Chris' Journal

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I am grateful
I have so many blessings to be grateful for:

Basics, which no one should have to do without, but so many do: a warm, safe house; clothing; good food; energy for heat and light; books; a nation with strong civic institutions with relative peace in the streets; medical care. And I have not only all these basic blessings, but nice versions of them, and the luxury of plenty, giving me the chance to pick and choose which bit or which sort of them I want on any given day.

My Crohn's is under good control right now, and I have a really good doctor helping me with it. She's smart and knowledgable and communicative and listens to me and follows up on issues.

My family: two strong (and strong-minded!) beautiful, growing, healthy girls. A partner who is a full co-parent, a good support for me, truly loving, and with whom I share so much. So many, many hugs every day.

My friends, near and far. People with whom to share joy and heartache, parties and gatherings, cooking, crafting, childraising, gardening.

Judaism and my spiritual path. The immense library that is the world of Jewish thought and knowledge, those who built it in the past and are building it in our own day, the many teachers and fellow learners who are helping me explore some small bits of it. the opportunities that I have to learn and think about myself and how I want to live.

For all this and more, I am thankful. May we all be blessed with peace, health, prosperity, and love; and most of all with friends who help us out when things are hard.

Gardening
We've been interested in moving towards having some edibles in the yard. Harold was intrigued, on seeing the yard of our friends Linda and Yair, with being able to pluck something off a bush or vine and eat it, just like that. One day the girls and I were over there for our playgroup. When I picked Rebecca up in my arms, she smelled of sweet, fresh, sunwarmed strawberries and tomatoes. And then when I spent a week doing cat feeding and garden harvestong for Matt and Janet, I was wowed by the fresh raspberries and figs. I was also a bit dismayed by the paucity of raspberries on the long row of canes, but I gather they were well past their peak.

I've been doing our back yard in all native CA plants. The only edible thing we've got there (that's fruiting yet) is a prolific wild grape. The fruits are small, with large seeds, so they're not much good for eating out of hand. I did freeze enough to make some jelly from, if I ever find the time. There are also a hazelnut and golden currant, but both are small and slow-growing and I don't expect fruit any time soon (like, it'll be years). I started to consider raspberries... and then was thrilled to discover several related fruits native to California! There's blackberries, raspberries, salmonberries, and thimbleberries. Thimbleberries are THORNLESS and supposedly have very tasty fruit (you don't see the berries for sale because they are too fragile to ship). I just planted three thimbleberry bushes in our back yard, between the hot tub and the back fence. The plants we bought are fairly small -- the nursery had sold out off the ones they considered truly ready to sell, and pulled some more for us from the back. They gave us 3 for the price of 2 because they were small. I've got them in the ground and waatered them. Later this week it would be good to clear the weeds for a wider distance around them and add some mulch.

But most of our edibles are going to slowly replace the front lawn. Low-effort is key to gardening when you're parents of twin toddlers. What could be easier than cutting out a bit of the already-spray-irrigated turf and dropping in a nursery annual? In spring, I want to put in 2 or 3 tomato plants that way, and maybe one sweet pepper. I'm also thinking of herbs, because spending two bucks for a handful when all I need is a teaspoonful always seems like such a waste. And if it's all there fresh in the yard, I can cook spontaneously, without having to buy all my week's fresh herbs in the one weekly trip. I need to figure out which herbs belong down in the irrigated section and which belong up above it in the non-irrigated planter (which is also getting some freesia bulbs real soon now -- I ordered them last week). Our very first front-yard edibles went in today -- CA wild strawberries, in a bald patch that wasn't getting enough sun to be proper lawn anyway. The girls helped plant them and then lay out a stone border to heep off treading feet and lawnmowers and such. I envision the lawn gradually becoming a patchwork of different edibles, with meandering borders of re-used materials and maybe some quirky statuary.

girl linguistics
The other day in the car:
Me: "...and besides Michelle and Rebecca, I also like to hug Daddy"
Michelle: "Mommy fond of Daddy!"

Well, yes, I am! "Fond" somehow seems like a very grown-up word.

Tonight at dinner:
Me: "Next week Grandma Toni and Grandpa Jonathan are going to come."
Rebecca: "From Pennsylvania!"

I have no idea if she knows what "from Pennsylvania" means, but it is excellent recall and appropriate use of a 5-syllable word.

five things make a post
My two daughters lisping through the Shema (one of the msot important Jewish prayers) in stereo is one of the cutest and sweetest and best things ever.

We spent our first night together away from the girls last night, at the Hilton Santa Cruz/Scott's Valley. They did fine without us -- apparently it was not until 11 am today that Rebecca asked, "Where's Mommy?" (We had of course told them what the plan was.)

I have not yet baked even one batch of cookies for my big December party. I think we're looking at pot luck, here, folks! (December 19, btw -- save the date).

My inlaws are staying with us and, unlike us, occasionally watch broadcast tv as it is aired (we catch a few things via the tivo-lite Harodl has rigged up on our server). I got sucked into Gray's Anatomy the other night and might beome a fan if I had the time. 8^)

We have the latest Discworld book! Harold's further along in reading it than I am, though I suppose I could make some serious headway during the girls' naps this week.

I hope all of you out there are well -- we're doing pretty good here.

Rebecca-isms
Rebecca has some charming mispronunciations. They will surely vanish as time goes on, so I thought I'd record a few of them here:

compumputer
mukis (music -- Michelle uses this one, too)
effelant

And one that was not really a mispronunciation, but a misunderstanding. Rebecca LOVES tomatoes, and for a long time she referred to them as 'napples". It took me a while to figure out why: we have a word-and-picture book that has a big collage of fruits and vegetables. Two moderate-sized tomatoes are superimposed on a big pineapple. She must have thought I was pointing to the tomatoes when I said "pineapple"...anyway, she kept calling them "napples" for a long time, with us insisting that they were tomatoes. Then for a while she compromised with "tinapple". Nowadays she actually says "tomato".

"I'm in the suitcase!" declared Michelle
What she meant is "sukkah" (under construction).

well, THAT could have been a lot worse

Harold and I were sitting in the living room after dinner, when I noticed that things had been a little too quiet for a little too long. Any parent of even one child, let alone twins, knows the kind of suspicious silence I mean. The had vanished into some other part of the house and were clearly way too intent on something. I headed down the hallway, and saw the door of Harold's office open. Now, Harold's office houses his computer, the printer, his treasured comic book collection, and most of his tools, to name just a few. This is why the door is normally kept shut, with a child-defeater on the knob. There's a pack-n-play in there, where Rebecca takes her naps. Michelle used to be the one who napped there, but on a recent occasion she really didn't want her nap and managed to lever herself out of the pack-n-play, so now Rebecca gets that very-un-childproof room. Rebecca is probably also physically capable of getting out of the portacrib, but she's more tractable and hasn't tried it yet. Anyway, I figured correctly that Harold had neglected to shut the door when he picked up an unhappy Rebecca at the end of her nap today. This evening, they found the open door and went in. And, with all those goodies at their disposal, what did they get up to?

( This )

honey cake recipe, for Abi and others

I made a status post on Facebook that said "Christina Zable is watching the girls play at Cubberly. Later we'll go to Peet's to buy coffee as an ingredient for an apple-honey- spice cake for Rosh Hashanah." In a comment thereon, Abi asked for the recipe. Now that the cake is baked and the girls are napping, it seems the perfect time to post the recipe. The cake is wonderfully flavorful and moist, btw.

The recipe is from The World of Jewish Cooking, by Gil Marks. Marks is wonderful -- everything I've made from any of his cookbooks has come out well the first time. It was matzo balls from his recipe that prompted someone to ask, "you made these matzo balls, and your name is Chris!?" He labels the recipe "Lekach (Ashkenazic Honey Cake)"

There's a lot of play in the recipe.

3 1/2 cu flour -- all white, or 2 1/2 cu white and 1 cu whole wheat (I did the latter)
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground allspice, cardamom, or ginger (I did the ginger, will try cardamom next time -- need to buy some)
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp salt
4 large eggs
1 1/4 cu granulated or brown sugar (I used 3/4 cu white, 1/2 cu light brown)
1 1/3 cu honey
1 cu hot strong coffee or tea (I used Peet's decaf)
1/4 cu oil
2 Tbl whiskey, brandy, oj concentrate, or apple juice concentrate (I used brandy)
1 Tbl grated orange zest (optional; I omitted it)
1 to 1 1/2 cu raisins, chopped pitted dates, or a mixture (optional, omitted)
blanched whole almonds for garnish (optional, omitted)
variations:
increase honey to 2 cu, reduce coffee to 1/2 cu and sugar to 1 cu (didn't do this)
add 3 cu grated apples (did this, yum!, happy new year!)
add 4 cu finely grated carrots

Makes 2, 9x5" loaves, 2, 9" squares, or one 16"x11" rectangle. Prepare pan(s) by lining with waxed paper or aluminum foil, then grease and flour. (I used parchment paper. I don't have waxed paper on hand, and I'm trying to use less aluminum foil, as I have the impression it's rather energetically expensive to make, plus our recycler won't take it if it's food-soiled. Lining *and* greasing and flouring seems like overkill, but it did release beautifully.)

Combine dry ingredients. Combine coffee, honey, oil, and brandy. Beat eggs and sugar until light. Add dry and wet ingredients alternately, beginning and ending with dry. Gently fold in raisins, apples, or other adulterants. Put into pans and bake -- 1 hr for loaves (that's what we did), 35 min for squares, or 1 1/4 hour for a single big pan.

Enjoy!

playgroup has space, kids 3 & under, Palo Alto and vicinity
So, for the last year or more, my girls and I have had a weekly playgroup we go to. It meets at members' homes. The parents chat and the kids play, and the hosting parent usually provides lunch. Lately, we've had 4 regular familes, meaning 4 moms and 5 kids who showed up more often than not. Two families have just "aged out", with their kids starting preschool. Of the core, this just leaves me, with my 2-year-old twin girls, and one other mom of a 2-year-old girl. It would be nice to have a few more in the group. I've got feelers out to a couple of friends, one with a 9-month-old boy and one whose baby girl will be born any week now. If you know of anyone who's at home with one or more kids 3 years or younger, in or around Palo Alto, who you think I'd find sympatico and who would like a Wednesday morning playgroup, let me know!

unexpected ways having an iPhone has made my life better, #231

My friends Mika and David and I get together every week (or so) to work on our Hebrew. We read and translate articles from Yanshuf, a newspaper in easy Hebrew for language learners. The paper is on summer hiatus, so we're rereading old issues. Tonight we read (again) about the zanvan (זנבן), a small, fearless bird. A few months ago, we probably just looked the bird's name up in our Hebrew-English dictionaries, didn't find it, and moved on. Today I was able to pull out my iPhone and look the word up on morfix.co.il and discover that the English name of the zanvan is...

( (drumroll please) )This is a wonderful, wonderful phrase; knowing of it has made my life richer; thank you, Steve Jobs.

a few girl tidbits
Tonight at dinner, Rebecca had her feet on the table, which we don't allow. Me: "Rebecca, take your feet of the table." Rebecca: "Mommy go away!" Clearly, if I'm not happy with where she has her feet, I should just go where I won't have to be bothered by it... these days, she often doesn't want me too close. If I'm on the sofa where she wants to be, she comes over, pushes me, and says "move it". She is also sometimes very loving and snuggly.

The girls both still love books, and ask for books to be read to them many times per day. When we get to a place in a book where one of the characters is sad, Michelle hugs the book.

According to my father-in-law (my inlaws were visiting, and watched the girls during several outings of mine), one day last week, when I left the house, Michelle went over to the door and stared through the glass, repeating "Mommy gone! Mommy gone!" Then Rebecca came over, patted her arm, and said "She'll come back."

housework
My job right now is taking care of my daughters, keeping the family fed, doing enough laundry to keep us going, and at least sort of keeping the house in order. We have bi-weekly cleaners for the big stuff, but I manage the kitchen, clean up the dining area after meals and snacks, and sometimes tidy the living room. I also have a general desire/intention to unclutter and streamline many areas of the house, but I rarely get to spend much time on that. Still, I do bits when I can -- like, in the morning, if Harold's and my bathroom counter looks jammed with stuff, I look to see if there's somethign I can toss or move elsewhere.

I've had this odd transition recently. Usually, any kind of cleaning has seemed to me to be something I had to do and didn't want to do. A few times recently, it's seemed like something I have the opportunity to do to make the place where I live better for living in -- somehting nice to do for myself in fact. It's an odd sensation.

well THAT was no fun
I had a slight tummy ache yesterday morning that built and built all day . By late afternoon, the pain was fairly intense -- to the point where ignoring it long enough to take care of something a little girl needed was a real effort. Fortunately my mom was here to help with the girls, and able to stay until Harold got home.

My gastroenterologist called in the early evening response to a routine call I'd made about my prednisone taper, and I told her about the crisis. We agreed that I probably had a partial obstruction -- something stuck trying to get past a narrow place in my gut -- and she suggested a 10mg "booster" dose of prednisone to help reduce any inflammation that was making the narrow place tighter. She also said I should go to the ER if I had fever of vomiting or the pain got worse. "How much worse?" I asked, and she sort of left me to be the judge of that.

I took the prednisone, but the pain continued to worsen until at around 10 pm I finally decided to go to the ER. My mom came to sleep over so we wouldn't have to take the girls with us, as we did for Harold's kidney stone earlier in the year. We got to the ER and I'm afraid I wasn't completely civil to the folks on intake and triage. I spent an hour and a half curled up on a bench waiting for a doctor to see me. Towards the end of the time, I started to feel better, and when they finally called me, I felt much better -- pain down to about 2 out of 10 from a high of 8 out of 10.

So, they drew some blood, felt my belly, and had me stay and take fluids and some food, and when I kept that down, they felt my belly again and sent me home with instructions to get a doc to feel my tummy one more time today to make sure everything is still ok. I have that appointment at 3 pm.

For now, I'm tired and my belly aches a bit, but nothing like yesterday's curl-up-on-the-floor extreme pain. Probably it was an obstruction that passed on its own while I was waiting. In retrospect, I'm not sure I wouldn't rather have waited it out at home, but Harold says he would have been really scared for me watching that -- in the hospital he knew that if anything got bad, people were right there who could help. It was a tough night for him, and we're both tired today, which makes the girls tougher to deal with. Right now he's taken them out in the stroller on a long walk to the shopping center. After I post this I'll make us some dinner for tonight and then see if I can get some sleep before my appointment.

It was a whole lot of no fun, but not dangerous, and I'm basically ok now. Having Harold by my side and my mom with the girls were great blessings -- thank you both! In the grand scheme of things, we're all very lucky.

"a story goes with it" -- more Hawaii pix

Herea re some more pictures from our Hawaii trip. We've been back for a week and a half but getting time to sit down, process pictures, and post is a challenge when there are two little girls to look after. The last set of pics were for pretty; this set is of ones where I think there's a cool story, or it illustrates something nifty. I may post yet more later.

On with the show:
road sign saaying "kapu"

On our big excursion to see Volcanoes National Park, we took a detour to see the southernmost point of the US. This involves a very twisty, bumpy drive on a road that is sometimes only one lane wide; if you meet a car coming the other way, you both need to drive one side of your car off onto the shoulder so you will have room to pass. This road passes through (state?) government land, and signs like the one above warn you not to leave the road. What fascinated me was the use of the word "kapu." It refers to the system of laws belonging to the first people to live in Hawaii, who came from elsewhere in Polynesia in canoes perhaps 1000 years before European contact with the islands. I thought it was so cool that a vestige of this old language and culture was still there on these official government signs.
"half" a flower

Later the same day, we stopped at a black sand beach where we saw hawksbill turtles hanging out on the sand (pics to come, maybe). Near the beach, Linda and I saw this flower, which we had learned about on our oddball tour of the ethnobotanical garden earlier in the trip. See how it looks like half a flowerr, having petals go out on one side only? This is one of two related species of similar appearance. This one grows down near the seashore; the other grows up in the mountains, above 1000'. The ancient Hawaiians told how a pair of lovers who had offended the goddess Pele were transformed into these two plants, doomed never to see one another again, always separated by that 1000' of elevation.

Also at that park, I saw lots of passionflower vines, though I didn't take a picture. I love passionfruit, and so do the Hawaiians, who call it lilikoi. On the trip, I got to have lilikoi lemonade, lilikoi nectar, lilikoi chocolate, a virgin liliquoi margarita with plum powder on the rim of the glass,a lilikoi-orange shave ice, and straight lilikoi -- this last turns out not to be how anyone actually eats it, wand for good reason. 8^)

I bought both the lemonade and the whole lilikoi fruit at the South Kona Fruit Stand, where several of us stopped off on the first full day on the island. You can't get decent fruit in the big grocery stores -- they're all supplied from the mainland. Yuck! All the same stuff we get at Safeway in California, but worse quality, because they choose the greenest stuff in the hopes it will make it to the islands, and then it languishes in transit. We bought strawberries the first night, for instance, that were turning to evil mush by the next morning. So, we stopped at the fruit stand for some local fruit. We got an absolutely perfect white pineapple. A couple of days later, I scarfed the last few slices out of the container in the fridge and drank the accumulated juice. It was slushy with a few ice crystals from being in a very cold part of the fridge, and was one of the best things I ate on the trip. We also got a guyabano (which, sadly, spoiled while we were waiting for it to ripen); and Linda found the first of two breadfruits of the trip in the parking lot. Linda baked some of the breadfruit, and made some into ulu bread. The bread was pretty popular; it doesn't taste that different from banana bread, or zuchini bread, or whatever other sort of quickbread. The baked breadfruit, though it was stuffed with butter and brown sugar, found no enthusiasts. I didn't like the smell or the taste. Linda liked both the smell and the taste, but could not abide the slimy texture. We got some tomatoes that were well worth eating, much better than the Cali imports at the big stores. And I found THIS:

Do you know what it is? Can you guess?

It's a cashew apple. The greenish/grayish protrusion is a cashew nut in its shell -- toxic if eaten raw. We were cautioned not to let the kids have it, lest they get it on their hands and touch their faces, let alone actually try to eat it. The red-yellow part is the "fruit" (botanically, a swollen stem; culinarily a fruit). I've known about cashew apples for years, and even had a model of one. I had bought a set of carved wooden fruit at a yard sale; in addition to the dates, pineapple, and banana, it had a cashew apple, which I loved stumping people with. For the sake of the story, it would be best if I had loved the delicious fruit when I tasted it. Actually, I made a face, said "that's weirdly astringent", and threw it away. Sigh. Later web reserach suggests that while the fruits are sometimes candied or squeezed to make liquor, they're usually left on the ground to feed livestock.

pretty stuff in Hawaii

Here are some photos, all from my iPhone, of our trip so far. In this post I'm concentrating on the ones I think are pretty/visually interesting, as opposed to those that are more about interesting content. I'll put up some of those later, I hope. Most of these are from Linda's and my visit to the Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden.
A leaf of taro, one of many Hawaiian varieties represented at the garden:

Variegated stems from another taro variety:

Some leaf scars; I'm afraid I can't remember what kind of tree. It was in the section on rare and endangered endemic plants.

Beaters for making kapa cloth:

Others are from sround where we're staying. Koi in the pond out front:

and a flower (waterlily?) from the same pond:

A gecko on a tree alongside the walk to the front door:

Finally, some nifty-looking lava rock from a flow along Chain of Craters Road in Volcanoes National Park:

more Hawaii notes

Today, my friend Linda and I went to the Amy Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden, which is dedicated to preserving, researching, and transmitting knowledge about the plants and farming methods of the Polynesian inhabitants of Hawaii before European contact. Some of these are native Hawaiian plants; many, like sugarcane, taro, and sweet potato, were brought by the Polynesian settlers in their canoes, along with pigs, chickens, and dogs. The website indicates a twice-a-week guided tour, and today was the only day it would fit in our schedule. It turned out to be just us on the tour, led by an intern, and we were joined for part of the tour by another intern/volunteer (I wasn't quite clear on the exact role of either, but they were both very knowledgable). She took us around for a total of two and a half hours. We got a huge flood of agricultural, botanical, and cultural information. It was kind of like being caught in a wordstorm in an ethnobotany library, but Linda and I are such huge native plant geeks, and food geeks, and craft geeks, and maybe every other kind of relevant geeks, that we had a great time. Linda noticed a breadfruit fall from a tree, and they *let us take it home!* She's preparing to cook it now, having researched various methods on the Internet. (Her summary: either you make a quickbread with some breadfruit added, or you pull out the stem and core and fill the cavity with butter and brown sugar and bake it. I think she's going with that one. MMMM! 8^)

To give you one other example from the tour: we learned that, uniquely among Polynesian cultures, Hawaiian kapa cloth has a "watermark" you can see if you hold it against the light, because the bars it was beaten with had carved patterns -- we got to see some of these tools, too. And she demonstrated picking off the buds that, if left, would mean there would be holes in the cloth.

We also saw King Kamehameha butterflies and koa bugs (both endangered) that they're raising there. It was a fabulous time -- if you like that kind of thing, which we do.

A note left over from yesterday: In the morning, we werer getting ready to take the girls to the beach. I put on the swimsuit I bought at The Avenue (large-size store). It has a skirt, which seemed to me very matronly; I hoped to replace it with something I liked better before the trip, but didn't have time to do any more suit shopping. Then I put on the neoprene shoes from my old wetsuit, the ones with permanent ankle creases from lying at the bottom of my dive bag for years. I did not feel fabulous. And then I walked around a cornerr in the vacation house and ran into Harold, who gave me a kiss and said "you look hot"." I do? Cool!!!

Hawaii notes

Harold, the girls, and I have come to Hawaii with friends for a 10-day trip. We arrived yesterday. the girls did pretty well on teh 5-hour plane ride, considering, but were pretty wiped and wired by the end of the day. They were practically begging to be put to bed and at one point Rebecca rather piteously started requesting "Go home now?". They did pretty well today, until I let their bedtime slip too late and Michelle had a full-scale tantrum against having her pajamas put on her. We took them to the beach this morning. Harold was riding herd on Rebecca and I on Michelle. Michelle alternated between being timid -- exclaiming "don't like it!", or needing a hug -- and bold. She progressed to chest-high water faster than I would have expected,a nd when she got her face wet by surprise (not sure whether the water rushed up or she sat down), she wasn't upset. That combination of eager exploration with a need to pull back or get comfort is very classic Michelle.

Later, while the girls were napping, I went snorkeling for the first time in years. In the cove acrosss the street from our rental house, I saw corals, a half-dozen species of sea urchin, a variety of fish, a brittle star, and more. Particularly lovely were some sea urchins with thick orange-red spines and several black durgon. Black durgon are surgeonfishes with an oval body, rimmed with fins that they ripple beautifully. Body and fins are a velvety black, and a line of bright, almost irridescent white separates the body from the fins. I've loved them since I first saw them on a dive trip to Turks and Caicos many years ago. I'm hoping to do some night snorkeling later in the week, but I'm too tired for it tonight..

Later, Linda, Yair, Eric, and I did soem sightseeing and stopped at a fruit stand. After we got home, Harold, Yair, and Eric went out to dinner tonight, and Linda and I stayed home and made dinner for ourselves and our kids (Linda and Yair have two daughters, Ruby, 2 1/2 years old, and Hazel, 7 years old), using stuff from the fruit stand stop and a few supplemental items from teh grocery store. Linda boiled up the purple sweet potatoes, then looked after all the kids while I made a salad -- elegant mixed greens fromt he supermarket, plus really excellent tomatoes, avocado, and cucumber from the fruit stand. I made a dressing from odds and ends (like most vacation rentals, the kitchen is pretty rich in odds and ends) and then quickly pan-fried some gorgeous thin ahi steaks from the store. We ate it in the enclosed porch, and I had a view straight towards the sunset. The ocean is so blue here that in the red light reflected from the sunset it looked purple.

Today was a very, very good day. I feel happy and calm.

Now you say, "Honk-shoo."
It's after 9 pm, and the girls were put in their beds an hour ago. But I just walked past their room and heard, right on the other dide of the door, loud fake snoring. It was very cute. Fake snoring is a new skill -- we've been reading a Sandra Boynton book called Snoozers. In one of the stories, at the end of each verse, the parent who's reading the story instructs the listening child "Now you say, 'I"m not tired."" -- until the final verse, when it's "Now you say, 'Honk-shoo.'" The girls follow their cues better with each reading, and it gets more and more fun to do.

picture this
A slim girl with fly-away blonde hair, in striped pink footie pajamas, on a wheeled pony, scooting away from you and saying "no, no, no!" Saying, not shrieking, but still definitely meaning it. That was Rebecca this morning after I suggested that we change her into a daytime outfit. She seemed for a moment to be a lovely and absolutely canonical example of 2-year-old-girl-ness. It was a nice moment. And, being Rebecca and not really all that difficult most of the time, she let me get her dressed ten minutes later.

better luck next time?
It's official: our surrogate is not pregnant; this cycle did not succeed. We have two more embryos and will use them to make one more attempt. If that doesn't work, well, at least we'll know our family is complete. I did so want one more time to watch a tiny baby unfold into a person... maybe. We'll see.