A few more details

I was induced Saturday morning around 8 a.m. after walking around dilated to a 3 1/2 for two weeks. Once my water broke, we were in business: Lincoln was born at 11:59 a.m. after two pushes (whoa! didn't know that could happen) weighing 8 pounds 4 ounces and stretching to 21 inches.

I forgot to ask for an epidural because I was reading--shocker--and by the time we asked the anesthesiologist was in an emergency C-section. So...we held on through contractions until I was at an 8 1/2. Wesley is the best; there's no way I could have made it through that without him. He held me close and counted with/for me and helped me breathe and prayed with me. I can't actually think about Wesley without getting teary right now, so that's all I'll say.

The epidural allowed me to focus enough for the last little bit and not be so shaky once Lincoln was here (I shook uncontrollably for a bit there, and then again after they took Lincoln to the nursery for clean-up). But all is well with us both.

We came home Monday afternoon. Levi loves Lincoln and kisses his head as much as he can. He also directs me in holding him, nursing him, and taking him out of the crib. I'm glad Levi is concerned about my parenting--and that he's happy with a new brother. Phew!

Lincoln and I went to the doctor today. He weighs a bit over 8 pounds. Wow. As you can tell, this boy is an eater--almost to birth weight at four days! We think he looks more like the Kellers, but every day there is a stronger resemblance between the brothers.

I'm so grateful to be a mom of two beautiful boys, especially since Wesley is their daddy.

Lincoln Corrie is Here!

2011 Holiday Letter

Happy Holidays!

We enjoyed 2010 with the leaps of life changes and daily living. In April, we both graduated from Brigham Young University. Wesley earned his B.S. in chemical engineering and Cassie completed her M.F.A. in creative writing. Levi wore out the sidewalk in his stroller going to and from campus. We attempted a family vacation to Denver, Colorado (in conjunction with a writing conference); we learned a lot—such as, copy your child’s birth certificate, double-check all of your hotel, car, and conference arrangements, and avoid staying in hotels with young children (namely, Levi). We laugh about the many ways 2010 has taught us to embrace sleep deprivation.

After graduation, we moved to Idaho Falls, Idaho. Wesley interned at Idaho National Laboratory working on a project with their biomass energy group. This included a two week trip to the mid-west to study (play with) corn stover bales. He loved INL and continues to do work for them at a distance. Cassie and Levi played, read, and relaxed through the summer. As we expect a new baby, Levi discovered early on the hilarity of watching his mom lose even the idea of food in the toilet. He patted her back and laughed then flushed the toilet for her. It’s hard to feel miserable with that kind of support. Our summer disappeared quickly as we reveled in family time, visited Cassie’s grandparents’ cabin in Wyoming, and prepared to move again.

In August, we moved across the country (at least half-way and south) to Manor, Texas, just outside of Austin. We’re still in shock that we live in a house that doesn’t share walls with other people. It’s weird to not hear your neighbors vacuum or listen to the radio—but we’re adjusting well! Wesley is an official Ph.D.-candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. He is excited about the work he’ll do in conjunction with the Pecan Street Project (see pecanstreetproject.org). Basically, his focus is on energy efficiency in the residential sphere—and that can go in a lot of directions in the three and a half years we have left! Cassie teaches creative writing (nonfiction) for BYU independent study and is grateful to keep a few toes in the writing world.

Our baby is due in three weeks (give him four, although at this point Cassie wouldn’t mind two). As a result, we celebrated the holidays away from family for the first time; to make up for that we invited people over, ate too much, and learned a few new games. We never thought we’d eat Thanksgiving dinner with the air conditioner blasting, but now we have!

Levi dances, runs, and dives everywhere. He loves cars, airplanes, books, lights, and jabbering constantly about them although we cannot understand most of what he says. Every day he directs one of us to a song book, holds it carefully in front of him, then leads us with his hand while singing, “Lalalalala!” He is enthralled by choirs and instruments of all kinds. Wesley already encourages the violin and dreams of having free concert tickets from his son in the future. Other than music, Levi’s favorite hobby is cleaning. He knows which cleaners do what and often corrects Cassie’s toilet scrubbing technique (even though he’s under close surveillance with anything that resembles a potential danger). If we let him, he’d mop the floor six times a day; maybe in the future we will allow that! Levi also loves babies—particularly pictures of himself—so we’re hopeful that the baby will be as darling as he is and therefore warmly welcomed by his big brother.

We’re grateful for our wonderful year of miracles and challenges. Thank you for sharing our lives.
Wesley, Cassie, Levi, and New Baby Cole


Favorite Books of the Year:

Yearning for the Living God by F. Enzio Busche, edited by Tracie Lamb
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer
The Meadow by James Galvin
Poetry in Person edited by Alexander Neubauer

Christmas review

We had a wonderful, warm Christmas. Levi embraced cars, trains, tractors and books with delight--although he decided unwrapping was a bit cumbersome. Those boxes were to be arranged neatly under the tree, didn't we know?

 Helping with peanut butter cups.

 Tractors!

We took some videos, but they didn't really turn out. Sorry.

A small publication

Not that this is huge, but fun.

http://fertilesource.com/

Funny that this comes out just as we're beginning labor for our second baby.

Loyalty, Trust, and Trauma in the Hunger Games

Last night I finished the last of the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. Interesting series. I’m working them out in my head here, so it includes spoilers.

To separate the books, I’d have to admit that the first book is written the best, the story starts to fully engage in the second book, and the third book allows the characters to become more realistic and frustrating—which is a brave move as a writer (I think), especially when a lot of people hinge some emotion on your fictional world. Mostly I let myself be caught up in the narrative (because sometimes that’s healthy particularly when you have book-snob tendencies), but I occasionally thought, “Really? A dash—there?” or “Careful with the fragment power…” and wished that she could have had more time to refine the books on a sentence level. Still, the books are worth reading; they got into my system and made me analyze a few relationship things, which I appreciated.

People warned me about the last book. They told me I’d hate Katniss. They told me I might have issues with the ending. When I completed the first book, I worried that this would be as a result of the love triangle (gag! Please no more Edward-Bella-Jacob stupidity…at least Katniss can shoot things and has a personality…). I didn’t want to deal with that and almost didn’t read the next two, but gave it a try anyway. Happily the focus remained on survival and grew into themes of loyalty, trust, and coping with trauma (the last I didn’t fully anticipate, despite the violence of the situation). If the characters had been unaffected then they would have seemed heartless, shallow, or simply unbelievable.

When I closed the cover last night I gauged my response: it was almost like the feeling I had after Jonathan Safron Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (a must read). Something both painful and redemptive. Of course, especially in pop-fiction, people want the characters to survive unscathed. They want to see overall success and satisfaction. We’re trained to cheer the main character on to triumph. Katniss does not. Despite her fire and intensity, her humor and convictions, she falters emotionally, she fails in her mission to kill Snow, she fumbles in her most important relationships, she emerges from a coma depressed and deranged. Plus she is young, inexperienced (as we all are to a degree) and used. The books don’t skirt around the realities of broken people and the impact of political unrest, war, and frankly a lack of love and compassion. Katniss wasn’t alone in not trusting anyone, in battling with her loyalties. She can’t be called a “hero,” (which is perhaps why people have stretched a lot and compared her to Winston in 1984), but she can be called human and 17. If anyone is cast as a hero, it’s Peeta—not for his devotional to Katniss necessarily—but because of his courage at trying to figure things out after the trauma, at his willingness to face reality even when he didn’t know what that was, in his ability to create hope, in his selflessness. I knew Gale wouldn’t be sticking around when his character progressed only minimally and mostly as memories; he should have been developed more if only to be more than a narrative tool. I thought Katniss would end up alone and sunk, but I’m glad that Collins allowed Peeta’s loyalty to Katniss and to living life resolve the series—trauma scars people, often permanently, but it doesn’t have to be the final abyss.

Thinking on trauma in addition to the importance of trust and loyalty makes me further reflect on knowing the reality of the Plan of Salvation, on being able to trust God when mortality feels (and is) suffocating, on knowing the loyalty of Christ to me as an individual—so much that He atoned to make me whole. His life exemplifies that compassion and unity are possible even in seemingly hopeless circumstances. This is not stuff in pop-fiction, and those who try often flop with some moralistic beating-the-audience-over-and-over which is less appealing (see The Wednesday Letters, which is fine but not thought provoking or well written). Still, as I heaved my huge body into bed last night and looked at Wesley’s exhausted face, I felt whelmed. Thankful. Relieved to know that our loyalties and trust are in the Lord and in each other, amazed to realized that we will face our own set of horrors. Perhaps we won’t step away as heroes but I know we can grow in our humanity and purpose.

Notes on Lance Larsen's First Book

Erasable Walls is a good first book. I say this because I've been thinking about first books and how Edward Hirsch calls them collections of "the best ofs..."--meaning they don't flow as well as the next books because the writer is still figuring the process and himself out. I thoroughly enjoyed Erasable Walls on its own, but since I read the other two collections first, I can see how Larsen has become more comfortable and confident in his work.

I knew going in that Larsen is a narrative and personal poet--meaning there are people in the poems, healthy sentiment, an arc you can follow as a reader (compare to lyric poetry which covers more "landscape of the soul" and other abstract concepts). I enjoyed the whole collection; my favorite poems centralized on the attempts to spiritually translate a situation, though.

I love "Errand." What are our errands? Of our fingernails or knees?

Another section, from "Letter to Hieronymus Bosh" that I appreciated: "This afternoon I found a mouse with a chewed-off head / on my doorstep. What was he guilty of? If tossing / him into hte field was a kind of prayer, I offered it / quickly, but didn't mean it. A single, lazy arc." How do our actions become prayers? Or how should they be prayers? What does it mean to really have compassion on the least? Is simply noticing ever enough?

"Denouement" felt like a poet's poem--on naming and language and expansion. Most collections of poetry have at least one meta moment. Usually every poem has a line or so that hints toward it, perhaps because one of the purposes of poetry is to draw attention to how we shape the world and our experience by the way we name things, by our labling processes. So Adam addresses the new world. "And no punctuation--all commas adn periods / swallowed by a grammar of infinity: / for who can parse God?" as we see the punctuation, the thundering dash, and definite colon, all leading up to the question mark that hangs heavily and implies that we believe we are whole, or know we are lacking, but ultimately we attempt to parse ourselves so that we can understand God, so we can grasp our relationship to something even as simple as the comma that may or may not be there.

Overall, I savored the book and my main complaint is that I bought a used copy and dislike the previous owners' marginalia (alas).