And we are back. I have a very simple excuse for not blogging- maybe not terribly legitimate, but here it is. My laptop battery does not sustain a charge, so I have to keep it plugged in, which means I have to sit in specific and less than totally comfortable places in the house when I type, plus it takes forever to boot up, so I tend to do online things on my iPad. Only my iPad sucks to type on, so I only type the bare minimum. Blogging isn't the bare minimum. And I have gotten used to hiding out, off the grid. My cell phone dies immediately when it has to search for service all day in this valley and the house phone is on the cheapest long distance plan available which means about an hour of long distance a month, so I never call anyone, I just have to wait for them to call me. I am not complaining, I am just saying...with really no access to the outside world, no daily interaction with other humans, time just slips away and suddenly I realize days have turned to months and other than trips to town for blood work and OB checkups and groceries, one day could have been the day before it or the day after it.

Am I going crazy? Maybe. Would I know it if I were?

Not to say we haven't been doing stuff. Highly legitimate stuff. Farm stuff and manure stuff. My mom and I ordered 75 chicks with the plan of keeping them alive through the winter so they can start laying early next summer. They arrived the day before Thanksgiving, little balls of fluff. Mom did her research and decided we needed hearty heritage breeds, then we had to find a hatchery that actually sold said breeds. We used Ideal Hatchery in Texas because they had three of the breeds on our list- Black Astralorps, Barred Rocks, and Rhode Island Reds. We also ordered 25 chicks for the neighbor, but they are raising them themselves.

And what do we plan to do with 75 laying hens, you ask? What if they all manage an egg a day? Do we have a use for six dozen eggs a day? Well. So glad you asked. We actually think there is a bit of a market for grown up chickens around here- everybody wants a little flock, but nobody wants to house, feed and raise them before they start laying. About a dozen are already spoken for. Plus they will be free ranging, which means they will have a high mortality rate. Even if none of them die, that only leaves about 25 for each of us. And there is always the farmers market, and if not that, those in the community who have chickens always have more requests for eggs than they have eggs. Once a person gets accustomed to real farm eggs with real orange yolks, all flavorful, turns out they have a hard time forcing themselves to buy store eggs.

B has been working, pushing through the last of the manure, frantic to get it all done before weather moves in. And he did. He hauled the last of the manure out of Caprock (the monster feedlot six miles from our house) three weeks ago. One day we were up before dawn, bleary eyed, stumbling around packing lunches, I spent long days by myself here in the valley, we all waited until B got home after dark so we could greet him with wagging tails and slobbery kisses. The next, work was done and we scarcely knew what to do with ourselves.

The truck went to the repair shop, where thousands upon thousands of dollars were gleefully dumped into it by mechanics who promised that all of it's many ills would be cured. We spent two weeks on projects. The basement renovations got finished. We installed a slapped together kitchen down there for the pheasant hunters who lodge there when they come out from eastern Kansas for their weekends of shooting things. Someday, there will be an actual kitchen, but for now the boys are okay with the sink, stove and fridge down there, and we use the big baking table, which Grandma used in her restaurant for rolling out pies and shaping cinnamon rolls, for our own baking projects. It is nice to keep bake day messes out of my real kitchen.

Then we moved onto the fence project. B and I spent days tamping and setting posts, stringing stringline, measuring, leveling, cutting, nailing...it was cold and windy and miserable, but we now have a real, bona fide fence around a portion of the backyard, providing privacy, wind protection, and most importantly, dog restraint. The dogs have taken it upon themselves to begin large scale landscaping projects back there- deep holes filled with treasures such as socks and underwear smuggled out of the laundry room. But now we can leave them home alone without worrying that they are terrorizing the neighbors. They, however, are less pleased with the arrangement.

And then on to the nursery. The green shag carpet, concealer of 30 years of dust and allergens, got ripped out, rolled up went out the window and got hauled away by the pheasant hunters. The walls got painted by my mom and me and a new vinyl plank floor was laid by B. Then we spent an evening driving around the community picking up items promised us by neighbors- a crib from the next door neighbors, carseat, swing, and boxes of clothes, blankets and baby miscellany from the cousin who is done having babies conveniently just in time to pass on their stuff to us.

Simultaneously, I built a brooder house in the barn out of hay bales. Well, I tried. As it turned out, I could only lift about six hay bales before by body rebelled by producing waves of uncomfortably tight contractions around my belly. So I enlisted B's help getting the bales out of the hayloft, into the south room of the barn, and stacked up. I am happy to report the temperature in the brooder has stayed balmy, there is no draft, and the chicks are exceptionally healthy. Although I did lose two to pasty butts a few days after we got them. It is a bit of a design flaw in baby chicks that when they get stressed out, as shipping hundreds of miles over three days can do, they can get diarrhea which sticks to the fluff on their butts like cement. If enough of it builds up, it can actually plug them off completely, and not being able to poop leads to pretty predictable results- death. The only way to deal with this is to take the chick, soak it's butt in warm water to soften to poop, pull it off (do NOT attempt to just rip it off without softening- you risk being forever traumatized by having pulled the poor baby's intestines out of it's bottom) and then, just to be safe and keep it from happening again, smearing their shiny, soaked, pink butts with olive oil. My mom came over and helped me and we soaked, cleaned and oiled 75 impossibly small butts in no time.

And then there was the fuel pump debacle. The same day that pheasant season opened- in fact, while the boys were ripping out the nursery carpet- the phone rang. B had decided to leave that morning for Granby, Colorado, to take his and his brother's snowmobiles to the dealership there to be sold. He got as far as the lonely stretch of road between Hugo, Colorado and Limon, Colorado when his pickup truck, pulling the large flatbed trailer with two snowmobiles, suddenly died. He got a tow into Limon and sat in the dealership for three hours while I drove out there from home, then we hitched up the trailer to the Sequoya and we continued on our way to Granby. After a long, long day on the road, we got home about midnight, then had to make arrangements to go back to Limon and get the pickup two weeks later, once it's fuel pump was replaced.

And our last project is not yet finished- we have dreamed, ever since moving away from Colorado, of the fabulous rec center, it's indoor track and weight machines beckoning us, telling us we don't have to brave the icy winter wind to stay fit and healthy and toned. It has been hard to continue with our fitness regimen here, with B working dawn until dusk in the non-winter times, and the cold, windy days in the winter. I have made it work, but I am mostly a cardio person with occasional weight training and B prefers lifting and using cardio to round out his routine. So we cleaned out the storage room downstairs, tore out shelving to make room, and B has spent hours designing the perfect home gym in an 8'x15' space. Granted, it is going to have to be extremely basic, but we think there is space for a treadmill, a squat rack, a bench and a set of free weights, plus a space just big enough for a floor mat and fitness ball when the treadmill is flipped up. I was adamant that we save space for my bike trainer mounted with road bike, but honestly, I am no longer training for bike races, so I think the treadmill will be sufficient. It will be amazing to be able to get my running fix while staying close to the baby. Much less stressful than trying to push him in a stroller through the howling wind. I am jonesing for the good old days of being able to punish myself until the endorphins kicked in. I never thought I would miss working out. But I do. I miss going out and feeling like I am kicking butt when I start to feel fat and lazy. Not that I can't still do that, but exercise gets the contractions started, which makes my bladder spaz up, and I feel like have to stop every five minutes to try to pee, and the round ligaments stretch and hurt, and my knees hit my belly when I ride bike...I know, excuses, excuses. But in six weeks or less, this kid will no longer be a resident of my body and I will feel better about punishing myself. Walking still kinda works in spite of the contractions, but at the moment it is snowy and icy and wintry and I tend to overbalance on the slightest slick footing.

I know this because several weeks ago we went to Colorado for a week, and B took the vehicle to the ski resort every day so I walked two miles down to shopping, coffee shop and bus stop several of those days. Good thing I know how to fall like an athlete. Actually, I only dumped my butt on the pavement once, but there was no sudden stop. I felt my falling instinct take over from years of landing on parts other than my feet, my knees went soft, I curled around my belly and there was no jar, just a gentle roll. I got covered in snow and slush, but nary a bruise.

Our vacation was wonderful, but now we are home for the foreseeable future. On the pregnancy front, we are hoping this kid stays put for at least another three weeks until he is full term at 37 weeks, and hopefully for another few weeks after that. I am a few days short of 34 weeks right now, and I have to say, although being 34 weeks pregnant is not exactly the most fun or comfortable thing I have ever experienced, it is not as bad as I have been led to believe it would be. I am not as huge as I thought I would be by now, and I am not falling apart at the joints like I expected. My back hurt worse at 19 weeks, when I was trying to adjust to a changing center of balance, than it does now. So did my feet and ankles. By now, my body has remembered that it is healthy and adaptable, built the muscles necessary to support this new fat girl it finds itself trapped inside, adjusted it's posture, and nothing really hurts. I had expected that running would be extremely uncomfortable, but as it turns out, that belly is hard and firm and not going anywhere. Not that I run, except out to the barn in the mornings, because it is too cold to do chores at regular speed. I do suspect that something has been kicked out of whack in a spot in my ribs that has been tender for two months. I don't have any of the pregnancy ailments I was told to dread in my third trimester by multiple pregnancy websites, including but not limited to: return of morning sickness, constipation, hemorrhoids, migraines, joint pain, sciatica, backaches, bad acne, etc...all the classy crap pregnant women may or may not admit to. The only ailment I actually have and hate is the heartburn. Horrible heartburn. Heartburn that, on more than one occasion, has interrupted my lovely REM sleep enough to make me dream that I was in labor and having this baby...upwards. Out of my mouth. But this is not new with the third trimester. Heartburn was the first pregnancy symptom I had. My poor esophagus is probably about eaten through by now. I eat Tums like candy. And, of course, there is the progesterone issue. My progesterone is still riding at rock bottom. It has risen some on it's own, but my natural, unsupplemented levels lag eight to ten weeks behind what they should be. Which means I am on insane amounts of supplemental progesterone to keep them at normal levels. I do notice that the Braxton Hicks contractions get stronger and longer and more often when I am due for another shot. This makes me strongly suspect that staying pumped full of a pregnancy hormone may be the only thing keeping me from going into labor. Which does make me worry that this kid may threaten to make an early entrance. But so far, he is staying in there, and he is growing at the expected rate, and he is strong. Like tiny kung fu master strong. Like you can see my belly move from outer space strong. Like his hiccups make my belly jump almost as much as my own do. But he has finally changed positions, his head is down, which is a big relief. I totally prefer walloping kicks to my diaphragm, feet jammed into my ribs, to those same walloping kicks to my bladder and the nerves attached to my colon- talk about getting goosed. There were a few occasions before he turned when I was sitting, minding my own business, when suddenly, WHAM! It literally felt like I got kicked in the butt with no warning. That'll make you sit up suddenly. It'll even surprise a little shriek outa you if you don't catch it in time, necessitating an explanation to the concerned parties you are currently with who don't quite know how to handle sudden exclamations from pregnant women. Although the walloping kicks have somewhat subsided as the little guy runs out of space in there. There is more squirming and less kicking and punching. There are still the contractions that I suspect may be a bit more frequent and a bit harder than other women experience at this point- some of them are a bit difficult to continue breathing normally through- but I am blaming the low progesterone for that, and thinking of it as a good thing- after all, I am a believer in training for big events requiring physical exertion. Muscle tone can't hurt.

So now we wait. Time sped up once I passed the brink of viability and started thinking that maybe, just maybe, this kid would be born alive. I know there is still a chance of losing it, because nothing is promised, but 90% of survival is good. 90% lets me sleep at night. And once the horrible spectre of losing this pregnancy faded a bit, I was free to put it out of my head, and once I stopped fixating on whether or not I would be able to keep it, I was free to focus on other things.

And that is your update on all things us-related. Sorry it's been so long. At this rate, we may have a son by the time I post again. But I guess better seldom than never, right?