I’m not one for settling into a predictable boring life. There is a lot I have to do to maintain a friendship with myself. For example, last year, our car was on it’s last wheels so to speak, and instead of buying a car with the money in  our tiny bank account, we bought a little boat. Still a mode of transportation, we figured. It didn’t help that our car died in the next 6 months. But things tend to work out.

My point in that story, was that I have to do adventurous things to maintain a friendship with myself. I have to be able to look at my life and find myself interesting. I like change and adventuring, unless- apparently, I’m pregnant. If I’m pregnant, I prefer being boring. I prefer nesting into a cozy little hole and piling the blankets around my head and reading classic pregnancy books like “The Guide to Childbirth” and “The Active Birth” and “Birth Reborn” and “Your Birth, Your Way.” But instead, I am tucking my instincts away, under the pile of blankets, and I am packing my house up into boxes to go to the recycling centre, the Nu-to-U and the dump. I am extracting my treasures and putting them in tupperware boxes with labels like “In Case of Fire, Please Grab First!” and “Manda’s Most Precious Possessions, to be brought into the after-life.”

And we have been avoiding small breakdowns like “All I want is frozen pizza for dinner and we have no pizza pan!” and “Where is the pepper? Don’t tell me we packed the pepper?!”

Yes moving is challenging. But, we now have somewhere to move to. Granted, we will be in limbo for a few weeks as we sort out mooring etc. But, read this: We now have a home!

This is our 47 ft home. It is sitting in Sidney, BC right now, awaiting transport, and awaiting a mooring slip at the dock on Pender. Awaiting a new adventure. From farming to sailing, we are onto a new stage.

Don’t worry, the bees will still be happening. I can’t give up my favourite spatula and half my kitchen appliances and the bees now can I?

Dear Baby,

I feel you kicking often now. Especially after I eat. And I think about you a lot, now that you’re reminding me every couple hours with your demands that I eat, or when you nudge me hard in the bladder. I know there is no offense intended.

Already in the 6 short months that you’ve been my belly-resident, you have been squished as I’ve crouched in the garden, weeding. You have been keeping bees with me, when I am so focused on moving slowly, on being unintrusive, you remind me that you are there by giving me a sharp elbow to the belly-button.

You have been sailing, swimming, eating berries with me, petting cats, exploring this beautiful world, but I haven’t met you yet. What are you like, you littlest being that will change my world?

I have so many hopes and dreams for you. But I don’t want to impress my own expectations on you. I want you to feel loved, wholly and completely. I want you to feel validated in your passions, in your likes and dislikes. I want to show you the world, and then be taught how to see the world through your eyes. I am so excited to introduce you to the things I love. But I will try really hard to listen to what you love.

I hope you don’t resent us the life you’re being brought into, the choices we are making of how we want to raise you. I hope you won’t begrudge me for wanting to keep you in cloth diapers, to limit your toy collection, for the alternative lifestyle we are living. Please know we do this with the best intentions, with thought of the impact not only to you but to the world we leave you with.

You have so many people that love you so much already. I’m so excited for you to meet them. I hope you have a great next couple months getting bigger and fatter and slightly squished. Be easy on me and I’ll try to eat what you like, rest, and get Daddy to read aloud to you a lot so you love his voice as much as I do! Happy Belly Living! See you soon.

Love,
Mama

We’ve been re-drafting our life lately. What do we need? What can we do without? I always appreciate these moments of transition and these moments of re-evaluation. It refreshes me and refocuses me. Because I need a purpose or a goal to keep me from being miserable, times like this are exactly what I need.

So we are looking around our tiny thumb-print house, and saying “Do we need that?” And we are forming a list (which I also love) of things to sell, things to recycle, things to give away. The first time I moved, I could fit everything I owned into a Toyota Tercel and it stayed like this for a very long time. Everytime I moved,  I would pack up whatever junk I was driving and it would be that easy. Now, even though we’ve only been on the farm for a year, we have STUFF! How did we get so much stuff? It’s astonishing how easy it is to accumulate even though we look around and realize most of it we were given, we didn’t buy it. What a rich society we live in that we can replace things so often, that we have a surplus that goes to our poorer neighbours (ahem, that’d be me) or the recycling centres, or the *gulp* dump!

And to think, we have a baby coming along, and with the baby, comes the acquiring of stuff that we’ve never even thought of owning. Like a stroller, a carseat, a crib, and clothes for another human being. Already, this babe who has not even emerged into our green earth has stuff stockpiled behind the dresser.

So in this quest to simplify our lives, we are also simplifying our stuff. Do you want any of it? Seriously, if you’re interested, I’ll post a list of what we are trying to relieve ourselves. It’s nice stuff. Stuff I’m fond of, but we just have too much. Please, come, take it.

And we are not hoarders… or pack-rats… We move too often to do this…. We just happen to have passed through a lot of hobbies that we are too busy to pursue…

What do you do to purge yourself of your stuff?

“Disbelieving that interests are only valid if they come with monetary or status gain. We do things for the love of what we do and trust how our needs are always met.”
-The Organic Sister 

I needed to read this quote today.

We’ve been doing a bit re-haul, re-evaluation of what we want from life, what we need, how we want to live, how we want to parent, and how we want to face the world in adventures and impact.

At Backyard Feast, the author and her “Skipper” contemplated living on a boat as a more sustainable, affordable choice but they chose against that.

“Sailing is a light way to live, but you have to get to land to get to your food, and there has to be extra food and supplies that you can buy from those who have more than they need.  Sailing away also began to feel like a kind of opting out of the world’s problems, and ethically I struggled with that too.”

So we didn’t want to throw away that thoughtful glance at living on a boat. Also, there are complication with living on a boat, like laundry and the expense of upkeep. But it is still something we long for in our hearts.

Last week,  I read a lot of the blog by The Moneyless Man, about a man living without any form of currency for the last 18 months. Alternative living like this excites me, though I’m not thinking of throwing away all I know just quite yet.

There are so many different ways to live the 80 or so years we have on this planet, yet most people go to university, (or not) get a job, go into mass amounts of debt to buy a house they won’t own until they retire, work jobs they don’t prefer, (-or hate) and then have to buy things and go on extravagant vacations just to make the rest of their working year bearable. Yes I know, it’s a run-on rhetorical sentence, my English prof would have my head.

I’m not saying that everyone who owns a house and works a full time job is unhappy. I think it’s just important to be mindful of our choices instead of just flowing with the “normal” way of doing things. And that’s what we’re slogging through right now.

What is a sustainable, affordable way for us to live and raise a child? What steps do we need to take now to make that happen?

What do you think of these thoughts, dear reader? Your opinions are highly appreciated.

If all of you have been on the edge of your seats for the last week wondering what happened to my elusive swarm, wonder no longer. Or keep wondering… They are gone. They have flown from their very high perch and found another home. And it is not the home we designated for them. I suppose they wanted to make their own realty choice and did not appreciate our promise of coziness and ample food. If someone promised you milk and honey (sans the milk) wouldn’t you take them up on the offer? I suppose it was just too good to be true. So Gertrudabelle is carrying on, hatching and mating a new queen, Gerty the Second, and the bees are concentrating their power on the blackberries which are in full bloom.

The blueberry watch is on now. We have 500 blueberry plants that Marc tends faithfully, weeding, scything, fertilizing. And they have a great set on them this year. They are hanging in luscious green clumps right now so we keep checking the weather, hoping for some heat to turn them blue. Rather ironic when you think about it that blueberries turn blue because of heat. I turn blue because of cold. Or because I’ve eaten too many blueberries! These are our big farm crop for the Farmer’s Market.

Speaking of Farmer’s Market, I was asked to give a beekeeping workshop this Saturday so off I trotted. I was fortunate enough to snag an observation 1-frame case from someone getting out of beekeeping, and I put a frame from Cleo Hive and took them for show-and-tell at the Market. I think the talk went well and I was encouraged to have people asking really intelligent questions. The children there even seemed quite informed about the honeybee’s life cycle. Except one well-meaning child asked me if I had bees in the case, or wasps. Marc and I giggled about it afterwards, the thought of farming wasps was quite amusing. It ranks up there with farming mosquitos. I think perhaps if I were to be a super-hero villain, I would choose something so insidious.

I had my first ultrasound on Wednesday to see how “Womb-eo” is progressing. Thankfully, he/she has two arms, two legs and a head. And apparently the technician could see the cerebellum (how you would know in a squirming blob of a tiny sea monkey, I have no idea.) and the kidneys, bladder and spine. It was good to see that the squirt was very active and fiesty. Perhaps 5 months squished in utero will calm that down so that the baby will be nothing but a cooing joy when he/she emerges… Well, we can all cling to our delusions!

And I did want to share with you my successes. Since being pregnant, my baking and cooking skills have completely disintegrated. I have burned more things than ever in my life! And I completely blame the cocktail of hormones coursing through my veins, but a couple of the burning incidences have reduced me to tears and hopelessness. But last night, I had a first ever success!

I attempted yorkshire pudding in muffin cups. I have done this before and they have ended up the consistency of hockey pucks, with the potential of seriously cracking drywall. Well, behold these puffy beauties!

I hope your Canada Day was splendid!