Holiday Greetings

I think I mentioned in my last post that we actually mailed out Holiday cards this year - before Xmas!  So I thought I would just go ahead and post the card/photo as well as our Year In Review.  I also want to include the very long Christmas letter your Dad wrote (and I vetoed because I only wanted to print one piece of paper) - it's a wonderful and detailed review of our year.  Enjoy!

Jeff, Shannon, and Socha’s 2012 Year in Review

A la Harper’s Index

Apartments lived in: 2

Fee for movers to move us 200 yards: $1,400

States slept in: 13

Feet of Roller coasters ridden: 97,235

Minutes spent inducing labor: 4,320

Approximate number of sprigs of sage in delivery and recovery rooms: 10

Estimated number of nurses rotating in and out during the labor process: 15

Number of doctors attending the labor process: 4

Hours Socha cried/screamed during her colicky months: 630

Times walking down Main Street at 2am with a screaming baby: 14

Hours in an average night’s sleep in April: 4

Hours in an average night’s sleep in December: 7

Number of epic poopsplosions that ruined clothes and required at least 2 adults to clean up: 5

Cloth diapers purchased: 45

Cloth diapers outgrown and given away: 25

Number of colleagues who have offered to babysit Socha: 4

Number of colleagues who wanted to be paid to babysit Socha: 0

Visits to New York City and Boston: 5

Family members far and wide: 59

Family members who still need to meet Socha: 10

Number of FaceBook posts about Socha: 30

Other people named Socha: 0

Visitors to our home in Massachusetts: 10

Number of times Socha has been mispronounced: countless

Number of smiles Socha elicits from complete strangers when they see her: countless

Lakes swam in (or toes dipped in): 9

Children born on campus within 1 year of Socha: 4

Full-time equivalent jobs, January: 1

Full-time equivalent jobs, November: 2

Number of high school boys living in our dorm: 36

Number of countries where Socha is plausibly “from”: 3

Weeks until Socha’s first smile: 13

Circumference in feet of the old Sycamore that Socha hugs on the way to the dining hall: 21.8

Photographs we’ve taken of Socha so far: 2,706

Average number of photographs in Socha’s monthly photo albums: 50

Number of teeth in household: 58

We wish you a Happy Solstice, Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, and Happy New Year. 

 Keep making the world a better place.

Jewett Savage Christmas Letter 2012

4 Seasons

With apologies to Signor Vivaldi, I’ll do my best to capture 2012 as a changing of seasons. Here goes…

Winter – Preparation & Anticipation

We started the winter season in Michigan for a pre-Christmas visit to my family, before we escaped the gray for the sun of the Yucatan. We thought a trip to Mexico would be a great “babymoon” – our last big adventure as a couple before we expanded our family.  Playing in the surf, snorkeling, kayaking, and clambering up Mayan ruins Indiana Jones style, it was a great trip to Tulum, Chichen Itza, and parts further south. We flew back to Boston on New Year’s Eve and had a fun night on town with our friend from Bulgaria, Lindsay Bouton.

January and February were snowless here in Massachusetts, and I kept my head down trying to adjust to my new job and new life back in the USA. It was my first year teaching environmental science and serving as the environmental sustainability coordinator at Deerfield Academy, a prestigious boarding school. I had never heard of it when I started my job search back in Bulgaria (lots of interviews via skype!), but think “Dead Poet’s Society.” It’s a great place to live, with a historic village and quiet streets, a river to swim in and lots of trails for hiking and biking, while still reasonably accessible to culture in nearby Amherst and Northampton, not to mention Boston and NYC. The faculty are ridiculously talented and interesting to work with, and the “it takes a village to raise a child” proverb really means something. There are downsides to this bubble of affluence and power, but on the whole, it’s a nice place to work & live (there’s not much separation between the two at a boarding school where your apartment is attached to a dorm full of 15-year-old boys). Despite living far away from friends and family, the community here threw us a lovely baby shower and we’re even now part of local history, adding our names to the series of plaques that commemorate first-born faculty children going back to the 1940s – a neat tradition.

Shannon kept busy during the winter by being 3^rd trimester pregnant, which is a pretty busy job. She tried singing in a community choir (though never got to perform once Socha was born), and just getting us ready for a new person in our life. We tried to take a Bradley Method natural childbirth class, but the instructor was so epically terrible that all four of her students (including us) quit on the same night. Somewhere there’s a half-done blog post about how terrible she was, but suffice it to say that after 4 years of marriage, arguing about whether to keep going ONE MORE WEEK to that awful class remains our biggest fight.

My father came to visit Deerfield along with family friend Don Jost on our first week of spring break.

Shannon was due on April 3, but the doctors ordered her induced 2 weeks early due to mild-pre-eclampsia. Our future daughter, on the other hand, had other things in mind. Her swimming pool was warm and comfortable and she had no interest in being shown the door so rudely. The doctors pumped Shannon full of drugs to induce labor, too much discomfort, but no baby. Lather, rinse, repeat, for three days. Shannon was exhausted, the doctors were ready to call for a c-section, but we insisted they try all available methods before resorting to surgery. Finally, Shannon delivered a 6 lb 14 oz baby girl (20 inches long) naturally (though full of plenty of pain meds) on March 22, 2012. We hadn’t picked a name yet, and it took us (in classic style), over a day to settle on what today seems so obvious: Socha Sage Jewett Savage. Socha (pronounced “SO-chuh”) is an English transliteration of a river in Slovenia. Well, that’s not quite right. The Soča is not “a river,” but the most beautiful river that Shannon and I had ever seen, pouring out of the Julian Alps crystal clear and bright minty green, in a color which is too pretty to look real. We visited there in the summer of 2011, and we wanted our daughter to have a connection to our time in Europe. When we looked up what the name Soča meant, we couldn’t an exact definition, but we found this description of the Soča  river from the Slovenian tourist board: “its heart belongs to the mountains and that is where it reveals itself in all its beauty, childhood liveliness and original purity….We can simply write that the Soča is beautiful, untouched, pure and perfect in its mountain current.” As for the rest of her name, Sage is both for wisdom and for the perfect smell of the American West, Jewett is her second middle name, and we went with Savage as her last name both for alliteration and to keep the Savage last name alive in this generation.

SPRING – survival

Wow. Spring was hard. Socha arrived before she was ready, and wanted us to understand that she was upset about that. We had never planned anything but breastfeeding, but due to her jaundice we ended up supplementing with formula right away. Combine the jaundice with the difficult induction, and Shannon spent a full week in the hospital for Socha’s birth – too long. We got home on the night before my spring term classes started, and we were totally exhausted and shell-shocked. Now what to do we do? I spent a few hours trying to create some lesson plans for a substitute to handle in my classes, which if you’ve taught you know can be harder than just going to class. I hadn’t worked long enough to earn paid paternity leave, but the school was fairly flexible about letting me take some unpaid days and work from home when I didn’t have to be in the classroom. Shannon’s parents were staying with us for a few days after the birth, and then her sister Kathy and niece Madison came. It was great to have help those first few weeks. My colleagues & neighbors were also super kind in bringing over casseroles and other vittles so that we could not worry about feeding ourselves or trying to venture out to the dining hall.

Socha lost too much weight early on, and wasn’t breastfeeding well. She got skinny, down to the 6% in weight, at one point, and the doctors were concerned. Oh, and after a few weeks, she found her voice. It was well used. The doctor told us “Yup, she has colic. Shouldn’t last more than a few months, no more than 6 months.” 6 months? That’s about how long it takes for a spacecraft to travel to Mars. It seemed just about as likely that we could survive 6 months of Socha’s constant, teeth-gnashing, put-your-head-in-a-vice crying as it did that we would hop a spaceship to Mars. ‘Oh, it’ll end, just like that,” people would say, or sometimes, in the grocery store, while she was wailing in the checkout line “Oh, just be sure to treasure every minute. Every one. Especially the crying. They grow up so fast.”  I walked a lot with Socha. After we got her some prescription antacid, I was sometimes able to calm her down to quiet with  a nice long bouncy walk. I started walking around the block, but some days I had to keep walking and keep walking until the yelling stopped. The campus security got to recognize me and stop wondering who it was that was out wondering the streets at 2 in the morning. And 4 in the morning. And 6 in the morning.

Late in the spring, when I thought Shannon and I had started to figure things out, and were sleeping a little bit, I heard through the grapevine that Socha had been serving as effective teen birth control. One of my students had commented to another of his teachers that “Man, I never want to have kids. Mr. Jewett just looks like hell all the time.”

I looked like hell but it was better than I had been feeling, and Shannon was (by nature of trying to breastfeed) certainly taking the brunt of the late nights. It was a hard time. But the weather got nicer, the days longer, the crying, well, not shorter. We waited a long time for Socha’s first smile, much longer than the books and doctors suggested we would have to. We really wanted that smile, to help us get through the long, crying awfulness. By June, things were getting better. The crying had diminished a tad, and on father’s day, Socha gave us her first true smile. It was great, even though that grin doesn’t really look like her today. None of the pictures from the first few months look like her today.

SUMMER – It gets better

I was started to get one-meeting-a-day to deathed on my summer vacation, so we escaped to Maine to visit my Aunt Barb and Uncle Jim Haughey. We had a wonderful visit and Socha provided much entertainment, though Barb was convinced she would be able to figure out how to soothe Socha…not so much. Shannon wouldn’t let me take Socha sailing, which was her loss, but we’ll get hauling in the mainsheet next summer for sure. We then had a frantic week spent moving apartments on campus (with help from dad, sister Jenny, and niece Helen) before setting out for wild road trip. Lots of people have told us that driving was a great way to soothe their babies, and had we tried driving to calm her down? Yes, we had tried, and she generally yells for 20 minutes until she falls asleep, at which point our car becomes the bus from Speed, as we were not to decelerate or stop for any reason lest we blow up the bus, er, wake the baby. Just keep driving, never mind the really interesting historical roadside attraction. This was a new style of road trip for us. A new slow kind of road trip. Sometimes we could drive two hours before stopping an hour for a feeding, other times it was much less. We had hoped to drive to see our old friends and stomping grounds in Colorado and Montana, but that proved much too far west for our current mode of travel. We did hit Cedar Point (best amusement park in the world – yay, roller coasters!), Minnesota (Lakeville to see the Kathy, Madison, Michael, and Steve Hjermstad, and Sand Lake, to see Brett, Betsy, and Nate Potash), and McCollum Lake, Michigan, to see the whole Jewett clan. It was a fun 3 weeks of travel, and great to show Socha off to all her relatives, but the driving was exhausting. The colic never did “turn off like a light switch”, but by late July Socha started putting on the pounds and started losing the scream. Finally. She also discovered her first true toy, her toes. Toes are amazing.

In August I traveled to Costa Rica on a work trip (I know it doesn’t sound like a hardship, but I would have rather been home with Shannon and Socha) while the girls visited relatives in Colorado. The separation wasn’t much fun, but we made up for it with visits from Hanna Soltow and Pei Pei Lu (en route to Bulgaria), and then the Savage family reunion on beautiful Lake George, NY (yay, more sailing! Boo, weird creepy cult we shared the camp with!). Socha even spent some time with her slightly-older cousins Micha and Ella. If only Socha had been crawling, we could have had some serious baby races down the hotel hallway. As the summer came to an end, Socha was putting on weight, smiling and giggling, and really becoming a person. It was much more fun than before – too bad I had to go back to work.

I started the school year spending most of labor day weekend redoing recycling signs all over campus (glamorous) while Shannon was settling into being a wonderful full-time mom to a happy, exuberant girl. Everywhere we went, Socha spread joy. As we walked down the street in Boston, people walking the other way would turn their heads and grin. In the dining hall on campus, the staff all cooed over her. We certainly think Socha is pretty amazing, but she’s getting plenty of adoration from outside parties as well.

This fall our family’s plans changed when Shannon was offered the chance to do post-doctoral research out of the same research lab in Montana where we had met (Rick Lawrence’s lab at Montana State in Bozeman). Shannon hadn’t planned on going back to work for at least a year, but the opportunity to work from home on a project she was excited about (mapping lynx habitat for the forest service) was too good to pass up. We were able to find a wonderful nanny that helps give Shannon some peace and quiet to work, but also allows Shannon be “present” as mom (and for feedings). It works out pretty well, though both Shannon and I are now working pretty flat out all the time, so things like mailing out birth announcements tend to get put off and put off.

At work I’m pushing the school to create a major campus-wide sustainability planning document, which is keeping me plenty busy, along with trying to do all the day-to-day things like making sure recycling is happening, teaching classes, and watching the students in the dorm. Living at Deerfield provides an almost idyllic bubble for Socha to grow up in. There are about a dozen faculty children under the age of ten living on our same quad, so when Socha is a little older there will be no shortage of playmates, and the campus is safe enough to allow general free-range child-rearing, which seems like a lost art but one that I hope will allow independence in  safe environment.  This Thanksgiving we were able to visit my Aunt Betsy and Uncle David, along with cousins Kevin and Dan in New Jersey, and our friend Jaime Laurens in Brooklyn. As the year comes to a close, our final travel will be to California to visit the Savages at Keith’s new place, before coming full circle and going back to Michigan.

Socha is really, really cute. Every day we are shocked at how cute she is. She looks just like her mother, so much so that several people are not convinced that I was involved, although we just came across a similar-aged photo of her cousin Helen (on my side) and the resemblance is unavoidable. A few weeks ago she started crawling, and she’s standing without support occasionally (and also whacking her head on things pretty regularly). She enjoys tearing up paper into little bits and gnawing on spoons. Straps (like on my camera, or my backpack) are really interesting, as are all the electrical cords she can crawl to faster than we can keep her out of them. Socha likes to be flipped and swung, and loves the dining hall with all the people and noise – plenty to look at. Whenever we walk by the giant sycamore on the way to/from the dining hall, we stop and let Socha feel it’s bark, and pay it proper heed. It’s a grand old tree, and if we’re going to raise a treehugger, it’s a good one to start with.  We haven’t paid for babysitting yet, because kind-hearted colleagues and neighbors keep offering to do it for free, because they want to get their baby fix. She’s got two bottom teeth, and is working on a few on the top. It’s incredible to watch her learn things, especially motor skills, and I swear she is noticeably taller day by day recently. All of this is clichéd, of course, to any new parent, but it doesn’t make it any less true for my daughter. Amazing. I have a hard time envisioning her as the age of my students (17-18, mostly), but I also couldn’t really imagine this time just back in May. It’s coming.

So there is a long-winded account of 4 seasons in the life of the Jewetts and Savages in Deerfield, Massachusetts. It was a momentous year, and future years will likely be more routine, but for now we are celebrating all the wondrous little things that are firsts for us. I was sad that I had to be away the day that Socha first got to play in the snow (she apparently wasn’t that into it). Shannon and I can both be pretty amused for hours just hanging out and playing with Socha. We’re not jetting to a different country every weekend like we got to enjoy for a while in Europe, but I wouldn’t trade our current family of three for anything. It’s a wonderful life, it seems.

Happy Solstice, Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, and a Happy New Year. Rejoice in the miracle of our existence.