Happy Mother's Day!

Today is Mother’s Day. It will be Joni’s second. She and Jasper are flying back from a five day trip to Arizona today. Their trip has given me time to consider the past year as a dad and to appreciate (even more) the job Joni does as a mom. So I thought –with my first entry into the blog – I’d give Joni the spotlight for a bit and, being the mathematician I am, I’m doing this one by the numbers (with some accompanying pictures to help the innumerate through).

The picture below was taken on June 25^th 2006 in Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada. Notice Joni near the lower corner. She tells me it was on this hike that she first began to think she might be pregnant. She wouldn’t tell me for another 8 days what she was thinking. Jasper wouldn’t be born for another 36 weeks (247 days). It was a pregnancy with stretches of 50 days of being actively sick all while teaching high school 5 days a week. Better times were ahead…

So on Friday, March 9^th, 2007 Jasper hit the stage. It was a short, 7 hour labor with only 1.5 of those in the hospital – she got a pretty good break there. She had quit teaching the previous Friday. That week, looking back now, was her one week off. Her real job was just beginning…

The numbers to get pretty unbelievable. Joni’s been a mom for 430 days now. That’s 10,320 hours. We’ll be generous and say that she has had 30 days off – maybe Jasper was with Grandy, or Gigi, or one of the Grandpas – so she’s down to 9600 hours. Pay her an insulting $6 an hour and you’d fork over $57,600. Pay her more like $30 and that’s $288,000. Working with some conservative averages we’ll say Jasper dirties 5 diapers a day, nurses 3 times in the same duration, and takes a bath once a day. Though I certainly have helped in afew of these instances I think it is safe to say she has changed 2150 diapers, nursed Jasper for 215 hours, and spent close to 3 solid days kneeling by the bathtub soapin’ up the little man.

Jasper started solid foods pretty close to Labor Day, 2007 – 253 days ago. Joni has spent countless hours preparing avacados, broccoli, sweet potatoes, asparagus, zucchini, squash, kale, yogurt, apples, pears, bananas, hot cereal, and more recently eggs, turkey bacon, and toast for jasper to eat. Although Jasper has had his taste of canned baby food and formula, I would say that an astounding majority of the solid food he has eaten has been prepared in our kitchen, by his mom. At 3 meals a day for 253 days that’s 759 meals, one little spoon at a time.

Jasper love to read. I found this picture of him at Christmas, well into his reading phase. It started a good bit before this picture with a book from Ashley Benton, “Mirror Me.” Joni reads to Jasper every day – easily 3 books a day. He drinks it in. That’s 414 book just since Christmas.

Things I have no idea how to count are the miles she has walked with Jasper, the hours she spent pumping and storing milk (he drank her milk exclusively for 6 months and still does daily), the time spent at the doctor’s office (which thankfully hasn’t been much), the days she has spent blogging the best of the 1647 pictures we have of him on our computer, the hours she has spent in prayer for Jasper and our family, the pages she has read about childbirth, nursing, sleeping, scheduling, baby food, exercise, training, toxic stuff, child development, la la la la … all so she can be the best mother possible. Most amazing to me is that she enjoys it all and continuously finds new ways to mother him and love him.

Thank you to our mothers – Susan and Jennifer. They did all this twice…sheesh. It’s crazy to me to realize that, if God is willing, we will willingly do it a second time. My grandmother, Betty Skogman, did this FIVE times and she still has her wits about her. I can’t imagine. Happy mothers day to all the mothers out there. I hope you get a nice present and a card…