We're not going to BlogHer 2008. As tempting as it would have been to rent out the Fatty Arbuckle suite at the St. Francis and throw a raucous party with plenty of champagne bottles, the chances of it ruining my blogging career would have been too great. Don't rupture any bladders without us, girls.

I think the very idea of traveling with these two kids to a city where I used to enjoy unfettered childlessness was too much to even consider. I can't imagine going there with them until they're old enough to be bored while I drag them around town saying, ". . .and this is where daddy saw his first drag show." I think it's great that the event is being held at a historic hotel in the heart of San Francisco. For those attending who hope to get out of Union Square (and I do recommend getting out of Union Square), I wrote up a top nine list of our favorite things to do in San Francisco right before we left two years ago [number ten? walk around our old neighborhood]. I'm sure some things on there have changed, although Clement Street undoubtedly still smells like fish guts and dried-Chinese fungi. But if you're headed there this weekend or anytime in the future, nothing could make me happier than internet strangers seeing any of these parts of that beautiful old city. Well, I suppose I would be happier if it was me seeing them again. Without two kids.

In San Francisco I occasionally heard a suspicious piece of conventional wisdom that because of the weather, it is particularly difficult for people who move there to remember when things happened to them. Someone said the brain associates events with the weather in which they take place, with the season. Changes in the weather and seasons in San Francisco are so nuanced: brown grass in the suburbs indicates summer; it may rain more in the spring; the fall, they say, is when it will finally be hot enough to leave your house without a coat. To minds accustomed to stark seasonal contrast, days blend into one another and you cannot remember what month something happened.

In that way, years are said to pass like weeks. Everything happens in the fog of a perpetual spring. One day you are 23 and single and poor and drunk most of the time and the next day you are 33 and single and a bit richer but still drunk most of the time. I have my doubts, but I heard this discussed by enough provincial refugees trying to figure out where the last five or ten years of their lives had gone that there must be something to it.

It is understandable why parenthood is so feared by those who've grown accustomed to partying and generally behaving like 23-year olds well into their thirties. There are plenty of reasons your childless friends will dislike your baby, but one is that your baby will be a goddamn touchstone that even an endless summer cannot obscure. There is no way to hide from the creaking of your own bones when there's a baby around to remind you of how long it's been since it was born. For two years its life will be measured in months, months that slip past you as they always have, and the baby serves as a perpetual reminder of just how quickly they've gone.

San Francisco is a city where, besides money, the preservation of youth is everything. Despite the marginal presence of old gays with their moisturizers, the aging, bitter hipsters, and those ancient Chinese on the buses, it is a city of young people, with new batches of them arriving all the time from universities on the east coast or the Midwest, many of them overpaid and willing to spend obscene amounts of money on food and drink. At 24, we'd read newspaper articles there about the city's continual loss of families, and say, "bah, who needs families?"At 26 we found out were were going to become one. It was one of the loneliest times of our lives, not knowing anyone who had already tread that path. For a city that treasured youth above all else, San Francisco seemed to have a Herod-like fear of diapered usurpers.

This is why we started writing here. For all its bizarre current manifestation as dull domestic performance art, "Sweet Juniper!" started out as a way to communicate and commiserate what we were going through with others who were similarly isolated. We actually met other parents in San Francisco through the site, and the loneliness ebbed. But not enough to keep us there.

I have never really written about why we left San Francisco for downtown Detroit, although I am asked why we did it almost every day. I have different answers. It is complicated. I have not written about it because I have so much to say it would be boring. The bottom line is that it was the right decision for our family, that San Francisco was a wonderful place to spend our twenties, and we loved it.

And yet I have not missed it once.

When we moved into our current home one year ago, hundreds of monarch butterflies converged on our neighborhood as they migrated to California and Mexico. This morning, exactly one year later, Juniper and I counted nearly three dozen in the tree outside our house. Strange, I considered, how they know to head out on the same days every year. Such a befuddling ritual, to go all that way for constancy in temperature, only to come back again in spring. On one of our first nights in this house, we spotted a mama opossum carrying all her babies across our backyard. The other day we saw one of her babies, now nearly fully grown, sniffing around our mature tomato plants at night.

This hasn't been just another year for me. Beyond where we now live, this year has been all about how we live. I haven't logged into Lexis Nexis for thirteen months. I've spent my days picking apples, tramping through snow, watching buds form on freshly-unfrozen branches, and burying my feet in the sands of Lake Michigan. More importantly, I've spent every day exploring the world with my little girl. I will remember this year always. Those friends we left in San Francisco might see her now and gasp at how much she's grown, how much she's changed in the past year. But there is no shock in it for me. I've been watching her grow, all day, every day of the best year of my life.

You wouldn't know it from the hundreds of stories on parenting issues he writes for Blogging Baby or from the sorts of things he writes around here, but there was a time when Dutch was scared shitless of becoming a parent. We were living in San Francisco, and every month when he heard me pull the tampon box out from under the sink it was as if the collective weight of a thousand dirty diapers had been lifted off our apartment. Each time I dragged him into our neighborhood baby gear store looking for a gift for one of the growing number of children being born to my friends, he would break out into hives while looking at books with titles like Finding a Preschool for Your Child in San Francisco and Finding a Nanny for Your Child in the San Francisco Bay Area, and inevitably he would storm out of the store to hyperventilate on the sidewalk outside. "We're not going to have a kid in this city," he'd say. "There's no way I'm going to deal with all that crap here."

It came as quite a shock to me, then, when one day in 2003, well over a year before I got pregnant, he came home with the newly-reissued Miroslav Sasek book, This is San Francisco, which at first he claimed to have purchased for the classic mid-century illustrations, but which he later admitted to buying so that one day our kids could read it and learn all about the city where their parents lived when they were young.

Today Juniper is sick. Her symptoms include a runny nose, general crabbiness, whining, all sorts of carrying on, crappy sleeping, and lots of complaining. The only weapon we seem to have against it all is reading books. It's the only thing that makes her forget how miserable she is, and so we spend hours reading the same ones, repeatedly caving to the dreaded, "Again? Again, please?" and starting from the beginning, over and over and over.

Last night Juniper finally got tired of her own favorites and toddled over to her bookshelves in search of something new. She eventually settled on This is San Francisco. It's a big book, and after she lugged it across the room over to my lap last night, I read it to her for the first time in many months, the first time when we weren't sitting in the middle of the city portrayed in the book. She was quiet and didn't protest at the lack of dogs or monkeys or babies, the way she had the last time I'd tried to read it to her. I assumed she was just tolerating it because the snot filling up every spare hole in her head made it hard for her to hear, but on the 5th page she interrupted me, pointing to a drawing of typical San Francisco houses lining a hilly, typical San Francisco street, and said: "Home?" On the next page, she pointed to another house and asked, "Mama dada, live?"

For the first time since we've moved here, it felt like someone had stolen my heartbeat, and I was overwhelmed with longing for San Francisco. The page featuring a drawing of Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park, where I reminded Juniper about how we used to feed the ducks after picking up coffee and bagels, reduced me to tears. In that moment I felt foolish for ever denying that I miss our old home. Co-workers and new friends have asked me so many times some permutation of the question of how could we ever leave San Francisco, don't we miss it, and wasn't it so much better than Detroit. I've shrugged those questions off every time, expressing mild irritation as I tried to explain my new love for this new city. Moving here was risky in so many ways, that I think I was afraid that even the smallest acknowledgment that San Francisco was a city well worth missing would be an acknowledgment of our worst fears: that moving here could be a mistake.

Now that we've been here for two months, I'm confident enough in our decision to move to Detroit that I can allow myself some space to miss San Francisco. Our well-worn apartment on 2nd Avenue was the place where my boyfriend turned into my husband, and after that, where we grew together from people terrified of accidentally becoming pregnant to the parents that we were both born to be.

Last night Wood and I set our signatures in blue ink on the freshly-delivered contract for our new 3-bedroom, 1470 square foot home in downtown Detroit with central air and a finished basement and a garbage disposal and a dishwasher and a full-sized washer and dryer. As the ink dried, the sound of trumpets echoed from all around and the walls of our tiny one-bedroom apartment rattled violently and the sheet that we've hung between our bed and Juniper's crib to keep her from gesticulating crude mammary gestures at us all night fluttered as though a strong gust of wind had ruffled it, and the apartment-sized washer/dryer combo that have been the bane of Wood's existence cowered in the corner of the kitchen, jiggling the doorknob to the fire escape, and the stuffed animals, all those goddamn stuffed animals whose depraved nightly inter-generic orgies have caused their number to swell to the thousands, and all their bizarre hybrid progeny, they whimpered in fear that one day soon they would be confined to a closet or a bedroom and no longer allowed to graze freely on cookie crumbs throughout our living room, and finally the hardwood floor of that very room (in the very spot where my mother-in-law has slept during each of her sixteen visits) opened up into a fiery, roaring maw of Charybdis from which resonated the cackling of Moloch in Pandaemonium and the barking of hellhounds returning to the womb of sin to gnaw at her entrails. . .

I put a rug over it and assured Wood that now we were going to get out of this hellhole for good.

Just when you've spent an hour sitting with your daughter by a pond in Golden Gate Park, resting under the ferns and feeding the ducks among the lilypads. . .

. . .and it's so idyllic you half expect Ellery Channing and H.D. Thoreau to float past on a punt discussing the virtues of wanderlust. . .

. . .and you're struck with a sudden sense of mourning for this park, its beauty and and its giant presence in your life and the life of your child, and how much you will miss it when you move. . .

. . .then suddenly a mangy rat will scuttle out from its den of filth and snatch up the last crumb of crust that your baby has tossed out to her friends, the baby ducks.

And you'll tell her it's a mouse.

This morning I put on an old blue coat that four years ago my supervisors at work told me not to wear because it looked like it had been "purchased at a Goodwill." They were unaware, perhaps, that I believe Goodwill almost universally overprices its garments, and that it was probably purchased at the Salvation Army instead. Besides, before I could say that, they had moved on to telling me to get a haircut.

While standing on the bus this morning I leaned my nose into the bicep of my upstretched arm and smelled an odor in the coat that reminded me of walking past a homeless man. After four wet winters in my San Francisco closet the coat had reverted to its natural state of beautiful thriftstoriness. For some reason this made me feel very happy.

In little more than a month I intend to set aflame two weeks' worth of 15.5/33 Ike Behar shirts that I never want to wear again. And I will let my hair grow long and wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion, and all that jazz.

* * * * *

We had hoped to start this past weekend with a celebration, but it didn't work out that way. After putting an offer on another house last Thursday, we thought we would be in contract by Friday afternoon. Instead, we spent all day Thursday and all day Friday waiting for our realtor to contact us. Turns out she didn't convey our offer as we had asked her to and then she underwent a lame effort to cover up her mistakes, primarily by not returning our phone calls or e-mails. When I finally got in touch with her and confronted her about what happened she told me it was inappropriate for me to "interrogate" her and said she wished "my mother could hear the way" I was speaking to her. She told me I was being disrespectful (this, after being incommunicato for more than 24 hours while our offer was out and then telling us our offer was "foolish") .

I wanted to say, "When I'm being disrespectful, trust me, you'll know it." But I didn't. I was uncharacteristically civil when I fired her first thing Saturday morning.

* * * * *

On Saturday we "ran into" Leah and Simon from a girl and a boy. Self-acknowledged as "baby crazy," Leah is a veteran blogger and one of our readers and Simon is such a good sport he arranged for a secret encounter with Wood and I, despite the fact that if I were him I would hate us. Leah has powerful Utah genes that are propelling her towards parenthood, and reading Sweet Juniper doesn't help much there, I guess. It seems she thinks we make parenting look tolerable. I love that people without kids read this blog, although if I were childless, this blog would make me throw up in my mouth every morning. Either that or I would read it just to make fun of my sappy ass. I know many "parenting" blogs have regular non-parent readers. I sometimes wonder what it is about this blog that makes it interesting to anyone, let alone people who aren't just here to commiserate about shitty sleep schedules and dirty diapers.

* * * * *

Sunday was the gay pride parade, and though it wasn't quite as exciting for us as last year (no surprisingly friendly gay barbarians), it's always great to see how the whole city rolls out the welcome mat and the rainbow flags and so many people celebrate gay culture and gay rights on such a huge scale. It reminds me that this society has been slowly arcing towards greater equality, and that heavy resistance is often a sign of desperation against the inevitable. Pride week always gives me more hope that soon every couple who wants to be married or raise kids together will be able to do so with the same legal rights as any other and that someday all the people out there who think it's any of their business to deny others such rights will be remembered just as we remember those crowds of saps you see in newsreel footage from the 50s being held back by the national guard while they hurl obscenities at little black girls just trying to go to school.

A reader recently posed the following question via e-mail, which I will answer in the traditional "ask the judgmental hipster asshole" fashion:

Q. Dutch, why the fuck do you always take pictures of Juniper in front of graffiti?

A. I lived in Pittsburgh for a month or so when I was studying for the bar exam and when I was drunk one sweltering afternoon I saw this Cable Access documentary on the Pittsburgh graffiti scene. There's this guy named Mook who leaves his tag in ridiculously precarious spots on top of bridge towers. The documentary was interesting and made me look at graffiti in a whole new light. Also, Wood's dad is a probation officer who knows the guy in charge of the city's effort to clean up all the graffiti. His stories of taking on the graffiti artists made HBO's The Wire look like the Keystone Kops. There was this cool bike trail along a Pittsburgh highway wall that was covered in graffiti. I really started to respect the talent of the people who were doing it, in a gay 1978 Manhattan art gallery kind of way, I guess.

When I first moved to San Francisco, I noticed the city has this thriving poser hip hop DJ culture that just cracked my shit up, and, as their books on early eighties hip hop that they buy at Giant Robot tell them, graffiti is as important to hip hop culture as "bustin' rhymes over beats." Don't get me wrong, I went through it, too. But that was high school. These people were in their thirties.

Any feelings of appreciation I had for street art felt like cliche, so I buried them. One time Wood, Juniper and I were riding the N-Judah through the tunnel under Buena Vista Park and four dudes in baggy clothing walked up and down the train with big permanent markers tagging the windows and empty seats. Everyone on the half-full train just ignored them. Wood and I couldn't help but laugh at the lameness of it. San Francisco is like hip hop Disneyland: it's got the gritty urban architecture, a population of bored white youth listening to underground hip hop, and yet it's perfectly fucking safe, even for sidewalk babies. There are commissioned graffiti murals on buildings that have $2 million condos inside. Graffiti is constantly being incorporated into ad campaigns and corporate billboards to lend street authenticity to the products advertised. I thought, what could be the ultimate emasculation of San Francisco graffiti as hip hop posturing? Why, taking pictures of a weak ass little baby in front of it, of course!

Bottom line: I thought these shots were funny.

But as time went on and I kept doing it, I realized I was really starting to appreciate again this "vandalism" that brings color and ad-less flavor to the advertising permeated streets. Besides, no one wants to see the pile of toys or the half-empty laundry hamper cluttering your living room in pictures of your kids. The vibrant colors and loopy, indecipherable letters of graffiti made perfect backgrounds. So I co-opted the art for my own purposes, you could say, just like the corporations I hated. But I loved that even the street artists who could make good money doing it legitimately still crept out at night and broke the law and created art for its own sake, leaving "letters from God dropt in the street, and every one sign'd by God's name"; art free for anyone to appreciate or scorn. Like blogging, I guess, only more beautiful. Through the photographs I was able to borrow from the transient beauty of this art, to make a visual record of this part of Juniper's life living here, in a city filled with color where people come and people go just like the words and spraypaint on the walls, which get replaced as soon as they are washed away.

I've got a whole flickr set of these "Graffiti Girl" pictures, and I've started a flickr group for you to upload shots of your babies in front of graffiti in your own towns, if you are so inclined.

Oh, and if anyone else wants to ask us any big questions, we'd be happy to do further Q&As. Ask in the comments or by e-mail.

In a comment to Wood's post below, SF blogger Llamaschool expressed an interest in a washer and dryer that plugs into a wall outlet and uses the sink as its water source. Llamaschool clearly hasn't seen our appliances. I would gladly walk down a dozen flights of stairs to reach a real washer/dryer.

When we learned Wood was pregnant, she gave me an order: "no more laundromats. Get me a washer/dryer or find me a new apartment." I pleaded with the landlord to put a proper voltage hookup in the garage and offered to leave the appliances behind after we moved out, but he refused. He suggested an in-apartment sink hookup model.

I didn't choose "Dutch" as my nom de blog because of some affinity for Ronald fucking Reagan. I am ethnically half Dutch and therefore genetically a cheap bastard. In the world of ethnic stereotypes, the Dutch make the Jews look like profligate spendthrift Irishmen. I come from a long line of intolerant tightwads. The Dutch Calvinists who settled the part of Michigan I'm from left the Netherlands because the government was granting rights to Jews and Catholics and their church had grown too liberal. They are perhaps the only immigrant community in North America who left their native land because the government there had grown too tolerant for them. And man, are they cheap.

So instead of doing the right thing, I did the Dutch thing. Instead of going to Sears or Home Depot or something, I scoured craigslist for weeks looking for a used apartment-sized washer/dyer combo for $200 or less. After several weeks of looking, I found one. We had to drive out past the foggy curtain of the outer sunset on a cold night, and when we got there, what did we find? Two sweaty Greek teenagers, one of whom talked like a used car salesman while the other made erotic hand gestures towards a washing machine like one of Barker's beauties on the Price Is Right. The salesman gave me this long-winded story about how they bought the appliances brand new and used them for a couple years but now their mother lives with them and they need bigger ones (as if to pepper the tale with evidence, a sharp mannish-voice barked something at them in Greek from upstairs). We fell for it hook-line-and-sinker, baby, wrote a check and lugged them out to my car.

I should have known it was a scam. Even though it was a Sunday night, somehow my check had already cleared the next morning. Plus, while I technically only know Ancient Greek, I swear at one point the Greeks smiled at each other, nodded towards us and mouthed the word for "suckers." Apparently, these two Greeks have quite a scam going. They pick up ancient, broke-down appliances from the sidewalks and "repair" them. The second time we washed a load, one of the agitator belts snapped. That sounds like a very knowledgeable conclusion, but at the time I was fucking clueless about how a washing machine worked. When I unscrewed the metal back from the machine, I wouldn't have been surprised if there was a little gnome on a stationary bike back there. I was that clueless. So with my traditional DIY spirit (read: cheapness), I set off on an internet journey to learn washing machine repair, or should I say, belt replacement. It was curious, because I didn't need to "replace" a belt at all. The agitators weren't connected with a solid rubber belt like they should have been. The Greeks had "repaired" the machine by using a scrunchy. Yes, they stretched a scrunchy between the knobs on the backs of the agitators and sealed the back of the machine up before they sold it to us. It took six trips to the hardware store, but eventually I was able to find a real belt. It worked fine.

A few weeks later, the dryer stopped working. Another belt problem? You betcha! When I removed the back of the dryer, I learned they had replaced the broken belt that went around the tumbler with a fucking shoelace. Six more trips back and forth to the hardware store, and I was able to repair the dryer. It still works.

Let me put this in perspective. At my job, they somehow charge the clients $285 an hour for what I do. I spent at least eight hours trying to figure out how to fix those damn machines. That's $2280 of my time. It's an interesting thing about the Dutch. We have no concept of the term "opportunity costs." A Dutchman will never do "Wash'n'fold." This is also beyond his comprehension.

During the course of my internet research, I learned that our machine models were last manufactured in 1973. That means they were at least four years older than I am. The interesting thing about these machines is that the wash and spin cycles are performed in different compartments, meaning you have to take your load out of the washing compartment, put it in the spinner, drain the washing compartment, fill it with rinse water, run a rinse cycle, then put the load in the spinner again to spin. It is a very wet process. And I just did seven loads. That's seven wash cycles, seven rinse cycles, and fourteen spin cycles. This is some Laura Ingalls Wilder shit.

And during the last few spin cycles, I could tell that the spinner motor is on its last leg. I am not fucking with that shit.

I can't wait for the day when we buy a nice house that has room and hookups for a nice new set of appliances, and I can post an ad on craigslist: "Almost new washer/dryer combo, great for small apartments." $175.

A dutchman understands depreciation value.

Dutch didn't really make it clear that we were FIRED by our doula. I mean, pretty much. Here's what happened:

Like Dutch said, I met with the doula first. From the beginning he wasn't really into it, but hey, I was the one with a baby in my belly that had to come out somehow, and that meant that I got to call the shots.

I talked to the doula on the phone a couple of times, and then I had her come over one night when Dutch was conveniently working late. And she was great. Really, really great. We had an awesome conversation and she listened to me talk about my pregnancy in the way that I wanted my OB to listen, but had yet to realize just does not happen with OBs (yes, I should have hired a midwife. next time). She asked questions, she offered advice, and she gave me book suggestions. And, to this day, despite the falling out that was to come, I still owe her big time for the book suggestions. She nudged me towards Ina May Gaskin, and for that alone, she rocks.

She showed me her bag of tricks. Her adorable hipster-thrift-store-purchased bag of tricks (oh how I coveted that slightly faded, just garish enough print, and those well-worn leathery handles). Her bag of tricks did include aromatherapy and tennis ball socks, and I was SO INTO IT. Right on, sister, I thought. I sniffed her little bottles, I felt her home-made massage tools, I examined her sticks of honey, and I nodded my head and made approving noises. I concluded that she was exactly what I needed and I told her so. I also warned her that Dutch wasn't completely on board yet, but that I was working on it, and that he just needed time. She understood, she told me to call her.

About a month later my belly had finally grown big enough that Dutch was forced to recognize that I was the shot-caller, and he started to tow the party line on the doula. He said he understood, he said he wanted to be supportive, and he was ready to meet with her. He said he was still afraid that I was trying to replace him, and I assured him that he was ridiculous but encouraged him to talk with her about his feelings. He said he would. And even though Dutch can be a pretty standoff-ish guy, he was pretty cool about the doula at this point. More than cool -- he was open. And as you might have guessed, openness is a rare state for Dutch.

The doula came over, and it was like Dutch said it was. AWKWARD. It was horrible -- an unbelievable, staggering sort of awkward, where you assume that the next thing out of your mouth will finally break the ice, but it never does, and it just gets worse. I was waiting for the doula to sort of take over; I mean, this is what she does, she works with couples, so I guess I expected her to have questions or thoughts or at least lead the discussion. But she stonewalled, and instead we had strange conversations where she was sort of suggesting that we start all over (leave my OB, get a midwife; leave the hospital, go to the birthing center) and we were like, Hell-ooooo? This baby is due in 2 months, and if we got a midwife and went to a birthing center, why would we need you?

But the worst was when Dutch said: "I mean, I just don't think a birth center in the mission is for us." And while he was just being honest, the way he said "mission" conveyed some of the disdain he holds for the mission that he explained in his post. And the doula just sat there in silence and made no response. I don't know if she picked up on his anti-mission-ness and was personally insulted, or if she was just annoyed that we didn't want to do what she thought we should, but either way, I could tell she just wasn't that into us.

She called the next day to break it off. She asked me if I wanted her to suggest another doula, but I told her it was okay. We only had two months to go, so I gave up on my dream of having a doula.

And, having elbowed the doula out of the way, Dutch stepped up to the task and read "The Birth Partner" cover to cover. He prepared his own bag of tricks (including some aromatherapy and tennis balls), and he repeatedly told everyone how he was going to be the best doula ever. Once I tried to explain to him that he was the father and that was way better, but then I gave up because it was just so damn cute to hear him say it.

So the Bug's due date came, my contractions started, and we were all ready. Dutch was an amazing partner -- far better than I would have ever thought my husband, the guy who comforted me during my morning sickness by reminding me that I was the one who wanted to be pregnant, could be. It was because of him that I finally took off the stupid oxygen mask and moved around the room even though I didn't think I could do it. It was because he kept telling me how "fucking tough" I was that I didn't cave in the 17th time the nurse asked me if I was sure that I didn't want an epidural? how about narcotics? a little morphine? And it was because of him that the whole thing went so damn smoothly -- without a hitch, stitch, or regret. I wouldn't have changed a thing. I did have the best doula ever.