Happy Thanksgiving!

From: Elton John and Family

Halloween 2009

On the prowl...

Cruising in style...on the lookout for cute lionesses...

Check out the lion's fierce teeth.

Lion and "Captain America's Daughter" (Cousin Carly)

Six Months

Summer has come and gone without so much as a post from us. Our blogging activity has been inversely proportional to the busyness of our lives. Please call for details, it was a fantastic summer. Best of all, Sam is now six months old. Our friend Nicole took some amazing baby pictures of Mama and Sam. As you can see, she's VERY good. Check her out at: nicolehill.blogspot.com

A Father’s Day Revisited; A New Father to Celebrate

This is my first ever, and potentially only, blog entry.  It’s part of my Father’s Day gift to Paul this year.  Since I no longer have an income, I’m learning to be creative with gift-giving.  I’m not sure that Paul will consider this a gift or not, but I’m hoping that by sharing my thoughts and feelings from the amazing ride we’ve experienced this past year, that he will see how much I love him and know how proud I am to say that he is my “baby daddy”.

This year, Father’s Day is special not just because it is Paul’s first official Father’s Day, but also because it is the anniversary of our discovering that Sam was on his way.  A year ago, on last Father’s Day, I got out of bed and walked groggily to the bathroom to take what would ultimately become the most important test of our lives.  Paul called after me to just wait one more day.  I knew he was trying to protect me from the disappointment that had accompanied all the other negative pregnancy tests I had taken for the last 18 months.  We had mentally prepared ourselves for the long-haul in infertility treatments, so when the pink double lines appeared on the stick, my heart began to pound: with joy or perhaps disbelief or maybe even a little from fear.  It was so different than the feeling I had had all those other times, when my heart seemed to fall from my chest into the pit of my stomach.  My hands were shaking as I took the positive test back to the bedroom to show Paul.  He stared.  “ I don’t know what this means” he said, “I’ve never seen one of these before.”  “I think it means you are going to be a daddy” I replied, somewhat tenuously.   And then we cried.  

Somehow, Paul knew from that very first day that Sam would be a boy.  He even said as we stared in disbelief at the positive test, “It’s a boy”.   I don’t think it was wishful thinking or a lucky guess.  I think Paul knew.  As much as I had been waiting and praying and longing for that positive test, Paul had been waiting and praying and longing too.  The long months took their toll on us emotionally but also brought us closer together.  For two people that seemingly always got what they wanted, it was perhaps only appropriate that the one thing we wanted more than anything else continued to allude us.  Now, when we look at our sweet baby, we can only think that we love him all the more because he didn’t come easy. 

I’m not sure when Paul decided that he wanted to be a dad.  Maybe he had always felt that way.  But I know that for as long as I have known him, he has talked with excitement about being a father.  I’m sure that this is a great tribute to his own wonderful father.  Paul has proven to be a natural, he intuitively knows what to do with Sam and I love watching the two of them together. 

Paul started taking care of Sam while he was still in utereo.  Paul went to just about every single pre-natal appointment to make sure everything was alright.  He cried the first time we heard Sam’s tiny heartbeat.  He had my doctor wrapped around his finger and would somehow manage to talk her into doing extra ultrasounds so we could see the baby.  In early February, I slipped and fell outside in the rain.  I didn’t feel the baby move for several hours and finally Paul insisted that we go to the hospital.  Luckily everything was okay, but Paul demonstrated his protectiveness of both me and the baby. 

Sometime in mid-July we started calling the baby Phil.  Paul would talk to Phil through my belly all the time.  In the morning before he left for work, Paul would get down next to my belly and say goodbye to Phil.  He would kiss my belly and then kiss my forehead.  We, Phil and I, felt loved.  Paul decided it would be a good idea to read to Phil.  Paul loves reading and is usually reading 3 to 4 books at one time and he was eager to share this old passion with his newest love.  Sometime in the early fall, he started reading the beautifully translated edition of War and Peace that I gave to him for Christmas the year before.  He didn’t want Phil to miss out on any great literature.  Luckily for all of us, the War and Peace  phase faded by December.  Then Paul started reading Chekov’s short stories to Phil.  I am quite convinced that this delayed the baby’s arrival.  Chekov paints a very grim picture of the human experience.  Happily, I came home a few weeks ago to find Paul reading Sam Baby Animals, perhaps a better fit for a young, developing mind than 19th-century Russian literature. 

In January, Paul began downloading all his favorite Pete Seeger children’s songs.  He wanted to make sure he had them ready to share with Sam when he arrived.  Now the two of them listen to “Wake Up” in the morning and “Take You for a Ride in My Car, Car” as Paul dresses Sam for bed.  Paul dresses Sam a lot.  Almost every morning, while I’m scrambling to get out the door for the mommy and me gym class, Paul is calmly dressing Sam, putting Sam in his car seat, and carrying Sam out to the car for me.  The one time Paul couldn’t help, Sam had to go to the gym in his pajamas, and he still hasn’t forgiven me.

Paul's main responsibility is to play with Sam and he is great at it.  They have all sorts of games they play together. They apparently even have their own language.  

  

     

The two of them are destined to be best friends, and I can only watch with pride.  I think those many months of waiting for Sam prepared Paul well for fatherhood.   He is proving to be just as great a father as he is a husband.  As with everything, Paul is exceeding expectation.  

We love you Paul!  Happy Father's Day.   

Do These Cheeks Make Me Look Fat?

Last week, Sam had his eight-week check up. The doctor said that he was in the fiftieth percentile for weight, but we're a little concerned that he is carrying 60 percent of that weight in his cheeks.

Kim and I have been trying to trace where Sam got some of his features. Here's what we've come up with so far:

Bright Blue Eyes: Color (Kim) Shape (Paul)
Perfectly Round Head: Paul
Handsome Chin(s): We're hoping this won't stay plural, but the main chin looks like Kim's
Rosebud Mouth: All Kim
Hair: Too early to tell, but we're optimistic that there are traces of Kim's grandpa's hairline (hope, hope). He had hair that would have made Ronald Reagan jealous. Not that bald isn't cool, we're just hoping he goes through his bald phase early. And only once.
Button Nose: No idea. One theory points to our fertility doctor, Dr. Farkas.
Irresistibly Pinchable Cheeks: Sorry Sam, you are cursed. All Paul on this one. Check out the comparison photos below of Sam vs. his dad back in the day.

Sam Meets More of the Tribe

We took Sam to Utah for Easter Sunday, where he met  dozens of Florences: grandparents, great-grandparents, uncles, and aunts.  Oh, and cousins.  Lots and lots of cousins!

Four generations of Florence boys: From left, Giles Jr. (Papa), Giles Sr. (Grandpa), Paul, and Sam.

Abby and Sam.  I love this picture.  I used to baby-sit Abby when she was this age, and now she's holding little Sam.  

Did I mention cousins?  They couldn't wait to hold him (except Henry, who can be seen in the background, sneaking Easter candy). 

Check out Peter's strong move above, and the look in Abby's eye as she sees what he's up to.

Undaunted by Abby's rejection, Peter plots his next move. 

Mellow Baby

Sam is now eight weeks old, and Kim and I are just emerging from the fog of being the parents of a newborn.

Sam takes a bath almost every night, because when he does, he sleeps nearly twice as long.  Bath time is the highlight of our day.  Tonight Sam was even more mellow than usual.  

PS--Special thanks to guest blogger Andrew, who got on the blog and posted as Samuel because Sam's parents were too out of it to post an update.  Who thinks Andrew should be permanent webmaster of the Hotbed of Genius?  

I Am Handsome, Sam I Am.

My name is Samuel David Florence. This blog is now mine. You will hear less about interesting travels and good literature. I have officially taken over the Florence home and will now proceed to take over this blog. I may look small but I know what I am doing. Feel free to try to find a cuter face or more perfect head. Thanks for checking in. Back to eating and sleeping.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Stegner

From Wednesday's New York Times.  I wish I could have met this man before he died:

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Wednesday was the centennial of Wallace Stegner, the writer and uber-citizen of the West. His friends said he looked like God ought to look, and perhaps not since Eden was first sketched in Genesis has an author been so sternly rhapsodic about the land.

Were Stegner around this week to blow out the 100 candles on his birthday cake, it’s likely he would still be mad at the East Coast Media Conspiracy, and by that he meant this newspaper.

Wallace Stegner.

“It was The New York Times that broke his heart,” said Nancy Packer, a retired professor of English at Stanford, who knew Stegner well in the time he nurtured writers from Ken Kesey to Larry McMurtry here on the Farm, as the university is known.

Stegner won the National Book Award for“The Spectator Bird,” which The Times never reviewed. He also won a Pulitzer for his best-loved novel, “Angle of Repose,” which the paper only noticed after the award, and then with a sniff.

Even in anointing him the dean of Western writers, The Times couldn’t get his name right, calling him “William” Stegner. He died in 1993 at the age of 84.

Living and writing in the West, Stegner wrote, left him with the feeling that “I gradually receded over the horizon and disappeared.”

The fact that a writer of Stegner’s stature felt ghettoized with the dreaded tag of “regional author” raises the question of whether our national literature is too tightly controlled by the so-called cultural elite -– those people who talk to each other in some mythic Manhattan echo chamber.

Norman Maclean, the Montana native whose gin-clear prose makes “A River Runs Through It” an American treasure, certainly carried some of the Stegnarian chip on his Western shoulder.

After the success of his first book, Maclean was approached in 1981 by an editor at Knopf publishing, which had rejected the novel but was eager to take on his next project. Maclean wrote back in compacted fury.

“If the situation ever arose when Alfred A. Knopf was the only publishing house remaining in the world and I were the sole surviving author,” Maclean wrote, “that would mark the end of the world of books.”

Stegner felt similarly dissed, but he’s aged well — everywhere, perhaps, but Manhattan and Stanford, the cradle of the creative writing program he started.

I asked Tobias Wolff, the author of “This Boy’s Life,” and a former Stegner fellow who teaches at Stanford, if there was a class here devoted to his canon. After all, he wrote 35 books — novels, histories, short stories — and is the subject of two lengthy biographies, including Philip Fradkin’s recent tome, published by Knopf.

Wolff shook his head. “Generally, students don’t read him here,” he said. “I wish they would.”

Everywhere else, though, Stegner has grown in stature. For starters, there are rivers undammed, desert vistas unspoiled and forests uncut in the wondrous West because of his pen.

He influenced several presidents, from Kennedy to Clinton, to see that “something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed,” as he wrote.

How many writers of fiction can make that claim?

All over the West, Stegner centers, Stegner prizes and Stegner scholars produce work that follows his life theme: an attempt to get Westerners to make peace with their surroundings.

His prose was never Hallmark, and he was often blunt.

“The West is politically reactionary and exploitive: admit it,” he said in an interview. “The West as a whole is guilty of inexplicable crimes against the land: admit that, too. The West is rootless, culturally half-baked. So be it.”

This product of the hardscrabble, boom-and-bust, wandering man frontier — his dad made a living playing poker and selling bootleg liquor one year — has given us two of the most famous lines about the West. Both are grounded in optimism.

He called the West “the geography of hope,” despite many misgivings, and he dreamed of a day when Westerners would fashion “a society to match the scenery.”

Stegner certainly had the writerly credentials — Ph.D, a teaching stint at Harvard, short stories published in all the right journals read by all the right people. But he chose to make the cultural elite come to him.

And he grounded himself, spending nearly half his life in the Palo Alto foothills above Stanford.

On his 100th birthday, it’s worth remembering another lesson of his life — to choose authenticity over artifice. “If you don’t know where you are,” he said, paraphrasing the writer Wendell Berry, “you don’t know who you are.”

He knew — the where and the who.