Fall Already?

Alright...

So it's been about six months since the last post.  I'm not sure that anyone bothers to check in anymore.  In case you do- don't worry!  We're all still alive and well here in Sitka. As I was browsing the last post- wow! So much has happened since then.  It was just April! Phin has grown and changed, we did some fishing this summer, we traveled to Colorado for a wonderful vacation and Klansek family reunion, I got pregnant, we enjoyed summer in Sitka, we took a couple of trips to Kake, summer wound down, Brent started hunting deer again. 

 Now- here we are in fall! I find myself in the early second trimester of my second pregnancy. So far, so good.  We're expecting baby #2 in late March or early April.  We're a little overwhelmed by the idea of two kids two years apart- but plenty of other people have done it.  So we'll just charge forward and do our best.

Phin has been changing so quickly.  He's been a real delight and a real handful all at once.  His language is really exploding, which is fun.  He comes up with new words every day. It's amazing to have a little look into his developing brain and see the wheels turning as he makes connections.  He can identify objects from the stories we read over and over, the things he sees every day, and the mundane things around the house.  His current passions are trains, buses, animals, climbing on things, and wresting with Brent.  Those of you who have followed his food allergy history will be pleased to know that recent testing has shown oats and wheat to be now in the SAFE category!  YEAH!!! Bring on the Cheerios!

Brent's doing a fantastic job of caring for Phin day in and day out. They get into all sorts of mischief while I'm at work. They've picked gallons upon gallons of berries this summer.  The two of them seem to enjoy each others company. Let's hope it lasts a long time.

Enjoy the photos from the past six months.  No guarantees on when the next post will be...

Peace,

Val

Industrious Phin goes to work in his new garage sand-table built by Brent.

Dry land training is underway

Working on gentle touch towards the baby... we've got a ways to go.

Phin's favorite activity- picking and eating berries. He calls them "budah-budahs"

SPRING

Phin plays on the beach with a herring opener in the background.

It seems fitting to draft a blog post about spring on an April morning with a dusting of fresh snow. The weather today is classic for Southeast Alaska where fall, winter, and spring are basically variations on precipitation, temperatures in the 30s and 40s, and the usual Pacific driven storms. But each season has its own hallmark distinct from the weather. Spring’s hallmark is the return of the herring to spawn. I checked the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s website which estimates that Sitka Sound will see a return of 195,000,000 pounds of herring this year. That’s a lot of biomass. When one considers that each fish weighs much less than a pound, one recognizes that it is a whole lot of fish swimming into these waters! From several locations and on different days I have watched seemingly endless schools of fish swimming by. The air here is thick with ocean smell – not a stinky ocean smell but a salty bright smell. It is the smell of spring.

The concentration of herring is a concentration of food for predators. From a good vantage in town one can see up to a dozen whales, tens of sea lions, some stealthy seals, a hundred or so eagles, and thousands and thousands of gulls. You have to watch out when the gulls take flight from the buildings down town because they drop lots of poop synchronously. The cormorants and sea ducks have also returned in large numbers. While not driven by the herring, flocks of migrating ducks and geese will be following the coast northward any day now. It is not hard to imagine that halibut, salmon, and other seafood are under the waves taking advantage of abundance of herring.

Humans too are drawn in by the herring. The sac roe herring fishing fleet arrived to Sitka in mid-March. This year’s harvest goal is 19,500 tons of herring – nearly all of which is sold in Japan as a delicacy (there are all sorts of market issues with the recent Japan quake and tsunami that I won’t go into.) As I write, all but 3,000 tons of the quota has been caught in three “openers”. An “opener” is an official window of time in a specific location that the permit holders are allowed to fish. The location of the opener is announced just hours in advance. Fishermen have to wait by their radios for days to weeks- waiting for the announcement of the next opener. The last opener should be today. The openers are a mad frenzy of boats. There are 50 permit holders, each in a big seine boat. Each seine boat has at least one powerful skiff (small open motor boat) that is used to pull out the net. A handful of tenders (these are the middle-men, big boats who collect the fish from the fishermen and deliver it to the processing plant) stand by to take the fish from the nets. In addition boats belonging to the troopers, fish and game, the coast guard, and random folks are in the mix. A constant drone of more than 15 spotter aircraft circle around. All this is packed into a relatively small area. It looks like mayhem. Embedded here is a video from the second opener of this year. 2 minutes into the video you can see the seine boat, Infinite Grace, pulled onto her side by a massive load of herring in its net. There were too many herring, and they all swam for the bottom of the ocean at once. A powerful force of nature indeed! You can watch the cable holding the net boom in place snap. The herring opener is a local spectator sport.







Small fish, short work.



Human draw to the herring is not limited to the commercial fishery. I filled a five gallon bucket with herring in about an hour. I used a jig with 5 hooks on it. I never waited more than 30 seconds to hook a herring and I always hooked at least two fish each time I brought my hooks in. Often  I had three or four fish on at a time and a few times I brought in 5 fish. We will use the herring for halibut, shrimp, and crab bait this summer and fall. Lots of other folks were catching their bait for the year at the same time as me.

Once the spawn started a few days ago the normally clear waters around Sitka turned a milky green – similar to the Kenai River or other glacier fed river. The beaches are awash in tiny herring eggs. Traditional harvest of herring eggs started with the spawn. The Tlingit (local Alaska Native tribe) love to eat fresh herring eggs. One method for the herring egg harvest is to submerge cedar limbs which the herring eggs then stick to. Another method is harvesting kelp with herring eggs. We have eaten traditional herring eggs a few times. I am still not sure I have a taste for them. We collect seaweed from the beach full of herring eggs as well. This makes excellent (if not terribly stinky) fertilizer for gardens.

Milky green water in the harbor.  The dark mass just off shore is a school of herring.

Traditional herring egg harvesting.

Herring eggs on the beach.

We welcome the herring into our lives this spring as the forbearers of eagles, whales, sea lions, salmon, halibut, and fishing. We hope that the herring will bring us a freezer full of seafood and a garden full of produce. What an awesome symbol of the abundance of spring in Southeast Alaska!  Check out http://www.shobestudios.com/ for more cool Sitka spring pictures from local professional photographer Tim Shobe.

Plus a few random Phin pictures.  We have been going on walks on the trails lately with the red bucket.  A walk usually doesn't take us very far but we both are loving the experience.

Choose Respect

Today marked Alaska’s second annual statewide “Choose Respect” march.  Our governor (yes, a Republican!) has made it a personal project of his to highlight the issue of domestic violence and sexual assault in Alaska.  The statewide “Choose Respect” campaign kicks of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault awareness month.  I was lucky enough to have the day off of work- so I organized some colleagues to march with me in the walk.  Brent, Phin, and the dogs joined in as well. I have to say- our signs and doggie sandwich boards were a big hit.

 

Since moving to Sitka, I’ve learned so much about domestic violence and its impact on health outcomes.  Through projects through our hospital’s DV task force, I’ve learned just how rampant these social illnesses are in our population.  Alaska’s stats are particularly alarming. This data is from 2010 : 47.6% of Alaskan women have experienced domestic violence in their lifetime. 37.1% of adult women in Alaska have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime.11.8% of Alaskan women have experienced either domestic violence or sexual violence in the past year.  These numbers probably underestimate the true prevalence of this plague.  To compound things, there is plenty of good data out there showing that children who are exposed to violence in the home have an increased risk of developing chronic health problems such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer as adults.  I’ve started asking my patients about their exposure to violence in the home, and unfortunately- the responses tend to trend with the above statistics.

Phin's stroller decked out for the walk.

It’s hard to know what to do with such depressing information.  I’m happy to see that a group of about 50 people came out in the pouring rain on a Thursday afternoon to walk together in solidarity on this issue.  Sitka is working on a “Choose Respect” mural to be completed within the next year. There is a “Girls on the Run” program in the schools to get middle school girls out running with a final event of a 5k.  Some coaches in town are participating in the “Boys To Men” program to teach respect towards girls to their male athletes in the schools. And there is a new anti-bullying curriculum in place in the schools.  Hopefully these programs will impact the young people of this community to understand respect for themselves and for each other, and to break the cycle of violence. In the mean time, we’ll paint posters and walk together in the rain.  If you'd like to learn more, a great resource is the family violence prevention fund: www.endabuse.org

Isis wears her heart on her sleeve most days.

On a more cheerful note-

The Edwards Family had a fantastic spring break in Scottsdale earlier this month. All of the Edwards cousins were able to see each other and hang out together. It was wonderful having the family time.  We were also lucky that Grandma and Grandpa “P” were in Phoenix for a wedding.  So Phineas got to see almost all of his relatives in one trip! What a lucky kid!  Highlights of the trip included family time, meals together, daily dips in the pool, a trip to the train park, and a hike up Sqaw peak (way to go Grandpa John!)

Sqaw Peak Summit!

Book time with Grandma E

  

Kiddo updates:

Phin is now toddling at full speed. No more crawling for our little guy! His current obsessions are dogs, rice Chex, books, and bathtime.

Spring has arrived to Sitka.  Stay tuned for a future post on whales, sea life, and the herring opener…

Future berry picker in pre-season training

This picture is just too fun to leave out.  My friend Julien and I wearing our "invisibility cloaks" on the houndstooth sofa.

ONE!!!!!



One is So Big!!!



One year ago (plus a few days because we aren’t the most consistent bloggers & because our internet connection has been down for a ridiculously long time) our little Phineas was born. Wow. It has been such an adventure for all of us. There are all sorts of ways that we as parents can relate the experience a year of keeping a little one alive and thriving. There are all the diaper changes, the midnight feedings, the first crawl, first sounds, the tumbles, the un-explainable crying, countless books, and so on. But what has Phineas experienced? He has more than doubled his weight in one year. He started as a skinny little human shaped blob that couldn’t hold his head up and grew into a little pot bellied creature who can crawl over to a pile of books and retrieve the one you are asking for. He has gone from exclusively eating breast milk to eating birthday cake (albeit special allergy free cake – thanks to his super cool mom.) Once he could barely manage to bat at a toy, now he stacks his rings like it is no big deal. So much must be going through his active little brain to make all of these things happen. We sure love our little guy. I know that he loves us too.

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You are one now so it is time to learn to ski.

We had a little party in a cabin about a quarter mile from the road for Phin's first birthday.  Here Val skis in with Phin, a box of essentials, and the laundry. 

Howl if you are one.

The morning after the party. 

Escape to Paradise

Phineas and Val sporting their Aloha-wear

7 days in Hawaii. No zip-lining, no hiking, no camping, no boogie boarding, no surf lessons, no parasailing, no snorkeling with sea turtles, no swimming with dolphins, no exploring volcanoes or caves or remote beaches, no scuba diving, no kayaking, no bike trips. Bottom line: no “adventure”. Yet this trip was one of the most joyful vacations I have ever been on.

Seeing the delight in my little boy’s eyes as his tiny toes sunk into warm wet sand for the first time was thrilling. Keeping on top of him as he crawled fearlessly to the ocean edge to play in the surf was challenging. Listening to his shrieks of joy as waves washed up to his knees was delightful. Pushing him around the pool in his floating inner-tube device while he splashed, blew bubbles, and waved at strangers was the perfect antidote to stress.

I imagine in the future we’ll be more adventurous on our vacations.  I look forward to taking Phineas hiking, snorkeling, boogie boarding, and camping on our winter escapes as he gets bigger. But I hope I never forget my little guy taking on the waves from the shoreline, standing tall at 2 and a-half feet.

           

Enjoy the pictures,

Val

Brent & Phineas on their daily morning "dadventure"- usually consisting of a long sunrise walk finishing up with playing in the sand.

This kid LOVES playing in sand. Check out the yoga moves as he moves mountains of sand. So zen.

Full speed ahead! Straight for the waves!

All tuckered out. And it's only 9am

   

Edwards family heads back to Alaska.

Eight Hours

Uninterrupted

Welcome back REM dreams

Sleep. How you were missed!

In case you prefer not to read haiku, I’ll spell it out in plain paragraph form. We’re all sleeping through the night! This is a huge milestone. It had been a year since I’d gotten any more than four hours of sleep without being woken up (to pee during the last 2 months of pregnancy, then to soothe or feed the crying baby).  At once, the stress of the disrupted sleep, the crabby kid, and the exhaustion was enough to break this camel’s back.  I felt ready to ignore the wailing pleas of my sweet baby boy at 10pm, 2am, and 4am. Taking a leap of faith, I assumed that even if he was left to cry until blue in the face, he would still awake a chubby happy cherub. So we schemed.  Brent sent me upstairs so I would not have to listen to the crying. He slept in the bedroom across the hall from the kid and put in earplugs.  What happened next? Who knows!  By night #3 I was back downstairs, the earplugs were returned to the garage, and we all slept just fine. VICTORY!

There are so many books out there about child sleep stuff: extinction, graduated extinction, Furber, attachment, etc... But could it be so simple as "just let them cry"?  That is what it took for our little Phin. I think I knew this deep down.  But it is just so incredibly painful to listen to those awful screams. With a first kid, you have no guarantee that it will work. I’d never really seen such a plan in action first-hand. Then as soon as you think maybe you’re ready to try it, you read some “attachment parenting” article that makes you feel like an evil, awful mother for letting the tyke fuss a little.  Add in the frequent travel, and there just didn’t seem to be a good time to give it a try. I think it’s just one of these parenting lessons that each family has to cross on their own. There’s not a correct way or perfect time. Every family is different, and everyone’s sensitivities are set differently. I’m sure it was hard for our parents to not chime in and tell us their opinions on how we could get some sleep. But we appreciate their support, love, and withholding of unsolicited advice. They knew we’d figure it out eventually.

What to do with all of this extra energy that sleeping through the night has provided us? Oh- wait… I gotta go! He’s headed for the stairs again! That’s about it.

Enjoy some pictures from the last couple of weeks.



Above: Grandma Sue shows Phineas his new Christmas gift.
and : Brent takes Phinny for a few laps around the lake.

Our sleep strategy was difficult to implement on the ferry.

Here Phin taunts his mother at hour 15 of a 21 hour ferry ride

 while she tries to demonstrate the joy a good nap can bring.

Who let a dinosaur loose on the beach? I love this picture.

Getting bigger! Can now stand at the wheel!

Burning bridge

The Edwards household seems to be busy and in flux. As a result we are not keeping up on this blog. Its been so long that updating the blog now almost seems like writing a letter to an old friend. Where to begin, what to leave in, what to leave out. Here are some highlights from our world as it is currently and lately:

Probably the biggest news is that we recently learned that Phineas has significant food allergies. We are pretty confident he is allergic to wheat and milk. He might be allergic lots of other things too, like eggs and soy, so we are holding back on introducing new foods until he can see the allergy specialist. We are taking this in stride and starting the transition to a diet that Phineas can eat. Val is taking this transition more seriously than me since it is possible that some allergens are passed through the breast milk. On the bright side we are going to be avoiding most processed food and should be eating healthier. Phineas has not exhibited any allergic reaction to smiling, laughing, playing, crying, or venison. Bottom line - he is a normal kid.

Val went to Kansas City for work in Mid-December. She is a mom Samurai. She has to be to survive taking a 9 month old on all those long flights in the midst of holiday travel. Sue drove through blizzard conditions and bad roads to meet Val and Phin to do a little grandma duty. The draw of KC BBQ was strong but I stayed home partly to avoid all the holiday music piped into the airports. While Val and Phin were gone my dad and Ryan came to Sitka to do some deer hunting. We got one small buck. Happily the family harvested four deer this year (so far). This is plenty of deer for our freezer and for the freezers in Anchorage.

Phineas mastered the art of crawling much faster than we mastered the art of chasing a crawling toddler. A number of times I have caught him with a dog toy in his mouth or going for the toilet. It’s a mystery to me why these are such irrestitable draws to Phin. Phin has started working on standing unsupported. He might stand for a few seconds at a time. He can stand a little longer every day. Walking can’t be far off. Chaos continues.

I am not much of a holiday person. I am neither religious nor spiritual and I try to resist crazy commercialism (gifting is fun though). For me the holidays are equal parts tolerance for others and practice at not sticking my foot in my mouth. I am not particularly good at either. It is also an exercise in tolerance for Val because she has to put up with me. We do have some Edwards holiday traditions we agree on. Festivus is one. If you aren’t familiar with Festivus, check it on Wikipedia. Another holiday tradition we agree on is a tree. Obtaining a tree from our vast woods is a family event that I cherish. I would prefer that we leave the tree in its natural un-ornamented state, Val knows this and decorates the tree a little more sparingly than if it was entirely up to her. Lastly, I like my ugly holiday sweater with the snowmen on it. I will wear it all week long. This brings Val some holiday cheer from me and I can stay grumpy.

Taking the tree home.

Phin showing "so big".  We are returning from an ill fated trip to a wilderness cabin. The seas did not cooperate.

Phin hanging with his future 4th grade teacher.

Lovin' the tub!

See the nubs (i.e. teeth.)

Our neigbor has chickens, ducks, and a rabbit.  They all spend considerable time in our yard where they are always welcome.  Phin has discovered the spare animals and loves to watch.

Phin does a little editing to my legal work.  I am too wordy anyway.