The beginning

I am raising a scientist.

A NASA scientist. 

He's on the floor now, playing with Hot Wheels cars and track. Just before that, he was acting out predatory activities in the depths of the ocean with his collection of sea animals. Let's just say, the Manatee was voracious and he wasn't chomping on just vegetation. Harry has the only carnivorous Manatee in the deep blue sea!

Sometimes, when he's playing so intensely - using different voices to portray different characters - I can just say his name (simply to ask a question or to tell him something) and I scare the bejesus out of him!

His mind is amazing - constantly churning, questioning, challenging, solving.

He has an incredible imagination, a sense of adventure, curiosity, creativity and invention, and always wonder.

When he's quiet, I love to ask him what he's thinking about.  It's always something worthy of further conversation.  And it could be literally about anything!

With the seriousness of a real scientist, experimenting with color.

I suppose though, I should begin at the beginning...or at least fill in some of the blanks.

Harry was born in December of 2009.

He was so incredibly beautiful.

I gave birth to Harry when I was 49. It was a good pregnancy, progressed normally, despite my mother thinking that I was “high risk” the entire term.  I’m not sure where she got that idea? My OBGYN said that I was healthier than most of his patients half my age. The only real trouble, physically, was post C-section when my ankles were swollen to three times their normal size! The result of (at best guess) the cocktail of drugs used to numb me prior to delivery.

I knew single parenting would be challenging, even difficult.  I had no clue exactly how difficult. 

Harry wasn’t a good sleeper and he was a reflux baby.  There wasn’t a piece of furniture (or for that matter person) in our lives, that wasn’t the target of the fountain-like flow of partially digested formula/breast milk.

I was seriously, seriously sleep-deprived for the first two years of Harry’s life.  I should have asked for help, but I guess I didn’t really know how (or who) to ask for it.

As Harry grew, things leveled out and we were hitting our groove.  The reflux ended, he was healthy, growing quickly, and I was getting more sleep and functioning more effectively.

But life doesn’t always proceed as planned.

When Harry was almost three and a half, my “stable with benefits” position was eliminated.

I was in shock and wholly unprepared. I knew things were rapidly changing in our industry, but I naively believed that no matter what “other factors’, if you did your job and did it well –that you could continue to do your job.  Unfortunately, the “other factors” outweighed my performance.

I managed to negotiate an end date of July 8, 2013 to round out my length of company service to a solid eleven years.

I started immediately preparing for what I thought to be a short period of unemployment.  Cancelled expensive cable and phone plans, talked to a financial advisor, reviewed insurance policies, cut back on other expenses and most importantly, began the job search.

I had some early luck and a few interviews for really great positions, but for one reason or another, I was not the one hired.  It was disappointing. In retrospect, each of those positions (responsibilities, travel, etc.) would have taken me away from Harry and I would have entirely missed the incredible early years…and so much more.

We moved everything we own to an 11 x 17 foot storage room and drove to Wisconsin to stay (temporarily) with Grandma.

Grandma has been living for a long time in a big, old farmhouse on a beautiful piece of property, all by herself. She has neither the energy nor the strength to take care of all the things that need taking care of.  So, I set to work: recycling hundreds and hundreds (I am not exaggerating) of magazines, painting, repairing, fixing, organizing, consolidating boxes and boxes of accumulated stuff, and cleaning…and cleaning. My goal was to make her existence (and ours) more comfortable.

During the time we’ve been here, Grandma has had quite a few health problems.  For a time, it was one thing after another. She would be at the point of healing from one event, only to have something else happen.

So life put us here – Harry and I, with Grandma, so that we could help her through all those challenges; to cook for her, run errands, to fix things that break, to organize, to recycle, to downsize, to weed and to mow, to garden, to take out the garbage, to feed the birds and to do whatever else needs to be done.

And because of life’s redirection, I have completely and boundlessly enjoyed bringing up Harry.

Success!