Under the weather

We've been battling a cold or flu for the past almost 2 weeks, with me being the last one to get sick, and the last one to (just today) start feeling better. Little M was spared the worst of it, having a cough just before the rest of us got sick, and a cough and stuffy nose just now, but avoiding the high fevers that brought the rest of us to our knees. Now that we are recovering and getting back to our normal work, play, home routines, I'm feeling that sigh of relief that comes when life gets so much more manageable again!

One morning early on while we were sick, I had a burst of energy one morning (trust me, I regretted acting on it later in the day!) and swapped some furniture out in our living space, moving the carpet play area closer to the wood stove so we would have a cozier place to play. Within the hour us three girls were contentedly playing with 'legos' (really duplos, but don't tell Little M!). She has been really into her lego's since about mid-December, before that it was wooden blocks that were the thing. The lego thing is going into its second month now, and I'm absolutely loving building with her - castles, or barns, or barn castles are the most frequent construction. Baby E enjoys 'playing' with us too, although the last week or two she has been getting awfully close to making forward crawling movement, and has needed frequent rescuing as she gets into positions that she can't get out from, and can't comfortably play in either. In the picture below you can also see that Little M got her first real/professional haircut - her bangs finally grew out long enough, and the bob cut is working so well!

Well, I hope you are all well, and enjoying the last bit of winter that the season has been throwing our way (at least here, where we finally have a few inches of snow, and the temps are dipping down into the negatives, and staying well below freezing even during the day!

Guest post over on R-Dub Outdoors!

Thought you might all want to check out a guest post I wrote for the mister's blog, about grouse hunting these past 6 years.

Grouse Hunting Through My Wife's Eyes 

Rory and I met online back in 2008. Our first date was at a Starbucks, where I proceeded to shock him by ordering hot chocolate on a 100 degree day. I'm not sure if that is what prompted him to follow up and ask for a second date (a hike up nearby 'mountain' looking for Shorthorned Lizards), and then a third (another hike on another very hot day), but whatever the reason, a bit over a month later I found myself out hunting for basically the first time of my life.

Read the rest after the link

The upsides of night shifts

Its been a long couple weeks here, and actually its been a long couple of months here, with the mister on night shift plus fall hunting starting up. In actual fact he's nearing the end of a 6 month stretch on night shift, where he's left at either 5 or 7 in the evening, to return shortly before 5 of 7 in the morning. I've only noticed it being especially hard since he went back to work at the end of June after Baby E was born, and more-so since hunting started at the beginning of September; before Baby E came, when it was just me and Little M, it was more do-able. Needless to say I'm looking forward to next month when he starts on day shift (during the week, with both weekend days off with us no less!). I've actually been writing a post about how I feel about this whole night shift process, which I may share next week sometime if I can manage to get it a bit more coherent :)

In the meantime, I needed a pick me up, and decided to write a post about the things I love about this schedule, with him leaving at 7 every evening, getting home just before 7 in the morning, and working mid week through the weekend. So, here goes, what I've been loving...

• evenings with just me and the girls that are incredibly low key. I mean, he leaves at 7, and we can just start getting Little M ready for bed if we want, including a long bath, bedtime snack, bedtime story, brushing teeth, going potty, bedtime songs, getting tucked in, the whole bit.
• evenings with just me and the girls that are more active. When it was still light until easily 8, we would go for walks down the road shortly after the mister left for work. That was fun.
• now that it's dark about when he leaves, lighting a candle on the table and having the flickering light and nice smell in the main room. Even better - having my twinkle star lights in the kitchen window turned on as well.
• having the whole bed to myself (and Baby E) almost every night. Ah, stretching out space how I am going to miss you once all three of us are in the bed every night come day shift next month!
• friday afternoon walks with Baby E along the block and a half of back alleys between my work and Little M's 'new daycare' where she goes once a week right now, and the subsequent errands around town that the three of us girls do to productively waste more time between daycare pickup and the mister's wake up time of 5 o'clock.
• having one or two mornings a week of breakfasts as a family when we wake up about when he gets home and he stays up a bit to hang out with us.
• dashing down to the garden for a brief mama interlude for a few minutes some time between 5 and 7 on the nights where he actually wakes up at 5, supper doesn't take too long for me to make, Baby E isn't too fussy, and it isn't too smoking hot outside at that time of the day.
• the couple of days where he has had some hunting or fishing stuff going on right after work so hasn't gotten home and to bed until mid day or later on his last shift for the week, when that we can be as loud and productive as we want all morning.
• needing only 3 days a week of daycare for Little M, as he is (somewhat) awake and able to be with her during the day the other 2 days a week.
• having supper with him, where he is at least present at the table if not always particularly interested in eating a full meal, every night of the week.
• having limited daily dog chores myself as most mornings and basically every evening he is in charge of feeding them and letting them out.

Ok, well that's all I can think of right now, but this will serve as a great reminder for myself come January when he starts back on night shift, of what positives to focus on to help me start the next 6 months off right :) I think it is helpful to focus on the positives, because then it's them that I remember. Clearly our lives are full of both good things and bad things, but thinking about the past positives makes me a happier person than remembering the past negatives!

Firewood with the littles

When I was a little girl, growing up on 100 acres of mixed deciduous forest on the Canadian shield, every year my little sister and I would help our parents stack the split firewood to dry down by the turnaround, and move the dry wood up to the house and re-stack it inside the woodshed. I have fond memories of the bouncing of the tractor trailer as we rode it back and forth as we were moving the wood, the smell and feel of the wood and the grit associated, and the various critters and their trails we would uncover as we moved the wood.

I remember moving the wood from the trailer into the wheelbarrow, and then wheeling it across the plywood ramp from the trailer into the woodshed, having to adjust the plywood as the load in the trailer got lighter with each wheelbarrow-load, making the trailer approach and then get higher than the woodshed floor. Moving wood was a family affair, and although it was fun, it was serious - we needed that wood to stay warm in the depths of winter. Heating pretty much exclusively with wood, as my parents did and still do, was pretty common where we lived. They had a woodstove in the basement, a cookstove in one side of the kitchen with a large brick chimney behind it, and a fireplace coming off the backside of that chimney in the family room.

Now with 2 little girls of my own, and a wood stove that is our main source of heat, bringing in firewood is again a family chore. This year is the first year Little M has been an active participant, and although she's only stacked a handful of pieces of firewood, I'm glad she's sharing this piece of my childhood.

Every winter we go through between 3 and 4 cords of wood. In our woodshed, that means the lean-to is filled with 4 stacks of wood, and the breezeway has 2 additional stacks. We try to have another stack at the end of the carport, although that usually doesn't get touched. In future years, we want to convert the small closed off room off the breezeway into our main wood storage area, and use the lean-to for equipment storage (like the wood trailer), and thus be able to have nearly 2 years worth of wood on hand, but we're not quite there yet.

We cut our wood (well, the mister cuts our wood) either on the wooded portion of our property, helping to get it thinned out to reduce the forest fire risk, or up on the national forest land using a firewood permit. Normally by this time of the year we've got more, and have just a few loads still to get, but with Baby E we're running a bit behind. Worst case scenario though we just would need to buy some from a friend, so I'm not that worried, and most likely we'll get the wood taken care of mid-fall in the lull before duck hunting, or later once the lakes start freezing and the woods get a bit chillier.

Our favorite swimming spot

This summer after Baby E arrived we found ourselves with not a lot of mama energy for doing things like hiking and exploring, but lots of time for relaxing and playing. We ended up doing a number of drives around exploring new backroads and taking various short day trips to see the sights. We drove the backroads southwest out of our valley into the next in that direction, and northeast out of our valley into the next in that direction. We also stumbled upon this cute little swimming/beach spot right off the highway on one of our loops up and down adjacent side valleys.

We've been back every couple of weeks, and only twice have we had other people there. It was better earlier in the season when the river was still fairly high, when there was less beach space and less people on their summer vacations, but visiting it mid-week like we tend to generally meant less chance for others.

There's room for our blanket and towels, sandcastles & sandturtles, fishing, swimming, wading, and rock skipping.

It has the perfect mix of sand and cobbles, shade and sunbeams, depths and shallows. Its further than our nearest riverside beach, but that one is way too busy all of the time. We like our solitude!

On Juggling

Responsibilities, that is, no juggling balls here!

I've started back at work (very) part time in the past two weeks, with Baby E in tow. I started back with good intentions of not committing to working days unless the night previous Baby E had let me sleep sufficiently to make me feel rested and able to withstand not only the drain of the work hours, but the evening hours as sole parent at home (the mister is on night shift - eww!). However by the end of the first day I'd realized that coming back meant taking on certain responsibilities at work, which unfortunately had rather set deadlines associated.

I really enjoy my job and the responsibilities that come along with it, but I hadn't really given much thought that after this pregnancy, unlike after my pregnancy with Little M, when I was still very new to the office, that my tasks upon coming back to work would be so much more important to the organization. Luckily in most of what we do, time isn't really that important, so I've been able to push the deadline off for a week. But it is still a bit more pressure to come in on a regular basis to get work done than I had anticipated this first month back having! However, since I'm only going in 2 days a week, and even on those days only for 3-4 hours, I really can't complain!

Along with adding back in working outside the home, I'm having to balance that with decreasing things done around the house, especially on days when the baby and Little M are fussy or needy. I'm having to decide what around the house and property I can let go of, or do more efficiently, so that the important things still get done, I get some hours in at work, and most importantly, I stay rested and happy so I'm a good mama! Being a grown up sure comes with a lot of responsibilities I never imagined when I was a kid :)

I'll share a garden update this coming week, just have to find the time to take some pictures of how everything is growing. The raspberries have been a hit the past week or more, we've been bringing in a large bowlful every other day from the lower garden to freeze, and enough for fresh eating from the side garden daily. I'm thinking we won't need any more space for raspberry plants in the side garden once we expand it, because right now we've got more in the freezer than I think we can turn into jams, smoothies, and frozen snacks!

Happy Canada Day!

Some pictures from way too early (baby-induced-lack-of-sleep-wise at least!) on Canada Day :) It's our 4 year marriage anniversary too, which of course we are celebrating in style by taking Little M in to see the doctor about a sore throat/mouth she's had all weekend. And of course getting little sleep due to also cranky Baby E. Sigh... The trenches of motherhood at its best folks! At least the dawn was amazing! :)

She's here!

Baby E has arrived and all are happy, home, and doing quite well :) We couldn't be more thrilled with her!

Daily life while waiting on Baby #2...

Not much to report on lately, just hanging out at my mother in law's place on the lake while waiting for baby to decide she is ready to emerge. We've been here 4 nights, and if I consider 2 weeks late as being the last possible night, we may be here 3 more weeks. gulp. That is a heck of a lot of time for weeds to take over my gardens! A heck of a lot of chicken eggs to build up in the fridge! And a heck of a lot of time to be away from home!

My husband is staying at home, working, until I go into labor, so its lonely for him there missing the little miss and I, and lonely for us here missing him and the gardens and all. We've been keeping busy though, as we've got 2 of the dogs with us, and the lack of a real yard, fenced or not, means multiple walks a day. Whew. At least walking is healthy for the baby!

I'm not sure I'll be posting regularly until we get home after the baby is born, since really I don't have much to share from over here, since mostly all I'm doing on a daily basis is lots of dog walking, food making, and playing outside with the little miss. But I'm sure once we get home I'll have lots of weed photos to share of my overtaken garden spaces! (sigh!) Oh, and surely some baby photos too :)

Our Week in Pictures

The past week has been a bit of a whirlwind, between Little M's first hotel stay and then surgery, casts, and cast removal, several family visits (grandpa, cousins, and then cousins again), first snake sightings of the season (a gophersnake and a rubber boa!), a quick vet visit for Lily (the 4 year old 'puppy') to determine that the alarmingly large & rapidly appearing lump was just a bruise, all on top of the usual spring gardening chores. I'll show you through our week in pictures, ok?

first hotel stay and acceptable bed-jumping = happy hyper girl!

silliness

Pool jumping!

hot tub time with daddy

once the fun left the pool and entered the hot tub, mama got out to read and get ready to snuggle a worn out girl!

Dopey little girl from pre-surgery funny drugs prior to anesthesia

post-op rage when I was expecting neediness (mama take them off -- sorry, I can't love bug -- NO! GO!).

quickly adapting to the casts, happy smiley girl showing back through once more

Cousins! all the better to decorate my casts mom!

Started turning over the soil in the back of the garden for this years dry bean bed

get well soon card from a friend (see those decorated casts?!)

Transplanted the largest peppers and tomatoes into larger pots, the shelf is getting filled quickly!

Figuring out how to eat her favorite food (white cheese 'sticks') with limited arm and hand mobility

Planting potatoes

Digging in the garden

Ummm... getting rather filthy in the garden... Oops! Luckily the casts come off in 24 hours from this point!

 

Saw the first hummingbird of the season, so put up the feeder - no bird on feeder pictures yet, but soon!

One last picture before my casts come off mama!

Bath for a dirty girl with no casts! (the bandages cover the dissolvable stitches for a bit longer

Slight update on day to day life here

I'm still trying to get my schedule figured out what with my husband working the night shift, and with ever diminishing energy levels as the baby gets larger and larger, I'm not sure that I'll find a balance between work and home and rest before baby comes. Doesn't stop me from trying though, and also doesn't stop me from wishing things were simpler!

This past week Little M had bilateral trigger thumb release surgery. She had nodules on the tendon in each of her thumbs, meaning the tendon couldn't slide through the tendon sheath, meaning her thumb couldn't extent to a fully out position, and was forever bent a bit. Three out of my husband's four siblings had the same surgery done on one thumb or the other, back in the day when they were about her age, so it wasn't as scary an experience for us as parents as it would likely have been otherwise.

Little M was really great about it, apart from the whole waking up with casts on each arm almost to her armpits, and an IV in her foot with wrappings all around it, even though we had talked about each of those things happening. I'm sure it would have been hard for her to understand what a cast and IV were, and that they weren't removable, prior to experiencing them. Plus add in the dopeyness of the drugs wearing off, and she kept forgetting about them then realizing they were there again. So that waking up period wasn't such a pretty half hour. Mostly it was hard for my husband and I, as I'm quite sure she won't remember it at all what with the anesthesia. But definitely the hardest moments of my mothering life, that's for sure!

However once she fully woke up and got some food into her system, she was much much better, and much more content with the casts. Since then she has gotten very used to wearing them and has been developing work arounds for most things. For example, this morning I looked over to see her moving all of the shoes in the front hall into rows (one of her favorite things to do when I'm not paying close enough attention). Since she couldn't carry them, she was getting into them and walking them into the row!

She gets the casts off later this week, luckily only has to wear them for a week, and then for the next couple of weeks she'll have bandages on over them to keep the incision sites relatively clean. From how quickly she has adapted to having the casts on, and how little pain she seems to be having from them and the surgery, I really doubt she will remember this as much more than a little blip on her radar, which I'm glad for! I'm also really glad the surgery was able to be scheduled when it was, so that we could get it all done before the baby arrives so that my focus could be all on her for the duration. Yay for things working out :)

Small additions can be great - the sofa table edition

You might have noticed something different if you were very familiar with my main living/dining room and were looking at the picture of the hoya plant in my weekend in pictures post from a few weeks back.

Over the last year I've been dreaming of having a sofa table for storing kid toys, games, and books to go behind the couch in the living room part of the main room. Behind the couch is where we had been keeping Little M's toy bucket, filled with whatever selection of toys we currently had out for her, be it Lego's, doll & dress up clothes, or one of 2 selections of assorted small toys. Our area rug was back there, and we sometimes also had a rocking chair against the wall too. The plan for the area was for it to be a sort of kid-zone, where she was able to ignore the TV since the couch was in the way, and be in a more central location - close to the kitchen, dining room table, and couch. It was working quite well, although often we would have the toy bucket plus several of the storage bins of toys from the hallway, plus a bunch of stuffed animals from her room, plus... You get the picture.

Ahem, this dirty carpet? the result of the Christmas tree falling over twice in the course of an afternoon... christmas tree fail!

Clean up time ended up being more about moving bins back to their hallway or bedroom destinations than about actually cleaning or sorting toys. I was getting sick of hauling bins around, and thought it would be great to have a shelving unit of some sort so that her area could be even more her area. And also so the hallway closet could be devoted to storing other things (like all of the office stuff that used to be in the spare-room-to-be-turned-Little-M-big-girl-room!).

So I put an ikea sofa table on my christmas wish list, and as Christmas Day rolled around, I was rather overly excited to discover that my mother-in-law had happily obliged! After a bit of trouble shooting to get it fitted into our Escape along with our 3 dogs including 2 set up kennels and 1 collapsed kennel, the 3 of us humans, and all of our weekend away gear (plus presents!), I managed to convince everything to just fit in the gosh darn vehicle for me. Yes, there was some creating packing, and our half-way-home pit stop entailed a little bit of manuvering to get access to Little M's potty seat, but we managed to fit everything in, and got the ikea boxes home.

I quickly fell to setting the sofa table up (well, after unpacking the Escape and putting most of the Christmas stuff away), and put it in place. While I was amazed at how much stuff I could fit in it, I was a little dismayed that there was really only room for Little M's toys - more of a quantity of toys issue than a sofa table space issue methinks! It actually worked out well to just have her toys in it, as it made the space much more clearly the kid-zone as opposed to a shared space for some of my puzzles and books as well.

With the addition of the play kitchen (yes, still not quite finished!), my favorite bouncy chair, and Little M's bookshelf, the whole space turned into a great little play and reading area. I'm really happy with the additional space in the hallway closet & in Little M's bedroom shelves, and with not having to lug storage tubs back and forth every couple of days! This way, she can get the bins out on her own, and put them away on her own too - she's becoming quite the tidy-er :) Because of the life season we are in right now, you can see I really don't worry about having everything tucked away just so - the books are rarely staged-photo-worthy, neither are the bins, but just having spots to tuck all of those items away makes the whole area look much more structured & neat I think!

I also love how we've been able to incorporate reading into her daily routine so much easier with the bookshelf right there. before, she occasionally would sit in her room and read books on her bed, but now I quite often find her with a huge pile of books around her, just sitting and 'reading' the perfect selection happily by herself. Not to mention it is a great spot for her and I to sit while reading our bedtime stories!

To cap it off, I'm really pleased with how a relatively small addition has added so much function and purpose to our space! I thought about building my own version of the ikea table, but looking at the progress I've made on the play kitchen past the 'just get it functional' stage, I'm glad I have only 1 rather unfinished piece in the room not two! Ahem, not to mention the lack of window trim, etc - but I love our home, unfinished as it always is!

Balancing gardening & pregnancy

I'm just itching to start planning this summer's garden. I can't wait to look through my seed bins and see what is left over from past years & will still be usable, what seed was saved from last summer's garden, and what seed I will need to buy. I've got a tentative list floating around my head of what I want to change from last year's garden, and a couple of new plants I want to try growing.

The problem is, this here baby, just starting to be kicking up a storm in my belly, is due in mid-June. Now most of my more tender plants get planted out in the first week or two of June most years, depending on the weather. So regardless of whether this baby is early or late, I don't know how much gardening I'll be getting done about that time of the season this year...

I've told myself that one year of not having a huge garden is perfectly acceptable, and I know that with a newborn I won't have a lot of time to be keeping up on weeds, but I'm just still not sure what level of gardening I want to aim for this summer... There are some things that it seems like a no-brainer to grow based on planting time (for example to not-so-tender crops & the crops I just sow as seeds), however some of those crops need a fair amount of weeding throughout the season to grow optimally (onions anyone?!).

So in the meantime I'm trying to put off even looking at my seeds, much less making a list of plants to grow or putting a garden plot plan down on paper until it is a little closer to go time when I need to decide whether I'll start onion seeds or how many I'll start... Since last year we had an amazing onion crop, and I started my onion seeds sometime in March, I've been trying to put off thinking of gardening until February at the earliest. Maybe even mid-February. I figure as long as I've decided on at least the onions by planting time in early March, I should be ok. And really, I've grown onions from seed planted once the ground was workable in the spring too. Not huge onions, not a bumper crop like this past year, but a crop nonetheless. So we'll see. And in the meantime I'll try not to fall asleep thinking about the garden... :)

Little M's first snowshoe

For Christmas we gave Little M her first pair of snowshoes. They are basically purple in color, her favorite color these days, and she just loves them! It took us several weeks to have a daylight moment to go outside and help her take her first steps around the driveway in them, but this past weekend we finally had the right combination of circumstances & were able to get out just at dusk for a quick trip around the house, out to the mailbox, and down in the yard a bit.

At first, I walked behind her to keep her upright, as it took her a little time to get the hang of having to not step on the other snowshoe then try to lift it. Once she figured it out better, all three of us walked hand-in-hand which helped her keep upright, but by the end she was going off on her own, stumbling occasionally still, but she didn't have any real falls! We even got her up on the actual snowpack for the second half of our walk (the first half we just walked on the cleared path and up the driveway to get her used to walking with extra large feet!).

She did really great, and I'm excited for snowshoeing with her in years to come! I've been snowshoeing since I was a little kid, as well as cross country skiing, but snowshoeing was always my favorite. I could go off trail and wander through the woods following whatever animal track I felt like, which was always quite appealing to me.

I'm so glad we got her these snowshoes this year, as she is getting much heavier to carry, especially now that I'm pregnant. The last couple years we just put her in the Ergo pack on my back, or the frame backpack on my husband's back when we went out hiking in the winter, but now that she has her own snowshoes she'll be able to walk around herself for at least part of our hikes!