Wow Thanks Yay #43

Hi there, and a very happy 2024 to you! It’s been a minute, hasn’t it?

Life has been so full (and just full-on) the past few weeks that I’ve hardly had a moment to pause and digest. But here’s a moment, so here I am in your inbox today with a few thoughts about birth, death, and taxes.

WOW

Perhaps the wowiest wow of all wows is that our baby girl will be full-term a week from today, which means she could be moving from inside-world to outside-world literally any day between then and mid-February.

Wow is pretty much the only word for the swirl of feelings and thoughts that fill my heart each day now.

Ashlinn is a truly prodigious reader and, to help us prepare for our next grand adventure together, she has hoovered her way through thirty-or-so books on pregnancy and parenting over the past nine months. For some, she gives me the verbal Cliff’s Notes, but the true winners she passes along to read through myself.

Of that crème de la crème, the creamiest was The Nurture Revolution by Greer Kirshenbaum, which offers a scientific explanation for how nurturing is key in fostering human resilience and mental health.

A neuroscientist, a doula, and a mother, Kirshenbaum wrote this book for parents, but I truly believe it would benefit anyone who either knows a child, or who was a child at one time.

In fact, in this video I recorded awhile back, I discuss one of the practices that I picked up from the book of cultivating space to increase one’s power of choice, for example.

Here are a couple of quotes that demonstrate how broad-reaching, and truly revolutionary, such a seemingly simple thing as nurture could be for all of us:

“Nurture is revolutionary activism. If we have lived lives with low nurturing and mental health struggles, which many of us have, we can start a beautiful change toward new cycles of intergenerational epigenetics of health and nurture with our babies. We likely will not do it all in one generation, but by doing our best to nurture, we are moving nurture forward and beginning a new cycle…The change one nurturing parent can make is staggering and legacy-creating.”

“For at least the last hundred years, brought on in large part by societal changes during the Industrial Revolution that needed citizens to be workers not nurturers, the advice from doctors, most of whom have not birthed, fed, or taken care of babies, has been to separate a baby at birth, separate them at night, teach independence, teach ‘self-soothing,’ avoid holding too much, avoid spoiling, avoid feeding too much or too long; don't comfort or ‘give in,’ don't validate emotions, but do modify behaviors with punishments ranging from violence to shame to isolation. It goes against our gut feelings and instincts not to nurture our babies, but we've also learned to suppress or dissociate from our gut feelings.”

THANKS

I am so deeply grateful for my flexible career and amazing clients that enabled me to head back home to the USA on a moment’s notice when it became clear a few days before Christmas that my Uncle Jack’s health was failing quickly.

I arrived in Cincinatti on December 26, and was able to spend some really precious moments with him, my parents, and his many dear friends who stopped by to visit us at the hospice. We reminisced a lot, shared some laughs (his great sense of humor never faltered), and helped put all his affairs in order.

Our sensation of time is very strange sometimes, isn’t it?

Jack left this world just a week ago today but it feels simultaneously like it was a month ago and just yesterday that I was there holding his hand and laughing at his witty asides.

He was a very dear man who lived a good and simple life. I’m very much looking forward to telling our daughter all about him.

YAY

I promised at the outset that I would be touching on all three of life’s inevitabilities. It’s January, and isn’t now the perfect time to get going on organizing your taxes so you’re not scrambling at the last minute come April, like you’ve always intended to do?

I know that’s not the most delightful proposition but to take the edge off while you’re categorizing those expenses and hunting down those income statements, you can cue up one of these house music sets from Flavour Trip. Adorable Belgian couple and DJ dynamicduo, Amii and Jimmi, take turns cooking up tasty meals while they also serve up tasty tunes.

Ash and I found them by accident one night awhile back and now we cue them up whenever we need a little injection of some fun, joyful vibes.

Speak to you soon,
Adam