Fog

Olive has finally started sleeping through the night most nights!  I feel like I am coming out of a fog.  It feels like there is more space in my life.  I have some breathing room and it is bittersweet to me.  On one hand I can do some things in my life that I enjoy doing and do some fun things with the girls.  The other is that the days of having a squishy little baby in our house are nearly over.  I'm ready for a new phase, but I hope it's normal to feel a little sad and nostalgic about it.

Right now we have a 1st grader, a 3 year old, and a walking one year old in the house.  I range from teaching Erin how to deal with her emotions in an appropriate way to digging God knows what out of Olive's mouth.  Izzy is just our wild child.  Sometimes I call her "Walks With Thunder" because she cannot grasp what walking without stomping might be like.

I sometimes joke that this house is my prison.  But it honestly is very hard to get out when babies need naps and having kids going through the stage of running away at a store.  I dream that one day we'll be able to just walk out the door with our children, go do something fun, go out to eat, and then come home and not want to drink an entire bottle of wine and fall asleep because it was so stressful and exhausting.

Even though I long for freedom sometimes crazy ideas of homeschooling my children come to me.  I'm hoping to create several revenue streams from our homestead that will generate enough money to expedite paying off our house so Scott can eventually work less.  If I'm able to do that I will be able to be the farm girl I've always dreamt about being and wouldn't have to go get a "real" job.  In my craziness I figure that since I'll be at home why not have my children at home helping me and I could teach them.

I'll leave you with pictures of my adorable little nuggets...

Homesteading It.

We have embarked on something that we didn't plan.  Although it isn't surprising with our very independent natures.  It started with the idea to get chickens to lay us eggs.  I bake so much and we love to eat eggs, so it just made sense.  We have enough room out here so we figured we'd start small and get 5 and see if we liked it.

Scott built the coop with some ideas from the interwebs and mostly materials that we had laying around.  There are some things that don't work very well about it, but they chickens seem to like it in there.  There are  4 nesting boxes in the back, but the silly things cram all into one of them.

Turns out.....we LOVE having the chickens.  All of us love it!  And just this past week they finally started laying us eggs!!!!  Now we've been clamoring to build a much much bigger coop so we can get more!

It has been heartbreaking to see all the poultry for sale on craigslist and not be able to buy them because we didn't have anywhere to put them.  So we are taking ideas from the interwebs again and building a pallet coop.  We have little to no construction experience so we are slowly fumbling our way through it.

It doesn't help that the way I tackle a project and the way my husband tackles a project are completely opposite.  I want to jump right in without a plan and start putting stuff together.  He wants to know every step before he starts and every angle.  There may be some friction there.

However, I help keep him moving forward and he keeps me from going to fast and not having things last or look like crap.

The pallet coop is costing us nearly nothing and is half up!  Hoping this week we can get a roof on it and we can introduce our 5 chickens to their giant new home.

Six Years and Counting.

I have been a parent for over six years now.  Not very long compared to some, but the beginning is oh so exhausting.  Children are born with nothing but needs.  At first most of those needs are physical and then evolve to emotional and structural.  

I'm still wading in the mostly physical end right now and I'm tired.  I want to sleep through the night again.  Take a bath (without visitors) with a book and a glass of wine.  Shop alone.  Use the bathroom alone! 

Parent after parent warns me over and over that everything goes by too fast.  That you blink and they are graduating school.  And I don't want to be in a hurry for my babies to grow up.  I want to soak in these days of snack time and midnight rocking.  I know that I will miss them.  I can feel deep in my heart that I will ache a little when these days are done.  

On the other side of that though is a never ending struggle to accomplish anything besides the needs of the children.  At this point I have my own needs that wander outside of diapers and nursing.  I need to do things in my own areas of interest.  And I can do them, but there seems to be a cost.  It requires so much effort to carve out the time and the space to do something that I want to do.  

It will get easier.  And harder I'm told.  We'll go from learning to walk and potty training to running all over for activities and dealing with lies and attitudes.  However, right now all I can dream about is a life that doesn't revolve around nap time.

6

My beautiful Erin turned 6 today!  I can't help but think back to that first night I had all alone with her.  It was her that made me a mommy.  I think about holding her at less that 6 pounds alone, in the dark.  Intoxicated and overwhelmed with love for my tiny little girl.  Becoming a mom changed me, made me softer, gave me focus.

My whirlwind, darling girl.  I love seeing what kind of person she is, and is becoming.  She is filled with emotions and challenges me to observe mine and my reactions to them.  Teaching is so much more than instructing.....it's modeling.  And it speaks much louder.

I love my girl who tells me at least 20+ times a day that she loves me.  I love you too baby girl, so very much. ♥