Since she was born, friends, family and co-workers have looked at me, looked at Jason, then looked at Lyla and pronounced whom she looks like.
Jason’s grandmother, Ellie, says simply, “She looks like Lyla!”

But, what do you think?

Here’s Lyla, snapped with my cell phone camera just moments ago:

Then there’s me. Both photos were taken when I was four months old. This one is with my mom at Christmastime. I hear I was nearly 10 pounds at birth. So, compared to Lyla, I was huuuuuuuuge!

And this one is with my dad, Nick. I hear I loved riding around in the backpack with him.

And then there’s my husband, Jason, when he was a baby. Turns out he was 8 pounds, 3 ounces when he was born. I’m not sure how old he was in this photo but I’m guessing about three or four months old.

So, now that you have seen the photographic evidence, who does Lyla look like?

Lyla and I had a busy weekend.
On Friday, she spent some time with her grandparents, Art and Gale. She hadn’t seen them in a couple of weeks and she cried a bit when Gale held her so I guess she’s at a point where she doesn’t like being held by whoever wants to hold her. I guess after a while she settled down but it was a little tough at first.
As you can see in this photo of Lyla with her Grandma, she was just fine…

Friday evening my sister, Elizabeth, drove down to visit us. We had dinner at Hacienda del Mar and then went back to my house just about a mile away and hung out. We talked and talked, my sister and I, which was great. Lyla was very unhappy. The first two days or so on the soy formula, our little girl didn’t like it too much as it constipated her a bit, but by the end of Sunday she was fine. But, unhappy Lyla didn’t want to be held by her auntie, either.
Saturday afternoon I ran down to Mama’s Steak and Pasta (formerly Mama Passarelli’s Dinner House) in Black Diamond so she could meet Mama herself. She did pretty well getting a little time with her honorary Nona Ginger, who got her smiling and giggling, but she did seem a little unsure at first. Ginger is clearly an experienced Nona (I understand that’s the Italian word for “Grandmother”) and I look forward to Lyla, Ginger and I having lunch together sometime soon, especially so we can talk about The Soup Ladies (an organization Ginger helped start a few years ago to feed emergency responders who handle disaster response) who will be recognized for work they did in Pierce County in the past year.
Coming soon will be a photo of Lyla in her very own Mama Passarelli’s onesie.
On Sunday my friend Nancy, her husband Ryan, their son Tannis, 8, and daughter, Jerrin, 6, came over for the Super Bowl. In addition, my friend Bambee, and her three year old son, McKailen, also came over. We ate, we drank, but Lyla still didn’t want to be held by anyone else.
Jerrin wanted to hold the baby, so, I had her sit on the couch and she did a great job holding her but after a few minutes the crying began so I took her back and she quieted right down.
Later, I handed her off to Bambee so I could have something to eat, and she cried the whole time. Within moments of me taking Lyla back after I finished scarfing down some of our tasty Super Bowl food she settled right back down.
It was one of those days where I just couldn’t put her down. It was all about mommy. I even tried to put her down in her crib after she passed out. As soon as I did that, her eyes snapped open, so I picked her back up and by the time I had gotten back out to the family room to sit down and watch the game she was asleep again.
I keep reading that you just have to follow your baby’s lead and this was one of those times where Lyla was happy only in my arms. Alrighty then.
After everyone left, I watched some of the Super Bowl highlights to catch a few big plays I missed while tending to my little girl, thank goodness for technology and our desire for on demand everything and instant gratification.

On another note, I wanted to show you a couple of other photos.

Here’s one of the pictures from our photo session a couple of weeks ago at Yuen Lui:

And this is Lyla laying on her new quilt, handmade by Victoria Laise Jonas, Maple Valley Deputy Mayor and driving force behind the Maple Valley Farmers Market which started last year, something I’m very excited to take Lyla to on Saturdays this summer and fall. She went with me to almost every market over the summer, anyway, while I was pregnant.
Anyway, I just wanted to share a peaceful Lyla and her quilt. It’s a sweet photo.

I promise all is well in the land of Lyla, I’ve just been crazy busy recently, so I apologize for not writing a blog post in almost two weeks. My mom and husband’s birthdays are just four days apart so the end of January is always nuts. Tack onto that the fact that I’ve just come back to work and get busier here with the paper with each passing day, well, it’s been hectic.

I don’t really have a theme for this post, I just want to post about some things that have been going on to just so everyone knows what’s going on with our kiddo.

Food
Now that I’m back at work, I’m eating much better than I was while on leave because I have structure to my day and I don’t feel guilty taking a break from work to eat, because work doesn’t mind if I put it down. Granted I eat at my desk most of the time, but, at least I eat.
It kind of pains me to admit that I gave up nursing about four weeks after Lyla was born but she wasn’t gaining weight and I just wanted to her to be able get enough to eat, which wasn’t happening with nursing. She’s a stubborn girl, like mommy, and I think the tongue tie issue just set us on a different path from the start whether I liked it or not.
So, we started out with this ready to eat formula that they sent us home from the hospital with:

But it’s $10 for a box of six bottles, which lasts about three days now — Lyla’s drinking four ounces per meal now, yay — so we switched to the powdered version.
Basically this (I don’t have my own image, so, I grabbed this one from another photobucket account)

Today I picked up a soy based version at Costco because Lyla gets really uncomfortable gas and even with burping and passing gas she can be pretty fussy. She fusses badly when she’s hungry and has painful gas, otherwise, she’s a pretty happy baby.
So, this is what I got today (thanks Mom, for the $100 Costco card for Christmas)

We’ll see how the soy based formula works. I’ll report back on that in a week or so.

Development
Jason’s grandmother, Ellie, has been taking care of Lyla while we’re at work which I have previously mentioned. Every day when I get home, she tells me all about Lyla’s day, new things she’s doing and all the things she does with Lyla.
She puts Lyla in her activity gym so she can work on developing her coordination and plays music to help stimulate her growing brain.

Ellie also is doing a little bit of tummy time with Lyla every day so she can build up strength in her neck and arms so that she will be able to eventually sit up on her own as well as roll over. These things lead to eating solid foods, crawling, and all the other skills Lyla will need to be a self-sufficient person. My mom and Ellie think Lyla will be walking early and suspect she’ll skip over crawling altogether.
Lyla already has awesome head and neck control for her age. She blows me away.
Ellie told me yesterday that she is surprised by how alert and active Lyla is at 2 1/2 months old. Usually babies her age spend most of their time eating and sleeping, she said, but not our girl. She’s curious and looks around as well as just likes to see what’s going on.
Lyla likes it when Ellie reads books to her. Jason’s parents got her a box of “Baby’s First Books” with small cardboard and bath safe books.
A new favorite activity is playing with her pink elephant rattle which plays music when you pull its tail. She smiles and giggles at that.
Many mornings Jason and I will sit with her on our bed and sing along with music on the radio or his iPhone. We just got a Phillips alarm clock radio with an iPod/iPhone dock so we can play her our favorite tunes or the playlist Jason made while I was pregnant called “Lyla’s Songs.” It starts off with, “Lyla,” a song by my favorite band in the world, Oasis.
Jason was telling me this morning that he was singing to her yesterday and she really enjoyed it, she was laughing and smiling at him. That makes me happy. We’re both musicians (he played clarinet and I played viola — he plays guitar now) so she’s going to grow up with lots of music. I hope she takes to music and wants lessons of some sort when she gets older.
And we know music is good for her … I play jazz and Mozart for her, especially when we’re in the car, we listen to Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk.
Every day is so exciting with Lyla.

People ask me all the time how she’s doing and I could talk endlessly about everything she’s doing since every day is a new adventure. There’s a reason the blog is called Baby Babble!

Growth
This is the last thing I’ll talk about today. Lyla is getting bigger all the time but she seems to just be getting taller more than anything. She’s finally outgrown her newborn clothes and is filling out 0-3 month size items.
A growing Lyla also means making a change in her sleeping arrangements. We got a bassinet from a friend of my mother-in-law’s before she was born. I had zero intention of her sleeping in our room but once we got her home there’s now way I could let her sleep anywhere else.
Ellie has been putting her down for naps in her crib the past couple weeks so that when we do start putting her in there at night it’ll be an easy transition. Right now, when Lyla stretches her arms out, her armspan is too wide for the bassinet and in a couple weeks she’ll be too long to fit in it.
I had planned to put her in her crib last Friday night but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it! At this point I don’t wake up every couple hours to make sure she’s breathing — I’m such a new mom! — but we don’t have a baby monitor system so I’m still kind of nervous letting her sleep in her crib at night even though she’s only about 15 feet away from us.
Pretty soon, though, I won’t have a choice. I better get a monitor so I can better handle the transition. She’ll probably be just fine.

So hopefully in the next day or two I’ll post some videos of Lyla here on the blog so you can see why I am already planning to sign her up for martial arts — Bill Woodcock suggested tae kwon do, of course!

Till next time.

It’s been almost three weeks since I came back from maternity leave and whenever I talk to one of my regular sources, I get the same question:
“How does it feel to be back at work?”

Every morning I have to tear myself away and go to the office. This week my husband suggested I get up half an hour earlier than I need to so I can spend some time with Lyla before I leave. Jason has been off for the past three weeks spending some quality time with our daughter since he only had about four days with her after she was born. So, that gives him a bit of a reprieve in the morning while I change her, get her a bottle or feed her so he can get a little extra sleep or do a couple other chores around the house.
I have found that it’s a bit easier to head out the door after taking the extra 30 minutes or so to spend with Lyla.
Once I get to the office and get focused on work, and I hope this doesn’t sound horrible, but for a little while I forget I’m a parent.
During the past three weeks I’ve been getting re-connected with the communities I cover and all the wonderful people I work with as well as meeting new people. I am reminded daily what I love about my job.
Basically I get paid to talk to awesome people about awesome things they are doing or awesome things that are happening in the community, take pictures, write about all of it then put that work onto a newspaper page or upload it to the Reporter Web site.
For me, there really isn’t a better job.
And at the end of the day I get the reward of going home to my beautiful daughter and wonderful husband.
It keeps everything in perspective and so far, I seem to be finding a balance.
Have I mentioned how lucky and blessed I am lately?

There is probably nothing more startling for a baby to wake up to than a needle being jabbed into her thigh.
And that is exactly what happened to Lyla this morning after she got the once over by our family doc for her two month well child check up.
After she was weighed and measured — she’s 9 pounds now and 21 1/4 inches — our doctor checked all her vitals, reflexes, we talked about how she’s eating, various developmental milestones, whether or not the water at our house is fluorinated (probably not, it turns out) and other important baby health issues.
After he left with instructions to come back in two months, we had a bit of wait, then the nurse who weighed and measured Lyla returned to give her the immunizations — a pair of shots and then an oral medication.
From there, we headed home and left Lyla in the care of her great-grandmother, Ellie.
We got our hair cut, then I grabbed lunch then headed to the office. While I was working Ellie was able to get Lyla to nap in her crib. That’s a pretty big thing since she’s primarily slept in her bassinet or cuddled with a family member. We’re hoping daytime naps in the crib will help her transition to it more easily at night because she’s going to outgrow the bassinet very soon.
After work we headed to Yuen Lui photography studio in Kent. My in-law’s bought a family plan four years ago that came with four sittings and we only used one so I figured we should take advantage of the sittings to get a nice family portrait as well as professional photos of Lyla.
While I am a good photographer, I’m not a portrait photographer, nor do I have the equipment to take good portraits or the training, really.
I can’t tell you how much I love the pictures. Technology is great because we were able to view and order the photos 10 minutes after the session was finished. Normally I hate pictures of myself but the photographer did a great job of picking poses that made me look good.
And Lyla looked adorable, as always.
She was fussy and we weren’t able to totally settle her down to feed her but we got her calm enough to get pictures. They really show off her big baby blues.
Once we finished the session, we fed her, and by the time the photos were ready to be viewed she passed out. She’s been asleep since and that’s no surprise considering what a busy day it has been but it was well worth it.
Days like this remind me what a wonderful life I have with my own little family. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

OK, so, I must profess that I don’t actually know anything about the book, “It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us” by Hillary Rodham Clinton that I referenced in my blog post title.
I do, however, think the concept of having lots of awesome people taking part in your child’s life is important.
Having my family and friends involved in Lyla’s life is critical. When I was quite young, we spent a lot of time with my mom’s family, but as I got older she drifted from them as my cousins grew up and moved away, as things changed and as I grew up. By the time I was 15, I lost touch with all but my most immediately family, my mom and my sister.
I was close with my best friend’s family, Mike is the fifth of nine children and I spent a lot of time with them after we started hanging out in sixth grade.
After Jason and I started dating, I was blessed that his family is so wonderful, now I’m not saying there weren’t bumpy patches since I was 17 when we started dating and 19 when we got engaged but as we’ve grown up our relationships with his parents, his brother and his grandmother have gotten better.
One reason I was so dead set on moving back to Washington state after we lived in Las Vegas (where Jason attended UNLV and earned his business degree) was so that when we did decide to start a family we’d be near our own relatives. We knew there would be plenty of baby sitters.
As I’ve discussed in previous posts, we agonized over what we were going to do about child care.
In mid-December, Jason’s grandmother, Ellie was at our house with one of her sisters, Rae.
During the visit, Rae asked, “have you figured out what you’re going to do about child care?”
Oh, boy. This was a tough question while I was on maternity.
“We’re not sure yet,” I admitted.
“Oh, I’ll take care of her,” Ellie said.
She had a big smile on her face. I was thrilled. Having a family member take care of Lyla would be ideal but Jason and I had thought his mom would have retired (she’s got more than 35 years in with the Bellevue Fire Department) and would be available. We didn’t think Ellie would be available and we definitely didn’t know if we should even ask her to take on such a task.
Believe it or not, up until little more than a year ago, she was working. In fact, she was taking care of Jordan and Madison, providing in home care for those kiddos from the time Jordan was a little boy. They were the ring bearer and flower girl in our wedding.
They’re teenagers now and changes in the family left Ellie without work.
It must have been meant to be … just a few months later I was pregnant.
So, starting tomorrow, she’ll come over and help us out. Jason goes back to work next week so she is going to spend this week with him learning about what we do, where everything is, and so on.
No one is better qualified. She’s the second oldest of eight children, raised two children of her own, helped take care of my husband and his brother then later took care of Jordan and Madison.
What’s more, she only lives about 20 minutes away from us off Issaquah-Hobart Road, about halfway between Four Corners and Issaquah.
I am stoked.
Jason tells me she’s pretty excited, too.
Maybe it doesn’t take a village, it just takes a great family, and I feel so blessed that we can give that to Lyla.

Here’s Ellie and Lyla the day our baby girl was born.

For months people would say to me, “Just wait, your whole life is going to change.”
Duh. Can you hear me rolling my eyes?
Isn’t that the point? To change your life, start or expand your family, and so on when you get pregnant?
People can get so melodramatic when you tell them you’re pregnant. But, you’ve heard all those complaints.
Obviously — and to all of you reading this who told me my life was going to change, forgive me — I just nodded my head, smiled and said, “I can’t wait” while silently dismissing you.
Don’t you know that until someone is in the parenting club there’s no point in telling them that? They’re not going to listen. That’s like trying to tell a teenager there’s no reason to rush into adulthood because there’s bills and work and chores and other mundane responsibilities. All they see is freedom.
And all an expectant parent sees is the wonderful, adorable baby they’ve envisioned in their mind.
So, obviously I was expecting my whole life to be turned upside down, to go through some major upheaval and need beta blockers or valium or both to manage the insanity.
Granted, the first week home with Lyla was challenging, but it really didn’t take long for her to fit right into our life.
Yes, there’s change, but it’s incremental … almost like weight gain, before you know it you’ve put on 20 pounds.
Or, with a baby, before you know it there are toys everywhere, making a bottle or changing a diaper is second nature, you reach into your pocket for something and discover a pacifier and after the first couple trips out of the house that took an hour to get ready, suddenly you can be out the door almost as quickly as when there wasn’t a bundle of joy to strap into a car seat.
Sometimes when people would tell me “your whole life is about to completely change” it almost sounded like an ominous warning tinged with a bit of resentment and wistfulness.
There is something about pregnant women that makes people, especially veteran parents, want to scare the crap out of them. What is up with that?
Parenting so far has been wonderful. I wonder to myself, “Why didn’t we do this sooner?”
And I’m already plotting what I need to say to persuade Jason to go for no. 2 in a couple years. I don’t want to wait too long, I’m 31 and high risk as it is, plus I don’t want to have a huge gap in age anyway. My sister and I are nearly 12 years apart while Jason and his younger brother are separated by more than six years.
So, yes, life has changed. For the better. And in ways I would never have expected, which is what I suspect everyone was trying unsuccessfully to articulate.
I enjoy changing diapers, even stinky poopy ones, and feeding Lyla and trying to soothe her when she’s fussy. Every moment is awesome when it’s challenging.
Therefore I hereby promise to NEVER tell an expectant parent, “Just wait, your whole life is going to change.”
I know better because I have officially joined the parenting club. Like every pregnancy and every baby, every parent is different, and every parenting experience is different so I’ll just let you expectant parents find that out in your own way and time.

And now, pictures of Lyla.

On Monday I was at Lake Wilderness Elementary School in Tina Newberry’s fifth grade social studies class. I was there to witness students using netbooks for the first time in the classroom.
It is part of the Tahoma School District’s efforts to help students at all age levels have access to the best kinds of technology tools with the idea that the skills learned will help them after they walk of the stage, diploma in hand, ready to head out into the world that is increasingly wired and wireless.
This kind of thing is funded by a technology levy passed in 2006 — a levy that took three attempts before it finally passed — which over its four year life will collect $10 million in taxes from residents of the district.
I have no problem admitting that as a resident of the district, I voted for the levy, and would do so again. At the time we didn’t have kids and hadn’t decided to have kids. But, there’s a whole lot of kids in Maple Valley, about one-third of the city’s 20,000-plus residents are under the age of 18.
And a handful of them live on my block not to mention the hundreds of youngsters that live in the surrounding neighborhoods.
My thought process then was if the kids who live around me are getting a good education and have plenty of opportunities to do the right thing they won’t go breaking into my car or my house.
Now, though, I realize that someday my own kid will be using these tools. Whoa.
As I stood next to Kevin Patterson, the district’s spokesman, and talked with him about how far technology has come just in the four years since the technology levy originally passed (which I wrote about then, too, and that’s crazy for me to wrap my mind around having been working in this community that long).
Then I thought, man, imagine what kind of cool stuff kids are going to have when Lyla is in grade school. Right now students are using netbooks to draw maps, create PowerPoint presentations — a skill I do not have and I consider myself quite tech savvy — and do online research.
And not just kids at Tahoma High, no, all the kids at the elementary level have access to these netbooks and eventually there will be 1,700 of them throughout the district.
Considering less than six months ago I bought myself a Toshiba netbook to tote around in my camera bag for doing interviews and other handy work-related things, this puts Tahoma on the edge of technology, not quite the bleeding edge because netbooks have been available for a few years now but in the past six months or so have really come into their own.
I am trying to envision what kind of cool stuff Lyla will be doing in kindergarten with technology, in fifth grade, in high school. It blows my mind.
My dad was an engineer, an O.G., and by that I mean original (tech) geek. When I was five years old I was playing video games on a black and white screen monitor on a computer my dad had at home. He had a VCR and a microwave in the early 1980s when they were still novelties.
I remember sitting next to him on the couch when I was 7 years old, watching “Dennis the Menace” on Nickelodeon, nodding inattentively while keeping one eye on the TV as he explained how batteries worked.
So, here I am, 31 years old. My dad is long gone. But the geek factor is clearly an inherited trait.
Look in my camera bag for an example. Inside is a Nikon D80 with an 18-135mm lens attached, a speed flash in another compartment, and a Sigma 70-300mm telephoto lens. Also in there is my netbook, a digital voice recorder (the high tech version of a tape recorder minus the tapes) and my 120GB iPod classic with Bose TriPort headphones.
If someone got hold of my camera bag they would have well over $1,500 in gadgets.
Add to that my love of cell phones. I have the newest BlackBerry available, the Bold 2, which replaced my year-old Bold. I ordered it from at&t with my upgrade the day before I went into the hospital to have Lyla. It was waiting on my door step when we brought her home.
Normally I would have torn into that box right away and set up my new toy.
It took me almost four days. A newborn is kind of hard not to focus on.
Quite a few folks jokingly asked what cell phone Lyla would be getting. Heh.
Oh, I already have a couple cheapo spares ready for her to play with when she starts reaching for my BlackBerry. And she will.
Now I also wonder how much will she be into technology.
According to a guy name Ian Jukes who spoke to Tahoma teachers a couple years ago, kids these days are “digital natives” anybody over the age of 25 is a “digital immigrant.”
Pfft. Not me!
But, anyway, the point is this tech stuff is second nature to kids these days.
So, if I’m lucky, we won’t blame any tech geekiness on my genes and simply say Lyla’s just one of them “digital natives” Mr. Jukes talks about.
Meantime, how young is too young to give a kid their first cell phone?
Oh, you think I’m kidding. Ha. Ha. Ha.
The conversations I’m preparing to have with my daughter. I have to be prepared because every parent I know says time flies and before I know she’ll be graduating high school.
I think I’m going to stop envisioning the future of technology in Lyla’s lifetime and just enjoy her being a baby.
The rest of the stuff, I’ll deal with it when the time comes. Yeah.

Many people say tattoos are addicting, once you get one, you’ll want more.
For me, this has been quite true.
My first tattoo was one I thought about for a long time. When I was 16, a junior in high school, I decided I wanted a feather quill pen on my right forearm. Then I went to college and thought about it some more. I realized I couldn’t have a tattoo there and get a job in an office. Since I decided I wanted to be a journalist before I settled on this tattoo, I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize getting a job in the business, so I figured I’d get the ink on my right arm in the bicep area.
Then I moved to Las Vegas after graduating from college where sleeveless shirts in the summer are a must, at least for women, so I decided the final placement of my first tattoo would be on my right shoulder blade.
With no knowledge about how to select an artist, I went to the nearest place I could find to get the work done, Diversity on Maryland Parkway across from UNLV. Our apartment was just a half mile away.
I set my appointment for my birthday, Sept. 8, 2002. I turned 24 that day. It took eight years from initial thought (though legally I couldn’t get one for two years after I came up with the idea) to finally going and getting it.
Much to my dismay, the kid who did the tattoo showed up an hour and a half late, he barely grunted more than a few words to me during the process and not long into it I found out he had only been tattooing for about nine months. I paid $150 for my tattoo, about double what I would’ve paid anywhere else.

My second tattoo was a much better experience. In October 2007 I decided to write a story about Maple Valley Tattoo next to Gloria’s on Maple Valley Highway. I decided a great way to write the story would be to get a tattoo. I had wanted to get a memorial tattoo for my dad, who died when I was 7 1/2, because my mom scattered his ashes but doesn’t remember where anymore. At the time, she wouldn’t tell me, so I guess I’ll never know.
So, I decided to get a triquetra knot, also known as the trinity knot. It’s common design found in Celtic knotwork. It seems like I have a lot of Scottish stock in my ancestry, particularly on my dad’s side, which seemed appropriate. Another reason I picked the triquetra is because it looks like three fishes, or pisces, and my dad’s birthday is in March, making him a Pisces. Plus, I just liked the way it looked. His name and birth date are also part of the tattoo.
Eddie Campion did the work and I love the way it looks.

My third tattoo was done by Jay Hand in June 2008 while he was at Ancient’s Arts tattoos in Renton. It covers up a scar on my lower back that remained following surgery I had in March 2006 to repair a bulging/herniated disc. By the time I got this piece done I was totally pain free and felt like that was a good time to cover up the scar. It was closure. I just like fleur de lys. I know I had some good reasons for why I picked this, but, first I figured it was different plus there’s some strong connections to this symbol from my teen years as well as some more connection to my ancestry, both French and Scottish.

Finally, another very personal tattoo. I got this one done yesterday. Not long after I found out I was pregnant, maybe a month or so, I decided I would get the baby’s name tattooed on me as soon as the opportunity presented itself. I tracked Jay down at Kya’s Underground Ink in Auburn via Facebook.
I got a time set up with him after talking over the idea on the phone. I told him what I wanted in sort of vague terms and somehow I got exactly what I was looking for from him, but, given how awesome my previous ink came out this wasn’t at all surprising. I love it and hope Lyla does, too, when she’s old enough to realize what it means.

What will I do someday when she comes to me wanting a tattoo? I’ll tell her she better wait till she’s 18. Then I’ll talk it over with her, what does she want, where does she want it, will it have an impact on any future career plans and go with it from there. If she seems dead set on it and it won’t create an obstacle for her, as well as if it means something, then I wouldn’t try and stop her — at least that’s how I feel now. I can only hope that my own thoughtfulness in the process to getting each tattoo will inform her own thoughts on the matter. For all I know, she’ll hate tattoos and never want one. We’ll just have to wait and see.

For now, I can only hope that she understands that I put her name on my shoulder so she’ll always be with me, because I am so proud to have her in my life and that I love her more than I could ever express in words.

Yesterday morning I rolled into the office to work for a living for the first time since the middle of November.
It was a little weird to be going work after more than six weeks away from the place but once I sat down and started talking to Dennis about everything that’s been happening around here (and it’s been a whole lot, good, bad and otherwise) it felt like I’d never left.
We went over some of the more interesting stories that broke while I was gone — I swear, all hell broke loose, people getting fired, quitting, resigning mid-term, developments changing their construction schedules, and so on — as well as talking about what we would be dealing with this week as far as getting the paper out.
Dennis is a great boss and definitely did what he could to ease my transition back. I totally appreciate that … but don’t tell him I said that to you. I would *never* give him such a compliment in person because then he’d want to don a cape and mask pretending he’s a superhero. Or worse.
But, I digress.
Colleen Starr from Vine Maple Place stopped in yesterday afternoon to drop off some calendars bearing the name of the local non-profit she founded. VMP helps single homeless parents transition from a tough situation to permanent housing and as a Christian based organization supported by the community and local churches, they help through faith, counseling and education.
One of the very first stories I wrote after we started the Covington/Maple Valley Reporter was about Vine Maple Place and Colleen is one of the first people in the community I met, so, I was happy to see her on my first day back to work.
She asked me how motherhood is treating me.
I love it. I love being a mommy more than I could have ever imagined.
So, as you can imagine, it was a challenge to leave Lyla at home yesterday morning. I have to admit, I had to hold back a few tears, but I took a deep breath and kissed her and my husband goodbye for the day.
There is no doubt that I was torn. I have loved journalism since I first got into it when I was a sophomore in high school. The longer I’ve done it, the more I love being in the business, and I’m thankful to be working here because my office is only two miles from my house. Plus, it’s just fun covering these communities, especially now that I’ve been doing it for more than four years.
That’s why I blogged while on leave. I had to stay connected and keep writing. Ultimately, the core of my identity is the fact I’m a writer, even if I weren’t a reporter I’d still be a writer.
But, now, another significant part of my identity is being a mom.
Somehow, I have to find a way to balance both. I am pretty sure I can do it, especially with the help of Jason, as well as our family. Heck, even our friends are awesome and supportive.
For example, I bought U2 tickets for the show at Qwest Field that’s coming up in June, and I posted on Facebook that I got the tickets. A couple wonderful ladies were offering to babysit when I mentioned I’d need one. It was bordering on a friendly competition. Heh.
Lyla is blessed to be so loved.
And that’s what makes it easy for me to be back at work, the knowledge that she is well taken care of when I’m not there, that way I can make a living to make sure she never wants for anything.
But, she is the wallpaper on my cellphone, because I do miss little Lyla terribly. It’s all I can do not to pester Jason (who is off for a few weeks to spend time with her now that I’m back to work) constantly to find out what she’s doing.
Tonight when I get home from work I’m sure I’ll rush in the door and scoop her up then shower her with kisses and coos and hugs.
That’s me, journalist, wife, working mom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.