Dear Ones,
This year opened in the last week of December, when Talina hit black ice on her way to work and flipped her Jeep into a ditch, an accident that looked terrifying, but from which she miraculously walked, making us very glad for mandatory safety measures in automobiles! So, January was a pretty terrible month, adding car shopping to the schedule with Megan working at a local client, but with a 45-minute commute, and routine 12 and 14 hour days. In addition to car dealerships and work, we unexpectedly lost a few animals on the farm. Thankfully, Megan’s brother Thaddeus and our friend Adam were both staying with us for the month, so Talina had help keeping the farm together while an increasingly pregnant Megan ambled from work to sleep and back again.
In March, we completed the process to legally change our last names to Corvus. We both kept our maiden names as new, second middle names, but are thrilled to share a last name for ourselves and especially for our future child! Corvus is the genus name for crows and ravens, and we chose it because we like the word, and we like the smart, social birds we share our farm with.
As the weather warmed, Megan’s father John found himself able to take a break from work, only to find himself up at the farm nearly every day, “working”. Between John, Thaddeus, and a huge number of family and friends who stepped up to keep things moving even as Megan became less mobile by the day, we accomplished an amazing list of tasks this spring: having cut down, then cutting up and clearing two enormous 100ft+ pine trees formerly on the east side of our house (and shading our garden), a beautiful new deer-proof fence around the garden space, a new gate and pasture area for the sheep, a new barn in the “Neutral Zone” pasture, frost-free pipe installed, blueberries and grapes planted, an entire 4,000sqft garden laid out and planted, construction and implementation of a chicken tractor for our 40 pastured laying hens to grow up in, completion of a turkey coop and separate run for our holiday birds to live in, and the successful births of 10 goat kids and 2 lambs.
And then came May. Megan worked from home the last weeks of April, and began a nice, calm week of pre-baby maternity leave on May 6th. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha… very early Tuesday morning, we went to our hospital, OHSU, to have some minor bleeding checked, and our midwives recommended induction. Thanks to the support of our family, and our doula, the delivery went pretty easily, and Archimedes River Corvus was born at 12:30pm, May 8, 2013: a Fibonacci baby (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…)! Unfortunately, shortly after Archer (for short: don’t you dare call him ‘Archie’!) was born, doctors and midwives determined that Megan had a retained placenta, and whisked her away to an operating room, where there was some drama, resulting in Megan spending the next 16 hours in the ICU while Archer was checked into the NICU (our hospital has no well-baby nursery, so although Archer was healthy, his mom wasn’t, and so the NICU it was). Those were not a fun 16 hours, and Talina and Megan’s sister Ana ran up and down the elevators many times to care for both Megan and Archer.
Thankfully, by mid-afternoon on Thursday, everyone was reunited in a recovery room, and after a few more days, everyone got a clean bill of health and we went home.
The rest of 2013 has flown by in a blur of diapers and farm chores! Archer attended four weddings (including ours, in Seattle, to make a legal marriage out of our 2008 Domestic Partnership), and visited 4 states: Washington, California, Indiana and Ohio! We were especially grateful for the opportunity to visit with so many family members, some of whom came from far away.
From welcoming Archer to our family to saying goodbye to a dear friend, we weathered unprecedented highs and lows this year. We are grateful every year for your presence in our lives, but this year we have received massive support for which we do not have enough words to express thanks. Be it with words, food, gifts by mail, or physical exertion, you have made this year possible for us.
This season, please know how much we love and appreciate you. Thank you.
