Jessica Reading

Sometimes Jessica likes to pretend she needs Mommy's glasses to read:

Though it doesn't usually take her long to realize she can see better without them:

She isn't actually reading this story, by the way, but she was telling a story as she looked at the book. It had nothing to do with A Witch's Garden by Miriam Young, however.

Elyse in Color

Here's the color version of the picture I posted on Elyse's birthday. I've since decided I like this one best; I was going for a kind of Julia Margaret Cameron feel with the sepia version, and I think it succeeded, but I think the color version is stronger anyway.

The Birth of a Child: For Jessica on Her Birthday

January 24, 2007, was a Wednesday. We will probably never forget that it was a Wednesday. Anna had taken the day off to go to her doctor's office for an ultrasound to check on Baby Burdett, and we were going to go out to lunch afterwords. The ultrasound wasn't quite routine; at her eight-month checkup the week before, Anna had measured "a little small," so Dr. St. Charles wanted to bring her in the following week for an ultrasound to make sure everything was okay.

We weren't expect to have a baby that day. If we'd had any idea that that were even possible, we would have packed our bags at least, instead of just saying, "We really need to get around to getting our suitcase ready," and then not doing it. So imagine our surprise when Dr. St. Charles said, "You're going to have this baby today."

"What? It almost sounded like you said we're going to have a baby today. But that can't be; the due date is still three weeks away--February 14, Valentine's Day, remember? We've still got plenty of time to finally adjust to the fact that we will soon become parents. We still have time to get ready!"

That kind of readiness is not a factor in such decisions, apparently.

Dr. St. Charles told us to get ourselves straight to the hospital. "Can we at least go home to get some clothes?" "No! Go straight to the hospital. This baby is going to be born in the next few hours." Based on the ultrasound measurements, they believed the still-in-the-womb Baby Burdett (we knew her name would be Jessica, but we hadn't told anyone yet) weighed about four and a half pounds, which is very small for a soon-to-be-born baby. Since Anna was 37 weeks along at that point, and they consider 37 weeks to be full term, Dr. St. Charles believed it would be best to get little Baby Burdett out into the real world to determine what issues she might have that were making her so small, rather than wait for Anna to go into labor.

So we went to the hospital, scared, concerned, totally inexperience, but still with excitement, albeit somewhat muted.

I remember so clearly sitting on a chair outside the operating room where they perform C-sections, wearing the flimsy hospital outfit they had given me over my clothes, including the paper booties over my shoes and the cap on my head; the face mask dangled down onto my chest, the top straps not yet tied, just like I'd seen countless times on "M*A*S*H." Inside, they were prepping Anna for the surgery; Baby Burdett's heart rate had dropped when they tried to induce labor, so a Cesarean was the only option. I sat there, not knowing what was going on anywhere, writing over and over in my back-pocket notebook, "Please, God, let this baby be okay. Please, God, let this baby be okay. Please, God, let this baby be okay." I sat out there nearly forever.

They called me in.

It takes a long time to perform a C-section, and it was comforting that while they were cutting my wife open and pulling our baby out--Bobcat Goldthwait once said a C-section is "when the baby comes out like toast," and I couldn't get that image out of my head--Dr. St. Charles and the assisting nurses were talking about vacation plans and family visits and other mundane things. On "M*A*S*H," you know everything is going to be okay when the doctors are chatting and making jokes; when they're quiet and really focused on their work, it's time to worry.

After a short eternity, Dr. St. Charles said, "Here comes the baby," and seconds later we heard crying. And we cried.

She was skinny; we didn't realize at the time how skinny, she was the only baby we'd ever had. And she was purple and covered in blood and everything else newborn babies are covered in. But she was crying, and wiggling around, and she was so beautiful to me. I didn't know I could feel so much love so fast.

I stood at the nurses side, tears streaming down my face, as they cleaned our little baby up and weighed her--three pounds, thirteen ounces, more than half a pound less than their estimate--and put her in a diaper and blankets; they showed her very quickly to her mother and then whisked her away to the NICU.

And that's how Jessica was born.

She was in perfect health, though they kept her in the NICU for six days--perhaps the longest week we've ever lived through--before they let her come home. They never found out why she was so small, but ultimately it doesn't matter; she was fine, and by five months she had caught up to most babies her age.

I can't believe it's been four years now. Four years is, of course, really not very long, but in a way it really is. I hope that the next few years go by very slowly. I hope our oldest daughter is telling me the truth when I tell her not to be in any rush to grow up and she says, "I'm not."

Happy Birthday, Jessica. I love you.

Happy Birthday, Elyse!

Today is Elyse's first birthday! I can't believe she's already one; it seems like only yesterday that.... Well, that's the thing about being a parent, isn't it? Children are constantly growing and changing, whether we want them to or not; only we adults are stagnant.

Here's a picture of her from the joint birthday party we had for her and Mommy last Saturday (Saturday, January 15, 2011, was Anna's 35th birthday):

And here is a picture I took during a formal photo session tonight:

Elyse at Play

Here are three pictures of Elyse playing in her play yard this morning:

She was very interested in playing with Maggie (one of Jessica's Little People) this morning:

Tessie is a frequent visitor to the play yard, and sometimes Elyse tries to involve her in play, as you can see:

Let it Snow!

If you live in the American South, at least in our part of Georgia, snow is an occasional and short-lived part of winter. The last month has been a real aberration: first, it snowed on Christmas day in quantities enough to stick and be measured, and then, just two weeks later, we got several inches of it! (Of course, for this to be true you have to buy into four being "several." Humor us, okay?)

And this isn't a short-lived episode, for us, at least. As I write this, school has been cancelled for a third day in a row (Monday, January 10 through Wednesday, January 12), and the college where I teach, Georgia Perimeter, has pushed back the beginning of this semester by a full week. (I'm very happy about this, because I don't have to worry about driving back home from my Thursday night class at 8:30 on low-trafficked streets glazed with ice.)

Here are some pictures of what our four-inches of snow looks like here at Planet Burdett. First, the view from our patio:

This is what four inches of snow looks like on our trash cans:

And, a little more poetically, on our bird baths:

I know to my Minnesota in-laws, four inches of snow doesn't even warrant the snow tires, but to us, where some years it's seventy degrees on Christmas day, this is a pretty big deal. However, it's also becoming an annoying ordeal; the novelty has worn off, and I'd really like it to clear away as soon as possible.

Plus, we're very nearly out of cat food, and if I can't get out and get us some more soon, I'm going to have six very angry kitties to answer to.

Twenty Years of Me

Here's a brief glimpse of how I've changed over the years.

First, here I am in 1989:

(picture by Margarette Rogers)

I was nearing the end of college--my undergraduate degree, anyway; I didn't know it at the time, but I would keep going back for sixteen more years until I eventually earned two master's degrees. I cut most of that mass of hair off just a few months later, though frankly I miss it sometimes. I liked having long hair.

Now, fast forward ten years to 1999:

(picture by Heather Dobson)

I'd had a beard for most of the previous ten years--though as you can see in the picture from 1989, it was a little sparse when I was younger--but I shaved it off near the end of 1998, and kept it off through half of 1999. (I haven't been beardless since.) This is how I looked when Anna and I met right in the middle of 1999, though by the time of our first date on August 11, I'd grown my beard back. I gave up the contact lenses not too much later, when my astigmatism reached a point where contacts didn't work very well for me. Besides, I look better with glasses anyway.

And here I am, about a year and a half ago, in the middle of 2009:

By this point, I was a full-time stay-at-home dad of one, and a part-time college English instructor. Not a whole lot has changed since this picture was taken, except that now I'm a father of two, and I have even more gray in my hair and beard.

As I write this, I am just three months away from turning 44, twice the age I was in the first picture above. Sometimes I miss the person I was in 1989, half a lifetime ago. You give up things as you get older, like the notion that you've got in you a string of great novels just waiting to come out, or the idea that someday you'll be a well-respected professor at a prestigious university. But after a while, you realize--or, at least, I realized--that it's okay to reach middle age without having published a book, there's still time. And the people teaching at prestigious universities are so busy with grading their students' work and reading the Important Books that they're s'pose to read that they don't have the luxury of reading cool science fiction and fantasy novels (especially the ones with covers by Darrell K. Sweet), lots of Ray Bradbury stories, and books about Zen Buddhism.

So in every way that really counts, I'm better off now, certainly happier, than I ever have been.

Pensacola Trip 2010: Days Two, Three, and Four, Pensacola, FL

The last three days here in Pensacola have been a whirlwind of walking along the beach, feeding the seagulls, and going to the Gulf Breeze zoo, among many other more mundane activities. Here are a few pictures from it all:

Tomorrow morning we will pack up and start the drive home. We'll be stopping for the night in Montgomery, AL, and then finishing the trip on New Year's Day.

See you next year!

Pensacola Trip 2010: Day One, Greenville, AL

We're about two-thirds of the way to Pensacola right now; we spent the night at the Comfort Inn in Greenville, AL, which is where we are now.

We left yesterday afternoon around 4:15, stopped for coffee at a RaceTrac in Lithonia, and drove for 100 miles before we stopped for dinner at a Waffle House east of Auburn. We found out that Elyse does NOT like to travel at night; after we left the Waffle House, she cried and screamed and screamed and cried until we got to the Books-A-Million in Opelika (a good place to stop for evening snack, since they have a decent cafe). She did get to sleep fairly quickly after we left the Books-A-Million, and slept the whole night through, barely waking up when we brought her into the hotel. Jessica also barely woke up when we came in, though she had some trouble sleeping through the night.

This morning, though, Elyse was just delighted to find herself in a strange hotel. Anna and Jessica had gone down for breakfast, but when Elyse woke up, she looked around, gave a quizzical baby "Huh?", and started smiling and clapping and waving. She thought it was just great that we were on a road trip!

We'll be leaving Greenville in about forty-five minutes, around 9:30 a.m. local time, with an eye toward reaching Pensacola around noon.

(Click here to read about the rest of this adventure.)

Family Christmas Pictures

We took advantage of Anna's parents' recent visit to take some formal pictures. Here are a few of them:

Here are Jessica and Elyse with their grandmothers:

And with the grandfathers:

And here--trying to fit ourselves into a space that's really too small for seven people, even if two of them are very little people--is the whole lot of us:

(Before I attempt a group shot like this again, I'm going to get a king-size sheet and three more feet of PVC pipe.)

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year: A Meaningful Christmas

          Among the many things I love about Christmas are the holiday kids’ shows—“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Here Comes Santa Claus,” “Frosty the Snowman,” and all the rest. I’ve been watching them for as long as I can remember, close to forty years at least, and I never tire of them. But, love them though I do, I also find something disturbing and sad in many of them.

          There is at the core of many of the Christmas kids’ shows the idea—or, in the inner reality of these shows, the actuality—that Santa Claus is in charge of Christmas, and that the True Meaning of Christmas is that Santa Claus comes in the night and leaves you a Heavenly Host of presents, all the things from the Sears Wish Book you wanted...or at least enough things to make you forget about the ones you didn’t get. I’m sure that for most of my childhood, that’s exactly how I thought of Christmas: it was about getting new toys.

          But now, as a middle-aged man who is a bit more pensive, and who has at least a yearning towards some kind of meaningful spirituality, these shows make me sad, and perhaps a bit indignant. For all of its beauty and whimsy and wonder, “Rudolph,” which was the first of the Rankin-Bass stop-motion holiday shows, and which I loved so much as a kid, sends a decidedly un-Christmas message: when a terrible storm comes up, limiting vision and making travel by reindeer-powered flying sled ill-advised, Santa says, “I’m just going to have to cancel Christmas.” And in “The Year without a Santa Claus” (most notable for the Miser Brothers and their Vaudeville-era leitmotifs), Santa decides that he isn’t feeling “up to snuff,” and that nobody much cares about the holiday anymore, so he’s going to “call off Christmas.”

          So there you have it: Christmas isn’t a deeply meaningful celebration, instead it’s something that can be cancelled because of illness or the weather, like a football game or a day of school or a concert. It isn’t really a holiday at all, in the original sense of the term—Holy Day—it’s just an elaborate party...but not a birthday party, of course, and certainly not a party for a major spiritual leader whose actual birthday we don’t really know, but whose birth and life are still worth pondering in our hearts every year. No, Christmas is Santa’s gig, and he can cancel it if he feels under the weather or intimidated by the weather or just unloved, and let the little kiddies scrape together their own toys.

          When Jessica and I watch these shows together—which we’ve been doing since July—I tell her, “Santa Claus can’t really cancel Christmas. This is just a made-up show. Santa Claus isn’t really in charge of Christmas, and Christmas is about more than just Santa coming and giving you toys.” She focuses on these shows pretty intently, so I don’t know how much she hears when I’m talking, but I hope it’s getting through at least a little bit.

          Christmas to me is about (“apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that,” as Scrooge’s nephew Fred says): a wide range of wonderful music, from the Tallis Scholars’ version of the fourteenth-century carol “Ther is No Rose of Swych Vertu” to “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas”; fanciful and often tacky displays of lights on houses and inflatable sleds on lawns and lighted animated wire-frame reindeer up on roofs; lots of Noel knick-knacks at Hobby Lobby (though that’s been going on since July, too); reading a little bit of A Christmas Carol to Anna every night before we go to bed; egg nog lattes at Borders; watching Christmas in Connecticut and It’s a Wonderful Life; lighting our Advent wreath every night before supper and doing a reading...and a good many other joyous things. I believe I could be just as happy, maybe happier, if instead of exchanging gifts on Christmas day we just got together with our families to appreciate all the other wonderful things.

          In his great book Hundred Dollar Holiday, Bill McKibben says that he is “unwilling to turn Christmas over to the forces of the secular world—to the people with something to sell. Christmas is too much fun for that.” Christmas very nearly has been turned over to the people with something to sell, but if we are to wrest it back before every iota of meaning and depth is squeezed out of it like juice from a Norfolk Biffin, a good place to start would be to remind Santa that he is but a floor manager, not the CEO of the whole shebang. He can enhance Christmas, but he doesn't control it, and it would go on just fine without him. What I’m saying, I guess, is that we need a kiddy-show Santa with a little less hubris, and a little more humility.

          Am I mad at Santa? No, of course not. I’m mad at the people who write and produce these shows, who flatten Christmas and squeeze the meaning and depth out of it and reduce it to a fat man in a red suit with a team of talented reindeer.

          There are, of course, some Christmas shows that don’t promote the Christmas-equals-Santa notion. “The Little Drummer Boy” grounds Christmas in Luke’s story of the Nativity. “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” is a tale of growth and redemption, of the Grinch’s discovery that “maybe Christmas doesn’t come from a store”; it is willing to assert that “Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.” And of course the best of all is “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” in which young Charlie Brown is troubled by the same problems that I am writing about here. Linus’s recitation of Luke 2:8-14 (“That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”) never fails to bring tears to my eyes.

          I’m not willing to give up “Rudolph,” of course. It’s too much fun for that. And it does contain within it some pretty good messages about individuality, acceptance, and friendship. But “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” has taken an appropriate place on the periphery of my Christmas activities, even if it is near the center of my daughter’s. I’m glad I get to experience it, and all the other shows, through her. I just hope I can teach her that there is so much more to Christmas than that.

Granny's Bible

Here are five pictures from a photographic study I did of my mother's fifty-year-old Bible (which has ended up somehow amongst all our books):

Christmas Essentials: Books, etc.

Four Pictures of Elyse

Here are four recent pictures of Elyse, which I took while I was entertaining her so Anna and Jessica could work on their gingerbread house:

(In this one she is, as you can see, in mid-clap. She likes to clap. Yaaaayyy, gingerbread house! Yaaayyy, Daddy's camera! Yaaayyy, Elyse!)

Passions: Old Cameras and Old Books

Forty Years

Here's a picture of me from more than forty years ago:

And here's a picture of me from just a few minutes ago:

(I really wish I had a yellow turtleneck and a plaid sweater vest to wear for this picture.)

Forty years. (Sigh.) Where did it all go?

Jessica's Students

Tonight, as Jessica was playing before snack time, she lined up many of her furry and plastic friends on the sofa and told us they were her students, and that she would be teaching a diving class:

Fortunately, the actual diving never took place. The reason it's fortunate is because we don't happen to have a pool in our living room.

Elyse is Ten Months Old! also, Jessica and the Big Leaf

On Friday, November 19th, Elyse was ten months old! Here she is on Mommy's knee, showing off her new princess ballerina pajamas:

Over the weekend we went to Vines Gardens for a mid-Fall picnic. Jessica found a remarkably large leaf:

This is what Vines Gardens looks like in the fall:

Of course, most of the trees are evergreens, and this was fairly late in fall--almost exactly a month away from the beginning of winter, in fact--so the splendid autumn colors are not as in evidence here as they are in other places at other times. Still, the trees in the upper left of the picture give a sense of how majestic fall can be.

Also, if you look closely enough you'll notice that there's a gathering on the steps just beneath the red and orange and golden leaves. An extended family was posing there for a series of family portraits, including one of the grandparents and their twenty-one grandchildren.

There's a general truism that if you go to Vines Gardens and there are more than five cars in the parking lot, there'll be at least one photo session going on. The day we were there, I counted no fewer than five photo sessions. One was a couple and their three dogs, one of whom, a Basset hound named (I believe) Cash, made a break for it just as we walked by. But, being a Basset hound, he got only about fifty feet before he was content to sit down and let himself be caught.

As Soft and Gentle as a Sigh

Not that I ever doubted it, but it turns out that Dolly Parton was right, love is like a butterfly:

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year! 3

'...I am sure I have always thought of Christmas-time, when it has come round...as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.'

--Ebenezer Scrooge's nephew in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

This morning, Jessica found an empty cardboard box we had set by the back door to throw away. She took it and told me she was going to put some of her toys in it, "to send to the little kids whose mommy and daddy can't afford toys."

God bless us, everyone.