Face game

The shock from our rather crazy birth experience has worn off and I've realized two things: 1) I have tiny ankles, and 2) holy smokes, we have a baby! And it's a boy! My family is pretty much all women with Chad the designated lifter of heavy objects at holiday gatherings. Having a boy is like catching a shooting star in a butterfly net. Luckily I felt like he was a boy the whole pregnancy so by the time he arrived (nearly two weeks late) it seemed pretty natural. Chad wasn't so sure so he is getting used to the idea that there are some man things he'll be teaching his son in the future, things mamas aren't privvy to.

Like many new parents we have spent countless hours examining him or simply staring at him. (I've actually come up with a theory that alien abductions are really latent memories from being poked and prodded as a helpless baby. Think about it.) Inevitably we end up trying to determine who he looks like which hasn't been easy since Chad and I don't really look all that different. So we've dug up some photos of us in our younger days to see if it might help us pick out some distinguishing features. Finley is in the top two pictures at 4 weeks. Chad is the baby in the photo of the two boys. I'm in the poofy red dress. What do you think?

The beginning

Where to begin but the beginning. Finley is two weeks old today and all eyes are for him (because, what can we say, he's adorable), but it seems like we'd be overlooking something if we skipped over his parents and the place from which we came. It is, after all, a big part of our family and who he will be, even if he does grow up to be a hip urbanite with 42 piercings or whatever the newfangled trend is in 20 years.

We are country folk, born and raised--many generations of Montanans run through our veins. We've mostly lost our accents (put the groceries in this reusable beg please), don't eat much red meat these days (only hormone and antibiotic free), think it's cold when it gets down to 45 degrees (damn it if we have to scrape some frost of our windshield), and express emotions on occasion (we cried when we put our indoor cat to sleep). But we are still quiet people, not a lot of chit chat, and the sound and sight of irrigation sprinklers with the mountains in the background is like valium for our souls. Our lives move a little faster now, but we find as we get older that we return more and more to our roots. So keep an adoring eye out for a little bit of Montana in Finley. It'll be there.



Chad's excitement about pipe changing was barely containable...