More from the weekend: Watson enjoys the early summer-like weather
We have been having strangely nice weekend weather here in Portland. Under Beckett’s close supervision and with Watson’s help, Kristialyn has been hard at work the last few weeks making the back yard beautiful.
Beckett turns four months old tomorrow. He is such a cool little boy. We love him so very much.
Daily Beckett Digest for the week of January 30
He’s a happy little dude in the morning
Like An Orange On A Toothpick
Beckett turned three-months old yesterday. Today we took him in for his two-month doctor’s appointment. The key stats:
- He is 2’ 1”
- The circumference of his head is a little over 17 inches, which puts him in the 90th percentile and confirms that the boy has the giant head of his father
- If he were a bowling ball, you would find him in the rack on the end with the other 15 pounders
He also got a series of three shots, which was unpleasant. Kristialyn has a needle phobia, and we decided beforehand that she was going to leave the room so Beckett wouldn’t pick up her vibe. He still didn’t like it.
Kristialyn and Beckett spent last week visiting her mom and grandparents in Bellingham. To alleviate my loneliness, K sent me several pictures a day of our little man. These are a few of them.
Home
The day after Christmas we took Beckett to visit the Johnson side of his roots (pictures have been posted on Facebook - there were a lot and it was just easier). He is my parent’s first grandchild and my grandma’s first great grandchild, and I had been looking forward to this trip since we found out Kristialyn was pregnant.
When I was little I grew up knowing the grandparents on both sides of my family. My folks were raised in neighboring small towns in the middle of Nebraska and they went to college and eventually settled in Lincoln, where they still live in the house in which I grew up. If you take 1-84 to I-80, it is just over 1,600 miles from our place in Portland.
Kristialyn’s mom and grandparents are only a six-hour drive north, in the Bellingham area of northwest Washington. They’re close enough to drive but far enough that trips need to be planned and days off need to be taken from work. It is not ideal but also not unlike my own experience growing up.
K and I have established our own family in Portland; not just our nuclear three (five with Yoda and Watson), but a circle of friends we love and are loved by. It makes me sad that to be with one family we have to live too far away from the other, or that to go to one would mean to leave the other.
My parents settled in Lincoln, and although I have been trying to convince them to move west for five or six years, I do not diminish the magnitude of such an uprooting. Being from a place (in my case, I claim the whole state of Nebraska) is an important part of who I am, and I am thankful that my folks built a home for me and my sisters that was physically stable as well as emotionally, relationally, and spiritually. I want the same thing for Beckett, but although we love Portland and its people I cannot yet say we have settled here.
A few years ago I read an article in the Oregonian about a Portland man who had lived his entire eighty- or ninety-year life in the same house, surrounded by trees that he helped plant when he was small and that are now towering, living memorials to a life lived in one place, season after season. At some point in the next few years, Beckett will begin forming his own bonds with the place we have chosen for him, sending down his first tentative roots into the soil. I have lived long enough to know I have no idea where this will be. We don’t need to figure it out now, and I can only trust that wisdom will be granted when wisdom is needed.
The Johnsons have returned to Nebraska to celebrate Christmas and to introduce Beckett to his people. We have had one day of uneventful travel and two wonderful days in Lincoln at Grandpa and Grandma’s house. More pictures and stories to come.
