Cold March Evenings

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

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!

Making Progress

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

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.

The Most Exciting Moment of March

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

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

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

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.

Getting Out

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

When I discovered I would be having a baby mid-November, I was terrified.

Don’t get me wrong. We’d been trying to get pregnant for months. More than a year, actually. But the thought of having a newborn in a tiny house that is solely heated by space heaters and a wood stove just at the beginning of a Colorado winter was a little scary.

A lot scary.

Terrifying, to reiterate my original statement.

Plus, I do not do well in winter. And combining seasonal depressive disorder with postpartum depression was… less than ideal.

It’s been a rough couple of months.

But! Things are warming up. And I got outside for the very first time today with Adam. We’ve been into town and we’ve walked over to my parents, but so far, we haven’t ventured far. So today, we braved the mud and slush and went for a mile walk down our road.

It was glorious.

Adam fell asleep immediately.

I’m not sure he even realized he’d been outside.

But! I enjoyed myself, and the sunshine, and even the mud. So it counts.

True Love

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

In honor of Valentine’s Day this year, I would like to let everyone know that, before we started dating, my husband used to come over to my house periodically to hang out and watch a movie with me.

The very first time he did this, I poisoned him with a questionable shrimp.

Accidentally.

I accidentally poisoned him with a questionable shrimp.

This was not intentional, I swear.

Not only did he not complain, he also married me anyway and continues to eat my cooking every single night.

This, folks, is true love.

That is all.

Returning to Normal

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

Do you know something? I haven’t worn my wedding ring in three or four months now.

I took it off around the end of October, I think. Or maybe before. My hands were swelling, my Preeclampsia was progressing and soon would land me in the hospital for an unexpected and unwanted induction, and the eczema caused by all the pregnancy hormones was tearing my hands to shreds and making them bleed.

It just wasn’t the time to be wearing a ring of any sort.

But I slipped it on again this morning. It’s back, safe and sound. My swelling is gone. The eczema is still hanging around, but it’s manageable, and I don’t bleed as often as I used to.

Slowly, things are going back to ‘normal’.

Except they’re not. Because Adam is here, my body is different and probably will never be the same, and even my brain and my soul seem to have changed at their most fundamental, basic levels.

So maybe ‘back to normal’ isn’t the right way to say it. Maybe it’s just ‘finding a new normal’. One that I can embrace and find myself in, despite the enormous changes.

At least my ring still fits. Some things—the most important things—have lasted through the crazy.

Story Time

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

I read aloud to my baby a lot.

Baby books? Yes. We do the silly voices and the bright colors and the black and white contrasts for his little eyes to develop.

But I’ve been reading him full chapter books since I was twenty weeks pregnant, and I don’t intend to stop now. This month, we’re reading one of my oldest and dearest favorites. (I’ll let you guess the title.) He may not understand the story yet, but it’s snuggle time and connection time and, one day, hopefully, he will be just as obsessed with the books as I am.

Plus, I have an excuse to read all my old favorites all over again. What could be better than that?

Juggling

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

I had meetings today.

All day.

Which means, because my husband is amazing and supportive and a terrific dad, he took the day off to hang out with Adam and do guy stuff.

Lots of napping was involved. And apparently they started reading Lord of the Rings together.

You know. Regular daddy/son things.

My heart melted just a tiny bit, but whose wouldn’t?

We’re Building A House!

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

Why is January always the month that seems to last eight thousand years?

Seriously. January is the worst month. Why does it have to be the longest too?

Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. And being a bit of a baby about the snow, negative degree weather, pitch black evenings, and icy roads.

Wait a minute.

No, I’m not.

Guys, I haven’t been able to get my car out of the driveway for weeks. Weeks, I tell you!

Ridiculous.

January is fired.

I’m moving to Mexico to open a chinchilla farm.

Okay, whining aside, I promised y’all a house update. Remember at the beginning of 2022, I told you that we bought an airplane hanger and had broken ground at our new house site? Everything was great, we were excited, progress was happening after a year of waiting, and we were finally going to move out of our 400 sq ft cabin and into a house that was big enough for us to walk by each other in the hallway without turning sideways.

And then . . . reality set it.

Because the next step after breaking ground was to get our plans approved and get our permits in order so we could start building.

Which means . . . the government got involved.

It took months, guys.

Months.

We couldn’t pour concrete for the foundation, we couldn’t get the plumbing in, we couldn’t do anything. We had to sit around on our hands trying to fix all the nitty gritty details so that the government would finally give us permission to build a house on our own land.

I’m not bitter about it at all.

Thankfully, we had an actual angel—for real, I’m actually pretty sure he was a real angel from heaven, you know, the ‘do not be afraid’ ‘I bring you good news of great joy’ kind—who finally got us around the last tripwire, and permits were issued.

After that, we sat around on our hands some more, waiting for the foundation guys to have time in their schedule to come out.

Building a house sounds like a lot of work, but it’s actually three or four days of crazy activity followed by weeks of waiting followed by three or four days of crazy activity followed by weeks of waiting followed by—

You get the idea.

On top of that, winter has set in. Which means icy roads, way too much snow, mud when it all melts (if it melts), and extreme cold.

Okay, maybe not extreme.

Extreme for me.

Oh yeah, and I had a baby and spent a month and a half recovering from a horrible breast infection because apparently breastfeeding is not intuitive and it’s harder than it looks so education is really important, guys, please always remember to have sunflower lecithin on hand before you start breastfeeding and don’t be afraid of pumping right from the beginning, especially if you have a clogged duct.

Inhale.

But!

The foundation is in. The metal building is up. The support beams for the second floor have been installed, as has the plumbing. Once the snow is gone and temperatures are more moderate, we can pour the concrete pad. Until then, we will be working on framing the upstairs, getting in a gas line for our propane stove, leveling the dirt work, and installing the pipes and insulation for our in-floor heating.

In other words, we have plenty to do.

Thankfully, after a year of drumming our heels, we have reached the stage  where most of the work is on us, and things will proceed as quickly as we can handle.

Since both of our little families are living in cramped quarters and have been going crazy with cabin fever this winter, we are pretty motivated. Our hope is to be in the house before we have to spend another winter in our tiny cabin.

Actually, what my sister says is, by the end of summer.

That feels ambitious to me.

But you never know!

Yikes, that was a long update! Let me know what you think in the comments, and any advice you may have for lasting through a long project like this!