There are times when I wonder if I will ever communicate with others and find the time to express myself like I used to. And then I wonder why I feel the need to do so. And then I wonder why I think that my communicating will make the world a better or more interesting place. And then I wonder if this is because I was an only child, made to feel unique in a world that really does not see me that way. And then I wonder if this is a good or a bad thing. And then I wonder if I am doing all the right things to strike some perfect balance of self-respect and self-deprecation in my own child. And then I google it. And then I discover that there are as many opinions on this as there are varying theories on child training, and then my head explodes and I go take a nap. Or I try to. This depends on whether my own “little emperor” deems it time to nap himself, because if not, there will be no nap for his mother, just more of the constant rotation of feeding him, changing his pants, and keeping him from killing himself or destroying property.

In the last eight months, my wee darling has changed from a giggling, wobbly baby, lurching into his first steps, to a toddler, running around with his shoes on the wrong feet, intent on the sole purpose of his existence- destruction. Be it property, serenity, or schedule, all must be destroyed. He does this mostly with the supreme happiness found only by those fulfilling perfectly their life’s purpose- giggles and shrieks, little ditties and tunes, words we sometimes recognize and sometimes not.  Today, it was throwing fruit. Expensive fruit, I might add. Oranges and avocados. Off the table, they bounced and rolled across the floor. Then all gathered back onto the table to repeat. Then chagrin when this most amazing game was discovered and shut down. Then it was the lampshade. How can one best fit a bike helmet inside a lampshade? And better yet, what could one do with a bike helmet covered by a lampshade?

I find myself raising a little mechanic, in spite of my idealistic ideas of crushing gender role expectations and showing him that both sexes can be nurturers, both sexes can be mechanical, and that no color, toy, or occupation is specifically “girly”. He does hug his stuffed animals, but it appears he does so more when the dog is observing and salivating over the toy, waiting to grab it and cover it in doggy slobber and dirt. As in, nobody even had to teach him to antagonize and try to incite jealousy. He played with a borrowed doll with a poked-out eye this weekend, and spent the evening trying to poke out the other eye. However, he also observed the use of wrenches and pliers before he could walk, and now every bolt needs a tool, and when bolt and tool are both available, he knows exactly what to do. Every moving part is a challenge to study and figure out why it moves the way it does. Movement, or even the suggestion of it, is mesmerizing- even in the most crudely drawn of his cardboard books, he finds the pages with basic representations of trucks, loaders, trains or cars, and insists we read those pages over and over.

To add to the utter uselessness of trying to redirect these tendencies to something more nurturing is his lack of concern over bumps, bruises, and things that make other kids cry. Falling off a rocking horse and bumping his head is cause for a sober two seconds of rubbing the bumped spot, a grin and giggle because it must have been hilarious, seeing him go all upside down like that, and a climb right back on, to apply the lesson we just learned in balance or the need to hold on more tightly. We as his parents feel somewhat responsible for this, since one of the few intentional parenting decisions we made was the one to never run to him for bumps unless he asked us to by crying- in which case we never delayed, but picked him up immediately for kisses and cuddles. We are not sure if it was this decision or his personality (isn’t that always the big question?) that has made getting hurt such a non-issue, but it honestly seems like knowing he will be picked up every time and have to endure kisses and cuddles over cry-worthy bumps and scrapes has him stopping to consider, before crying, whether he has the time or patience to deal with such an interruption to his play.

The other conscious decision we made as parents was the controversial one to allow him to make all decisions about his own independence. His dad and I spent ten years before the wee one existed having grown-up movie nights, uninterrupted sleep, cuddles and privacy. Our delayed decision to have kids was based on wanting to be completely prepared to spend these few, short, most formative years sacrificing our own luxuries to create an environment for our child that would never feel less than safe or secure. As a result, we have thrown out the books that proclaim a bed shared with kids makes for an unhappy marriage, that forcing toddlers into independence is the only way to make them responsible adults, that forcing them to cry themselves to sleep, limiting their dependence on others, is a good thing and the only way to create jaded adults prepared to face a cruel world. And again, the big question is, does this style of parenting create a calm, self-reliant personality, or does a calm, self-reliant personality thrive with this sort of parenting? We do know that we have a child who is not afraid of anything that we have yet discovered. A bit wary of strangers, but fiercely independent. One by one, he is making those decisions. He is deciding to fall asleep without being rocked or nursed, knowing that if he needs help relaxing, it will be available. He is choosing his own bed over ours, at least for part of the night. He has never been a very “clingy” kid, except for when he is sick or tired. I only hope this creates the sort of independent teenager those who have gone before us claim it will- one not so easily convinced by peers to become a hormone-fueled, drunken idiot. But time will tell.

This parenting thing is such a learn-as-you-go endeavor. We don’t have the answers. We don’t claim to. But when I think about the sort of person I want my child to be as an adult, I think, empathetic. Kind. Resourceful. Self assured. I do not think, obedient. I only think, respectful. Because there is a difference. Respect means choosing to do something wanted by someone else out of a wish to choose the long term, greater peace over a short term personal victory in conflict. And this is not a toddler sort of concept. So my biggest question at the moment is how to gently bring a small, undeveloped brain only just able to grasp simple mechanical and relational concepts to understand obedience that is in their best interest, and parental authority in spite of the fact that said parent so highly values personal independence and decision making processes, if not agreeing with the final decision. So far, it has been a simple process of reading each situation and trying to understand it from his point of view, and tailoring a response. However, he has not yet reached the full strength of personality that I expect to see in his 2’s and 3’s, and he still has a stronger desire to please than to destroy or misbehave. So again, I can only hope the answers will be there when I need them, because I’ll be danged if I have any now.

As far as newsy updates, our life is back in limbo. This time, our housing is secure for as long as we need it, but B’s manure-spreading business, which treated us so well for the first year, began to fail in its second and third year. The manure simply became less available, and due to a monopoly on the source by a company that uses it to make compost. Our agreement with this company was that a household-budget sustaining amount of raw manure would be available, and I guess technically it was available, but when the price was raised beyond what farmers were willing to pay, we found ourselves without a steady income, which dwindled to an income that was closer to nonexistent. Meanwhile, the payments on equipment continued to be expected by the bank (funny how that works) and repairs on his truck left B spending what money he managed to make on just keeping the equipment running and ready, should the opportunity for work arise. So, one day back in May, he pulled his truck and loader into the shop one last time, fixed everything he knew was wrong with them, and spread the word that they were for sale. He did not expect much interest, given his luck with finding work for them, but they sold within a month. And suddenly, there we sat. No job. No optimistic waiting for the phone to ring and for everything to turn around. No income. A nice little (and when I say little, I am not being modest- it really is quite small- enough to live on frugally for about a year, or maybe make a down payment on a house or a business, if the price is right) nest egg that we had made on the sale of the equipment.

Bobby had a job prospect in Nebraska, selling compost for my cousin (in a big family, everyone’s your cousin, right? The exact family relationship is hard to recite) that started in August, leaving us the months of June and July to wonder what might become of us. In order to take his mind off the fear that he may not actually turn out to be a salesman, B suggested we hit the road for somewhere. We tossed around ideas of exotic locations, and far away ones, but in the end, we decided to use the money we would have spent on hotels and airline tickets, and spend it on a travel trailer we could park in some high mountain location the next two months, and then park in Nebraska to live in once his job started.

Which is what we did. We searched classifieds and listings frantically for a week, and located a camper we thought we might like in Central Kansas. Turned out we hated it, it had been heavily smoked in, but another one on the lot caught our eye and we bought it. Like we do everything- make a decision, act on decision with dizzying speed. We brought it home, filled it with bikes and gear, and left for Colorado.

We had to come home for two weeks somewhere in there to sheetrock the basement, a project that had been back-burnered and which B’s dad was finally available for the farm to hire to help us with. Then it was back to Colorado for more sun-soaked afternoons on bikes. I went from no riding in Kansas to over 150 miles a week in Colorado, keeping both road and mountain bike hot and trying to reclaim a fitness level in weeks that it had taken me years to attain when I lived there. I volunteered at the Firecracker 50 over the 4th of July in Breckenridge, a 50 mile mountain bike race that I spent the day both wishing I could be riding in, and almost glad I wasn't, seeing the exhaustion on the faces of the contestants. It was enough that I commuted there by bike every day over Swan Mountain, flying down Swan Mountain road at 35 mph, low over my handlebars, feeling supremly alive and in the moment.

After several weeks of adjusting to the altitude, I was starting to feel confident that I could even enter a race- not to win, of course. Just to remember that racing feeling and maybe finish within sight of the back of the would-have-been last place finisher.

The day before I wanted to register to race the shortest leg of the Breck 100, I began to suspect something was awry. I felt a bit off. In a disturbingly familiar way. I rode my bike to Wal Mart in Frisco and got a sympathetic “good luck” from the gal who sold me the pregnancy test, and I rode home and peed on it. Studied it in several different lights, and decided there might be a shadow of a line. Took another the next day (always buy these things in two-packs, gals) and yep, there it was. So instead of registering for a race, I loaded up D in his bike trailer and pulled him to High Country Health Care, where they informed me I was not, in fact, pregnant. I convinced them to dig the test back out of the trash and look again. Ah, but I was. There was the line, after all. All of which had to be confirmed if I was going to get on supplemental progesterone, which seems to be a key requirement if I am going to stay pregnant.

As I rode home from the clinic, between calls to my fertility clinic in Omaha and trying to track down a compounding pharmacy at 4pm on a Friday, I finally had time to process what this actually meant. Was I okay with it? B seemed a bit shell-shocked, but rallied quickly. We had been rather laissez-faire about birth control, after having played roulette more and more irresponsibly in the last eight months, hating the effects of hormonal birth control, so we had been just winging it by reading my cycles every month to decide when was "safe" and when was not. We had almost decided maybe we didn’t need it at all, and wondered if trying to prevent another pregnancy was biting the hand, considering how hard it was to make our precious little D (although it was nothing by true fertility warrior's standards) and how hard it might be to make another baby. We knew we wanted two kids eventually, just hadn’t planned on it happening when the timing was so much less than ideal. But we both have said that we would so much rather have a happy, if untimely, accident next time than have to live through another year and a half of two-week-waits, every month another negative result, the few positive results short lived, the loss felt more deeply for how deeply it was wanted.

So it was hard to process our emotions about it all when a few days later I miscarried, in spite of the too little, too late progesterone. There was a bit of relief, a bit of guilt over feeling relief, a bit of sadness over the loss of something we had only just learned we had, a bit of apprehension over what this meant- obviously I am still somewhat reproductively challenged. We had hoped that one successful pregnancy would change that. What sort of long, heartbreaking process would making our second baby require?  

The following day we moved camp up to Crested Butte. I was running a high fever, shivering and demanding the air conditioning be left off and the vehicle be rendered a sauna, the miscarriage-induced pain and crashing hormones were doing a number on my mood, but we still lurched through a rocky, relationship testing setting-up of camp and told each other that we were here to have fun, so darn it, we were going to.

And we tried. I even treated myself to an hour of yoga beside the stream in a damp, emerald patch of grass, followed by a cocktail by the fire, feeling guiltily happy because cocktails by the fire were one of the many things I would not be abe to enjoy if I were still pregnant. We plotted the next day's bike rides, which proved difficult since we had no data coverage and we were still reying on online maps. But due to my fever having turned into a racking cough and nasty cold, it really didn’t get fun until I felt better a few days later, by which time we had we moved camp out of Cement Creek canyon and up to the Oh-Be-Joyful area, a wide open, high valley along the Slate River with majestic views of high peaks and a cascading stream below the flat (and free!) spot we set up camp. There, we unloaded our bikes and set out to explore.

Luck was with me, because on my first big ride, at the top of the 401 trail, an essential Crested Butte ride through high alpine meadows armpit-deep in wildflowers, while enjoying the view and catching my breath from the relatively short but steep climb, I struck up a conversation with Mark from Boulder. After answering a few questions about what to expect on the descent, he offered to allow me to keep him in sight, lest I miss a turn. We rode down, lost each other close to the bottom, and B was waiting for me in the town of Gothic when I finished. That evening we went to Mt Crested Butte to allow B to take advantage of the free Friday night bike haul, in which he was spared the climbing part of riding the mountain’s trails and transported to the top via chairlift. I walked over to stand in line with him, and the person beside him in line happened to be Mark from Boulder. Recognition and introductions followed, then B and Markfromboulder made several runs together. This turned into an invitation to come back to Markfromboulder’s condo, and use his shower in exchange for beer.  

It turned out to be a really great chance meeting. Not only did we get several more days of free showers out of the deal, I got to follow him on Reno/Flag/Bear/Deadman’s loop, a convoluted, 18 mile trail system in the middle of a complete cellphone dead zone. I had given up on being able to ride this highly recommended, classic Crested Butte ride, since I would have had to do it on my own with no way to call for help if it was needed. And it did not disappoint. Every climb was grueling, but every descent was unique in its challenges and completely exhilarating.

We stayed in our fabulous campsite along Slate River as long as Forest Service camping guidelines allowed- 14 days. Then, wondering if we were making a mistake leaving such a wonderful place, we packed up again and hit the road for Steamboat Springs. We had an incredibly relaxing afternoon soaking in the Crystal River in Penny Hot Springs, the bubble of hot water that pours into the Crystal River outside of Carbondale. We moved a few rocks to allow more cold water than normal to fill our little pool so that D could play without overheating, and watched him as he threw rocks into the swift, cold water moving past a few feet away, played with his rubber ducky toy bobbing on the water, found “special” pebbles to line up on mama’s tummy to keep for later.

We never got out our bikes, at least not for legitimate rides, again. Steamboat Lake was a daily affair of hiking down to our little “swimming beach”, the only spot where the trail dipped down close to the water and a small patch of sand washed up, letting D and Andy splash, floating in the waves from boat wakes with lake slime between our toes. This was also our daily bath. One develops new standards of clean when one is camping.

We did accomplish our one big goal at Steamboat, which was a day at Strawberry Park Hot Springs. The most wonderful hot springs in our admittedly limited experience of hot springs. Cascading natural-stone-walled pools, each with a bit more of the cold stream mixed in so each pool is progressively cooler, with the bottom one being just the right temperature for spending all day in. Again, with a toddler, we worried about overheating him, so we traded off, one of us in the cool pool with him, one soaking up rays and geothermal heat in the hotter pool just over the stone wall.

We spent the last two days of our vacation in Denver in the rain, an anticlimactic end to our sun-soaked, color- washed  six week mountain odyssey.

As we were walking through a soggy Denver cityscape, B suddenly asked me how long it had been since I had had the miscarriage. Should we be worried yet about maybe trying to not get me pregnant again? I had, in fact, been asking myself this very question, trying to process my mixture of relief and loss, wondering if we should be trying, not trying, or just not-not trying. In the past, it has taken about six months to get pregnant again after a miscarriage, so it wasn’t a question I felt needed answered right away, but still, as that monthly two-day fertile window approached, I wondered why B wasn’t freaking out, and in typical female fashion, began trying to read meaning into his complete lack of concern. And decided that, for this month anyway, so soon after a miscarriage when I typically am even less fertile than normal, I should just not even bring it up. So when he suddenly realized that we were past the time when we should have been worried about it, and pessimistically, if playfully, aimed a kick at my backside, proclaiming me already pregnant again, I could do nothing but shrug and act a bit clueless. Which, although I doubted I could possibly be pregnant, I still tried to read- did he sound hopeful? Was I imagining it?

Well, as they say, the rest is history. Since August first, we have been doing a lot of traveling back and forth between Kansas and Nebraska. It is far too early to tell if his contacts up there will turn into sales eventually, so far he is just meeting farmers and introducing them to a product many have never heard of before. Knowing farmers, it will be a long time before they are actually willing to pay real dollars to try this product. We are trying to stay optimistic, but realistic. After a quick foray into the Kearney, Nebraska real estate market, we decided to wait until the job is secure before we find a place to live there. Renting is apparently not an option, because nobody in Kearney will rent to a family with a 65 lb Golden Retriever. (Did you really just suggest that we “get rid” of Andy- our spastic, frustrating, endearing, galactically clumsy, toxically gassy galoot who has shared our bedroom, often our bed, every road trip, adventure, and defining moment of our lives in the last six and a half years? Clearly, we can no longer be friends.) So we are hoping for a mild winter, since our camper is a three season camper- designed for nippy autumn nights more than deep arctic chill. In the meantime, I bounce back and forth over the four hour stretch of road that separates us- home to care for garden and feed and reassure our fearless watchcat, Marvin, a week of allowing D and his grandparents to reconnect, then back to Nebraska for another period of time living in much closer quarters with a rambunctious 20 month old, helping his neat-freak father constantly try to stay ahead of the messes that can happen when a family shares a 29 ft long space, and trying not to stumble too many times over the previously mentioned gassy galoot of a dog, who takes up a surprising amount of space, not to mention fresh air, when he is stretched out luxuriously in the company of his most adored humans.

And yes, as it turns out, I can get pregnant again right after a miscarriage. This one started out so much stronger than any other pregnancy I have experienced. I felt sick immediately, and I’m not an easy vomiter (I am almost jealous of those who are- they can just expel the contents of their churning stomach and feel better momentarily) so I have had to weather this constant nausea. At almost 11 weeks, it is starting to lift, which is a big relief- last time, I had the luxury, all but a few weeks, of letting the food aversions rage and just simply not eating. But this time if I get even slightly hungry, nausea hits, so in spite of aversions to almost every even slightly healthy food I can think of, I have been eating constantly, forcing down dry toast that is suddenly revolting, small pieces of obligatory fruit that is full of crisp, sweetly tart, horrifying flavor (just can’t manage to wrap my mind around the overwhelming flavor cacophony that is vegetables enough to engage in the intimate process of ingesting them, with all that horrifying tasting and experiencing the texture and actual swallowing that goes along with it), cheese that tastes of rot, and meat that tastes far too chickeny or beefy to actually be appetizing. My doctor shook her head at my three pound weight gain in three weeks. I shook my head too, and shrugged. What can I say? It’s not like I wanted to eat it. If only sweet breads and oatmeal cookies didn’t make my blood sugar jump for joy, creating almost instant calm in my stomach, it would be easy to follow those early pregnancy diet guidelines.

But for all of that, my progesterone is higher than my last pregnancy, the baby’s heartbeat is higher, and it is measuring more closely to my known conception date. I feel like this is a more healthy pregnancy than D’s was. I am still supplementing hormones, but almost wonder if this time, I might not need to. And we are processing that sometimes, pregnancies create babies. Newborns. In addition to toddlers who will be two years and three months when the new baby is born. We are glad that we don’t have to deal with this until April. We hope. I am already giving this one pep talks about staying in there until full term. I would love to give birth to a baby who knows how to do things like nurse and, oh, breathe without occasional worrying interruptions. Plus, March is only five and a half months away. Just no. In spite of being excited about meeting this newest wee one, and this undeservedly easy pregnancy, I need that extra month. Life is just too complicated right now, living in two places. We need time to let the chips fall and assess where we are at before we add a tiny, helpless human to this mix. 

I often wonder what our lives would be like if our scare with recurrent miscarriage had become a permanent thing without an answer. I would like to just go ahead and offend every parent out there who thinks kids are essential to happiness and say that, after I had finished fighting it, gone through the process of grief, and accepted that kids weren’t going to happen for us, I think we would have had a really great life. It would have been different than the one we have now, yes. But not worse. For one thing, I would be working, taking the pressure off B to be the sole provider for a family of four plus dog. We would have so many more options, because we would be able to be more resourceful, and therefore, more locations would be open for us to live, or just stay for a time. My days now are filled with the absolute sunshine of a happy little boy in a golden time of his development, his little voice echoing in my ears even when he is asleep, his beautiful, dark-lashed, ice-blue eyes meeting mine in unquestioning trust, his soft skin brushing mine when we nap snuggled together, the way he melts when I pick him up, feeling perfectly safe with his mama. All of the new discoveries and new connections that make me feel as triumphant as he does, watching the incredible process of a small mind that knew nothing about anything a year and a half ago, and now has so much information stored, just waiting to be accessed at the right time to make the most astounding new discoveries. All the endless wonder of everyday things has me seeing the world in ways as fresh and new as his own observations. 

But. I could also be happy with adult time, finding witty turns of phrase with friends and coworkers, coming home to an exuberant dog that I actually had the energy to take for a run. I could be fit, and B and I could use that bit of extra income we used to have on fun experiences together, and our happiness would not come from merely not knowing what we were missing. I just want to throw that out there. In a world in which infertility seems to be becoming more and more of a thing, especially for the people who have made the decision to wait until they were emotionally and financially prepared to have a child, it is okay to view a childless life as one that is not in some way broken. Even a life spent childless by choice is not a selfish or a narrow-minded one. It is one that is able to be lived, in many ways, larger. Instead of seeing the world represented in the differences between two pebbles and a child’s fascination with things like shadows and frogs and basic mechanical concepts, they get to actually, you know, see the world. Like the Taj Mahal and northern lights and Mt Kilimanjaro and the Sahara.  And it is these people who bring new ideas and a reminder that the world is bigger than the backyard sandbox to the parents at home who barely remember what it was like to simply put on their shoes and walk out their front door, meet friends, and go on grown-up adventures.

Hello and welcome to the land of fall. We have had our first snow, followed the next morning by our first deep frost, which squashed the tomatoes flat, shriveled up the pepper plants, turned the basil black, and shrunk the eggplants. Two days ago, I went out to my summer garden and pulled up all of the plants the cold had ruined, loaded them into the tractor scoop and hauled them away. I have a laundry basket filled with ripe and semi ripe tomatoes, as opposed to the basement room full last year. That's okay. I thought I'd never get through processing all of those tomatoes last year. Now the garden is bare again, except for a few surviving lettuce leaves, some surviving parsley, chives, and ciantro, and the strawberry patch. And, of course, for the plant and straw material that will rot in/over it this winter to feed it for next spring.

Our plans for this winter are in the process of being finalized. Bobby will take Daniel and me to the Garden City airport in January, drop us off, then hit the road for Orlando.  I will fly to Ft Myers along with Bobby's sister and his brother's family, thus saving little D twenty carseat hours, we will all rent a car or perhaps borrow his dad's vehicle, stay with his dad in Ft Myers for a few days, then drive up to Orlando and meet B, where we all have a resort condo rented for a week of theme parks for the kids (big and little) and poolside lounging. Then we will all drive back to Ft Myers for several more days, the rest of the family will fly home, and B and I will stay as long as we can. My parents will be dog sitting during this time, so we won't be gone for longer than two months. Work will determine when we need to return to the land of howling winter wind.

I am tempting myself with registering for the Naples or Key West Half Marathon in January. Even though I have not run 13.1 miles since before little D was born. I dont think I'll die. I might uncontrollably crap my pants or projectile vomit on a palm tree, but I know I could at least finish. I wouldn't be going for a record time, just as long as it took. I have done several 10K runs since D was born, and they felt good, even though my miles are several minutes longer now than they used to be. I just have no time to train for a half marathon, and it occurs to me that the way to still be able to run a half marathon when one has no time for training is to simply cut out the training. Sounds like a solid plan. No way that could go wrong.

So where are we in our grand process of searching for sustainability and self-sufficiency? Well. Glad you asked. I feel like there have been wins and losses this year.

Separating my garden-big win. Even though grandma's garden plot is not far from the house, it is too far. I absolutely loved having fresh vegetables literally two steps from my kitchen door. We wasted not and wanted not, with it so close. However, it was the first year in a new location, and the soil came from an area that was chosen for aesthetic reasons- you can't see the big ugly hole- than it was for it's natural nutrient profile. So it ended up being very bland soil with lots of thorny weed seeds I had to really work to stay on top of. The soil profile I could have worked with, had I done even the smallest amount of research into which sorts of plants require which sorts of soil. As it was, I planted strawberries, which need a lot of nitrogen, next to eggplants, which do not tolerate rich soil, next to watermelon, which climbs on everything and takes a lot of water, next to peppers which are easily overwatered. I also planted basil next to cilantro, and the basil exploded and covered up my cilantro,  which burned up and went to seed about the time I needed it, and then, after fresh salsa season was past, all of those seeds sprouted and grew all over my garden. Actually, the only complete failure was the eggplant. I applied turkey poop over the whole garden mid-summer, which pretty much everything loved except the eggplant, who's fruit turned from deep purple to sickly yellow within a week.

And in the meantime, my winter root garden just grew up in weeds. We mowed close around it. This was planned, since last year, I fenced it in and spread out my plantings with little thought to what order they would be harvested in. This year, I kept it compact and tried to plant with harvest times progressing from east to west so we could harvest, then mow and not need to weed anymore in the areas already harvested. I went out about three times since planting it this spring and weeded, and the nightmare weeds just immediately came back. This, of course, is mostly thanks to me overextending myself garden-wise last summer, then not feeling much like dragging my giant pregnant butt out there to care for it, and the weeds going to seed. I don't know what the weeds are out there. Some sort of bastardization of wild amaranth, it seems like. The seedy tops are somewhat the same, but instead of bristly seed heads, they are stickery, thistle like tops that scratch and tear and leave you wanting to remove your skin along with your clothes when you come inside.

However, the soil in the winter garden is..mwaaah. Benissimo. Black and loamy and loaded with earthworms, and just sandy enough that roots go crazy in it. It has grown the vegetables to feed my family for many, many years. That soil is written into my DNA. It fed my grandmother as my mother was forming inside her, it fed my mother as I was forming, it fed my son as he was forming. Our cells are formed of the stuff we feed them, and the cells of this family are formed at least partially from that plot of dirt. It sets one's mind to complemplating circles of life when one kneels in the family homestead's garden. All of the energy we borrow, then give back when our time here is done, and where that energy comes from. And then you realize that without nutrient, there would be no life, and then you realize that you are not only standing in a vegetable garden, but in the cradle of life itself. And then you realize that you are close to making some some illusive, profound connection, one that will leave you the next time you flippantly grab a bunch of bananas and a gallon of ice cream at the supermarket.

Actually, my intention for the day is to go out to the winter garden and harvest. I have three rows of potatoes to dig- a row of red potatoes, a pow of white, and a row of purple. Plus some sweet potatoes we optimistically stuck in the ground. I am hoping to find they did what they were supposed to do. Three rows of carrots, a row of beets, and two rows of onions need to come in, be washed up and then go to my mom's "root cellar", which is actually the cement lined hole that houses the well at her house. This is much harder to access since the twister tore through their yard this spring, playfully picking up the well house and tossing it through a tree, which splintered it, then into the neighbor's freshly re-stuccoed, freshly painted house and the vehicle parked in front of it.

At which point, the mower will come out one more time, and I will mow it close to the ground, and hopefully this winter we will get some moisture and a deep freeze to break up and soften the ground deep underneath it, because we did not have enough moisture followed by a deep enough freeze last winter and as a result, my carrots could only go as far down as the prongs of my spading fork, since that was as deep as I loosened the soil.

I am both relieved and sad that at this point, the only animals on the yard are Andy and a succession of barn cats. And Marvelous Marvin, the big yellow neutered tomcat, who has decided to come home again. He was gone for two weeks this month. I had been mourning his passing for several days already when one morning, there he was in the barn, awaiting catfood. Where he goes, he's not saying. But he comes home lean and clingy and covered in scratches, his ears shredded, his chin and neck rough from scabs hiding under his thick fur.

Hello and welcome back! I can't believe it is September already. The sun rises later and later in the mornings. Now it doesn't rise until after my first yoga class is over.

I find myself juggling work and raising a child, which I both love and hate. I honestly think my job (be it ever so part time) makes me even more happy to be home with my little sweetheart than if I never left the house without him. But on the "on" weeks  (every first and third week I add health coaching to my yoga schedule) I've gotta admit, I feel a tiny bit overextended. I am always rushing off to meet someone, or making arrangements for babysitting.

B is working again. Ever since wheat harvest ended, there has been demand for manure and, with the rain we have gotten, now there is supply as well. At least in some feedyards. We are still dealing with ongoing issues with supply, but we are limping, as opposed to dead in the water. This means he is rarely home these days. I think he secretly looks forward to Thursdays because on those days, he can stay in bed at least until the sun has risen, since I have no babysitter for Thursday morning. I get home at 8:30, throw an omelet together for him, pack his lunch, and as soon as he is out the door, finally kiss my baby, change out of my yoga pants, feed the cats, and start my day. Which may or may not involve a nap after two hours of yoga. More often not, but some days the universe aligns and the baby falls asleep after I have gotten enough done to feel as though I have earned a little snooze.

I have done yoga many times, in many different places, with many different teachers, but never every. single. scheduled. day for nearly three months, as I have done now. For the first month and a half, I was doing seven hours a week. That has now been cut back to five. But I am starting to feel strong and flexible and I love it. All of that muscle shortening that happened when I was training for bike racing, all of the running and biking and lifting and neglecting to stretch, is being undone.

My chickens have all been moved to my mom's yard, since mine was a dangerous place for them. I just hate seeing my birdies get killed in Discovery Channel fashion. Nature is so cruel. Although it was domestic dogs that did it.

I have become obsessed lately with cooking as from scratch as possible. Mostly because I have decided to limit genetically modified grains from our diet, and most supermarket food comes with an extra helping of GMO ingredients. Especially out here where said GMO ingredients are grown. So I have begun spending more time in my kitchen, pounding out the staples. So far, I am making our own bread again (we try to not eat bread, but nothing really works in B's lunches except sandwiches. The man refuses to stop and eat, so everything he eats has to be one-fisted and on the fly. Plus, a sandwich, he can slide out of a baggie and never have to touch, since hand washing stations aren't exactly plentiful out in the blowing manure dust). We eat a lot of Mexican food, so I embraced a resource of my era and googled how to make corn tortillas from scratch (since it is hard to find non-GMO masa out here, without ordering it on the internet.) I am feeling pretty incredibly crafty about that. I start with corn. Kernels of yellow corn. I boil it with powdered lime, then let it sit for a day or two, then return to it and scrub the kernels until they are shiny and hulled. Then I feed them through my food mill, add salt and coconut oil, shape into tortillas, and bake. I just got my very own tortilla press the other day, so I can now combine those last two steps- instead of placing a dough ball between sheets of wax paper, then smashing it between two floor tiles by stepping on them, then transferring the tortilla to my pizza stone placed under my oven broiler, I can now just place the tortilla press on the burner (it's cast iron, not cast aluminum like most), and press. It cooks just enough to hold it's shape but remains soft, and I can finish it in the oven or on the stove just before serving. Add homemade pico de gallo, all ingredients from the garden outside my door, some sort of shredded, homegrown, free range meat (our options are beef or chicken), a bit of shredded garden lettuce, and oh, my. I can now add this to my repertoire which already includes Eastern European food (Bierocks with cabbage, carrots, and onions from my garden, flour from our local organic mill) Greek (Gyros made with locally grown and milled flour, filled with seasoned beef -no lambs have been raised around here-lettuce and tomatoes from the garden, tzatziki sauce made from garden cucumbers and garden garlic and sadly, supermarket yogurt) and Italian (homemade basil egg noodles with optionally one of our optional two meats, with either homemade marinara or homemade pesto. Minus the cheese, of course.) I had the option of raw goat's milk at one point, still would, if I were not too busy at this point to add a milk goat to my schedule. I would like to call my neighbor and see if I could just milk one for long enough to at least get some cheese frozen.

But at the moment, I am preoccupied with being a mama. And all of these things will (might) still be here in the future. My little boy will not. Not as he is now, that is. I don't necessarily feel guilty, as I hear other mamas say they do when they are away from their babies, I just feel sad when my baby isn't in my arms. I imagine I can almost see his little cells dividing, stretching him out, growing him up. This is the sweetest time in my life, and I cant really afford to share it with a lot of other projects. Not because I can't. Because I won't. I could choose to run around and be even more busy, I could choose to have a cleaner house some days because he is just fine sitting under the table talking to himself and unpacking the diaper bag. But my heart isn't in it. I would much rather be under the table too. When he sleeps, I want to sleep curled around him, smelling his shiny, silky hair that is losing it's baby black and turning little boy blonde. When he plays, I want to play with him. And somewhere in there, I have just enough time to teach yoga, cook at least two meals a day, work in my garden, clean my kitchen, keep my floors free of choking hazards, and every other week, spend six hours coaching clients.

It is a good life. This winter, we hope to leave town for a few months and go down to southern Florida to stay with B's dad, enjoying balmy gulf breezes instead of cold, howling, damp western Kansas wind. We are getting more excited about that by the day. It helps keep B trucking through his breakneck 15 hour days. It makes me feel as though there might be a time when I can get back on track with running or biking, because there will be someone to watch the baby and the weather will be nice enough I will want to be in it. (Even before B was working, it was always him outside working on yard and shop projects while I stayed inside with the baby. I have never been inside so much in my life!) As much as our little boy loves his bathwater, we cant wait to show him the pool, and even the gulf. Let him eat a little sand and taste a little salt water. And in the meantime, we keep doing what we are doing. Because it ain't so bad.

Hello again! Time- what a rare commodity. Time to sit and write, even more rare. I actually occasionally watch TV seasons on Netflix now, but that is only because I do so while nursing my baby- an incredibly chubby, solid 5 and a half month old. Still happy, most of the time. He is lying on the nursery floor right now on his tummy, waving arms and legs in the air, talking and giggling at things only he knows about. Big brother Andy the Golden Retriever lies on the floor beside him sleeping. Andy lies just far enough away that he does not get an ear grabbed, but just close enough to keep an eye on him.

My farm is such a peaceful place right now. In the winter garden, across the yard, neat rows of potatoes, carrots, onions and beets are incredibly big and fluffy, promising roots to match. My sweet corn is getting close to knee high. In my summer garden just outside my back door, watermelon vines are shooting all over, and baseball sized watermelons are growing. I pick a long, smooth cucumber every several days. My eggplant has yet to set on, and my tomatoes are frustrating me- they flower, and then the blooms dry up and fall off without making fruit. Out of five plants, we maybe have five tiny green tomatoes. My herb garden is an explosion, even though it only contains basil, cilantro, parsley, garlic and chives.

We fenced in a portion of backyard for a dog run and a shelter from the wind last winter, when I was so large I had a hard time dragging fence posts around. I really want to find the time to go out there and build raised beds one of these days. I have the reclaimed lumber, I just lack the time. Then I will have B fill them with dirt, I will mix in compost, and it can mellow over the winter for next spring planting. Or perhaps I can even do a late summer planting in them in time for fall to produce cool weather crops.

It has been a bit of a frustrating summer, I can't lie. Bobby has not really worked since last fall. He is coming up on about seven months of a little work here and there and a whole lot of coasting and trying not to dip too deeply into savings as we hope for more work to come his way. When he came here two years ago, there was more work than he could handle. There were never enough hours in a day, or days in a week, to get all of the manure spread that he needed to. But when it stopped, it stopped. It has been great to have him at home, but at the same time, money would be great, too. Not that we are hurting too badly yet, thanks to him working sixteen hour days for months on end last year, but still.

In the meantime, I have started using my schooling of the last year to try to bring in a little income. It isn't much. By the time I pay the rent on the office I had to rent in town, there is even less. I see clients every two weeks for six months, guiding them in small steps to a healthier diet and lifestyle. I like it. But the two weeks per month I do it, just getting myself to town for those extra hours is exhausting and a bit overwhelming. In order to pay the rent on the office so that my health coaching can be income and to free myself from having to push it too hard and then overextend myself, I have started extending myself just a little by teaching yoga classes there four mornings a week and one evening- two hour-long classes on Tuesday morning, starting at 6 a.m., one hour long class on Wednesday starting at 6 a.m., two on Thursday morning, one on Thursday evening, and one on Friday morning. This is one of those jobs I cannot actually take a vacation while doing, because I do not have anyone to teach classes for me. That is a bit of a stresser, given our M.O. of skipping town when work is slow and we have a few extra hundred dollars in our pockets. We like to get out of town and take cheap vacations- camping trips, stay with friends, get out of the stifling summer heat, howling wind of all four seasons, or damp winter cold of western Kansas.

Actually, our love of skipping town is the reason my plan for making this a fully integrated, self sustaining farm is not working out as I had hoped. First of all, self sustaining farms still need humans to help close those circles. We still do not have a greenhouse, and with our income being slow, our dreams of building one just keeps slipping further and further away. I know exactly what I want, and it would be so simple to build, just a couple of days, some lumber, some sheeting, some hay bales, and Bobby's loader. It is called a Walipini. An underground greenhouse. It is basically a trench dug in the ground with a roof to let in light. The earth walls stabilize the temperature. But this involves actual money, even if less than a conventional greenhouse, so instead I sit and draw plans for aquaponic systems and heat sinks and heating systems and plans for keeping chickens inside for bug control and as of yet, those plans float around the house until we get tired of cleaning around them and they get tossed. Sigh.

We planted about 20 acres to wildflowers this spring, hoping that we would get rain and they would sprout, grow, and support the beehives we want to build. It was a dry year. Very few came up.

Hello to my faithful few. I find myself with nothing else to do for a little while except care for a baby, who is currently happily kicking and talking on the floor beside me. No better time to lie here on the floor beside him and write. He occasionally surprises himself by rolling over now, and if he is being held, his legs must be straight and stiff as a board. While I don't like to use the word "good" baby, (because that indicates that there are "bad" babies), he has been an incredibly easy baby. Before making the decision to start trying to make a baby, there was a long, long list of things I had to get willing for- pregnancy, labor and delivery, recovery. Colic. Post partum depression. Losing the baby weight. No sleep. Foregoing all of my normal stress outlets in favor of a kid attached to my boob. If I was even able to breastfeed. Isolating not one person, but two people's food sensitivities. Stinky diapers. Massive amounts of stuff to pack up every time I left the house. Stepping on legos at midnight. Potty training. Terrible twos. Preschool and school and strict schedules (which I can't manage to save my life). Having to be nice all of the time. Teenagers. Puberty. Drivers licenses. The fear or the horrific reality of teenage drivers and the stupid stuff they do that gets them killed. The thought of losing said child.

Well, most of that stuff, from legos on, is still ahead of us. But the rest of it, I have to say, has not been too terrible. Actually, the hardest part of all of this process was the early miscarriages and the pregnancy. It was emotionally and physically exhausting. So many shots and blood draws and panicked moments in which I was convinced I was carrying a dead baby. From the moment my water broke, things sped up and I began experiencing the reality of it and it was not as hard as I had thought it would be. Yeah, labor hurt. A freaking lot. But I never hit my threshold, because I was still able to assess my pain level and give an amount of time I thought I would still be able to last at this level before taking them up on the offer of an epidural. (Granted, my threshold is fairly high. But I expected to hit it and then some.) So in the end, while I would not exactly be in a hurry to repeat the experience, I have good memories of it. Everything that I had prepared myself for- needing pitocin, needing a c-section, baby being posterior, none of it was an issue. No sooner did I get situated in the labor and delivery room, but I was in full fledged labor with contractions hard enough to max out the monitor, and every hour or two, came a report that things were moving exactly on the schedule the hospital staff wanted to see, and in nine hours, right on schedule, I went from 1 cm dilated to pushing out a baby. Which was not a tiny or weak baby, considering that he was born a month early. His APGARs were 8 and 9. He woulda been an eight and a half or nine lb baby had he stayed in until full term. And he was happy. He didn't cry for several weeks after he was born. He grunted, he squirmed, he kicked and punched the air, he hollered and talked, but he patiently put up with us learning how to handle a newborn, hardly noticing when we scratched him with our fingernails, pinched him with snaps on his sleepers, folded him up like a pretzel trying to dress and undress him. Our lack of sleep the first week or two came from our paranoia, not from his sleeping patterns. Every grunt woke me up in full panic mode, if I had managed to drift off to sleep. I literally could not sleep unless he was close enough to hear, smell, and see. Which meant I couldn't sleep with him next to the bed in a bassinet and I was too paranoid to fall asleep with him in our bed. But then sheer exhaustion took over and I slept for several hours before he woke me up to eat, and I realized he could, in fact, function apart from my consciousness.

I went off of dairy and his squirming and grunting and projectile vomiting all but stopped. And it wasn't hard, since I have spent years being more or less vegan, given the availability of health food wherever I am at any given time. I know where all of the pitfalls of being dairy-free are hidden. I even know which incredibly unhealthy cheater foods are dairy free (hello, Oreos and Hershey's Special Dark Chocolate Syrup). At the moment, I am in the process of isolating which foods make him break out in an adolescent-sized case of baby acne, and have so far discovered that I cannot eat citrus or tomatoes. I live on eggs and avocados and other fruits and veggies, and grass-fed beef that my mom sells me, and occasional chicken and fish.

My problem with breastfeeding has been oversupply, not undersupply like I feared. Which is not nearly as much of a problem. And this has made the baby weight come melting off at a rate that has shocked me. I scarcely even remember what it was like to be a walking house, as I was three months ago. Sure, there were issues at first, you can't just expect a baby born four weeks early to come out knowing how to latch on and suck as well as one who stayed in that extra four weeks, but around the time of his original due date, he got it. And I had the luxury of being able to just be home with him and patiently work with him. I had the luxury of being able to fight for 20 minutes every single feeding until he remembered how to do it, then sit there another 45 minutes while he ate.
I fully expected that the same hormonal issues that caused the miscarriages and that would have made this pregnancy impossible even 25 years ago would also lead to a massive crash and a dark bout of post partum depression, and have been extra vigilant because I know I am a bit predisposed to issues of this nature, but nary a storm cloud has threatened. I have been freakishly buoyant and calm and incredibly happy ever since having him.

Our sleeping arrangement is one I don't exactly advertise, except just now to the entire Internet. And I decided to because I have, by now, done a ton of research and feel comfortable with it. We share our bed with the little guy. This has saved us. I think he sleeps through the night now, but in reality, he still awakes at least every three-five hours to nurse. I just don't register this as disruptive to my sleep anymore. We have a king-sized mattress on the floor. On B's side, it is as it always was- pillows, blankets, dog, etc. But on my side, there are no blankets. I sleep with a small round bolster pillow under my head and a pillow between my knees to prevent an unintended rollover in my sleep, wearing long sleeves, long pants, and socks. Little D sleeps on his back in the large space of bed I leave him, and some sort of mama-son spidey sense inevitably wakes me up a few seconds before he awakes. I roll him on his side toward me and lie there as he nurses and we both fall into a state of twilight sleep, then he falls asleep and I roll him away from me, back onto his back and am dreaming within seconds again. In the morning, it is almost as if I dreamed it. I couldn't tell you how often or when he ate, just that he did.

I find it almost amusing that while researching safe bedsharing, I realized that what we are doing is this crazy fringe parenting style known as "attachment parenting". Ya know, the babywearing, bedsharing, anti-immunizing, homeschooling, nursing-on-demand, non-weaning people. Apparently, wearing my infant son wrapped against my chest while I do housework and go for walks is not just a way to still get things done while keeping him calm and asleep, it is a parenting style. Apparently pulling out a boob for him the minute he cries, sharing our bed with him, taking baths with him, basically all the stuff we have started to do because it keeps him happy and relaxed and smiling, as opposed to fussing and stressed out, labels us as parenting extremists. But it seems exhausting to think of doing things any other way. He is such a happy baby, why try to force sleep training on him? And he never cries unless he needs something, so why let him cry it out? All of the stuff that I have heard other new parents complain of and pull their hair out over has just been such a non-issue for us. I feel so bad for them. I am not saying that we are better parents. We are just incredibly lucky to be able to simply absorb a baby into our lifestyle so effortlessly, thanks to the baby himself. Does this mean I will be nursing him until he is three? Probably not, but the one mantra I have lived by through this whole experience is "Flexibility in all things." Perhaps, if my body allows and he is loath to wean, we will carry on past the one-year mark. Maybe even well past it. After all, I do like the research that touts the benefits of doing so. Will we refuse to immunize? No. While I admit a bit of distrust in our current system, in the additives and extra ingredients that go into the immunizations that are dumped in such large amounts with such glee by the medical community into such tiny bodies, I have no desire to see the world stop immunizing. And if I do not want the rest of the world to stop, then I have no business thinking my child is any more special than the child next door, that he gets to rely on the fact that the child next door is immunized so that we do not have to. Will we homeschool? Most likely not. Although I would like to for reasons of maintaining a flexible schedule, there are many reasons to give a child the experience of a wide variety of peers from an early age.

I have read several studies that say that confident, relaxed parents tend to report that their babies sleep better, cry less, are happier and easier than parents who are prone to depression or anxiety, even though when monitored, these babies have the exact same sleep patterns and crying patterns. I would not exactly call us confident or relaxed parents, but on the other hand, we went through a lot to get here, and we are not about to complain or get worked up about what minor issues we may have. Not sure what came first, here, the chicken or the egg- did we create an incredibly happy baby by putting his security first from day one? I wish we could say that was the case, but let's be realistic. More likely, we had a baby who just didn't see the need to sweat the small stuff. Which made it easy for us to create an environment in which his needs are met promptly. And by that, I mean that 90% of his cry-worthy needs are met by simply changing his diaper, then shoving a boobie in his mouth until he goes to sleep. The other 10% is temperature or gas related.

On the farm, this is a completely different sort of spring than last year. This spring is loathe to let go of winter. It keeps calling it back for an encore. This spring, my early crops are in already, thanks to my parents coming over and taking over babysitting and helping me dig up my garden patch, plant, and lay out hoses for irrigation. I do not have any photos at the moment of the irrigation system my mom built, but it is going to be amazing. I foresee all of my irrigating issues of last year being a thing of the past. It is simply a long hose, cut into many two-foot-long sections. These sections are then rejoined by a three way coupler, from which sprouts a short hose with a shut-off valve at the end. So it is basically a switchboard for water, each row has it's own hose, the flow from which can be individually regulated. To each of these short hoses, we have attached either a dripline or a soaker hose. Once I get them all dialed in to water at a rate appropriate for each crop planted on each row, I plan to put an electronic timer on the hydrant itself, so that it can be self-sufficient if we need to leave.
And the most exciting thing happening on the farm right now is that one of our neighbors is moving to town, and unable to take their chicken coop with them. It is a raised structure with an attached run, so in one compact little structure, it contains a run, a coop, and shade. It is not terribly movable, but I am scheming about somehow putting it on wheels so it can roll around the yard and if the local coyote, bobcat and fox population does not allow my chickens to be truly free range, at least they can be "free-ish range", able to dig and scratch in a new area every few days. B does not know yet that I am going to make him move it to our yard as soon as his truck and loader are home and available.

And now my Very Happy Baby is Very Unhappily requesting some attention and I have sat here long enough. All the best to my faithful few, til next time.

Hello to you, my dear, quite possibly no longer faithful few. I know, it has been an embarrassingly long time away. My excuse remains- my laptop is tethered to the wall by a cord until I can get the battery replaced, and my antivirus expired, so now it is buggy and agonizingly slow, and it needs to be fixed, so in the meantime I fill my computing needs by iPad, which is a giant pain in the butt to type on. IPad killed the blogging star, apparently.

So I decided, in the interest of things eco and, lets face it, procrastinatory and just plain lazy, to go paperless for this year's New Year's letter. Have I explained recently the sheer genius of the New Year's letter? Ya see, when all of the holiday cards start pouring in, I become tempted to run out and add to the craziness and rampant goodwill, but then I ask myself what the odds are of me getting so busy doing holiday things and not getting a boatload of addresses tracked down and stamps bought in time and oh, my. The stress starts to mount. But then I start to think logically. The holidays end basically at midnight on December 25. But when does the New Year end? January? February? March? Probably March, since the first quarter of the year is then past. Definitely June, because then you are closer to the next New Year's Eve than the last one. So as long as it is before June, I have just bought myrself a six month extension. And then, if I have other mass mailings in my future, like, say, a birth announcement,  I decide to wait and just send them together. (We won't talk about all of the two times I have actually followed through on this logic and got said New Year's letters sent out.) And then I even flaked out more this year because I started calculating costs of paper and ink and time to print and fold, well. You end up here, reading my New Year's letter on my sadly neglected blog. Which you may have found by following the link on the little scrap of paper that fluttered out of your birth announcement when you opened it.

Little Daniel Collins Koehn joined our crazy life and has been trying to keep up ever since. That's the big one. And I feel like I have a new, fabulous body, offloading nearly 30 lbs of pregnancy weight. I can move! Climb stairs! Fit through tight spaces! Stand for long enough to cook a meal! Looking back at the pictures B happened to take the day before I went into labor, I was one giant, bloated, miserable people (yes, people. Just because. I was plural at that point.) I had been advised to take it easy for seven weeks already, and was trying, honestly I was, but that didn't keep the small one from announcing, at 5:30 am on January 22, that he didn't care that my due date was still a month away, this was happening today. So, after briefly, foggily considering going back to bed and dealing with my broken water and eminent labor at a more manageable hour, we scrambled around, threw a few ill-thought out items into a bag (because where is the excitement in being prepared enough to have a hospital bag packed four weeks early?) and made our way to Scott City, where Little D's mama decided she wanted to go all drugless and his daddy tried to talk her into an epidural every time she acted less than tough. And at 2:31 that afternoon, an exceptionally healthy little boy made his appearance and made the whole two year journey of miscarriage and hormone supplementing and pregnancy and labor and childbirth worth it. We named him after his Grandpa Danny and his daddy, Bobby Dan. His middle name comes from his late grandma Judy Collins, who was not able to live to see her own little boy, his daddy, grow up.

They kept us there for three days, since the littlest Koehn kept turning yellow on us, and then released us into the wilds of first time parenthood. It has been an amazing and informational trip since then. I am a stay at home mother. I never saw that coming, and I am so incredibly happy that I get to experience it. I have time to do all that stuff I have always assumed would not be so easy while working- for example, I get to cloth diaper. There is nothing to make a mama feel more crafty than a pile of freshly washed diapers, all fuzzy and soft (cloth diapers have come so incredibly far since our mamas used them on us!) piled up in her nursery. Another thing I get to do, thanks to my amazing, overachieving body, which I am thankful for every day even though it apparently sucks at making kids from scratch unassisted, is donate breastmilk. Through this whole process, I became aware of the huge need for donated milk in NICUs where tiny 1 lb preemies are unable to digest formula and their mamas are not yet producing their own milk. So I found a mother's milk bank in Denver and am in the process of sharing my incredible good fortune, whatever little D does not need, with other babies. Don't kid yourself- I do it for selfish reasons. What could be better than knowing that you are helping give life and health to not only your own healthy, chubby baby, but to potentially hundreds of other babies as well?

In the middle of all of this, I was also finishing up my year of school at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Now that the baby project is both more and less manageable, I am ready to start marketing my skills and knowlege and working, but not too much! toward my dream career of guiding people to better health. My dream is to start a community garden and incorporate a health coaching business, so that I can provide not only the mental tools necessary to help my clients find a way of healthy eating that works for them long term without making so many sacrifices that it becomes unsustainable, but I can also provide for them the fresh, healthy, organic produce that this area is so void of. But I can only start the health coaching thing right now, due to lack of funding for a community garden. There are grants that I need to look into, but honestly, as long as the garden doesn't exist, I get to work mostly from home. Not that I would mind driving into town every day to garden, but until my plan starts making money, it isn't terribly feasible.

And while I scheme and dream, Bobby has been working himself ragged. He worked ridiculous hours all year, until suddenly, poof! The manure up and disappeared. This was mostly due to the drought we are in the middle of, the manure turning to dust and the dry wind blowing it away. After the big feedlot he was working out of got all cleaned out, he suddenly has had farmers calling but no product to spread for them. The timing was fortuitous, since this happened right before little D joined us, but it has us hoping that more work will magically become available soon.

In the meantime, we have gotten the most amazing bonding time, the three of us here together in this house in the bottom of Ladder Creek Valley. Grandma Sandi and Grandpa Kevin make up wild excuses to come over, often in the evenings when their own busy days are winding down, to get their cuddle quota in. Our little boy has stretched out and turned into a solid, heavy baby, if still a bit small. His eyes are lightening from slate gray to his daddy's violet blue, and his hair is lightening to a decidedly reddish tint- not actually red, but not exactly brown, either. We credit the Collins side for that. He has been a talker since day one, and every day he carries on more of a running commentary of grunts, yells, and other poorly controlled voice exercises. He refuses to cry for any real length of time. If he is hungry or unpleasantly surprised, he will definitely cry, but after a short session of the most heartbreaking wails, he will stop long enough to reconsider whether or not the cause really merits the effort he is putting into it. We, of course, think his every move is sheer genius.

As for things under the surface, it has been a lovely, relaxing (for the most part) year for us. We have done of lot of focusing on learning to love more unconditionally, on less judgement and more honest support, of seeing beauty in everything we look at and choosing to believe. Whatever that entails. Mostly, that every individual is beautiful in his or her own right and that their motives are pure. Even when we strongly suspect that may not be the case. We have dug deep into the sources of what makes us who we are and dug up both beautiful and ugly, and have tried to embrace the beautiful and let the past stay there. There has been next to none of the things that defined us in Colorado- activities, recreation, enjoying nature, that is all harder out here. Here, it is all about the social stuff. Here, you are who your friends and neighbors think you are, and the yardstick by which this is measured is a bit of a foreign one to us. We often talk about how best to live true to ourselves no matter where we are or what the pressure, doing the things that give us the most fulfillment and the most inner peace, no matter what is expected. When we have started to truly dissect our motives and our reasons, we have found that under all the rocks one turns over of social expectation and doing what one has always done or what one was taught or what one has always accepted as right, there are the most delightful little treasures to be found. Little truths that can turn one's whole outlook on life around. And in all of this, we have made the most bizarre discovery- that we are actually kinda happy. Life is pretty freaking awesome most of the time.

Until next New Year...our love, Bobby, Susan and Daniel

Here is the birth announcement, in case yours got lost in the mail. The hat little D is wearing was knitted by his grandma Sandi. The blanket was crocheted by his aunt Marci. The sled is the same one his great grandpa Jim pulled countless squealing kids over frozen cowponds on, and the picture and card itself is a product of his aunt Wendy, who owns a photography studio in Leoti.

Lessons I learned from being a basket case

Things you think about when you are only weeks from your due date- #1. Kid, listen. Please, please, please don't die. I just want to meet you and have our communication be more than kicks, squirms and wiggles. I don't even care how much you hurt me. I don't care if my tender bits look like Rocky Balboa's face when you get done in there. Or if you make them cut through my belly to get you out. As long as you come out alive and stay that way. #2. How on earth did I get here? With all the things that could have gone wrong and didn't...you are still in there! How lucky am I? #3- when I stop and think how completely my life is about to change, I panic a bit. But waiting another five weeks really doesn't do me any good. I won't be any more prepared then than I am now. Any chance you can step it up and grow a little faster? #4- Please, please, please, please, please. Don't die. #5- If you do, in fact, die, there is a chance that everything I put in this nursery will have to come back out. I may not survive that. Can't we just wait until you are safely here to furnish your nursery? Refer to #1 and #4.

Okay, maybe most of these are just things that fatalistic basket cases like myself think about. But ya know, the whole learning that just because you conceive a brand new life doesn't necessarily mean you are going to be a parent, that'll do it. Even if your miscarriages are early, as mine were, it blows my mind that this is the third life to take up residence in my body. I have worked hard at this current, third project for most of a year. The emotional investment has been huge, ever since this kid landed inside me over Memorial Day weekend last spring. And it is now closing on Valentines Day. I have had 60 inch-and-a-half needles pushed into my hip and held there for two minutes each while they were slowly injected. That's a total of two hours of bending over the bathroom counter feeling a needle deep inside my muscle moving around as my husband tries to hold it steady, telling me to stop swaying, pushing the thick, oily substance that made this pregnancy possible into my increasingly bruised and scarred hip. I have poked countless chalky, icky suppositories into my nether bits when the shots by themselves proved to not be strong enough to keep my progesterone high enough to not risk preterm labor. I have choked down hundreds of vitamins that were truly nasty and made me nauseated and had so many attacks of vicious heartburn my poor esophagus hates life by now. And run the gamut of assorted pregnancy weirdnesses and discomfort. And passed up a LOT of wine and margaritas in the last eight months. And at least four fabulous vacation hot tub sessions. And watched cellulite grow on my thighs at an alarming rate. And if my life experience has taught me anything, it is that even with a lot of superstitious bargaining and hard work, there are no promises. All that stuff I have been doing, all those panic attacks and all the insomnia and impatience that each week that brought this baby closer to viability was passing at the pace of cold molasses...none of it was a promise. It all meant nothing, as far as guaranteeing that I would have an alive baby and not just a bloody lump that could have been a baby. And before all of that classy stuff started, I got pregnant twice, and loved the thoughts and dreams that those lives were, and was devastated when they left, and cried. Hard. Long. Tried to hang on for the ride as my messed up hormones ran their course and made me certifiably crazy. Learned that grief and screwy hormones are an emotional dirty bomb. Beyond toxic. Wanted to punch every pregnant person I knew in the face. Asked myself why they deserved to keep their babies while mine planted, grew, and quickly died. Tried to prepare myself for the possibility that I may never have a kid. Peed on sticks that mocked me with only one line every month. Waited and waited while month after month, nothing happened. Heard friends announce their pregnancies and instead of being able to congratulate them with heartfelt happiness, felt their happiness and contrasted it with my grief and couldn't manage to choke out a sincere sounding congratulation around the lump in my throat and the roar inside my ears from the inevitable hysterical bawling that was bound to happen the second I was alone.

If you have a friend get pregnant after you lose a pregnancy, it is incredibly hard to not let things get weird. Likewise if you are the pregnant one, helplessly watching your friend go on a hormone-fueled grief and rage trip. But you can still be a good friend. After my second loss, I tried my hardest to explain to my (to me) suddenly cruelly pregnant friend that I knew I was being crazy, and begged for time. I loved her, but really could not hear about her pregnancy. She understood as well as she could be expected to, never having been in my shoes, never having lost the dream that was a pregnancy. She couldn't entirely understand why I couldn't be happy for her, after all, she had been trying to get pregnant when I got pregnant the second time, and had still been happy for me during those weeks, and sad for me when I lost it. But she still told me that I had the hall pass I was begging for. I didn't have the words to adequately explain that I was truly happy for her, in the part of my brain that managed my diminished logical thought, but simply the fact of her existence, at that moment, reminded the illogical, subjective, emotional 9/10ths of my brain of what I had lost and may never have. The fact that she already had one healthy child and so easily conceived the second one made me beg the question why she and apparently everyone else (it seemed) deserved to get what they wanted and I kept having it ripped away. It took me weeks to be able to talk to her again, weeks that I spent bawling every time I thought of the life she was growing inside her and how happy she must be. During which time various other friends also announced their pregnancies and a regular baby boom swept my community. And people with babies came and went and for the first time, I could not find one bit of sympathy for exhausted parents of newborns. I just wanted to punch them because they were happy. (Yes, apparently my hormones think violence is the answer. To everything.)

Something like one out of seven pregnancies end in miscarriage. That's a LOT. Now that I am all objective and logical, I realize that means probably at least a dozen of my facebook friends have lost a pregnancy at some point. And most people, unlike me, do not make their grief public so that people can forgive them for being crazy- they just mask the crazy and act normal and...impossibly NICE. How, I don't know. Not admitting how I feel and why I feel it seems comparable to depriving myself of air, water, and food. So I am convinced that if their experience is fresh, they may secretly want to punch me in my ("OH, SO GLOWING!") face. Or possibly stab me with a fork in my ("ADORABLY ROUND") belly. Having felt the urge to punch innocent pregnant women at one time in my life has sort of ruined me for a normal, happily self-absorbed pregnancy experience. It has made me keep those ballooning belly pictures off of public forums. It has made me keep the postings about my pregnancy on Facebook to the milestones- ultrasounds and hurdle dates and a few posts about the things I am most grateful for. (Because the only thing that took away the urge to punch a preggo was hearing them say they knew how little they deserved such good fortune...and the one thing that was guaranteed to feed the rage monster was hearing them complain.) The last thing I want is to be to them is a grief trigger, and it is hard when I am carrying a grief trigger the size of a Fourth of July picnic watermelon under my shirt. Now I feel guilty being the fortunate one. Especially since I raged so much about having to watch other fortunate ones. Yes, I was going through a process. Yes, eventually I would have been okay. In fact, I eventually was (kinda) okay. Even before I got pregnant. It took me six months after that last miscarriage to be okay, and on the seventh month, I felt human. Ya know, kind and happy and non-violent. I didn't even resent anyone. Not even happy people. I even considered joining them, childless though I was. My lack of reproductive productivity stopped feeling like the end of the world. And later that month, up popped two pink lines on a little white stick and I dissolved into a scared, shaky, panicky, tearful mess that I have yet to entirely mop up, even at T minus 30 odd days. The timing supports my theory that the grief, by itself, was not the monster, but my hormones were. Because the month the stars lined up and my hormones were right enough to allow conception was the month they also allowed me to be reasonable and objective for the first time in half a year. But then I had to live with the guilt of having been so absolutely, certifiably crazy and wondering how much of it leaked out and landed on those around me, and how many people I had alienated by not being able to be happy for them at the precise moment they needed me to be.

So if you are the pregnant one in danger of being unfairly punched by a heartbroken friend who resents your knocked up existence right now, the absolute best thing you can do is be okay with being pregnant without having her unbridled support and enthusiasm. Give her a hall pass. It will happen eventually, and then, oh goody, you will even find yourself having to counsel her through her guilt over the way she treated you. It is okay to take a break and continue with your friendship after the crazies have passed. And try to remember that she still loves you, even though she can't stand the sight of you right now. And even if your own screwy hormones can't take her rejection and your own bloated, nauseated self is sobbing in the shower, it really, truly isn't personal. She'll come around and adjust to the new development. And the best thing you can do in the meantime is be visibly grateful. Bask in the glow of your good fortune. Don't pretend to be cavalier or dismissive about the insanely awesome thing happening inside you. Acknowledge that you are the luckiest person on earth and you did nothing to deserve this incredible fortune. And if you are the one who has lost a pregnancy, the best thing you can do is just be crazy without hating yourself for it, and be honest so people know why you are being crazy. And wait. And try not to say or do anything you can't take back.

And that's all I've got to say about that.