Asier Enrique O’Malley finally came out to great us a couple of weeks before schedule on the 5th of february. Seems he was just as curious and excited to meet us as we were to meet him.

My first question as my husband looked at him being born, was does he have dark hair? This is an inside joke… I wanted to know if I would have a dark haired companion or would I be alone and outnumbered in a family of honey haired beauties. And yes he did!

I was just reviewing past posts and had to laugh at my open ended speculation about "Perhaps"… "Perhaps we’ll have a fourth."  I wrote those fateful words in February.  Jim and I had agreed to remain open to a fourth but to wait until our economic picture had improved.  God must be hard of hearing or have a sense of humor because he skipped the whole "if" and "when"  statement and four months later we were surprised by number four.

I am now two weeks away from the due date and we are so eager to meet the new member of our family. Will he have black hair like his mommy? Curly hair like Javier? Will he have the O’Malley cleft? We are all very excited to meet him. 

At first we thought we’d call him Luis Enrique. Jim liked the name and I thought it was appropriate seeing as he might be born on his grandmother "Louise" birthday.  Another runner up in the naming game was Alejandro do differentiate from Alexandra his cousin. Now we are more partial to Asier, meaning "Beginning" in Basque. 

Jim and I do feel like we are embarking on a new beginning.  Though 2006 was a rough year in our economy and the business dropped dramatically we have been chugging along, up beat with a new sense of purpose and control.  In a way I think it comes down to the moment when Perhaps became Reality.  In a split second you have to choose and embrace what your reaction is going to be:  We had already been moving towards improving our quality of life. Reality knocked on our door and surprised us and we responded, "today is as good a day as any, we are glad to have you."

Jim and I both know there is nowhere to go but on to "victory."  We have been down and out and the only thing that made our life worth living was each other and our wonderful little family.  Now, we fear not the difficult times and have embraced a new beginning.  Our active realization and choice to welcome this new beginning I believe has given us a recent "high" a natural motivational boost.

 Over Christmas, Jim dusted off his woodworking talent and built me two beautiful book cases as a birthday/Christmas gift. It is now the first time in 10 years I see most of my books decorating my home.  The sight gives me such warmth and peace.  We have thrown out and given to the Salvation Army half a conex of memories.  Clothes from college that I had not worn in 8 years or more, papers, letters, shoes,… the list goes on… Jim touched up the oven and fridge, and is currently building new shelves for the kids room and medicine cabinets for our bathroom.  All in addition to both working full time.

Perhaps became a Reality and I cannot be happier about our New Beginning.

My husband found out conclusively that in this economy it has to be easier to buy illicit crops or contraband than to buy green coffee. In fact it seems there is more trust afforded to underhanded people you know than to trust strangers thinking they are out to rob you.

It was a rough day one of those days when your search and your tasks are trampled by individuals who are eager to assert themselves by disempowering others. "It’s not done" It can’t be done" "I have policies to follow because people have robbed us." So we all get treated liked criminals, thieves and corrupt individuals.

How could the coffee sales people at the public relations office deny a Dad with his two sons some green coffee. what did they expect? What horrible secret could have been uncovered.

So I got a movie to commiserate with… I got Crash. I was ready to see vignettes of other people’s lives, people having good and bad moments, a mixed bag of events and small victories.

I was ready to evaluate the movie as a bit contrived, with its own prejudices and ignorance as it tries to capture reality and depth. The message everybody is a mixed bag of good and bad comes at the expense of there is no plain good people. THus rather than building social trust through humanizing the other the movie reinforces what it is trying to combat – ok so maybe we move from having tunnel vision and being blind to seeing people but our "seeing them" reinforces that we cannot trust "them." All in all, however, I enjoyed the story-telling.

Now that was my evaluation, but little did I expect for my husband to actually walk out frustrated with the misrepresentations and shallow stereotypes used. His criticism like mine was in the lack of realistic rendering of the individuals cast, but it bothered him to no end. To him Hollywood’s sermononizing on race relations was too much for him to handle.

Discussing our disillusionment with the Oscar winning movie, we went on to forget about our difficult day by walking down memory lane and rembering the movies we did like. In no particular order these are some of our favorite movies.

• The Sixth Sense – neat story-telling
• Unbreakable – intriguing story
• The Usual Suspects – suspense good story
• The Mission – sweeping drama beautiful

 ”The glue that holds all relationships together — including the relationship between the leader and the led is trust, and trust is based on integrity.” –Brian Tracy

 ”Trust each other again and again. When the trust level gets high enough, people transcend apparent limits, discovering new and awesome abilities for which they were previously unaware.” –David Armistead]

”Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson

Albert Einstein, The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results

The milk of disruptive innovation doesn’t flow from cash-cows. (David Isenberg)

"To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards. (Arthur Koestler)

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them. (Galileo Galilei)

The winner is the chef who takes the same
ingredients as everyone else and produces
the best results.
Edward
de Bono

The milk of disruptive innovation doesn’t flow from cash-cows. (David Isenberg)

One of the wonderful pluses to having kids: a party is always around the corner. I truly enjoy celebrating holidays and now that I have my own brood it is just blissful. I know I get cranky and tense as I prepare meals, especially any baked portion, but aside from the baking anxiety I love every moment.

This Valentine’s Day began a few days earlier when Jim let me know I was getting a spa treatment as a gift. I choose to have a pedicure – it should be coming soon. Olaia had a school project that required her to create a valentines for a classmate. She and I sat down at the dining room table with scissors and construction paper to plan out our Valentines. I made one for Jim and gave her ideas for hers.

She followed my lead and we created cards that had three layers folded back and forth and were able to stand revealing all three layers in steps. We put hearts overstepping the edge of each folded layer. I wrote: My dearest Jim you make my heart skip when I’m with you. She wrote: Querida Estefania,Alegras me corazon cuando me haces reir.

The night before Jim and I watched the Alton Brown-s show on the Food Channel and Jim confessed he was drooling craving the taste of chocolate. So chocolate was now on the menu for Valentine’s Day. I made tiny chocolate  torts for dessert.

For some reason this Valentines I just wanted to do fish pies. A strange urge I admit, but who can explain the affairs of the heart. I prepared my dough and cooked some fish, put it together in the oven and voilá! Ok, so the chocolate tortlets were the best part of dinner, but I do enjoy sometimes just cooking something out of the ordinary that captures my fancy.

Last year it was lithuanian style potato/veggie pancakes with apple sauce and sour cream toppings. Before that I have gone for oven roasted lamb and other unusual dishes. They don’t always turn out perfectly but what is life without risk. Passion is not perfect it is messsy,  full of risk and requires openness to surprises.

Jaimito waited all day on Tuesday for the time when I would bake a cake. I looked everywhere for a heart shaped cake mold but found zilch. But before any baking began, Jaimito worked on his Valentine day cards. He made cards for Olaia, for Daddy and one for the rest of us…Mami and Javier. Oh, and he made a Valentine’s day card for himself.  

This year, because Valentines fell on a Tuesday Jim went to his prison ministry and spread the love and cheer. Kids ate early and later I ate with Jim.  For me, it was just a long day of preparation, anticipation and happy wonderful celebration.

I just love celebrating life and love!

It is hard to believe it has now been seven years since we first moved into our house. I remember loving its location and Jim saying it was the only suburb where he had felt a familiar connection a certain " I could live here … wake up in the morning early go outside and across the street work out on the park, after work go out to play in the park with the kids." The place evoked us going outside and being active and we liked it. In fact, living here has lived up to that first impression. In a way it is like it was in the Basque Country, tiny living space makes it uncomfortable enough to want to spill out of your house to live outside in the company of other people, your neighbors who may become your friends. But regardless of who you choose to make your friends the truth of the matter is that everybody in the neighborhood ends up knowing who you are because they see you everyday or atleast every week for the past three hundred sixty weeks.

I can still remember the shock of moving from a nice 1200 sq. ft. apartment for two in Oakland to a 500 sq.ft. apartment in Renteria. We were so grateful to our hosts but wondered how could people live in such tiny spaces for so many years. "Why, there is barely any room to put clothes, what about the rest of the things you accumulate?" Our American ways could not comprehend such a drastically different paradigm for living. We had barely begun a life together and were living in the apartment of a recently deceased elderly couple . In two years of marraige we already had spill over boxes of stuff outside the aparment in the floor of the inner courtyard where people shook out their table cloths and rugs and hung their laundry.

Over the course of the couple of years we realized a transformation coming about. Every opportunity to buy, get, save, accumulate would go through the heavy filters: do we have space for it? do we absolutely need it? will we pay to take it with us? can we save it some other wayby taking pictures or writing about it? At the same time, hanging at home watching tv was almost painful in the Basque Country. The TV programming was awful and after a few hours in the living room the walls seem to cave in, searching for deep breathes and space we were compelled to leave the apartment. Being out led to being seen and talking to strangers that soon became neighbors and later became friends. Life was good.

When we bought our house, we knew it was small and increasingly feel small as our family grew. But we now valued living small and knew that though painful it would serve us well. Well I am now at that pain point. Seven years and three children later we do not fit. I have to let go of something. Over the past few years our sentimental instincts had us saving baby toys, baby clothes, car seats, strollers and the like, saving for the next baby. Saving and recycling hand me downs felt good as we avoided being consumed by the western push to buy, discard and consume again. But even if we been less consumers of new goods we still have accumulated so much and our tiny house is woefully short on storage thus forcing me to this moment.

I am not sure if it is the anthropologist in me *that sounds so fancy* or if it just the sentimental packrat in me but I have this old world compulsion to want to hand down to other generationsof family some of our precious things. Many are precious not so much for their market value but for the fact that they were chosen and worn for baby that was so loved and adored that the item itself has come to carry the sentiment. Alas, we cannot save it all so I am today applying the critical analysis:

Is Javier, our third child, to be our last? I cannot say I wish it so. My husband and I do enjoy children and parenting so much. Strangers on the street ask us if we are "closing shop." I reply "we have not shut any manufactuing lines down, we are just not putting in orders for now." We always knew we wanted atleast three children. It was always "and perhaps four", "perhaps." What does perhaps mean? It has been this mental marker. I planned and held on to things because we were sure we wanted three, now I am in the realm of Perhaps. If it were to happen what will I keep for "Perhaps"? Well, for starters I cannot save all of this I see before me for the chance I may need it. I now need to plan the space for elementary school books and longer dresses and pants. I have come to accept that if number four were to happen the biggest thing we are saving is the joy and love we have and wont go away. If number four comes, it will be a joyous return to early childhood parenting, but the time and context will be another. The family demands a new use of space and it is into that family that any future "Perhaps" will have to fit.

So today, I have come to terms with what Perhaps will need, so long as it is a construct we hold. As I look around I have my camera in hand, laptop on lap and am ready to ask: How special is this article? Is it is in good enough shape to save for another 10 or 20 years? Is it a classic that will age well in 10 or 20 years? Can I bear to part with it and not have it around for Perhaps? For memorable items that do not make it past the 10-20 years question I have pictures and brief stories. To ease the transition I also remind myself that just as I enjoyed recycling hand-me downs, these beloved articles of clothing will now go to clothe another baby and part of our love will be added to that new bunddle of joy.

These outfits were colorful children’s clothes that were gender neutral and worn by all three: Olaia, Jaimito and Javier. They were my battleground ready for anything adventure clothes. Their use was primarily around the house crawling around in our concrete tiled floor.  Their whites stopped being white a long time ago but as the white became grays they became dearer peices of wardrobe. Clothes that begged no special care and enabled carefree times are clothes that become embedded with memories of a happy baby-hood.