Orion is demonstrating a pretty remarkable memory these days. He’ll recall events of several months ago in detail, for example, or remember offhand comments about future events (“maybe Friday we go to beach?” “Geez, did we really promise that?”). Interestingly, when he talks about past events they always happened “yesterday,” but he uses random day names for future events.

Which leads me to realize Orion is entering the age when he starts to Remember. Last summer when he got stung by a bee: when he’s fifteen, that will never have happened. When he fell off his bike yesterday: he might be working that out with his therapist in 2040.

What was my First Memory? I guess it depends on what you mean by “memory.”

I very clearly remember seeing Star Wars in 1977 (at age five). That’s my earliest unequivocal memory of a distinct and singular event.

I remember several of the toys at my preschool (ages 3 to 4). I also remember making peanut butter at preschool. These are probably amalgam memories.

I remember playing “doctor” with an older neighbor girl. Actually we were playing “house” but it was really a variation of the stereotypical “doctor” game. We took turns watching each other pee in a bucket. This was probably before Kindergarten (again, age 3 or 4). (I also remember playing literal “doctor” with other neighbor girls, sometimes with the expected implications and sometimes without. But this was at older ages: kindergarten or first grade.)

I remember falling in a river in Wyoming while my parents fished. Actually I don’t remember falling in the river, I remember sitting in the front seat of our ’68 Barracuda with the heat on full blast and drinking coffee with lots of sugar and cream. I don’t know what age this would have been, probably preschool as well.

I have an impression of riding on a commercial airplane with my mother. I sat on the floor and played with my Fisher Price zoo animals. The only commercial airplane flight I took before college was from Scottsbluff to Lincoln Nebraska for the occasion of my grandfather’s funeral, in 1974 (at age 2).

I have another impression of entering the front room of a house similar in layout to my maternal grandmother's, and several grownups were seated way above eye level around the room. My impression was they were gathered. This may be a memory from the same trip: the grownups were gathered for the funeral. My parents tell me the house they lived in before 1973 had a similar layout to my grandmother’s, so this might be an earlier memory of some other event, perhaps my brother’s baptism?

What’s your earliest memory?

Iris has kind of been the Big News around here the past 10 days so it’s easy to overlook what the other Souders kid is doing in that span. Stuff like: eliminating somewhere other than inside his diaper. Mastering the scoot bike. Skinning his elbow and not crying. Playing alone in his room for half an hour. Buying, and wearing — at his own insistence — a backpack, and shoes with laces. Taking showers not baths. Learning his first mildly colorful song (“I’m Popeye the sailor man/I live in a garbage can/I eat all the worms/and spit out the germs”). Swearing (“oh Geez!”)

He also insists I dress like him (same color shirts, mostly) which, I must say, has actually improved my sartorial presentation.

That’s just in the last two weeks. Maybe it’s the lack of one-on-one Mommy time; maybe I’m just a lazy parent who wants to make his son carry his own backpack; maybe it’s having a little sister; maybe it’s just his brain hit a sudden maturation phase coincidentally at the moment of Iris’ birth. I dunno.

Tantrums of course have taken a sharp upswing too, but I’m impressed at his occasional rationality. Sometimes we can actually reason him out of a tantrum. Not often, but it happens.

Parents with older kids always say crap like “pay close attention to the first years, they go so fast.” Those parents are right. A month ago we had a toddler and in a few more months we’ll have a preschooler. Our nights of cuddling at bedtime are limited.

Iris Elizabeth Souders, born July 11, 2010. 7lbs, 6oz. 20" long. Ten fingers, ten toes, a full head of hair.

Jenny & Iris are sleeping, Orion is out with Grandma Ellen, I finally got five hours sleep. Some random thoughts in this short pause.

This labor was completely. Different. Than last time. Saturday I said to Jenny, "that baby's coming tonight." But we went about a mostly-usual Saturday, except I insisted on running errands and watching Orion all day. (Sidebar: we went bike riding and he actually rode his bike. Like both feet off the ground. This no-pedals thing works.) I gave O his bath and put him to bed as usual, which in our case means we fall asleep together in his bed and then about an hour later I creep downstairs. But Jenny woke me early in his bed: "I'm having contractions." There was nothing tenative about it, they were hitting hard and close together.

With Orion, the first inkling was her water breaking, followed by 15 hours of sloooowly building labor, ending with a teriffying rush into surgery.

With Iris, there was barely time to think; so somehow more focused and lucid. Jenny couldn't sit in the car, her pain was too great. She kind of crouched over the infant seat in back while I drove exactly the speed limit to OHSU. Her first words at the ER were: "get me an epidural."

Of course, they can't just shoot opiates into the spinal fluid of any random person who walks into the ER. It took maybe 90 minutes to get the epidural, by which point she was probably fully dilated and within an hour she started pushing.

As luck would have it, Jenny's usual Ob-Gyn was on call that night. So we had one doctor (OUR doctor, importantly) and one nurse for the entire experience. It was significantly less terrifying. Orion's arrival spanned two shift changes; that experience was attended by a parade of strangers.

But as with her brother, baby Iris presented backward and Jenny (despite pushing with an intensity that impressed even the seasoned L & D nurse) couldn't get her past the final curve. And, as with Orion, Iris' heartrate spiked and she started to show signs of distress. Jenny, very lucidly, put forward that Iris was the most important factor in this experience, and she was "open to whatever would be best for her."

The C-section was magnitudes less terrifying than with Orion. Orion's c-section was ordered by a doctor who had just come on rounds, and had dreadful bedside manner. The staff had no idea what to do with me that time and I spent half an hour sitting on a folding chair in scrubs, shaking and near tears. This time, waiting for Jenny's prep, I got kind of bored.

Cesarian deliveries have a kind of mysterious poetry. There's a long sequence of surgery where mom's health is paramount. Staff talk in hushed, professional tones, just like during surgeries on TV. All this happens behind a kind of screen. On the other side is Mom and Dad and the anaethesiologist. In both experiences, our best friend was the anaethesiologist. S/he stands right next to mom's head during the delivery and can narrate what's happening if Dad's too squeamish to watch. I tried.

Then with a sudden rush of activity the baby emerges. She is perfectly shaped, shiny purple and screaming, covered with cheese and ectoplasm. A being from another world. The pediatricians and nurses put her on a warming table and start doing Apgars or whatever.

Because the mother is immobile, fathers are extra-important during a c-section. We have to be comforting. We help wash off the cheese and ectoplasm. We get to hold the baby first, and give her to mom. We go from being well-intentioned supercargo to vital team members.

36 hours with Iris and I realize kids are all different. They come out different. Based on a sample size of 1 I used to say things "babies are like this" or "newborns are like that." It's really clear that "Orion was like this" and "Orion was like that." Iris is different.

Where Orion struggled to eat, Iris won't stop. Orion barely reacted to the world, Iris shows a keen interest in anything near her face. Where Orion cried, unprovoked and inconsolable, Iris only cries when something bugs her and shuts up when it stops. Where Orion slept fitfully for 20 or 30 minute periods, we have have to wake up Iris to eat. Where Orion liked tight swaddling and lying on his back, Iris likes her hands near her face, and sleeping on Jenny's chest. Where Orion could barely lift his arms, Iris can move her head (!) and kick off her socks. (She is, in fact, very strong).

The corollary here is kind of keen too. As a newborn, Orion was fussy and collicky, fragile and indifferent to people. But as a toddler he's adventurous and empathetic, rugged and outgoing. Kids come out different but they don't end up the way they come out I guess. He was a "difficult newborn" but he's an "easy toddler." Iris might be the other way around, or a totally different configuration, who knows? One day isn't very long to know a person.

In 1994, when I was 23, I was shopping for graduate schools. I remembered a paper I’d read by U of O archaeologist Madonna Moss, “Shellfish and Gender.” So I applied to the U of O. A year later Dr. Moss was my graduate advisor.

In 1990, I was obsessed with Twin Peaks. It was set (and filmed) in Washington, but that was the first intimation of the coming Pacific Northwest Cultural Wave (Grunge, Starbucks, Microsoft) that kind of wormed its way into my perceptions of the world.

In 1986, when I was 14, my family took a vacation to the Pacific Northwest. On that trip I first saw the ocean, probably at Neskowin. We stayed in Manzanita. I’d had dreams about the ocean my entire life: swimming in heavy waves, being underwater, sailing, standing on beaches. The beach at Neskowin was exactly like I imagined an Oregon beach should be. Even the smell was familiar; the whole experience was familiar. Cold feet, salt air, windburn, gray sky, woodsmoke, rotting seaweed.

In 1985, I saw the movie Goonies. It was a good enough story but I fell in love with that landscape. Trees and cliffs and rocky beaches, set hard against the restless water.

In 1981, I was in fourth grade, the year that Nebraska children first learn state history. We lived in Scottsbluff, within sight of the famous bluff that featured prominently in diaries of the Oregon Trail. Near at hand were actual physical artifacts of the Trail: the Rebecca Winters Grave, Signature Rock, wagon ruts on Windlass Hill. Much of our state’s history was the story of people moving through. To Oregon. These were gruesome stories of hardship: hunger, starvation, dysentery, Indian attack, freezing in passes, drowing in river crossings. It didn’t take a genius to figure: Oregon must be pretty nice. Nice enough to walk for four to six months across a continent.

The year previous, Mt. St. Helens erupted. It struck me as profoundly weird that people would live in a place with volcanoes. And Bigfoot. And flying saucers. All of which were childhood obsessions.

Also around that time I read a book I think no one else has ever read: The Haunted Cove by Elizabeth Hazelton. I think I got it free from Scholastic Book Club for ordering umpteen other books. It’s a Young People’s Mystery (ala Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew) set on the Oregon Coast. Hazelton did a superb job drawing the Oregon land/seascape. Her prose is why my dreams of the ocean looked exactly like the ocean in Oregon. This obscure book is probably singlehandedly responsible for my ultimate move to Oregon.

We’ve a long gray wet spring that just can’t seem to quit. It’s easy to complain but — for me, anyway — easier to remember: this is why I moved here. I came here for the gray and wet and chilly. So mild, so green; so unlike the fierce wilting humid heat of my childhood summers. The coldgraywet makes me grateful for books, for bicycles, for mud and coffee and hiking boots, for empty beaches and quiet forest trails. It makes the beer taste better.

Dave Moulton wrote today about the evolution of mountain biking. He asked for his readers’ “take on the period” — here’s mine:

I grew up in rural Nebraska in the 1970s when banana seats gave way to BMX. My favorite thing wasn’t jumping ditches though so much as taking long rambles up dirt roads, I’d be gone for hours. In retrospect I was probably never more than 2 or 3 miles away from the house but it felt much farther. I had a fear of county roads and blacktop traffic, so I stuck to dirt roads: section road, irrigation access, that kind of thing.

We moved to the “big city” Lincoln in the early 80s and I bought my first grownup bike, a late 70s vintage 10-spd “racing” bike. I think it was a Sekai. I rode this and a Schwinn Varsity until high school. My new favorite bike thing was to ride those 10-spds all day, either around town into new neighborhoods, or to outlying towns. At age 13 I rode my Varsity 52 miles (round trip) on a surprise visit to a girl in a neighboring town. I taped cans of Coke to the frame for sustenance, and ate a slice of pizza before the ride home. The girl was out of town, that taught me to always call ahead.

For about 5 years I barely rode at all. It was too “uncool” to be seen on a bike at my gearhead high school, or so I felt anyway. I kept that unhealthy obsession with cars until college when I got my first MTB, a Giant Rincon (1992).

The Rincon reawakened the joy of being gone all day on a bike. This time it was back to dirt roads, and wasteland like timber claims or Wilderness Park (an undeveloped city park southwest of Lincoln). I also lived exactly the right distance from campus for steady bike commuting: too near to drive, too far to walk. After college I took the Rincon — and its successor: a Yokota mountainbike — with me on my archaeological adventures across the Great Plains. I never had the Xtreme Mad Huck personality ascendent in 90s MTB culture, I never railed on sketchy descents or caught big air. My ideal ride was a long distance on two-track in the hinterland. Exploring. Cow-trailing. Unsuspended steel MTBs excel at that.

I took the Yokota with me to grad school — I had long since given up cars entirely — where it was my primary mode of transport. Ironically, once I moved to Oregon — where we have actual mountains — I pretty stopped mountain biking. This was the mid-90s and MTB culture was no longer under the radar, and in Oregon at any rate you couldn’t just go ride a bike on all that sweet singletrack. Either it was closed to bikes, or it was developed into a kind of skills park for Mad Hucking. Mostly, to ride a MTB bike in Oregon it helps to have a car; you have to drive to a “trailhead” where you spin around for an hour or so then drive home. It has always struck me as absurd to drive somewhere to Have Fun by biking (or hiking, or skiing) around in little circles. Other than riding a bike to work, I never spent much time on a bike between 1995 and 2001.

Not quite a decade ago I bought another road bike — actually kind of a cross/touring bike, a Bianchi Volpe. That set me on my last — and most durable — love affair with bikes. With a road bike (or better, a ’cross bike), as soon as you step out the front door you’re Having Fun. That bike kept me sane through my divorce, when my all-day-bike-riding habits became a little obsessive. The peak of that period was my solo tour down the Oregon Coast.

This was how I met Jenny: she saw me carrying my bike into our apartment building (we were neighbors), and she asked “do you know any good rides around here?” I didn’t ask her out right that second but I eventually did, and the story had a happy ending. Much of our early courtship — and most of our vacations, even today — are had on bike. Sometimes on that Bianchi, or on one of its roadie successors.

Last spring I won a fancy new Kona mountain bike. I never would have bought this bike myself, and I’m kind of at a loss for what to do with it. Mostly it’s seen semi-legal singletrack in the weirdly-zoned terrain of SW Portland. I guess you still have to drive a car somewhere to have fun on a mountain bike, and I still think that’s stupid.

On Saturday, I rode my Vanilla road bike 90 miles — all on blacktop — into the beautiful rural hinterlands around Portland. I don’t get to do this as often as I used to but it’s still my favorite bike thing to do.