A message from The Baby

She's always trying to "type" while I'm on the computer so I just let her go at  it today.  Here is what she has to say:
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A]'f mhjmkjbnhk,mnhygjvunklo.bg fgb bruokbjk,jbknkjl,lo;lp jiuuj
  bniluy9oimui76gn ? hb   ;'pp;      l.      

What I want to be when I grow up

 

    I was born in the city.  I lived in the city through my childhood, my youth, and my most of my adult life - the few years I've had anyway.  I never once set foot on a farm, I never helped my mother in the garden, I killed everything I ever attempted to grow.  And then a year and a half ago I left the city.  My husband and I packed up the kids and the dog and went to live in the country.  We left partly out of desire and partly out of necessity and we had no idea how it would go. 

    For a year and a half I have lived 20 minutes from the nearest town and 35 minutes from the nearest city.  I hear coyotes at night instead of the highway.  I hear roosters and cows and goats all day long instead of people and buses and airplanes.  I see stars at night instead of streetlights and stoplights.  It is a beautiful existence.  I even began a garden last year.  Things grew instead of dying!  It was amazing!  And then, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up...a farmer!

     This city girl wants to put on golashes and gloves and muck it up with pigs and chickens!  I want to dig in the dirt and grow vegetables and fruits and herbs!  I dream of a big red barn and a tractor and a greenhouse!  I never, in a million years, thought that I would want any of these things and now I can't wait to have them all. 

Motherhood

Is when you're vomiting into the toilet while you're 4 year old watches from the shower asking you why and you have to explain (in between heaves) that the baby in your tummy makes you sick then while brushing your teeth after, your 8 year old comes into the bathroom to read what her friend wrote on the last day of school.  Oh, and the 4 year old ifs in the shower because he was too busy playing outside to come in and poop in the toilet so he just went in his pants.  Fun times.

Chicken dinner pie courtesy of Betty Crocker.

This pie was super easy and my pickiest kid actually ate it.
I just made a rue with flour and butter and some salt pepper and sage, then added chicken broth I made from the powdered stock stuff and milk.  After that boiled a bit I added some left over chicken and a couple handfuls of frozen mixed vegetables then put the whole thing in a pie crust (that I didn't make)  covered it with another pie crust.  I cut some slits in the top and covered the edges with foil, baked it for 20 minutes then removed the foil and baked for another 15 minutes. 
Yummy!!

I'm a Gardner!

One potato...

                                                                            Two potato...

 

           Three potato...

More!

   Not more potatoes, just more.  Mostly green things and hopefully tomatoes. 

   The potatoes are in a huge, round planter full of topsoil and mulch.  The garden is 4 x 12 x 1.  Our dirt isn't very good here so I had to mix the dirt I took out with half a giant bag of perlite (I know, not organic but effective,relatively safe and on hand), and 3 big buckets of mulch. 

    I still have to cover it with weedblock and get everything planted but I was too proud of my work to wait to post it! 

It's the little things

The last few weeks I've been trying to look on the bright side, you know, count my blessings.  And it's really tiny stuff like being able to button my pants again or getting ALL my laundry done ON laundry day that makes me happy.  The best one was when I was putting the kids to bed last night and The Monkey - who doesn't  hug or kiss me back at bedtime so really I end up just squeezing her head - actually wanted me to pat her back 'til she fell asleep.  It was super cute and made my heart melt.

Lost a Peanut...

Ok, first I just have to say that I strongly dislike Elton John right now.  Sitting in an ER for 8 hours with "The Circle of Life" stuck in your head sucks.  It mostly sucks because the song sounds so beautiful and happy and wonderful when in reality those 8 hours were messy, heartbreaking and slightly embarrassing.  (Oh, and from here on out there's a little TMI so if you're squeamish...stop reading.) 

When you're pregnant, the baby eats your brain and you forget things or you don't believe things or you just don't want to believe things, so when I started having some light bleeding a few days before I was thinking "I'm sure it's nothing.  Those women on TV who never knew they were pregnant had bleeding all the time and their babies were fine.  Sometimes it just...happens".  Of course in my 4 previous pregnancies it had never happened, but I was determined to be optimistic.  "Every pregnancy is different".  Then reality finally hit me.  I went to the bathroom and suddenly I was passing blood clots and bleeding everywhere.  I tried to be cool, took a shower, called my husband, didn't tell anyone else, but it didn't work for long.  My Grandma and Grandpa-In-Law drove me to the hospital and my Hubby met us there and as soon as I got out of the car I started bleeding worse.  I could feel it running down my leg and as I was walking I could feel my jeans sticking to me.  I got into a wheel chair - thankfully, happily even, I just didn't want anyone to see my pants - and that's where I stayed for quite a while. 

First there was triage where they asked questions, drew blood, ordered tests and gave me drugs.  I figured, since I had time before the ultrasound, I should go to the bathroom.  I have to say that there has been nothing in my life more heartbreaking than pulling a dead embryo out of my own vagina.  And when we got to ultrasound there was nothing on the screen but my empty uterus.  From there on out the bleeding slowed down and the drugs kicked in and I just tried to rest.  When they finally got me back to a room and did an exam the NP told me that I had passed some tissue on the table and that my cervix was now closed so the process was complete.  She explained that sometimes these things just happen and it wasn't because of anything I did and that I could get dressed and go home.  Here's where it gets embarrassing; when the nurse cleaned up the absorbent sheet after the exam, she took my undies too and everything went in the trash!  So, the nurse put a diaper on me and not the adult-underwear-ish type.  This was a giant, plastic-covered, tapes-together-like-you're-a-baby diaper!  Great!  And to top it off,  I had to put on jeans that had been soaked in blood and then sat in for 8 hours!  (That's because we live in Retired-Ville and everything closes at 8:00 so there was nowhere to go get anything new.)

So, we went home - emotionally and physically exhausted - and I thought everything would be fine the next day.  WRONG!  I found out that you need to rest almost as much as actually having a baby and that the bleeding lasts much longer than you would think.  I tried to be a superhero and went shopping the next day, bad idea.  The cramping and bleeding got worse.  So, here I've been, hardly getting out of bed for almost a week and I think I'm finally getting better.