In Memoriam: Vivian LaVerne Johnson

Maeva’s great grandmother Vivian LaVerne Johnson passed away this past weekend in Rochester, MN at the age of 81. We attended the funeral on Tuesday in Hayfield, MN – hometown of megan’s mother’s large family. It was Maeva’s first funeral and she did pretty well – even saying “hi” to the minister from the second row when the church was stone quiet at the beginning of the ceremony. I fed her veggie chips and cried into her hair while Megan stood and read from a piece we worked on with her mother Linda. Only near the end did Maeva get too antsy to sit (she’s walking now, and doesn’t have time to be held or sit too long anymore) and we had to head down to the basement to chat with the church ladies who were preparing lunch. I loved my little family more than ever.

Vivian LaVerne Johnson: Aug. 28, 1927-June 27, 2009

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Here is the piece that Megan read during the ceremony:

If Ever A Mother

A young man who worked at the facility where Vivian passed away earlier this week, recounted with tears in his eyes one evening, that our mother was a “real gem” to know and to care for. He worked with Vivian in the last years of her life, a time when we might think she was just a shadow of her vivacious self, and yet her beautiful, sweet personality shone through for all to see. The young man reminded us that Vivian was loved and admired by all who knew her for all of her lifetime.

To us Vivian Johnson was the consummate mother, an extraordinary woman with easy loving grace and boundless caring. She was kind, classy, charming, eternally pleasant, sweet as pie, humble, always thoughtful of others, creative, meticulous and above all: loving. Viv loved life, she loved her husband Marshall, she loved her family completely and she absolutely adored her grandchildren.

Vivian’s life’s work was raising her five children. And in that she set the gold standard. No small feat, considering the age spread between her children was twenty-two years. She had the rare ability to make you feel that you were the only thing she had to attend to. And yet she found time to keep everyone on the farm well fed in home cooked meals, she found time to play with her grandkids and show them her jewelry and her scarves, and in her spare moments, she kept the houseplants polished. Through it all she kept herself looking immaculate and beautiful.

Her ability to mother us kept her youthful, spirited, energetic and strong. Her ability to divide her love between all of us and make each feel special and loved was most amazing. Since we were old enough to understand, she dished out loving compliments like candy. She was the foundation of our family.

Heaven is lucky to have such a homemaker in the house. You can all rest assured that everyone up there is going to be well fed and cared for. The place will be spotless, and the house plants will be dust free. And on Saturday nights when the polka band plays, she and Marshall will head out onto the dance floor and take a twirl…

Vivian was a real gem, a polished diamond to all who knew her and shared in her brilliance. As our mother, our grandmother and our great-grandmother, she was a diamond worth more than money; she was the mother of a lifetime.

Blessed be her memory. We love you Vivian.

Attending a funeral with a young child makes you wonder how you will explain such things when they are old enough to ask questions about it all. It also brings to light, again and again, just how precious every breath is.

Malfunction Conniption

Full summer is here. Our blog software is having a malfunction conniption. (Word-to-the-wise: Don’t upgrade to Wordpress 2.8) There’s gardening, fishing, biking, sleeping outside, weeding, pic-nicking, watering, drinking iced drinks, socializing, campfiring, sight-seeing, spending good time with family and, unfortunately, working to be done. Screw this computer stuff! Adios.

Flickr site updated.

A Progress Report: 13 Months

I went to Portland, OR for a couple days this past week. When I got home I found my daughter had grown and changed so much it near to broke my heart. This little girl is getting big! She has a ton of teeth (10), she is talking up a storm, and walks around with barely any help at all. Mainly, however, she just looks BIG. When she stretches out she looks like a real kid, not a baby. When she is asleep at night in her sleeper, all stretched out in her crib, she looks huge – like a 3 year old. I can’t get over how fast all this happens. I just can’t imagine having to travel more often, and coming home to find your child has changed so much without you.

Luckily, she just gave me a huge smile and a bear hug when I came home. “Hi Papa!”

She is going to her 1 year check-up this week, so there will be more to report following that. But here is a quick update on some stuff:

• A First: Pigtails. Meg wrapped her little baby mullet into pig tails. It looks funny.
• Words: Baby (still her favorite) Daddy, Papa, Mama, Hi, Bye-bye. She says all of them very clearly and properly.
• She is laughing and talking all the time. She has conversations with her little pink cell phone and with her two baby dolls.
• She has held off on actually walking by herself. I am sure she could do it, but she just isn’t ready to take those solo steps. We’re not going to rush her (too much.) She’ll walk when she wants to. I just can’t imagine her little body walking around the house. Just walking into the kitchen at snack time, walking across the grass in the back yard. It’s gonna be neat.
• She pretty much eats all by herself now. She enjoys feeding papa, and will allow her parents to feed her only at the beginning of the meal. She is pretty capable however, and doesn’t throw her plate until she is bored or full. She likes just about everything, but especially breads (pita esp.) crackers, fruit, cheese, peas, rice, tofu and yogurt.
• She is drinking milk now. We give her 1/2 formula and 1/2 milk in her bottle. She takes a sippy of milk sometimes, but generally not too keen on it yet. She prefers water in her sippy. Meg is getting ready to ween her pretty soon however.
• She is loving day school. She likes books and hanging with the older kids. She also has a buddy in class named Arianna. They share food and crawl around together. She really likes her teacher Jeanette. And her teacher Jeanette really likes her. (She calls Meg with updates mid-day.)

We put in our garden last weekend. Maeva helped dig, and ate a few clods of dirt. She also liked to lick the rocks. One thing is for sure: she has gotten really good at picking something up and putting it very quickly into her mouth. She is lightening fast. So you have to watch her and get it when she’s looking at it in her hand, pondering whether or not she should eat it.

I brought her home a little brown Kimono from a Japanese baby shop in Portland. It was a joy to see her crawl around outside in her sun hat and kimono romper.

Happy Birthday Auntie Ju-Ju

Maeva and her parents wish a fine birthday to Aunt Juliana today, 5/20/09.

XO L’equipe W.

She Calls Me Baby

We’ve been sick. Maeva has had a trifecta of ills and a nose that won’t stop leaking. It has become clear that I am not invincible, as I have a dry cough and a throat that feels like a badger got friendly with it. Meg, to her credit, is holding tough. (As of yet, we’ve never been sick at the same time.) We’ve all been sleeping poorly, mainly because Maeva is sleeping poorly. Spring colds. Day school colds. What is it about spring that enlivens these nasty viruses?

Maeva has been as much a handful as she has ever been. She’s busting through a couple chompers, too. She doesn’t want to eat (probably hurts her gums) and doesn’t want her bottle (just ’cause) and is tipping-over-tired and yet doesn’t want to sleep. Top it off with a low grade fever and you got a recipe for a handful. And somewhere in this mix, in the haze of early mornings and late nights, she started calling her father “baby.”

Up until now, she has been pretty clear on what baby meant. She would see a photo of herself and say “baby.” She would see a young child in a magazine and say “baby.” And now, for example, when she sees her papa across the lawn at a Mother’s Day party, she points and says “baby” and smiles wide and bright. When she sees me out of the window when I am working in the yard she says “baby!” And when her mother says “let’s go see papa” and they find me somewhere in the house, she says it loud and clear: “bay-bee!”

I don’t know how this happened. I never call her baby. I never call Megan baby. It’s pretty rare that anyone calls Maeva a baby. And it’s generally a stranger when it happens “oh, look at the baby!” So just where she picked up this word in the first place is a bit of a mystery. But pick it up she did, and she decided it was best directed at her papa.

Perhaps the word “papa” has morphed into “baby” in her mind. For awhile there, now that I think about it, she was saying “bapa” and then “baba”and then she moved into “beebee” and now it’s firmly and clearly “baby.” That might be it. And yet, she still seems to know what the word baby means, as she points at babies (actual babies, not her papa) and says “baby!”

She has picked up some other things lately too, out of the blue. Auntie Sarah gave her a little purse with a fake cell phone in it for her birthday. It took her about 2 minutes of playing with it before she was putting it in the vicinity of her ear and saying “Hi!” From there she moved on to the iPod, which she rightfully assumes is a phone, and in her hourly tour around the home she will pick it up as she passes by and shout “Hi!” (Special note to grandmas: this would be an excellent Christmas gift! She’ll take an 8gig iPhone in white.)

Maeva’s language skills have been on fire lately. She started some months ago with “dada,” commonly enough. But then she quickly jumped to “papa” with almost no prompting from me. She moved on to “mama” a few times, but didn’t stay long. She started saying “thank you,” which they noticed straight-away at day school. All along her own personal language moved from single vowel sounds to consonant vowels pairs and then to triplicates and is now an amalgam of nice sounding gibberish. But we have a clear winner in the category of Favorite First Word: it’s “baby.” She says it a couple dozen times per day. And for now, she has chosen to call her papa by her favorite word. I am not one to complain. “Come here little girl! Who’s your baby?!”

A Day For Moms

Birds are chirping like nuts in the trees outside our home. The sun is up. The sky is total blue. The morning smell of dewy earth, moist air and some blossom are coming through the front door screen. Megan just stepping in from her morning stretch outside and said “it’s wonderful out there!” It is, in fact, a picture perfect spring day. Good thing: We are celebrating Mother’s Day #2 around here.

On last Mother’s Day, Megan’s first, Maeva was just a freshie. A little bundle that slept most of the day through. I wrote a card to Meg on Maeva’s behalf, there might have been a little dinner and a gift or two involved, and that was probably that.

This year Maeva is a large toothy one-year-old girl. She says “baby,” “hi,” and “bye-bye.” She waves. She chats with us in her own special language. She laughs and smiles a lot. And when I tell her it’s Mother’s Day, she’ll hug her mom just because she likes to hug her mom. Unfortunately, she is miserable with a cold, an ear infection, two huge teeth coming in, a slight fever, and (potentially though undiagnosed) seasonal allergies. (It has been a series of colds and viruses for 5 weeks since she started day school. But she marches on.) It’s going to be a bonafide Mother’s Day.

The tulips are up. The birds (some rose breasted fellow and, intermittently, a cardinal) are at the feeder. I’m going out to water the gardens and check out the morning while Maeva sleeps and Megan goes for groceries. Happy Mother’s Day to all of our Mother’s: Becky, Esther, Linda, Vivian, and the family mothers and to our friends who are mothers and mothers-to-be. We couldn’t do it without you, ladies. And without you, it wouldn’t be worth it.

To my lovely wife and mother of my daughter: happy Mother’s Day #2. You work it full time awesome. I always knew you’d be a wonderful partner. I never knew how good of a mother you’d be. Well, I had an idea. Turns out: you’re, like, totally awesome.

Of Spring

We threw Maeva a little birthday party last weekend after spending the morning touring the Bryn Mar Garage Sales. The ladies left early to find hot bargains. The men stayed behind drinking coffee and were left to tend to the young’uns. It was a beautiful spring morning. I must have seen 50 garage sales and yet I found nothing that I wanted. But Maeva and I enjoyed walking and checking out people, their homes and especially their gardens. Ok – I found one thing: a plug in cooler for $3. But I didn’t buy it.

Around noon we got home and began to prepare food and home. Friends and family arrived for an open house from 3-6pm. It was a pretty small affair, but it gave us a chance to catch up with folks we hadn’t seen in a long while.

Maeva, however, was in the final throes of a triple whammy of ills: seasonal allergies, a cold, and an ear infection. She was in rough shape, as she has been for most of April. But she sallied forth, and seemed to enjoy her first birthday.

TODAY: One. Year. Old.

Little puddin’ pop, little scoot-scoot, little MW2, our pretty little Maeva Francine is one year old today. She woke up grumpy. She woke up hungry. She woke up with her cold and cough and runny nose. She woke up wanting mom. She woke up a little rough around the edges. But she woke up as a one year old. We hugged her up. We fed her food. We loved her up good. We put her special #1 shirt on her, handmade by Tia and delivered to our door in a pretty package late last night. Maeva doesn’t know it’s her birthday, but she does know it was a pretty good morning. We turned it around. She went off to day school smiling. She seemed proud of her accomplishment. They’ll take good care of you today at school. Mom packed pears for your lunch. You’re gonna eat the heck out of those.

Happy birthday MFW. Way to go little girl. You were born a year ago today at 11:30pm. That first year, looking back, was really good. You made us a family. You taught us so much. Despite the worry and the stress, despite the increase in gray hair and lack of time to exercise or to go fishing, despite the mess you make of our home, you have brought a love and joy and purpose to our lives the likes of which we could never imagine without you. You’ll see photos down the road and we’ll tell you all about it. You were born little but strong and healthy. You turned out happy and healthy (this cold you have now will pass in time. You’re just getting used to day school germs. It’s good for you.) You’re not too bad to look at, either. And that’s all a couple parents can ask for. We love you forever and forever. You’re the best little thing.

Congratulations also to Megan, my lovely wife, for being such a wonder-filled mother. She may look like me, but inside she is all you. I never knew it could be this good. I never knew anything. You taught me. And Maeva taught me. Thank you for doing this thing called family with me. I love you.

Year in Review:

MW2-Jan09

7 Photos

MW2

60 Photos

Autumnal 2008

33 Photos

grandmas xmas 08

8 Photos

 

The Fifty Second Week

Little Mw2 is a sneeze short of a year!

Update:

• She has had a cold for the past two weeks. Day school is giving her immunity a run. It hasn’t slowed her down any though.
• She rips around the home. She gets into anything that suits her fancy. She is into speed crawling. Her chubby palms slap the wood floor in a mad dash. She looks a little bit like a bull dog from above.
• She wants what she wants. Bonjour, attitude.
• She is starting to figure out how to crawl up onto stuff. Won’t be long there. You can see her mind engineering the moves. Perhaps she’ll be a rock climber.
• It’s confirmed: we have a daughter that likes to smile, hug, and cuddle. She is going to be a nice girl. Generally, she is pretty darn good.
• She has moved on from vowels and is now working on consonants. Then, once in awhile, she simply repeats the last word you said.
• The house is a large game of Memory. She is beginning to understand space and time and, as the docs call it, object permanence. She will point to where something was yesterday and call it out – such as her doll on top of the couch. (BTW, Magnusson Lees, she loves her dolly. Loves that thing.)
• That’s all I can think of right now. It’s time for all fathers everywhere to go to bed.

Spring 09 Brings Dried Leaves, Cycling

Weekend projects included:

1. Raking Our Daughter
2. Breaking Out The Chariot Cycling Attachment
3. Mending From Spring Colds