before Thumper’s birth because I was going to have a drug-free natural delivery with no medical interventions, thankyouverymuch. And after his birth, I couldn’t bear to think too much about the particulars of the surgery because I felt so traumatized by the way the labor and delivery had gone.

If Billy had photographed my first c-section, I would not have been able to look at those photos. No way.

But the thing is…bloody and medicalized and brutal as it is…this is the way my two beautiful children came into the world. It’s the way I came into the world, and my brother after me. That is the reality of birth for so many of us. (Yes, probably too many, but I’m not interested in debating c-section rates or birth politics here.)

It’s not pretty. It’s not romantic. But it’s birth. It counts.

Remember how the marauding neighborhood cats and their evil garden-shitting ways destroyed my spinach bed two seasons in a row? And how I swore it had put me off cats forever, that I would never again have a cat myself? Well…yeah.

It turns out that once I no longer needed to fear toxoplasmosis in my cat-contaminated garden soil blinding my fetus, my I Love Cats button got reactivated. I found myself really, really, really wishing we had a cat. It didn’t hurt that Thumper has been asking for a cat for months now. On Tuesday the kids and I headed over to the Oregon Humane Society and brought Benny home. (Thumper picked out the name. Good one, hunh? Billy and I have been calling the cat Benny Hill, but truth be told the kiddo named him after Benny the Bull in Dora.)

It’s so nice to have an animal in the family again. It’s been weird since Diego died in February. This was the longest I’d gone in my entire life without a pet of some kind. He’s nine days younger than Ladybug. Super sweet and affectionate, and very good (and tolerant!) with the kids. Yay Benny!

Also weird and kinda funny: As I walked out of the Humane Society, Ladybug strapped to my chest, holding Thumper’s hand, and the cat carrier in my other hand, I felt truly grown up for the first time. I was wondering what it would take, if I would ever feel that way. But don’t worry–the feeling passed.

PS: Thanks to Everette and David for helping me figure out how to get photos up here without the cushy convenience of iPhoto. You’re my very two favorite nerds (and that’s saying something!). AND you’re both now in Seattle. Remind me to introduce you to each other. You need to meet.

I read Anna Karenina for the first time in 1992, in the second semester of my freshman year in college. I loved it, but was never moved to read it a second time. There are a lot of books in the world, after all, and not nearly enough time to get to everything I want to read. It’s the very rare book that I read a second time.

Finding a free edition of Anna Karenina for my Kindle inspired me to give it another read. I’m now determined to change that re-reading policy. Better to read fewer books more deeply, I think. I loved Anna Karenina, sure, but I was eighteen years old. I loved it without any true understanding of what I was reading. I found her sympathetic, was caught up in her romance, thrilled to the tragedy of it, and that was it.

This time I found a much more complex book. It’s about the romance between Anna and Vronsky, sure, but it’s also about other marriages, other romances… It explores the themes of love, marriage, motherhood, faith, death, politics, family… This book seems to contain everything. EVERYTHING. It’s titled Anna Karenina, but it’s only partly her story. And within that story of hers, Tolstoy manages to make her sympathetic, then unsympathetic, then sympathetic again–through her love for her son, a clever move there–and then once again unsympathetic and finally, utterly pathetic and pitiable. Which is to say…she’s full and real and human in a way I didn’t appreciate the first time. Ditto for Levin. I didn’t understand why Levin’s storyline even existed the first time I read it. Now I see the book is great thanks to its several story lines and the way they fit together to form the greater argument about love and marriage. I’m also seeing how much the story of my current novel-in-progress (Cold Black Stars, for those of you who’ve been around here for a while) owes to Karenina.

I’m shaking my head and smiling condescendingly toward my younger self and what she thought this book was. And yes, I’m likely to do the same to the reader I am now if I read this book again in eighteen years. All the more reason to re-read. We bring who we are into each book we read. A great book will change as we do, I think. (Which is why, I suspect, the professor with whom I read all of In Search of Lost Time re-reads it every ten years. I promised him I would do the same, and so am scheduled to once again climb that mountain in a little over three years, at forty.)

I finished Karenina last night and now I’ve moved on to Madame Bovary, which I also read and loved that year. After that, The Scarlet Letter, which I haven’t read since I was fourteen.

The summer of infidelity, you see. I’m pretty damn excited about it.

What books did you love when you were younger that maybe merit a re-reading?

This pokey old iBook that I’m working on now (see Water Incident in this post for explanation) doesn’t have iPhoto–or any other photo program for that matter–so I can’t get the many photos off my camera to share with you. Or if there is a way to do it, I don’t know how. It’s gonna be dull, pictureless posts around here for a while, because we can’t afford to replace the dead Powerbook just yet. (The photos that I posted in the previous two posts were already in my gmail before the Water Incident.)

The photos you aren’t seeing:

1. Thumper’s fourth birthday party. 18 kids and 16 adults. In our house. Yeah. We’d planned to spill out into the backyard, and then there would have been plenty of room. So of course it rained. Yay Portland. Let’s hear it for the spring that never was. (We skipped spring but now we’ve got nice summer weather so all is forgiven.) Housebound though we were, the party was great. The kids had fun. The adults had fun. It felt crowded, but not unpleasantly so. Festive crowded. We covered a wall in the hallway with paper and let the kids go at it with markers and crayons and glue-on googley eyes and now we’ve got a fantastic mural that you can’t see until I can get the photos off the stupid camera.

I was afraid we were nuts to have invited his whole class plus a few non-school friends once I realized that almost all the parents planned to bring siblings as well as the invited kids. We invited something like 11 kids and got 18. But there were enough cupcakes for everyone and I don’t remember anyone crying or bleeding, so let’s call it a success.

2. The garden. We have way too many snow peas and snap peas. Way too many. We’re seriously sick of them, which I didn’t think would be possible. We’re giving them away to all the neighbors and we’ll still have too many. Anyone know if they freeze well?

Finally. FINALLY. After three years of attempting to grow spinach, we got a glorious spinach crop this spring. I’m sure I’ve got the stupidly wet and cool weather to thank for that. Now that the warm weather is here, it was threatening to bolt. I pulled all of it and now I’ve got a HUGE bunch of spinach that needs to be used up fast. Tonight, pea and saffron risotto with a spinach salad. Tomorrow, spinach fritatta. Sunday, sauteed spinach. With snow peas.

3. The kids. Ladybug is growing like crazy, in the way that babies do. Thumper is a big, gorgeous four-year-old who desperately needs a haircut.

And…speaking of kids… gotta go. Have a great weekend. I think we’re going strawberry picking tomorrow, so there are some more photos you won’t see for a while. It’s gonna be FUN around here.

Happy fourth birthday, love bug! You’re my favorite super hero.

It’ll have to do, yeah? Plus, numbered lists please me.

1. I’m typing this on a very old, very slow iBook and it’s a drag. I’m grateful to have this pokey old laptop, a handmedown from a friend’s girlfriend, but I miss my own superfast (even though it, too, was getting on in years) Powerbook. What happened to my Powerbook? The unfortunate combination of an almost-four-year-old, a glass of water, and gravity. Gravity’s a bitch. So is water. (The almost-four-year-old is awesome and it was totally an accident. Could have happened to an adult just as easily.)

2. Also a drag: this laptop is too old to run Netflix streaming. What’s a mama of an infant to do during those long nursing sessions on growth-spurt days? It’s probably just as well. It was scary how into Miami Ink I was getting.

3. The silver lining in the whole drowned laptop saga? Toward the end of the pregnancy and in the first month of juggling the needs of two kids our policy of no more than 30 minutes of screen time a day for Thumper was completely shot to hell. We don’t have TV, but we did have Netflix streaming and dvds and he was getting way too much of both because, well…frankly when I started feeling overwhelmed or just needed a break, plugging him in was the easiest thing to do. Now that we don’t have the streaming, we decided to use that opportunity to limit the dvds too. Rather than go back to the 30 minutes a day, which has proven a slippery slope, Thumper now can watch one full-length movie a week, and we all watch it together on Saturday evening. It’s been two weeks of that so far, and it’s been a wonderful change.

3.5. Another silver lining: With no streaming and slowpoke internet, I’m getting way more reading done now while nursing the babe–at night and when Thumper is in preschool that is. Billy bought me a Kindle for Hannukah, thinking the one-handed-reading aspect would make it easier to use than a paper book while nursing once the baby was born. Luckily he didn’t ask me first, because I was DEAD SET against them and certainly didn’t want one. I like my books to be made of paper. I even love the smell of paper. I can’t give up the fetish of turning the page. Etc etc blah blah blah. Stodgy old Luddite. You know what? I fucking LOVE my Kindle. The one-handed thing is brilliant while nursing. I read a thick hardcover while nursing last week and totally tweaked my wrist trying to keep it open while reading with one hand. The downside is having to buy all the books for it from Amazon when I prefer to support Powells. That’s a huge downside, actually… But still…it’s a handy little device. Especially now that I’ve discovered you can download a ton of classics for free. I’m rereading Anna Karenina now.

What else I’ve been reading (though only one of them on the Kindle, now that I look back over the list):
The Last Life by Claire Messud. It’s quite good. Do check it out. A couple years back I read and absolutely loved her pair of novellas, The Hunters. Then I picked up The Emperor’s Children and didn’t finish it. It didn’t hold my interest at all. So disappointing. I’m very glad I gave her another try. And sometimes when I can’t finish a book, it’s not the fault of the book but of where I’m at at the moment. Since that was last year, and I’ve loved two of her other books, I may give that one another go.

My Happy Life by Lydia Millet. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. I want to be Lydia Millet when I grow up. No…more like I want to read everything else she’s ever written and then I want to be her best friend and braid her hair.

I Smile Back. I bought this one accidentally and I can’t say it turned out to be a happy accident. I was downloading a sample chapter (which is another fantastic feature with the Kindle) and at the same time was trying to get the baby to latch back on and I jiggled a button when I should have pressed and then pressed and somehow the Buy button got selected and I didn’t realize it until it was too late to undo the purchase. So I read it, hoping very much to love it, since I’d spent money on it that was NOT in the budget for this month. And…no. I didn’t love it at all. I didn’t even really like it. Not a matter of giving it another go at another time…because, okay…I thought it was truly awful. (Another downside to the eBook thing: I can’t sell the thing to Powells and I can’t throw it across the room.)

3.75. Which reminds me of my production editorial days. You know what young production editors do when they’re having a really, really shitty day? Or at least what I and my friend Lucas used to do? We’d pluck a book we really hated off the Free shelf, close our office doors, and rip the fucker to shreds. Yes, author of Cat Mystery Cosies, we mean you. Yes, toupeed Pop Business Self Help author, we mean you, too. Yes, sweet Southern romance author, honey. I’m sorry. You too. (But thanks for that popcorn bucket at Christmas.) And Medical Thriller Man? Especially you. We ripped your (paperback) books apart. And then we felt much better and got back to work, making your manuscripts neat and clean and error free.

4. The eleventybillion ultrasounds I had during the little girl’s pregnancy apparently had an unexpected side effect: She LOVES to have her photo taken. Smiles and coos for the camera. Seriously. Check out this two-month-old goodness:

5. Water also killed my cell phone this weekend, but I don’t know when it got wet and if it was the boy’s fault or rain. Luckily I always get the cheapo phone so it was no big deal to replace it.

6. Speaking of water… I know it’s kind of ridiculous to leave NYC for Portland, Oregon, and then complain about the rain. And usually I don’t. I love the rain. But…shit. It’s not supposed to rain THIS much in the late spring/summer…whatever season we’re supposedly in now. This past Saturday aside (which was glorious and desperately needed) we have not had a day without rain in something like three weeks. Come ON. Everyone’s tomato plants are going yellow from overwatering. It may be a craptastic year for tomatoes west of the Cascades. Everything else in the garden is pretty damn happy with the wet, though. Especially the peas and spinach, since it’s been quite cool. And the radishes are fat and gorgeous because they like a lot of water. Not happy? The beets. Fucking leaf miners decimated them again. I love beets, but I have yet to have a successful crop. I think we’re giving up on growing them.

7. I’ve been calling the baby Ladybug. I think we’ll call her that here, too. Agreed?

8. The baby, Ms. Ladybug, has been consistently rolling over from belly to back since Saturday. At nine weeks old. I have a feeling this one is going to keep us on our toes.

Do you remember my review of Light Boxes and interview with the author, Shane Jones, that I did a while back? Well, I wasn’t alone in loving that novel. The original print run sold out completely. When the demand for Light Boxes exceeded the capabilities of the mighty but tiny indie press Publishing Genius, Penguin bought the rights and has now reissued the novel.

Yep, you’ve got another chance to own and read this beautiful, beautiful book. I strongly suggest that you take advantage of it.

CLARIFICATION: I suggest you BUY the book now that it’s available for purchase again. I’m not giving away copies.

I may not be managing to blog much since the little girl’s arrival (yes, she needs a pseudonym for the blog. Suggestions welcome.), but I have managed to keep up on the more vital stuff around here, like the garden. I mean…I may be busy, and I may be tired, but damnit, we have to eat.

Finding the time and energy to garden is a little easier when the garden supervisor looks like this:

Thumper NEVER let me set him down like this. Total Klingon child until he was two. This little one spends most of her time in my arms or in the sling or the wrap, but I’ve got to admit that it’s very, very nice to have a baby who will be put down every once in a while. (And not to jinx it, but she sleeps VERY well. As in…from 10 pm to 4am every night, then a quick nurse and back to sleep until 7 or so.) If I was only going to get one easy baby, it worked out pretty well that it would be number two. A six-hour stretch pretty much every night since she was a few days old. Crazy. All hail the soothing coziness of the family bed! Though Thumper’s main issue since his sister’s arrival has been the loss of his spot next to me in bed. Poor guy! I miss having him next to me, but it’s just not safe when she’s still so tiny. We put a single mattress down next to our king size and that’s his spot now. He is NOT happy with the sleeping arrangements. We’re hoping he gets over it soon.

Speaking of the wrap… I used only our pouch sling (pictured in the previous post) when Thumper was an infant, but now I’m totally sold on the wrap. She loves it. I love it. My back loves the fact that it’s worn on two shoulders. Here’s a peek at it. Not the clearest shot, but the best I could do on my own while out for a walk:

I bought it here.

Okay, so…garden. Right. Back to the garden. Stuff is growing. It’s good.

The asparagus bed is only three years old, so we still needed to show restraint in the harvest this year. We ate from it for a few weeks and are now letting the rest of the spears go to seed, to send strength back down to the crowns. I think next year is a free-for-all, if I recall correctly. No pictures of the asparagus, but, well…you know what they look like, yeah? Quite tasty. The bed’s coming along nicely.

Also not pictured, the broccoli raab. Not pictured because we already ate it all.

Coming along nicely but not yet feeding us, the peas:

There are snow pea and snap pea plants there. No peas yet, but I noticed a few blossoms starting to form today, so hopefully there will be many, many pea pods soon. This is our first year growing peas.

We’ve been enjoying the lettuces and the radishes for a month or so now. We’re on to our third sowing of each. Here was the garden’s contribution to my lunch today:

Also doing very well, the potato patch:

Spinach?

That’s been hit or miss. I got crappy germination from the first sowing, pictured here. It’s only giving us enough to add to sandwiches, etc. Never enough at once for a meal for the three solid-food-eaters in the house. The second spinach bed is doing much better, so we should have plenty when those plants mature.

Another picture I didn’t take: the leeks. They’re damn good. I made an amazing frittata for dinner the other night using our leeks and eggs from a local farm. (Crazy how much better eggs taste when the chickens get to live–and eat–like chickens are supposed to.) Tomorrow night I’ll be making potato leek soup.

What else…what else…

I put the tomato plants in this weekend and put in the first sowing of pole beans today… Planning to buy some cucumber starts in the next week or so.

Uh…yeah. That’s it. Consider yourself updated.

You’ll be shocked to learn that a new baby kind of gets in the way of blogging. Time to move the surgery pics down a bit, though, yeah?

Here’s a photo I’ve been meaning to post for some time, but it’s mostly a placeholder for a photo I’ve been meaning to take for weeks.

It’s the little girl in the EZ February sweater that Heather made for her. The sweater is gorgeous and she’s worn it nearly every day since Heather gave it to her a day or two after we got home from the hospital. I really need to take that photo of her wearing it–one where you can see the full sweater–before she outgrows the thing.