A Rich and Bountiful August

Our plans to do a multi-day float down an Alaskan river with our kids this summer fell through a second time. Russell and I were both off for the week and it was begging for some sort of adventure. The forecast for Juneau, oddly enough, was high 70s to low 80s and clear skies for most of the week. What the heck? When can I ever get tickets to the Lower 48 with miles anymore anyway, why not use them to fly the whole family to our lovely capitol? Especially now that Sarah Palin has moved back to the Valley where she belongs. Russell's brother and family live there as does one of Russell's cousins. I haven't been to Juneau in 8 or 9 years (which also speaks to how long I've now been in Alaska!) and the kids had never been.

The forecast did not disappoint. Forest fires from Canada made it a bit hazy a couple of days, but we could hardly complain. We were in shorts all week. Kevin went swimming in the ocean and Russell in a nearby lake. The kids and I played on a sandy beach and waded in the ocean as well. I do NOT usually swim in any outdoor body of water in Alaska and was amazed at how pleasant the temperature was! Aleria and Kevin live right on the beach and with the amazing weather it was the perfect place to camp. Natalie was beside herself with excitement about getting to sleep in her own tent by herself. It was only the prospect of a sleep over with her second cousin, Stella, and the fact that the next high tide would lap at our toes, that lured her away from sleeping in the tent all four nights. The ocean was so calm that we canoed with the kids to one of the nearby islands on one day. Russell caught up with one of his old Forest Service friends, Harry, during a fishing turned whale watching expedition. Natalie and I kayaked that day and explored the neighboring harbor.

Despite being totally sleep deprived due to Atagan's schedule, Aleria and Kevin were the most gracious hosts and entertained us and friends several nights with beach barbecues. The multitude of berries that one can harvest this time of year is overwhelming. We returned with quarts of blueberries. But, there were also raspberries, thimble berries, watermelon berries, salmon berries, huckleberries, elderberries, cranberries, currants. Not only are all Alaskans thrilled to have this summer as repayment for the absence of summer last year, but the gardens everywhere seem to be bursting with gratitude as well!

The warm weather has given us wildflowers like I've never seen. The lupine in June and fireweed in July were unprecedented in their brilliance. I've also never experimented much with eating flowers before. We had a salad with fireweed blossoms and one with nasturiums while in Juneau. I'm inspired enough to try stirfrying some stuffed squash blossoms from our garden tomorrow night. And, Natalie has been all over adding nasturiums to our salads since we got home. Of course, in addition to the berries and flowers are all the salmon. We took the kids to one of several streams where the water is literally roiling with fish. The ones that have spawned and are in their waning days of life are swimming around as their flesh hangs rotting from them. I heard Liam tell his preschool teacher when we returned, "I saw some fish. Some of them were broken." So true, my little man. But, the not-so-broken ones are mighty tasty eating.

My last hurrah with OB was that I had the honor of being the obstetrician for one or our resident physicians. Their timing was impeccable in that she went into labor the day after I returned from Juneau and the day before I was to leave for a weekend Seward stint. It was a beautiful, uncomplicated, healthy delivery of a gorgeous little boy. They are a fabulous couple that love to sail and be on the water and named their son Calder (which means 'of the water'). It was such a privilege to be a part of his welcome to the world and reminded me why I did OB for so long. Yet, also a wonderful way to end that chapter of my life... for a while.

Unfortunately, my Seward weekend did not impart the same warm fuzzies as the visit to Juneau and the birth of baby Calder. As bountiful and full of life that August was seeming, death, too, is part of life. Revisit the salmon. On more than one occassion that weekend I thought of Liam's comment. Some of them are broken. I saw some mildly broken lives. A couple of lives very analagous to the end of life struggle of the salmon. And I was witness to a life that got very, very badly broken prematurely. I cover the ER in Seward. It is a small town so sheer chance has it that I'm not very often going to come across the major trauma seen in bigger cities. But, it is still an ER. And it is 130 miles from the big city of Anchorage. And trauma happens everywhere. And so luck ran out. For me. But, more so for him. There is a mountain that looms above the hospital called Mount Marathon. It is somewhat famous in Seward in that there is a big to-do every 4th of July when runners, many of them elite, race to the top and back. The top being 3000 feet above sea level (where the race begins) in a mile and a half.

This man at the peak of life missed his chance to race up Mount Marathon a decade ago. He was back visiting Alaska with his family and decided to climb it with his kids. Some fatal footing sent him tumbling violently down a perilously steep chute for 30+ feet. He sustained a multitude of injuries and while another Seward physician and I did all we could for him, he passed away a couple of days after being medivac'd to Anchorage from the massive head injuries that he had sustained.

Life is bountiful, beautiful, resilient, fragile, finite, and yet infinite. What an amazing privilege and challenge to be so intimately involved with its beginning and its end.

In front of Nugget Falls at Mendenhall Glacier.


Fritz Cove Campout
Our canoe expedition

Natalie's "Thimple" berries on the half shell

Followed by spinach salad with nasturium and fireweed blossoms and more thimble berries

At the JensenHood Bistro on Fritz Cove

The Cousins

Playing Hide and Seek in the Skunk Cabbage



Russell's whale watching

Puffin in Seward


Natalie showing off our own garden's bounty after our week away. Cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, chard, beets, zucchini, radishes, peas, and, of course, the nasturiums on top.

Northeast Reunions

We started our 2 weeks in the Northeast in Maine visiting our great friends, the Banks. Our one gorgeous day of weather in Maine was spent soaking up the sun and enjoying the Maine coast at Reid Beach State Park. Brought to a delicious end with lobster, of course.

Look at those kids! Where did our babies go? (Liam, Cole, Birch, and Natalie)

They morphed into Superheroes! ..... and Cookie Monster.



From Maine we traveled to the White Mountains of New Hampshire to stay with some other old friends from residency days, Jill and Lou and their girls, Emily and Catherine.

The falls at Flume Gorge in Franconia.

Liam was psyched about the tricycle and having more big kids to chase after. Natalie and Catherine, who is just a few months older, hit it off great. They were delighted to discover they had the same wonderful purple Angel pillow. I love it that Natalie can equally have fun dressing as a Ninja turtle with the boys and playing with fairies and enjoying purple angel pillows!

Then, on to Long Pond to spend a week with Russell's family. Grandmother/Elaine/GiGi (short for Great-Grandmother ala Natalie) fortunately was able to make the long journey from the DC area to visit with us all and meet her newest great grandchild, Atagan.


GiGi and Atagan
Natalie showing her drawings to GiGi.

Liam very excited to show GiGi a very cool truck.

Although the lake was much cooler than a couple of years ago when we visited it didn't deter us from getting out on it. Maybe deterred us a bit from swimming quite as much. Liam was Atagan's age 2 years ago when we last visited. It was great to be able to all be out on the water together this year! Maybe a kayak trip in Alaska next year? Liam continuously asked, "Can I paddle by myself?"

I served as Natalie's kayak chaffeur to the various little islands in the lake. We'd paddle over and she would get out and "explore" the island why I circumnavigated it and returned to pick her up. Our intrepid explorer had a ball.



Natalie watching as Liam gets his turn out on the sailboat with Mom and Dad .

"Look, it's windy!"

Saying good-bye to the pond until another year...

Summer in Paradise

Russell and I threw together some very last minute plans and took a float plane into a remote lake in the Kenai Mountains to stay in a Forest Service cabin. The lake is very appropriately named, Upper Paradise, and our weather cooperated with the lake's name as well. Our spirits were only hampered by about 30,000 mosquitoes also enjoying the early melt and unseasonably warm summer. Up to this point my children's skin had never felt DEET - even in Central America. When weighing the evils of 20-30 mosquito bites that already existed on Liam's face and neck with DEET, I suddently couldn't recall why 20% DEET was a bad thing and began to use it without restraint.

We enjoyed a pair of loons on our lake and explored the numerous beaver lodges and their ponds. We spotted Dall sheep and mountain goats high above us on the peaks around the lake, a moose browsing the willow, had a porcupine living under the cabin, and saw a black bear swimming in the lake. He was definitively larger than the beavers we had seen earlier.

While the setting of the cabin on the lake was gorgeous and idyllic, we had to retreat from Upper Paradise every day to escape its mosquito ambassadors. A short paddle on the lake and a little quarter mile hike through the brush dropped us out onto a massive gravel bar. An abandoned braid of the Snow River kept us all entertained with throwing rocks, gathering rocks, hiking, playing in the sand, seeking out animal tracks like bear and wolf, admiring the stupendous peaks around us, and soaking in the sun without bugs.

Russell, the kids, and I all agreed it was a successful last minute trip and then some.

Happy Summer everyone!













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New Beginnings

It has been a busy but beautiful spring and early summer. We visited Indiana for 10 days the beginning of May. Mom and Dad went out of their way to accommodate my request to visit my relatives individually. I am lucky that I get "one-stop shopping" when I go visit since all my aunts, uncles, and cousins live in the same town as my parents. But, I seem to only get home every 12-18 months and it is too hard to catch up on the same evening with everyone. We had genuinely wonderful visits with everybody and caught up on each others' lives. I was especially blessed to visit with my Uncle Don on multiple occasions. He has been living through a tumultuous year with a rare and aggressive cancer. During our brief period home he was energetic, full of his usual humor, and receiving a reprieve from the cancer to some degree. Natalie and Liam got the usual kick out of feeding Don's 60 year old turtle, Myrtle, worms and lettuce. Natalie caught some blue gill with Russell while Liam was entertained with Don's magic tricks that he used to play on me at Liam's age.








My cousin, Kristin, has two boys roughly Natalie and Liam's age and has just welcomed a third child, Sylvia Claire, into their family. Lucky me got to hold one month old Sylvia and marvel at Kristin's three redheads - I'm still banking that Sylvia is going to be one too. We relished the warm weather and I tried to satiate my longing for the large deciduous trees I miss from back home. We went with Mom and Dad to explore an area not too far from them in southern Illinois, Shawnee National Forest. The endlessly flat floodplains of the Ohio River valley suddenly change to rolling hills of thick oak forest and amazing limestone outcroppings. Scrambling and climbing on the Midwest's Garden of the Gods was a fun discovery and warrants another trip on a future visit.








Russell enjoyed his mini golf outings with my dad. This is not a sport he pursues very seriously back in Alaska, obviously, but gets a kick out of it whenever we visit my parents either in Indiana or Florida. For fun, I asked Dad to teach me how to hit a ball and we entertained Natalie's superb ball-finding skills at the driving range next door. Natalie and Liam absolutely loved being outside pretty much the entire day, playing in the sprinklers, "fishing" in the little creek and pond by their house, and hitting various playgrounds most everyday.







We were saddened by the sudden loss of a longtime family friend. One of my mother's closest female friends died suddenly leaving us all in a state of shock. New babies, the loss of life, the sometimes arduous struggle to keep living, the heartwarming and comforting connections with family made this visit home more rich than most.

It also, in an underlying way, gave me further strength and resolve about a challenging decision I have made to change jobs. There is much that has been rewarding about being both a doctor and a teacher for the past 3 1/2 years. My involvement with training new physicians has made me feel an integral part of something much larger. I have learned so much and grown in many ways as a physician during my stint there. But, despite a unique job-share arrangement that has afforded me such opportunities as our Central America adventure, being a part of something larger has also demanded a larger share of my time away from my family than I prefer. After 11 years of doing OB, leaving my job has me walking away from doing deliveries among other things. While I could have the option of deliveries babies again someday, I may or may not. That has been one of the tougher things for me to let go of. It has been an internal struggle for me to find the right balance between Mom and Doctor, but shifting that balance more towards Mom feels very RIGHT at this present moment. I have 3 more weeks at my job and I'm rather excited. I have no doubt I'll keep my finger in the pot at the residency in some small capacity, but I am looking forward to a new experience. That "new experience" is only roughly defined at present and will fall more into place over the next several months. In short, I'll be filling in with several other practices in Anchorage and working roughly 2-3 days/week.

Russell and Natalie, too, will be embarking on new experiences come August. Russell, after his year leave of absence from the school district, was placed at a different school than the one he's been teaching in for the past 6 years. It was his first choice as he will be teaching only Physics and at the high school where he first taught 9 years ago. He will still be part time which was also our preference. He will be busy learning a new school and system, but I think it will be a fantastic position for him. Natalie will start kindergarten in the fall at our neighborhood school, Bear Valley Elementary. While Liam will undoubtedly miss being around his sister as much, I have no doubt our little social guy will have a great time at pre-school three days a week.