August 10, 2006: The Great Acorn Battle

Just at the hottest, most desiccated time of year, the oak trees turn fecund. Bountiful heaps of fat, green acorns litter the dusty ground all around our camp. Crush them with no more than a flip-flop, and they split like eggs, their moist, meaty centers spilling out in all directions.

When we first adopted Fenway back in the fall, we learned acorns were poisonous to dogs. Although we still have no idea what eating acorns might actually do to a pooch’s usually robust digestive system, we heeded the warning. Incidentally, it seems acorns – in their raw form, at least – are poisonous to people, too. We had to send a girl home from camp this week when she developed a suspicious rash all over the lower half of her body. At first, the theory was poison ivy. But we have no poison ivy up here (No water. Nothing so lush could survive). After she left camp, the girl’s cabin-mates came forward and admitted the girl had been squirreling away acorns in her pockets and hiding in the bathroom to eat them.

Back in the fall, we held our collective breaths when Fenway would go out sniffing around, knowing ourselves to be surrounded on all sides by mountain scrub oaks, a particularly acorn-rich variety of shrubby oak. Pines and oaks are our omnipresent, floor-to-ceiling companions. Finding out acorns are poisonous is like discovering rain water make dogs sick. Or sticks.

At the time, we were lucky. Fenway seemed to show no interest in the tiny (then), dried-out nuts crunching under every step. So, thankfully, we did not have to wean her from that habit, and could focus instead on getting her to pee outside and not eat used kleenex from the garbage.

But here we are at our first green-acorn season of her little doggy life. And these acorns are irresistible. Little chunks of milkbone smeared with bacon fat, it would seem, for how much she enjoys the things. She goes for the greenest, plumpest (and no doubt most lethal) nuts, grabs them up, and bounds gleefully far, far away from me.

Of course, in her adolescent brain, it is just a game with yummy treats to boot. I growl and holler at her to come! And to DROP IT! She grins, waits for me to near, then fakes away. Furious, with images of grabbing a stick and beating her rump with it, I close my eyes, take several breaths deep enough to float a zeppelin, and turn the other way. Hoping, of course, she will sense my disapproval and trot up behind me for reassurance, when I can whirl and grab her and show her who’s boss. This has never once worked. She instead goes bounding up into the woods searching for another bellyful of pooch poison.

I finally did manage to catch her today when she mistook my smiles and gentle coaxing for sincere approval. Once she was in grabbing range, I had her by the collar, my fingers down her throat extracting the offending nut. Startled, she cowered. I glared and told her she was a bad dog, then remembered some of the other puppy-training guidelines from so many ages ago. I turned my attention to the drool-covered acorn lying at her feet. “Bad acorn!”  I bellowed. I pointed ferociously at the acorn while holding onto Fenway with one hand. “Bad, bad BAD acorn!” I kicked it, then stomped it to bits, and yanked Fenway forward to a small pile lying nearby where I gave the whole heap of acorns a stern piece of my mind. Fenway quivered in what I hoped was horror at her previous association with these shameful objects. I dragged her by the collar down the driveway, spewing invectives at the monstrous nuts and stomping them to bits with my Tevas the whole way. En route, Fenway picked up a nice, benign stick and I rewarded her back at home with a treasured doggie biscuit.

I have to admit an overwhelming blanket of fear and guilt descending when I contemplate dealing with a puppy in human form in the coming months. How does a mother extract poisonous nuts (or coins, or rubber bands, or words) from her children’s mouths? When reasoning doesn’t work? When manipulation and bribery stop working? Living in the woods, far away from the curious and judging eyes of neighbors certainly cannot be an excuse to scream like a banshee at inanimate objects in the name of good parenting. Can it?

August 7, 2006: Worst Fears Confirmed

A labor and delivery nurse volunteering at camp this week unwittingly turned me inside-out with her perspective on hospital births. Apparently, nurses like herself will thwart any attempt a natural childbirth in a hospital. “Don’t even bother with a birth plan,” she told me. “The nurses won’t read them and the doctors don’t show up till the last minute anyway.” She had tried herself to give birth to her first two children in a hospital without interventions. She gave up on hospitals altogether and had a home birth with a midwife her third time around.

Her years working in hospital birthing rooms have taught her that the timeframe of the nurses and the hospitals is too rigid to allow for the pace of the birthing mother. All the interventions – constant fetal monitoring, IV drips, rupturing of membranes, Pitocin – help move the mother along according to the medical staff's tried-and-true game-plan. “They will cajole you and even scare you,” she tells me, “into just a little scratch on your membranes to move things along, just a tiny IV – it’s only fluids – because you will get dehydrated and water by mouth will make you throw up.” It’s a snowball effect, she warns, and I will find myself strapped to a fetal monitor and agreeing to an epidural before I know what has happened.

She knows, she tells me sheepishly, because she does it herself.

This scenario has been my biggest fear since deciding to go with a hospital birth. Handing over control of a natural process to a bunch of medical personnel who neither know me or care about my wishes, deciding to follow their own schedule. . . turning the birth and my body into a beeping, buzzing, medicated nightmare.

My question to her was, of course, how can I make this birth my own?

Her primary piece of advice: Hold out till the very last second. Show up at the hospital the moment I am ready to push, and they will simply not have time to do anything to me.

Nice, if only we didn’t live an hour’s drive on winding mountain roads from St. Mary’s.

Her second piece of advice: Do not begin pushing until I feel like pushing. If they tell me I am at 10 cm and should start pushing, ignore them until the baby and I have the urge. Standard hospital procedure, it seems, is to give a mother 2 hours from the time she starts pushing until it’s time for a caesarian. Wait till you are ready to push, she tells me, and they have to wait to prep the OR.

Tonight, Toby and I have the first of four hospital-based childbirth classes. I hope to gain a better sense of the culture of St. Mary’s maternity, and find out what I am up against. I hate that I have to think about this journey in terms of being “up against” anything. I wonder if it is too late to start planning a home birth.

July 29, 2006: Rattlers and Riverbeds

On the way out of camp this morning for our morning hike, Fenway startled a rattlesnake coiled by the gate. Fortunately, the dog’s fear eclipsed her curiosity. She leapt back just as the snake reared up. The dog kept a nervous distance while the snake rattled its devilish, locust-like buzz. I entertained the notion of killing the creature with a nearby stick. Then I remembered I am housing an already-viable human in my gut and I am an hour’s drive from a medical facility – not to mention the 10-minute walk back to house and phone and car keys and help – so the snake survived, and so did we. Instead of proceeding, we decided maybe we would put off our morning hike and head back home.

Yesterday, I startled a much more benign ground squirrel as I walked down the driveway to the house. It leapt across the dirt road and tried to hide in a hay bale. Just before it burrowed into its shadowy shelter, a hawk fell with a rush of wing and air, snatched the little critter into its claws, and ascended to the tops of the pines. It was over before I (or the little squirrel) could register what was happening.  

As I walked back home today, stewing in guilt for letting the rattler go on frightening campers and tormenting puppies, I remembered the rodent’s fate. These woods have their own form of justice. I have to presume that hawk is keeping its eye on the poisonous reptiles as well as cute little squirrels.

 At my front door, I found I had made the mistake I have been expecting to make for months. I had walked off without a key. Of course, locking oneself out of the house is disconcerting and inconvenient no matter the locale. But here, popping over to the neighbor’s house to borrow a phone is a major excursion in its own rite.

I quickly ran through my options. I could tear off a screen and try to climb into the house, destroying one of the few means of keeping our humble abode cool enough to tolerate. I could head up to our abandoned dining hall and sit in the walk-in fridge feasting on frozen pastrami and cold hoagie rolls for 12 hours till Toby comes home. A few other camps are within a 15- minute walk, and I’m sure I could phone Toby at ELK and ask him to come get me. But, heck, ELK itself only a couple miles’ walk away. I was still packed and ready for the hike I had planned on taking before the rattler headed us off at the pass. Full water bottle, relatively cool morning, and pooch rarin’ to go. ELK it would be.

A hike with a true destination is a joy. Most days, I walk just until I decide it is time to turn around. When I do, I feel revitalized and energetic, but not accomplished. Few hikes in the vicinity allow me a true goal. I long for a vista, a watering hole, even a loop that brings me back home. But mostly I just get exercise. So, on the rare occasion I hike to ELK, I am happy. I do not have to decide when I am ready to turn back. I simply walk till I’m there.

The ELK hike takes me aross Big Pines Highway, up behind the Armenian camp, and onto the fire road. The fire road is a wide, dirt swath curving along the mountainside, allowing for a safe and easy walk all through the Angeles National Forest. Because I do not need to focus on every step I take, I can sing while I walk – badly, and at the top of my lungs. At one point along this road, it is possible to catch a clear shot from the mountainside down to the Camp ELK, the pool deck a tiny but shockingly blue rectangle nestled in the midst of endless green. This is the halfway point. From here, it is but a few short turns in the road to the path down the mountain.

The treacherous downhill trek from fire road to camp is by far Fenway’s favorite, for it follows a creek bed still trickling with water even in the heat of summer. During the entire half-mile descent, she hurls herself into and out of the stream, sliding on stones, submerging in pools, snapping at small white-water rapids, and triggering avalanches of loose dirt and rock down either side of the ravine. I, on the other hand, take it slow and easy. Being pregnant descending an eroding mountainside while swatting at gnats is a lot like walking a balance beam carrying a 12-pack of Sam Adams longnecks with your right hand and playing the bass end of Chopsticks with your left. Breaking neither bottle nor rhythm. This particular form of recreation may be as dangerous as startling poisonous desert fauna, but it is a lot more satisfying.

We made it. Into camp, where children descended on the dripping, sap-sticky Fenway and sent her into pure doggy ecstasy with scratches and cuddles and squeals of joy. And I entered my own little paradise when I got to see and hug hello my husband right in the middle of his work day. He took a break to drive me home and let me back in. I suppose I will be burying a key somewhere in camp in case I find myself in a similar pickle in the future. It is good to know, though, that even with rattlesnakes and a pregnant belly and remote location and no keys or car or phone, I still manage. Who knows? Maybe I will be able to handle being a mom after all.

July 26, 2006: Beating the Heat

Today is the first day of the last trimester. Roughly 12 weeks to go.

Being pregnant during a prolonged southern California heat wave is its own kind of hell. I am certainly pleased to be having a child, but the carrying of the thing is my gripe. I am constantly, infinitely aware of the presence of the little squirt, including the 20 extra pounds of flesh and fluid taxing my over-wrought skeleton. Every day presents new opportunities for creatively maintaining a tolerable body temperature.

Yesterday, Toby and I enjoyed his only day off for the week by traveling down to Redlands to visit the San Bernarndino County museum. For two blissful hours, we perused displays of ossified bird eggs and covered wagons in a frosty, climate-controlled paradise. The only difficult part of the day was making the trek up to Victorville for an overdue dentist appointment then dragging ourselves home. The Subaru started to overheat on the Cajon Pass. We ended up making part of the sweltering drive up the mountain with the AC off and the windows open, waves of exhaust-laden heat spewing into the car. We managed to arrive without having to pull over and join the line of cars parked on the shoulder with their hoods gaping wide. Once in Victorville, the outside temperature gauge registered a delightful 108 degrees. Up at camp, the days usually hover in the 80’s. I say a small prayer of thanks for altitude and the shade of the Jeffrey Pine.

 With Toby’s workday averaging 14 hours and the chances of me driving anywhere off the mountain growing slimmer by the day, my job is to find ways to fill the hours with marginally fulfilling, solitary pursuits. Besides coming up with new uses for frozen chicken breasts and throwing grubby stuffed animals down the hallway for Fenway to bound after and retrieve so I can do it again, staying occupied when hot, fat, tired, and cranky is not the easiest task. So, I just keep moving. Every day. No matter what.

 While 7:45am is early, it is, unfortunately, not early enough to beat the blazing, California sun. Toby leaves for work and I get up and put on my hiking boots before I have even eaten breakfast. It’s the only way. From our camp, I have about 4 options for hikes without having to get in a car. Depending on the intensity of the sun and the vitality of my lungs and legs, Fenway and I may trek upwards, stroll downwards (which means a up to get back), or just meander along. None of these hikes is too rigorous for a pregnant lady as long as she does not become overly ambitious and try, for example, to make it to the stream that almost certainly crosses the dirt road somewhere up ahead. I take ice water, share it with the pooch, and make it home before the temperatures become unbearable. The rest of the morning is spent as still as possible, eating chilled fruit and reading novels in front of an oscillating fan.

 Around lunchtime comes the swim. Living and working at YMCA camps may not ever bring us great wealth or luxury, but we will always have a backyard pool. And usually someone else to take care of it. During the kids’ lunch hour, I head to camp ELK where camp actually happens and swim laps in the blessed refreshment of clear, chlorinated water chilled by the previous night’s brisk mountain air. This is my chance to float, to stretch, to recall the grace that I once knew before I was transformed into a waddling, feverish hippopotamus.

 While in the water, I get to interact, albeit briefly, with members of the camp staff who live on the pool deck. I am relaxed and generally ready for a conversation. I am submerged. The gnats steer clear. I weigh about as much as a 2^nd grader, and the baby inside me is fooled into thinking I am rocking it. If not for the imminent return of the campers to the pool, and my own undeniable need for the next meal, I would certainly bring my toothbrush and a novel and simply set up permanent residence in the deep end.

 Instead, I return home, eat again, nap, read. Take care of the innumerable tasks around the house that can be accomplished without exerting too much energy. Laundry, sweeping, paying bills, calling people to keep me company till my dear husband returns from the frontline. Eventually, inevitably, the sun retreats and the air grows cool. Dusk is the best time of day. Fenway and I walk. On these evening walks, the baby wakes up and joins us. MooShu pushes and rolls, intensifying the waddle but not so much that I stop moving or stop grinning. A baby. On its way. Oh, right – that’s what all this is for.

July 19 2006: Nesting

Three months till the little quirt makes its debut.