Endings...and beginnings

Farewell to the Hilltop- it was so good to have everyone over one last time before we move out. Marshmallow roasts and frankfurter toasts and baby squeezes.

The next morning Lauren and I rolled out of bed, into the car and drove out to Berlin NH, to attend the Baptism of our favourite little boy. My first time at an orthodox church. He definitely yelled, and the Father had to stop with his liturgy and ask for the holy binkie, seen here falling from the startled babe's wailing mouth.

Lauren and me and the newly christened child. He took it all very well, considering he was stripped naked, rubbed with oil head to toe, dunked fully under water and paraded about for the better part of 2 hours.

This orthodox church is a really neat blend of New England architectural aesthetics and classic onion domes. Can't help but wonder if the domes were stuck on afterwards...

Lauren and I got up wicked-early one day last week for a 7:30 am photoshoot date at Claudia's- we are all saying goodbye to our respective houses. Lolo is the backbone of this blog, as it turns out. See the rest here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/larlar1286/sets/72157629830884092/

tumble into spring

Sometimes when I haven't been posting it's because I've been so glum and bored I don't think I have anything constructive or inspiring to share. Sometime sit is because life is so full and varied and luscious that I don't want to stop and sit and type for a second longer than school requires. The latter reason applies to my most recent hiatus.

To sum up:

Spring on the mountain is glorious: hiking, swimming, running, sunning, new foliage, burbling brook, enough ticks to make this song an appropriate sound-track to my life: ticks

I will be done my first year of midwifery school in exactly 2 days.
In that time I have learned lots of booksmart facts, ways to talk to clients and handy skills, like venipuncture, IM injection, physical examination and catching techniques. I am also developing some honest respect for the thing we call "intuition", though I think of it as my mind's unconscious smartness logically synthesizing sensory input. If I think a baby is a boy, or 7 pounds 6 oz, or a mama is going to have a difficult labor etc, I don't think of it as psychic knowledge, I think it is something along the lines of what we call a "gestalt" approach in plant identification- taking in the whole being of a plant with all our senses and just 'knowing' what it is we are looking at. 
I was sole catcher at a birth a couple of weeks ago- first time ever. The euphoria I'm still carrying from that is indescribable. I felt her little face emerge feature by feature, in the reverberations through her mother's perineum (I'm still not sure how to spell that word). I originally considered calling my blog "in pursuit of natural highs", because I expend a lot of time and energy pursuing an endorphin rush. As it turns out, giving birth naturally is one of the most mind-blowing experiences a person can have, and we birth workers get to go along for the ride.
Another triumph: For the first time ever I was paid money to attend a birth.
Shit got real. In a good way.

This summer I'm going to be out west on an island in BC- more to follow on that, I'm sure.

Molls

Went for a hike the other day. Mollcat came. She is the worst hiker ever- has to stop and rest every five seconds, gets hot and grumpy, is slow but yeslls if you leave her too far behind. We love her anyway. Left to right. Me , Andriana, Alyssa. (photo likely taken by Alyssa's Pop- her parents came to visit over the weekend).

Still a celebrity

This time it's an article, and my name seems to have changed....maine magazine piece on saunas

I'm a celebrity

I've been on TV twice since I moved here, and sometimes when clients meet me for the first time they say: oh hey! I saw you on the news!
Sorry for the non-post. Here is my class on the news:

http://wgme.com/news/top-stories/stories/wgme_vid_11041.shtml

By the seat of my pants

My mum keeps wanting to know how things are going with the midwives. This post is supposed to answer that request.

I keep everything I could possibly need in the next 24 hours (and beyond) in my car. That means I can sleep, eat, do homework, shower, change my clothes, attend a birth and go dancing or running or skiing anywhere at a moment's notice.

Friday I was waffling between driving 2.5 hours to contra-dance in Belfast or driving 1 hour to have dinner with friends in Portland. Before I had a chance to make up my mind I recieved a call from Dr. Sarah and got on the 1.5 hr. stretch to Topsham: Somebody was having a baby. On the way, I realized the comfy birth-appropriate pants I was wearing were pink- a big nono (wearing pink or red is said to encourage bleeding....). Not wanting to spend the night in jeans (my other option) I ran into Target to buy me a pair of pants on the way.

We arrived at the mama's house with all our birth supplies at about dinner time, so started with that- the family had made glorious pulled pork, and we had brought salad and frozen pizza. To make a long story short, it was a lovely dinner date, but the mum was not, in fact, in labor (just uncomfortable and anxious). Her cervix was so far posterior I couldn't even reach it.

Unfazed, off I went to Portland for a sleepover (my second unplanned sleepover in as many nights) with classmates Lara and Teresa (Portland is nice and close to the mum in question's house, in case she decides to go into labor after all that cervical stimulation from the vag exam). Saturday morning dawns, no baby.

I decide to hang out in the city and do some homework, maybe some shopping. Then I get a text from Jen, my landlady reminding me I am running a sauna that afternoon at the house. Shit. I get back in my car, thankfully the plows have cleared the worst of the snow that has turned to rain.
As I drive up my road with minutes to spare, I swerve to avoid a pothole and....plant my car firmly in a snow bank. Shit. Shit. Shit. Let's just say that I can dig all I like but nothing beats a friendly person with a pickup truck and a rope.

The sauna went very well, in the end, but I was a mess by the end of all that jazz.


Today is Sunday. Stitch and study day. Lauren and Andriana and all three Buhlers are here. Baby B is being very chill. I'm still out of soup ideas so we're having apple basil cheese quiche and molasses-rye bread. And I am walking on eggshells because mama number two for March may or may not be in early labor and I may or may not have to run off with bread half-baked only to miss her birth becuase she lives two hours away and has had 3 babies already.....asi es la vida de las parteras...


As usual, photos courtesy of Lauren Romero:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/larlar1286/

baby B is a ladykiller.

Andriana, me , Lauren, Babe

The most snow we've had all winter. In March. Classic.

Spurr-of-the-moment too-much-snow-to-drive-home pizza-fun-club sleepover food.

For food in a world.

This morning dawned cold and clear. I lit a fire, ate a standing breakfast of Armenian string cheese and raw daikon (the things I eat often don't seem strange until I see them in writing...) and galumphed down my hill through the snow, mentally debating whether to go for a ski, walk or run (I keep all my gear in the trunk of my car down below because then I can do these things wherever, whenever). Walking takes less effort and more time, running is quick and feels good but takes a bit more effort, and skiing is kind of awkward but rewarding once I get going, and it did just snow, finally!

Thanks to Abby Hall for capturing the snowy twigs on camera.

Having decided to start with walking, I headed over to my semi-neighbour Sherri's place to hand over some egg cartons, pick up a book I'd loaned her and hopefully some eggs from her chickens as well. Sherry is a rockstar at feeding her family. A vegetarian, herself, she raises pigs and chickens for her family to eat, as well as laying hens (fed on pellets and the pulp from her juicer) and an epic vegetable garden. When I got there around 9:30 she had already baked a big batch of breakfast cookies that her family takes on hiking trips and a batch of blueberry muffins (sweetended with honey) and had moved on to pizza/calzone dough.

Sherri is that kind of mom. The kind who likes to stand and chat for ages. So we did that. She totally called me out on running on ice with eggs, too. Her house is about a half-mile from my house and sometimes I run over to her house, pick up my eggs, and keep on running another mile up her road before turning around and running home (running is faster than walking, and if I can do my shopping and exercise at the same time, great!). Running with eggs on ice may seem like a recipe for disaster, as well as just plain silly, but I've only fallen once, and that was in my driveway after I got home (only broke 2 eggs, but the hat of wonder was in the same bag and got egg yolk all over it. Not so nice.)

I so love being personally acquainted with the source of my eggs and dream of the days when I'll live in one place long enough to have a proper garden and some livestock again. It's part of the process of making food mean more than just that stuff I put in my face several times a day to keep my body running. Heidi, the director of our school feels the same way, and for that reason, our nutrition class has only one text book: In Defense of Food. The practical portion of that class revolves around all of us getting together at Heidi's and making a few epic meals from gorgeous whole ingredients. Photos from last Friday's epicurean adventure, taken by Abby, Lauren and whoever else got behind their cameras:

Heidi (and a mountain of ingredients) in her gorgeous classic New England kitchen

The babycatchers- check out all our sweet aprons!

I tried to get everyone to bring their favourite cookbooks for us to drool over (moosewood and nourishing traditions featured large). In the end only a couple of us brought books, but I still got to brag about mine- which was the main objective.

We made a TON of food. These two made smoothies, tempeh and tofu with mushroom gravy and this fabulous all-butter pastry berry pie, of which they were extremely proud.

Claudia and I made mile-high popovers (aka yorkshire puddings), rice and African groundnut Stew. The recipe calls for an entire dismembered chicken. Heidi has a marvelously sharp knife, so hacking off the chicken's limbs was no big deal, and it came with giblets (Heart-seen above, liver, gizzard, neck), so we were able to boil them to make stock for the stew and then feed them to Heidi's cats.

Ground-nut stew (actually peanut stew). Recipe: fry up a chopped onion, a few cloves of garlic and 3 inches of ginger, minced, with 2 T coriander seed and some cayenne. Add 2 pounds sweet potato chunks (skins on), 16 oz tomatoes, a cup of peanut butter, a 2 pound chicken in pieces and enough stock to barely cover. Simmer for 1.5 hrs. Pull the chicken out, remove bones and skin. Return meat to pot. Salt and more Cayenne to taste. Serve over rice with lots of chopped cilantro. yum.

The feast (part of it). Roasted veg, quinoa salad, gingerbread, tempeh, tofu, rice, pie, spicy kale stirfy. Missing from the picture are: popovers, potato-crusted fritatta, bread, smoothie, whipped cream, stew, mushroom gravy...just think "thanksgiving" and you get the idea.

The bread, made by Lauren and Abby. They used molasses in it and it was divine

We sat together and ate and laughed and it put me in mind of one of my favourite mealtime graces as a child:

For food in a world where many walk in hunger 

For love in a world where many walk in fear

For friends in a world where many walk alone

We give our humble thanks.

Bonus picture: While the food was cooking, Ashley gave me a private lesson on how to squat the right way: feet parallel to each other, heels down, chest open, tailbone rooted. It looks like fun but I could barely walk afterward.

small pleasures

 This morning I awoke well-rested to bright sunshine  in the spare bed at the top of the building that holds our school and my classmate Lauren's apartment (last night we had an indulgent evening of movie-watching, yummy food and red wine). Sleepovers are the best. woo!

I am very tired of driving, so it was refreshing to ride with Lauren to the farm for a mason jar of sweet-silky-creamy milk this morning, before heading to birthday brunch for Abby, our second oldest classmate (she seems to think thirty is old...). Bacon-bloody marys and mimosas all 'round.

Baby midwives. Some awkward smiles, some sincere ones...

Also in the news:
One of my pet peeves is the lumpen graceless awkwardly shaped cutlery that came with the house. Today I bought $3 worth of 25-cent forks and spoons at the local thrift store: smooth rounded edges, good balance and variety, far more aesthetically pleasing than their predecessors....my satisfaction is almost indecent. Now maybe Andriana won't mind so much when I hide the old set.

Sunday stitch and bitch at the hilltop has petered out somewhat, but as the ranks have dwindled and the homework-doing has increased the menu has stayed pretty tasty. Today I was reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, assigned for nutrition class, and we ate seaweed salad, sweet potatoes, spaghetti, licorice chai....I don't have a picture of any of that but last week was a lovely fresh taste of summer: Caprese salad a la Bridgton grocery store (i.e. they had no fresh basil but spinach and thyme compensated admirably- thanks Lauren for braving the tomatoes!)

fresh mozzarella is such a treat!

I finished knitting the incredibly luxurious baby alpaca hat* I've been working on (thanks to dear mum for the yarn splurge). Not usually one for patterns, this one caught my eye and I just couldn't resist: cool hat, adorable child. yup. Another hat with similar (brilliant) architecture can be found here and may or may not be next on the list.

Claudia, me, beaver pond after Abby's birthday brunch, and a mediocre view of the hat of glory.

The irresistible pattern book.

Missed yet another birth thursday night, which bites, because I drove an hour and forty five down to the mama's house only to be told she was in very early labor and I should go home. So I did. The following evening (after I had already been asleep for a good half hour) I received a text message asking which postpartum appointment I'd like to attend. Mama had her baby after all, but I wouldn't have made it in time so they didn't call. urgh.

Plans for summer are bumbling along. I got an interested call from the farm I've been hoping to work at over the summer, but I was crestfallen to learn they would need me to start in April, and the earliest I could possibly start is the end of May.
Back to the drawing board. Please, if you know of a promising way for me to spend the summer outside making decent money, holler in my direction.
I am burnt out on children, but I'm willing to do pretty much anything else!

As usual, thanks to Lauren Romero for taking sweet pictures and letting me use them :)

*disambiguation: yarn made of baby alpaca fur knit into a hat, not a hat for baby alpacas.