State of Wilderness

Digital Age Baby: There’s an App for That!

During the end of February through now, there’s been a lack of posts on this blog. We had stopped our forays into different urban wilderness areas and were focused on building our own nest. The birds out there might have been busy building their nests with twigs, leaves, bits of hair and feathers, but here we were gathering blankets, clothes, sheets and sleeping structures. I was reading stroller reviews and picking out feeding supplies, going to classes instead of planning our next expeditions.

So anyway, here we are, proud parents of our own “three week old organic biomass generator” (as Jason referred to him in his own version of a baby announcement to his friends), and I find myself reflecting on how parenting is so different now than it was when my first son was born fifteen years ago. There are many changes in circumstances, of course, but I think it is more than that. The main differences in parenting now versus then have to do with technological advances, my age, and levels of support from my spouse and extended family.

Though technically the “Information Age” or “Digital Age” started way back before my first son was born in 1999, we have come a long way, baby. We might have dreamed about personal computers that were small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, and allegedly smartphones were in development in the 1990s, but back then, cell phones were not very common. I had some kind of cell phone tucked away in a box that was available in case of emergencies, but I never turned it on. We had the internet, at some point, but I think we must have turned it off to save money, because I don’t remember logging on to my computer very often. I learned about parenting from books and magazines. Most of my information came either from the “What to Expect..” series of books, Parenting magazine, handouts from the pediatrician, and advice from my (ex) husband’s family. If I had a question, I used those references to find the answer. Now, I just Google it, without even getting up or putting the baby down. It is so awesome to have answers at my fingertips.

Not only are there answers at my fingertips, but there are also lullabies. I used to be able to remember the words to so many songs to sing to my first, but with this one, for some reason, in the middle of the night the only song that comes to my mind is some Frankie Avalon song about puppets that I can’t even remember the words to past the chorus. Spotify and Youtube to the rescue! We have a lullaby playlist on our smartphones that we can pull up and then play for baby, or perhaps just use Google or Youtube to help us remember the words for ones to sing to him ourselves.

I also have found that there are a plethora of apps out there designed to help parents track every aspect of their new baby. I found one that I like using (Similac’s Strong Moms App) to track feeding, diaper changes, and sleeping patterns. You can look at graphs of trends, compare days, even email reports to your doctor or spouse if you needed to. You can use it to track and graph growth, bottle feeding, and pumping information (although I haven’t used those latter options too much). Some of my friends have shared my enthusiasm for these apps, while others have poo-pooed them, saying this kind of tracking will either make a person crazy, or really is unnecessary or common sense. “Feed the baby when it’s hungry, let it sleep when it wants to, as long as the diapers keep coming, what is the point of tracking all this?” is their argument. I might change my mind later, but right now my brain is really loving being able to look at the trends, and I find it is most helpful in helping me remember how long ago I fed the baby last. In my sleep-deprived state, I tend to forget those details (I mean, jeez, three days home and my brain was so foggy that I even forgot my baby’s name and had to really think about it for a while before I remembered that simple, major fact). I am also trying to stick to a schedule, waking him up if needed during the day to feed him every 2-3 hours to help him be able to/learn to sleep during the night, so I think right now it is more important to focus on that then just on letting him set the feeding schedule through hunger cues.

Also, there are websites and apps designed to provide parents with not only access to information and reviews of baby gear, but support in the form of active forums where you can be matched with others sharing your same experiences or interests. Most notably, for me, the BabyCenter app is filling this role. I had downloaded their Pregnancy App, and now the My Baby app, both which have me connected to the April 2015 arrival board. I have been obsessed with this board for months now, and even though I am becoming a little less interested, it is still my “go-to” app when I am bored or trying to stay up in the middle of the night during feedings. It is interesting to me to read other people’s stories and read their questions and answers to common (first pregnancy, and now newborn) issues we are all dealing with. It helps me to understand that our experiences and concerns are common, and we are dealing with them in a way consistent with the experience of others. I should be a pro at this parenting stuff, right?, but it has been such a long time between babies that I have forgotten some things.

I think that most of this obsessive researching and tracking/comparing to normal is a function of my age and reproductive issues. I had some complications in this pregnancy at the beginning, and I had lost two pregnancies in the past, so I was a little hyper-concerned about what was going on with me. Some of this is a function of being older and more responsible. In a way, though, some of it is because I am also trying to mitigate the concerns of my husband, who is a first-time dad and also approaches everything differently than my ex did.

I don’t remember my ex-husband reading anything about new baby care, he never went to classes, and his attitude was more like “we’ll figure it out as we go”. Ex didn’t go look at daycare centers with me, we didn’t make a budget ahead of time to make sure we would be able to cover the extra expense of daycare, we didn’t save a nest-egg to be able to afford it all. He just thought we would “wing it”. I know that Jason stresses out more about financial security, and he prefers to research all the options up front.

It seems like babies are more expensive now than they used to be. This time around, I compared reviews and prices of all the baby gear I thought we needed, then made a list of what products it made more sense to buy where. I also compared the cost of daycares, then figured out how to set aside money to pay for the daycare for the rest of the year, plus cover maternity leave for me to stay at home as long as we were comfortable with. I don’t remember if I even had a registry for the baby shower for my first son, or if I had a list of essentials. I am sure I didn’t compare prices and have a list of what I absolutely needed to use the registry completion coupons for at each store to maximize our shopping dollars.

I also did not have the same sense of appreciation of the baby stage when my first was born. I was only 24, just kind of a baby myself really, and I was left kind of reeling over all the physical changes that having a child left me with. I struggled with the late-night feedings, the crying, the lack of sleep. I felt resentful of the sleep that my ex was getting. I feel like this time around, I am getting so much more sleep, thanks to Jason helping out in the middle of the night. I feel so much better physically than I did after the first child, too. I think my body learned how to bounce back and did it better with each consecutive child. Also, that first child was an unexpected surprise, whereas the next two sons I had arrived out of baby fever and biological imperative. I think it is probably easier to appreciate a baby that was intentional, and this does make me wonder how hard it must be for people with less support than I have who have accidental babies. The first month or so with a newborn is no picnic, but cherishing every moment makes it easier.

Time moved slower back in my mid-twenties. It felt like the years between zero and three went on forever. People would tell me, “oh, the years will fly by, cherish them while you have them”, and I thought they were crazy because it seemed like an eternity. Now, though, age and experience has shown me that the years do literally fly by, that between three and fifteen disappears in the blink of an eye, and that I will never have this baby back, as he will grow into a toddler and then an adolescent, a preteen, a teenager, a man – and though I will love all those stages, I will miss my baby and it will make me tear up when I think about it later.

So, this time, when I am up in the middle of the night soothing him back to sleep, I am not weeping quietly to myself, but stroking his soft skin and marveling at his sweet face. I am trying to seal this to memory, so I can hold on as long as I can to it. Since I am so much older, I know that this door will be closing soon, and as the reproductive years end, so will these sweet moments with baby. Every moment is a gift, and I plan to treat them as such.

It reminds me of this poem I came across:

Song for a Fifth Child

by Ruth Hulburt Hamilton

Mother, oh Mother, come shake out your cloth,

Empty the dustpan, poison the moth,

Hang out the washing and butter the bread,

Sew on a button and make up a bed.

Where is the mother whose house is so shocking?

She’s up in the nursery, blissfully rocking.

Oh, I’ve grown shiftless as Little Boy Blue

(Lullaby, rockaby, lullaby loo).

Dishes are waiting and bills are past due

(Pat-a-cake, darling, and peek, peekaboo).

The shopping’s not done and there’s nothing for stew

And out in the yard there’s a hullabaloo

But I’m playing Kanga and this is my Roo.

Look! Aren’t her eyes the most wonderful hue?

(Lullaby, rockaby, lullaby loo).

The cleaning and scrubbing will wait till tomorrow,

For children grow up, as I’ve learned to my sorrow.

So quiet down, cobwebs. Dust go to sleep.

I’m rocking my baby and babies don’t keep.

AJ_Home1 — First Baby, First Day at Home, 1999. FYI – I was very sick in this picture, we had come down with the worst flu virus or something while in the hospital, which made the first week with new baby even more fun (eye roll)

Kaleb_home — Bringing home second baby, 2006

Baytown Nature Center

This past Saturday, we drove an hour or so southeast to visit the Baytown Nature Center. Our geocaching friends were having a brief flash mob down there, hosted by “Baytown Bert”, and we were curious about the two hour wilderness survival course hosted by the park (free with the $3 entry fee) afterwards.

Despite the unpredictable nature of the weather the past month, it ended up being a beautiful morning to spend outside. I had been to this center once before, but Jason hadn’t, and we enjoyed exploring it with the kids. The center boasts 450 acres of wetlands, hiking and biking trails, and is an official site on the Gulf Coast Birding Trail. Some 200-300 species of birds visit the park during the year. It is surrounded by three different bays, and within site of refineries and a well-known memorial of Texas Independence (see below pic). Can you guess what memorial that is?

After greeting our friends, my youngest went off to play on the playground, which was surprisingly appealing in its nature theme. After this, he became engrossed in the survival class, led by Chrissie (spelling?), an employee of the park. She engaged the class in exploring different uses for common items found in hiking packs. After going through safety advice and suggestions at how to use these items in her pack, she broke the class up into small groups and presented them with an imaginary scenario in which they had to figure out how to survive with a specific list of items. She had Kaleb in her group, and he was coming up with some good answers to her questions. I thought it was so cute how into this class my eight year old was, but the older guys in our group were cold and ready to move on with our day, so I had to pull the youngest away from Chrissie and move him along to the next activity.

After this, we stopped to find a handful of geocaches on the way out. On the way to the first one, we saw a beautiful Osprey perched out on a pole along the bay. He was particularly striking, with a splashy white and black face. At the next cache stop, near the butterfly garden, we saw him again flying majestically through the air above us, searching for prey. At another stop, as we looked out over the wetlands from a gazebo up on a hill, we heard him crying out, and then spotted him perched in a tree near the water.

We also watched a Royal Tern dive into the water in the bay in a search for food that fascinated us for a while. I saw a Spotted Sandpiper bobbing by the water’s edge, its breast the solid white (no spots) that characterizes the winter plumage of this species. Brown Pelicans flew above the water, and cormorants shared pier posts with Laughing Gulls. We also observed brown headed cowbirds, common grackle, a Loggerhead Shrike, Great Blue Herons, Great Egrets, an d heard Red Winged Blackbirds.

We ended up with six cache finds in the park on our way out, with several left on the map unfound for a future return trip. Lunch time hunger drove us out of the park, and we ended up stopping for greek food on the way home in downtown. All of us really enjoyed the park (although the teenager spent most of the time listening to his music on his earbuds and just tuning us all out, which is so typical of these years).

This park fascinated me with its juxtaposition of the natural beauty up against the backdrop of oil refineries in the distance. It reminded me a bit of how I used to think Houston was an ugly city, but I have actually learned to find the beauty in its natural places, and have gained appreciation of how both can exist over time. Like Houston itself, Baytown Nature Center is a place worth a deeper look.

A Morning at Gulf Coast Bird Observatory

As we walk along the trail heading north back towards the nature center, we heard bird calls that were louder than usual, and saw a couple of people threading their way through a side trail ahead where the noises were coming from. As we came upon the intersection, I realized why the noises were so loud, especially given the human foot traffic – they were coming from a cell phone perched on a nearby post. A fine black net was strung along the tree line here at the junction.

One lady was walking away, and shared some information with another lady walking up. “There’s a hermit back there,” she says. That meant little to us, but the approaching lady knew exactly what it meant, and she walked a few strides and then bent down. We could see now the fluttering of a bird caught in the net, and the lady began to untangle its fine little feet from the net to bring it over to the table set up in the pavilion here at the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory in Lake Jackson, to get measured and have a little band placed on its delicate legs to follow it from year to year.

I had actually seen this lady earlier in the day. She was decked out in that look that certain older outdoorsy women get. I wondered if I would ever look like that, but it did occur to me that women who dressed that way were usually either flying solo or in the company of other women (although I am not sure why). She was wearing sunglasses and a broad-billed hat to shield her from the sun, and was carrying a pack with all sorts of supplies in it. She had on comfortable long shorts made of the sort of material that wicked away sweat and dirt and hiking boots. I decided right then and there that women like that were my idols. I am sure she is probably a master naturalist.

Earlier, she had stopped for a moment to patiently educate my child when he had asked me why we couldn’t just capture the wild birds and keep them as pets. Here in this moment, she stopped again, drawing the hermit thrush out from her hand to show my children and explain to us how to identify this species in the wild. She gently showed us the red feathers at the tail and compared the ranges of this species to the other thrushes.

This moment, and others like it, is exactly why I dragged my family out of bed early on this Saturday and twisted their arms to come with me here. Although we got to the bird banding a little late (typical for us) and the crowd had dispersed a little, we did get to join back up with the group after the capture of this thrush to watch Robert Lookingbill measure and band the birds while his wife Kay wrote down their measurements and tested the crowd on field marks of the species they had. We saw quite a few cardinals this day, but we also saw Carolina Chickadees and learned how to distinguish the Lincoln’s Sparrow from the Swamp or Chipping varieties. This is exactly what I was after.

In between banding, we took a walk along the short trails they have at the center. I think I also saw a Tufted Titmouse in addition to the other mentioned birds, but other than that, we heard the birds more than we saw them. Although I have been listening to my birding audio CDs some, I have to admit it has not been nearly close to the amount of time I have spent listening to the Game of Thrones audio books lately, and I still have a long way before I have the sounds committed to memory. I couldn’t identify anything by sound, although I bet that naturalist lady probably could. Although the trail was not long, it was nice and I enjoyed the time in the forest. I was excited about the thought of going to nearby Maclean Park and doing some more exploring/hiking, but we started to realize we were going to run short on time, and I wanted to take the kids to the Center for Arts and Sciences Museum, which we visited after this. That museum is free and boasts a huge collection of shells and gems, as well as other interesting displays, and I would recommend it to anyone heading out to that area.

I also wanted to find some geocaches, but we only ended up finding one, on the nature trail near the museum. Just that one little find managed to F%# me up a little, as I now have a nice “trail badge” e.i. scratch on my arm, and also I think I got bit by a spider. Even though I was wearing pants, I have a spot on my shin that is red and blistered, and originally swelled up to a head like an ant bite, but now is just festering. Just my luck!

Between all that we saw and didn’t see, learned and didn’t learn that day, there is plenty of incentive for me to come back this way another day, although I am not sure if my family is as excited about it as I am. It was a long drive, and the kids were a little sad about missing so much gaming time that day (especially since we went directly from here to Jason’s family’s house for the rest of the day, and didn’t get home until late). Sometimes it is hard to balance all our needs and desires, but the kids also have to get out more and step away from their screens to experience the world outside, so I don’t feel too bad about dragging them out here.

Nature’s Surprise

Most years, we try to go on a First Day Hike. All fifty states have participating state parks that participate in this initiative to get people outdoors and active. For us, it is a way to start the year doing something we love.

This year, we decided on Huntsville State Park because 1) our friends were already there and 2) my sister offered to meet us out there because she was also interested in a hike, and we were interested in going by her place afterwards to see what kind of surplus baby items she might have. This is the closest park to her house.

When we woke up, though, we started to question this decision. Already a friend at the park was telling us it was supposed to rain all day, and she wasn’t planning on going hiking. We packed up the rain gear and were trying to be optimistic, but the light rain started as we left Katy and only got more intense as we reached the park.

We weren’t going to let the rain stop us, but we also weren’t that motivated to get out in it once we got to the park. We spent a couple of hours just hanging out under the awning of Diane’s camper – the four of us, Diane and her friend, and then Scott and Michelle, some old-time cachers from way back. We had driven all this way and were hoping the rain would clear up. I really wanted to see some birds and visit the forest, but it wasn’t looking good for the home team. It also seemed like my sister and her kids weren’t prepared for inclement weather, so it was a real surprise to me when she actually texted me that they were in the park and ready to go hiking. The rain actually cleared up, just barely drizzling as we made our way along the Dogwood Trail and then the Prairie Branch Loop.

It actually turned out to be quite a nice little hike that we took. We saw some interesting things in the woods, like little tiny mushrooms and crazy colored lichen. I picked up a couple of pieces of moss, bark, and leaves along the way, thinking maybe about using them as pieces in a naturalist notebook or a little terrarium commemorating local flora and fauna. I also saw a surprising number of birds, considering the weather. This is a list of what I saw that day at the park: both black and turkey vultures drying out their wings on high perches, Carolina Chickadee, Pileated Woodpecker, Northern Mockingbird, American Crow, Eastern Phoebe, American Robin (a whole flock of them deep in the woods), Mallards, and a Pied Billed Grebe diving in the lake.

I ended up very pleased with the whole endeavor, and glad we took the time to go out there, despite the weather.

Over the weekend, I took two nice walks and a short bike ride that also yielded an unexpected bounty. Saturday, I spent about an hour out on the Addicks Dam getting a little exercise and finding a few geocaches. I thought at first that I was only going to see the “usual suspects”, but when I stepped out off the hike and bike, went across the dam, and got my feet a little wet in the low-lying area on the wild side, the birds got a little bit more interesting. I spotted a whole little flock of Cedar Waxwings. Savannah Sparrows flitted in and out, and I caught a couple of good sightings with the binoculars of a yellow rumped warbler and a blue-grey gnatcatcher. I spent some time checking out one bird that I eventually decided was a female Eastern Bluebird, and spied another Eastern Phoebe.

Sunday, my son and I rode our bikes around the neighborhood feeding the local ducks. There is a great flock of Muscovy Ducks in our neighborhood and I have no idea how the one pond supports all of them, but sometimes they do wander when food gets scarce. This day was cold, and a great number of them were sitting still in the grass or had wandered far up the little creek to forage. We saw probably all thirty of them that usually live out this way, plus the two white ducks and two buff colored ducks that live with a couple of Mallards at the upper end of the creek. I was astonished to see a Belted Kingfisher flying around the upper pond as well. I had never seen one of these before in our neighborhood, nor had I seen cormorants out here, but there were 1-2 of those in the upper pond as well, in addition to the typical Great and Snowy Egrets.

Later, I took the dogs to the dog park and for a walk around Polishing Pond in Cross Creek Ranch. At first I was like, well the bird action is certainly boring here, because it seems like all there is are American Coots out in the pond. I kept some record, though, of occasional glimpses of other waterfowl, only to discover at the end that I had also seen Gadwall, Redheads, Moorhens, and Northern Shovelers out in the water. In addition, a delicate looking black and white bird turned out to be what I believe is an Eared Grebe, something I had never seen before. I possibly also got a shot of the Glossy Ibis I saw out here a couple months ago, and potentially Black Ducks and Curlews, but I am going to wait to positively ID those before recording them. Chipping Sparrows flitted around in the grass and landscaping along the curbside.

The hawks are out these days as well, and I have seen Red-Tailed and Red-shouldered perched up on street lights and power lines. All in all, I recorded 29 species for this past week/holiday, which I don’t think is that bad at all, considering I really did not expect to see much except the usual.