Due date has come and gone (as usual) and I’m just waiting now. It gets hard, at this point, to make any plans–even for tomorrow–since we’re right there. I just shuffle along… When I was at this point with my last one, my husband took all the kids to the Library. When they returned, our youngest ran through the door and asked, “Have you had the baby yet, Momma?” It’s the question on everyone’s lips.
In OTHER NEWS (there are other things going on and being pregnant is not news at this point):
We harvested our first strawberry yesterday! The beds are still a mess, still overcrowded, but they are watered and producing a bit. Hopefully, by next year we’ll have doubled our space and have things a bit more systematized. I am thinking that maybe we could do a couple more raised beds for blueberries as well…they survived the summer up on the front porch, but they are not thriving and I’m afraid our fruit production is going to be pretty spare until we can get them a bit more light. For that matter we could even keep them in their pots, but shift them out there and build a deer protection/shade cloth frame for them. They have little green blueberries on them right now. It is so hard to adjust my brain to our growing calendar here! My New England upbringing has stamped a certain pattern into my brain and I am shocked any time things vary much from it. I think that’s one reason I found life in Oregon so much more relaxing…it made sense.
We have a second goat! She is not living here yet–our neighbor has 11 kids she is trying to feed and Amanda (our new goat! (though I can’t wait until one our goats throws a doe that we can keep so I can name her)) is helping her keep up with the babies’ demands, SO that means we do not need to bring her over and try to teach/supervise the boys in milking and train her to the stand (she is first freshener) while I am…waiting. Hurrah! We were going to offer to pay for her and then offer to pay for her to board and milk the goat for the next month. This is even better. Hurrah, again!
My husband and kids finished and refilled the garden bed that the kids and I started last year and they have planted…CORN. I kindly laugh just a little bit whenever my husband talks about growing a big garden because he talks about growing an acre of corn, while he’s really only a minimal corn-eater. The kids will snarf three dozen ears at a sitting if I let them, but he will have just one. I really don’t want an acre of corn right now. The blanching is not horrible, but ears take up a lot of freezer space and cutting takes a good deal of time….although I must say, corn chowder with the corn I froze and the leftover frozen goat milk in the middle of last winter was nearly to die for. Store stuff just can’t compare and that is why we do this. The biggest thing we need to learn/accomplish this year is to figure out how to garden here! I am thinking that shade cloth may be the key to keeping things growing during the summer, as I have already tried copious watering and fertilizing without success. I need to figure out some quick and cheap way to suspend shade cloth…
The hatchery we were going to order our chicks from ran out and I had really good half hour of panic this morning as my dream of raising our own chicken meat this year started to drift away. But then I found another online vendor with prices even a bit better than the first. They are a distributor, not a hatchery, and I’d really rather get them from the first place, as their birds are supposed to be really nice and docile (a strong selling point when you’re buying 50 roosters!), but we’ll give these guys a shot. People seem generally happy with them and I really don’t want to put this off another year. My plan was to buy birds as soon as this baby was born and I had a better handle on how this baby and my recovery were looking, but now I’m thinking I’ll just throw caution to the wind, order and risk the $10 cancellation fee rather than the vanishing dream scenario again.
I am trying VERY hard not to wish this time away, but I am looking forward to: eating, walking, sleeping for more than 30-45 minutes at a time, making food, working outside, being able to make plans and no longer worrying about whether the baby is head down or head up. On this last one, I realize that other worries will take it’s place, but I’m looking forward to putting the pregnancy-specific ones to bed.
I just read over this post and realized the blessings we are seeing as we move forward on this whole thing. We’ve had our share of setbacks, but we’ve also really been blessed. I am very grateful.
Consecration Acres 