This is the look I get when I have blueberries and I’m not sharing.
Ouch.
Mom Guilt 101
Ten Years In The Making
I have a confession to make.
It’s horrifying. Are you ready to be horrified?
Here we go.
Ten years ago, I wrote the first half of my two hundred plus page novel in the notes section of my iPod touch.
No, I’m not kidding.
Yes, it was every bit as bad as it sounds.
By the time I finally succumbed and switched to a computer, I spent almost as much time scrolling as I did writing.
You know, because it was all one impossibly long document visible only through a tiny iPod touch screen.
It makes me overwhelmed just thinking about it.
What happened was this. Ten years ago, I graduated high school and promptly went on a week-long road trip with my dad to a school up in Idaho where he was lecturing. The night before we left, I started playing around with a story that I had been thinking about for a while. A medieval fantasy story about a bodyguard-turned-gladiator who is forced to gamble on his own soul to save his partner from the ring.
And, because I was leaving for Idaho the next morning, I wrote the beginning on my iPod.
Would I ever do this again?
Absolutely not.
Was it worth it?
Well . . . I’ll leave that to you to decide. Ten years later, I am still working on this book/series. (There are five!) And at the beginning of this year, my lovely editor and I began moving toward getting the first one ready to release into the world.
I’m panicking. It feels like I’m letting my baby out of the house for the first time.
Okay, my ten year old child that I should have set free a long time ago. But these things take time, okay?
Anyway, the books are ready, and this year, we are running through all of the many tasks necessary to get them released into the world. Edits, a few last revisions on chapters that need an update, cover design, interior artwork . . . I’m having way too much fun.
There’s gonna be a map, y’all. I have an artist lined up already.
I’m wildly excited.
There are a lot of steps ahead of me, so I’ll be sure to share all the exciting things as they appear! I’m crossing my fingers for a 2023 release date and promise to keep you updated.
Cold March Evenings
These days, it’s a little harder to find time and space to write.
You know, between nannying thirty to forty hours a week, building a house, and taking care of an infant with serious skin issues.
So finding time for my scripts, outlines, and short stories is a little bit difficult.
Finding time for my books is even harder.
But where there’s a will, there’s a way, so they say, and tonight’s way happened to be bundling myself up in my coat and sitting outside on our porch swing on a dark, cold March evening while my husband gave our baby a bath and got him ready for bed.
You do weird things for words when you’re a writer.
Weird, cold, uncomfortable things.
But words come and chapters are edited, and my goodness, I can’t wait to share this book with the world. It’s almost ready. I don’t dare give away too much just yet, but I hope to be holding it in my hands very, very soon.
Maybe even by the end of the year. What a crazy thought, after ten years. I can’t wait!
Gut Issues
I haven’t talked about this much on here.
In fact, I haven’t said anything about it at all. I’ve mentioned my mastitis, talked a tiny bit about how hard recovery was for me, and kept most of my posts happy and geared toward finishing our new house and expanding our homestead.
But this is the other thing that has been dominating my life lately, and frankly, part of the reason I haven’t talked about it much is that I really, really don’t know what’s going on.
So, I’ll give you my best guess.
Right after I gave birth, I got mastitis. Which happens to be life threatening, if it gets bad enough.
And I was bad. When I finally got in to see the doctor, she immediately got me scheduled for x-rays to make sure I didn’t need surgery.
Thankfully, the surgery didn’t happen, but what DID happen was antibiotics. Three rounds of them. Nearly a month of pills. Which killed the infection… and quite a lot of the good bacteria in my gut. And Adam’s gut too.
A very short time after the last round, Adam’s skin started breaking out on his head and face. Sores, weeping pus, crusty, flaky skin… everything you can imagine.
That was back at the end of January. It’s still going on. Sometimes worse and sometimes better. We’re fighting it with every possible strategy you can imagine. Prebiotics. Probiotics. Antihistamines. Vitamin D. Anti-fungal meds. I’ve become the person I dread seeing at restaurants. I’m gluten free, dairy free, nut free, sugar free, peanut free, and corn free.
Oh, and I can’t have avocados either. We found that out after his face started swelling.
Suffice to say, we don’t sleep much. And my stress levels are not where they should be.
To be quite honest, it’s been driving me up the wall. Seeing my baby in distress, not being able to eat almost anything, and trying a million things with no improvement has made the last few months… difficult.
I told my family I’m ready to go on a pilgrimage to see if that will fix it. You know, the kind where you walk a hundred miles in sackcloth and stop every ten steps to kiss the ground and beg God to forgive you for being stupid enough to inflict three rounds of antibiotics on a new baby, even though they probably kept you from dying.
Yeah, that kind.
We’re taking him out in public tomorrow. Going to church for the first time since I gave birth. I’m… a little nervous. His poor skin looks so bad that I want to reassure everyone who looks at him—and myself—that I really do take care of my child. I am a good mother. I know to give him baths, but not too many. I’ve switched his shampoo. I’ve checked his laundry detergent. Believe me, if you can suggest it, we’ve tried it, and I’ve cried over my inability to change enough things and tweak enough things to just fix this.
Because I’m his mom. I’m supposed to fix it. I’m supposed to be the one who knows what he needs and how to take care of him. And right now, I can’t fix everything. Not right away. We’re slowly making progress, healing my gut and his, and I can tweak and tweak and tweak until I go insane, or…
I can leave it alone. I can let Jesus hold him for a while, and trust that time and His grace will be the true healers.
Making Progress
These days, I plan my life around nap times.
Lots of life happens during nap times. I clean the house, write my books, meet deadlines for my business, and, lately, frame walls and clean up a job site, all while my baby naps.
As you can imagine, we make progress by inches.
Or, I do. Thankfully my husband is also out there framing walls, and when the baby wakes up and I go back to nursing, cooing, counting tiny toes, teaching the smallest boy how to stick out his tongue, and reading books, he is able to keep building our house.
I love him. He’s a treasure.
Getting life done during nap time is a little stressful, but there’s nothing I’d rather be doing. Because while I’m fitting in my chores, business, and house building into the naps, Adam and I are fitting a whole world of discoveries into his wake times.
He’s been discovering his fingers lately. And toys. And rolling over. And he’s recently discovered that we have a dog in the house with us, which he found endlessly fascinating.
As much as I desperately need to do laundry, I am loving this chance to discover the world all over again through his eyes.
So I can wait for the nap times.
Working Hard
That’s my little brother.
He’s more comfortable with heights than I am.
In other news, we’re making progress on our house! The second floor joists are all in, the back wall of the ground floor is framed, and I have a window in my bedroom.
There is no bedroom yet, but by golly, there’s a window, and we’re counting that as progress.
We’re so blessed to have plenty of friends and family to come out on work days to help us frame, and we are slowly making our way through an enormous list of projects that must be done before this house is anything like complete. It still feels like a hugely overwhelming task, but little bit by little bit we are chipping away at the Things To Be Done, and hopefully by the end of the year, we will have a house to live in!
I can’t wait!
House Full of Babies
We have a house full of babies right now! Goats, goslings, and ducklings. Spring is coming!
Freakin’ Heroes
One of our goats gave birth this week. At like dark-thirty in the morning.
It was her first pregnancy, and, unfortunately, the baby was stillborn. I worked on it for a good ten minutes—rubbing, clearing the lungs, blowing into his mouth and nose—but things didn’t work out.
Sadly, this is how farming works. Animals are unpredictable, and you are told to expect to lose 40% of your stock to illness, predators, and the Unexplained. We cleaned things up and went inside to get our day started.
Two hours later, one of my younger sisters came up to report the goat was down again. I called the vet, thinking milk fever or something similar, and went down with her.
Just in time to save this little character from inside his birth sack.
Look at him.
He’s so tiny and cute.
In all, she had three kids. Two were stillborn, and one is now happily trotting after my sister wherever she goes.
Apparently, according to a neighbor with a herd of goats, this seems to be a year for stillbirths. She’s had more this year than ever before.
Maybe it’s something in the hay?
Anyway, we’re very happy to have at least one prancing around. And our new mother is doing fabulously, which is always a relief.
Oh, and my sister and I are freakin’ heroes.
Which is always fun.
The Most Exciting Moment of March
I was planning on doing this post a week ago.
On the first, actually. You know, a nice long post at the very beginning of every month to assure you all that I’m still very much alive and that I haven’t hidden away and determined to communicate with people only via social media posts.
I have, but obviously I don’t want you thinking that.
Anyway, I meant to do a lovely long post on the first, but I realized that the most exciting moment of this month hadn’t quite happened yet. So I decided to wait.
So, here she is. The most exciting moment of March!
Meet Polly.
She’s so cute. I can hardly believe she’s ours.
Now that I’m back to myself and the weather is beginning to warm up, we’ve shifted focus back to our homestead, to starting new projects and continuing established ones. Our rabbits are off to a slow start, but we’re making adjustments and finding our rhythm with them. One of the things that I love—and hate—about homesteading is that things rarely work the way you want them to immediately. The first animal you buy dies or doesn’t produce the way you were expecting, or the setup that you thought was perfect needs serious renovations to be usable. There’s no plastic, one-size-fits-all, factory assembled options of homesteading, and animals are predictably unpredictable.
Which means, adapting. Improvising. Experimenting.
Homesteading is about mistakes and restarts and, most of all, time to get things right. It’s intensely frustrating, and, at the same time, one of the most intriguing, challenging processes. Because where’s the fun in having everything handed to you, wrapped in plastic and already perfect?
So, we are adapting to new challenges with our meat rabbits. Rest assured, I intend to get our system right and smooth out the lumps. In the meantime, we’ve introduced Polly to the barnyard and begun our foray into dairy farming.
I’m excited.
Now don’t laugh. But because my sister—and my parents—also have goats for their dairy needs, we have built up quite the little herd down at our barn.
Eight.
We have eight goats.
I’m not gonna lie, every time someone messages us and is like, hey, we have a goat for sale! We say yes.
Immediately.
We probably won’t stop at eight either.
Two of our lovely eight are due to have kids in the next week or so. Our goat—and the one we picked up with her—are both due to have kids in June.
And we have two more females that we’ll be breeding with our male in the next month or so.
Starting up a homestead of this size is a huge amount of work, and a sizable financial investment, but once things start rolling—goats, chickens, geese (surprise!), and rabbits—we’ll begin to see returns for all our hard work. My sister, who is endlessly organized, has everything written down to make sure we’re getting our money’s worth and not paying too much for a dud animal, feed, or upkeep.
As much as I love her tenacity, I’m less invested in the financial side of things. Sure, I would like a return. I’d like to see things pay off. But for me, knowing where our food is coming from, knowing that our system is sustainable and responsibly sourced, and that my kids will grow up knowing where their food is coming from and how to get it should things in town go south . . . that is its own reward.
Plus, just look at that face.
Adorable.
Any exciting moments on the way for you in March? Tell me about them in the comments!
Working Mum
I had a week of meetings this month.
Long meetings.
Hot coffee turning cold, conversations through lunch, white boards erased multiple times kind of meetings.
Creative meetings. The kind with lots of ideas, people laughing, and problems that take hours to fix and are so, so satisfying once they’re solved.
It’s always one of my favorite weeks out of the entire year.
This year, of course, was a little different. I had a baby at home, and that meant driving the hour commute every day instead of staying home so I could squeeze his tiny cheeks.
I was also sick this year, but we won’t talk about that, because I’m still working through my frustration at being sick the ONE week of the year I really needed not to be.
Ugh.
Anyway, my lovely husband (and my awesome sister) took time off work to watch our boy while I was away, and I called in whenever I slipped away to pump so I could coo at him and see his tiny cute face.
He was crying when I called y’all. And then he heard my voice. And started grinning. And laughing. And playing up for the camera.
What a little ham.
I love him.
Adjusting to life as a working mom is definitely a different experience, but we’re getting there! And judging by that grin, he’s not suffering terribly.
Ramblings of an Obsessive Bookworm 