525,600 Minutes

Jonathon Larson famously posed the question in his Rent song “Seasons of Love”, “525,600 minutes, how do you measure, measure a year?”  For Dave & me, there have been too many ways to measure the past year for us to count.  However I suppose “Seasons of love”, like the song title says, are really the best way to measure these past 525,600 minutes in Belfast.  I went into this year convinced that I would be counting down the minutes until I got to come back to the U.S.  Now I am finding myself holding onto each passing minute as I have to get ready to say goodbye to this place I have come to call home.  In a year that I thought would be seasons of longing to leave, it really has turned into a year filled with seasons of love.  How else could I measure a year which includes the birth of my first born child?  Her season of love is enough to fill an entire year and beyond.  A season of love from this year that I am dreading to leave is our church, Newtonbreda Presbyterian.  I really don’t think this church realizes how special it is – it really embodies everything that a Christian church should.  It welcomes foreigners with open arms and shows them love in every possible way.  I am also sad to be leaving a season of love which brought growth.  Dave has been blessed to work for an institution which gave him a renewed sense of purpose and I have been blessed to have a year to reflect and find out that moving to a new land is not as scary as it seemed 12 months ago.  We have both experienced seasons of life that could not have been experienced any place but here – a city that provided us a small reprieve from our hustle and bustle lifestyle in America.  A year of love looks like the face of our daughter, it looks like the church in which we worshiped, and it looks like the green and rolling hills we were blessed enough to call home in 2013.  All of these truly special moments which far too often get taken for granted taught us so much this year about living instead of just watching life go by.  These are seasons of love which truly turned into moments of love to last us a lifetime.

Images from 2013 Seasons of Love:

Outside Belfast City Hall

View from our house

Walking along one of the rolling hills in the Lagan Meadows

Atop Divis Mountain, with the city of Belfast behind us (more like a hill, though, compared to Colorado's mountains).  (4 months pregnant)

20 weeks pregnant

Right before my 1K Fun Run & Dave's Half Marathon
(33 weeks pregnant)

At the hospital, last pregnant picture

Daddy & Daughter


First family photo
 

Merry Christmas (complete with our paper crowns from our Christmas Crackers - a UK tradition)!
 

A Visit from Grandparents

We have just come to a reluctant close of arguably the best week of Shiloh’s life.  This little girl is lucky on many levels, one of which is that she has three sets of grandparents who love her with all their hearts.  Sue & Gerry, parents of one of Shiloh’s namesakes, Ellen, came to visit us for the past week and it was so hard to see them go this morning.  Grandma Sue & Granddad Gerry spoiled our little girl rotten and gave Dave and me some much needed refreshment.  Although Sue & Gerry are not blood related, they have been like second parents to me most all of my life, with Gerry knowing my dad well before I was born back when my dad was interning at St. Lawrence hospital, Sue acting as my girl scout leader until I graduated from high school, and both of them helping to shape me into who I am today.  As wonderful as it is to have a loving church family here in Belfast, it is not the same as having our real family here.  It has been beyond wonderful to have them here and not having to ask for help, but rather having them see where help is needed with Shiloh and jumping into help.  As soon as they arrived last week, they went into grandparent mode, and began the week-long gift of helping the new parents with the new baby.  There were gifts like hauling a Christmas tree from downtown to our house via a city bus, cooking dinner while I was told to sit down on the couch, manipulating backs with osteopathy to alleviate pain, massaging my head which put me near to sleep, and gifting adorable hand-made pajamas & booties to keep Shiloh warm.  I didn’t realize how tired I really was after adjusting to the past seven weeks of motherhood until they arrived and I had two extra sets of hands to help with Shiloh.  It was so wonderful to walk into the kitchen and see that the dishes had been washed and counter cleaned and wet clothes hung up to dry, or being told to go take a shower and “we’ll deal with the crying baby”, or not have to carry the diaper bag or push the stroller because someone else had already volunteered for the task.  A definite highlight of the week was having them here for Shiloh’s baptism, and the fact that Gerry did one of the readings for the baptismal ceremony.  It was a special moment made even more special because these two grandparents were present.  I don’t think it will just be me who misses them – Shiloh had taken to smiling up at Gerry when he fed her her bottle of expressed milk at night, and Shiloh had gotten used to snuggling with Sue in the morning while Dave and I walked Toby.  Their calming presence amidst the circus that is taking care of an infant and a very emotional dog helped lower my blood pressure and provided a respite when I needed it most, especially coming off a stressful week of figuring out Shiloh’s tummy issues.  When they left early this morning I took a page out of Shiloh’s playbook, crying like a baby, so sad that this week, like all good things, has to come to an end, but eagerly anticipating the next time we are all together.

First time meeting Grandma Sue

Yawning as she meets Granddad Gerry for the first time

Our trimmed Christmas tree

Decked out in her "Pixie Girl" pjs made especially for her by Grandma Sue, wrapped in the receiving blanket made especially for her by Maga (the name I call Sue's mom)

Snuggles with Granddad as he and Dave beat Sue & me in Trivial Pursuit

Baptism Day

Sue, Gerry, & Shiloh in St. Anne's Cathedral

Bottle feed time with Granddad Gerry

Cheers!

In the gardens at Belfast Castle

Shiloh, Sue, & Gerry in Belfast Castle

Sue & Shiloh in Belfast Castle

Beaming Granddad Gerry & the Pixie Girl, fast asleep

Hanging out with Grandma Sue

Great-aunt Hattie booties

Our first (and second, and third) Trip to the Hospital

There are a lot of “firsts” that I am anticipating in this first year of Shiloh’s life.  First time rolling over, first time sitting up, first tooth, and so on.  One of the firsts I was not looking forward to was the first time we took her to the hospital.  Since she was born, Shiloh has had a lot of vomiting (or “boking” as they would say in Northern Ireland).  Right around Thanksgiving, it started getting worse.  For example, one morning she was lying in her Baby Moses Basket and managed to hit the wall with some big-time baby throw up.  Another time I was holding her and she threw up so much that the entire right side of my shirt was dripping wet from baby throw up mixed with red stuff in her little baby throw up.  While I was waiting for the doctor to call me back after that episode, I found myself collapsing onto the floor with my baby in my arms and just crying.  Toby came over and did his best to comfort us both, lying right next to us and doing his best to snuggle.  The doctor told us to take Shiloh to Children’s Hospital for observation.  A few hours later, we were sent home from the hospital with a new medicine, changed from the one she had been on for the prior two weeks (half her life at that point), and told to come back if she didn’t get better.  Two days later we were back, this time requiring blood work (from which both of her little hands still have bruises) and a scheduled ultrasound for the next day of her digestive track to see if there was a blockage.  After the ultrasound (marking our third hospital trip in five days), the results were thankfully all good, but her medicine was changed yet again.  So far that seems to have at least changed the projectile vomit to just regular vomit (and eliminated the acid in the vomit so her esophagus doesn't get damaged).  There is really no way to describe how hard it is to watch your new baby be in pain and also how scary it is to watch a little four week old get poked by big needles, hooked up to beeping machines and scanned with baby-sized ultrasound wands.  Thankfully, the doctors at the Royal Jubilee Children’s Hospital seem to understand that a hospital can often be scarier for the parents than the child.  They quickly ruled out pyloric stenosis and confirmed that Shiloh just has extreme acid reflux.  The entire time they worked to reassure us and tried to be as gentle as one can be when inserting a stiff and shiny needle into wiggly and doughy baby hands.  Now that we are on the mend and seem to have the correct medicine dosage dialed in, we are all quite thankful that this “first” is past us, and we are moving onto the next exciting milestone in Shiloh’s life.  Hopefully the next “first” is more along the lines of a typical milestone and less along the lines of one involving a medical team. 

They had to wrap her hand up to keep the IV in her hand.

An Abridged Thanksgiving

November 28^th came and went in Northern Ireland without much more than a yawn from most residents.  However, those expatriates from America (such as us) did our best to celebrate a mini Thanksgiving day feast.  We have known for quite a while that there is no way that we would ever be able to fit a whole turkey in our Euro sized oven.  We started looking around for a substitute fowl, but had a hard time finding pheasant or quail or the like, so we started scratching our heads for another substitution (a chicken seemed to common for a special day like Thanksgiving).  In the recent edition of Everyday Foods magazine, there is a recipe for a stuffed turkey breast with Italian sausage.  We decided our oven could handle that, so we ordered a 4 pound turkey breast (it was so fresh it still had some quills attached!) and a few pounds of Italian sausage from our butcher and bought fresh parsley and sage and went to work on our Abridged Thanksgiving.  We started wracking our brains for what side dishes we could whip up, too.  We don’t have any mixers or pie tins or many of the other kitchen tools here that we have used in years past to make a traditional Thanksgiving meal, which limited the items we could make.  Since we also have an infant this year, and we’re in another country, we decided to cheat a little and buy some store-made items.  While I still made mashed sweet potatoes by myself, we turned to Sainsburys (our local grocery store) for the pre-made cranberry sauce, gluten-free French bread loaf and gluten free deserts.  Two traditional British deserts we added to our menu this year were Christmas pudding (which is not really a pudding at all but more of a spiced bread) and minced meat pies (also deceptively named – the “minced meat” is really currants, sultans and spices).  Dave added some baby potatoes and carrots to the baking pan with the stuffed turkey breast and our feast was ready to eat.  It may not have been the fanciest Thanksgiving that either one of us have ever eaten, but it was one of the more thankful Thanksgivings.  This was our first year with a child for whom we have prayed for a long time, this was our first year with Dave out of school and me on a sort of “sabbatical”, and this was our first year figuring out our way in a foreign land and somehow doing alright at it.  God has truly blessed us to abundance this year, something for which made this Abridged Thanksgiving feeling like our Fullest Thanksgiving yet.

Pre-cooked stuffed turkey breast

The finished product

Our Thanksgiving table, complete with a 4-week old baby