We’re so happy that the homestead grew by one this week!
Baby C was born into her daddy’s hands at home on at 2:32am.
8 pounds even, 20.75 inches long.
We’ve been babymoonin’ all week, and resting when she sleeps as much as possible. I will try to get a few posts up and more pictures later this week.
I may look like this soon.
So twelve weeks (plus or minus a bit) ago, I swallowed a watermelon seed. This Friday we should be able to hear the heartbeat. Yep, you read that right. We are knocked up with number three here.
I was going to post those pictures that women take showing their growing belly, and I thought it’d be fun to take one every few weeks or so, so you could all see the progress. But then my higher reasoning kicked in and said – Uh, it’s just not as cute the third time, and really does everyone want to see that, and most importantly, do you really think you can handle that type of commitment and level of laughter?
So you get my artistic rendering here instead.
We are excited, and well into the figuring-out-where-exactly-we’re-going-to-put-another-one phase. We are planning another home birth, and despite everyone’s urging, we will be perfectly happy with another boy. Three was not exactly planned, so it’s not like we were going for a girl or anything. We’re fine either way, though our families are clearly already dreaming in pink.
On another note, as of last week, we no longer have Josie. This was an excruciatingly hard decision for us, quite painful, and I will probably blog all about it at some point, but I’m just not ready yet. She’s been missed terribly already and even typing these few lame sentences gets me choked up, so that’s all I have to say about it right now.
Besides giving birth this year, I do have a few other goals. I’m not really the resolution type, but there are a couple of things I want to do different or better. You probably thought things were crazy enough as it was around here (I know I did!), but it’s one of my goals this year to blog more frequently. I joined wordpress.com’s Post-A-Week challenge, and even found myself a blogging buddy. So look for more updates more often – baby ones included here on the blog.
We’ve been discussing a community type of gardening arrangement with our neighbor and a few friends this summer, and we’ve done some prep work and ordered seed catalogs. This is a big project and I plan to tell you all about it this year. I’m very excited!
It’s also a goal of mine to get our back yard patio completed. We started collecting sandstone flags for it last summer. We have a way to go, but I’d like to see it done before baby comes.
There are some other things too, but this first trimester thing has me worn out and nap time is looking pretty prime right now. In all, I’m looking forward to 2011. A lot of changes this year already, and I’m sure many more. But I hope they will all be good, even if they’re not all easy.
Until next week (if not sooner)!
We’ve been busy this summer and I’ve not had much time to write about it!
I was privileged to go to a friend’s birth at the very end of July – it turned out to be a long birth and it took me a couple days to recover. I don’t know how those midwives do it! Also, we’ve been getting lots of yummy produce from the farm and we’ve been trying not to let any go to waste.
Also we have a lot of veggies coming on from the garden. Pictured are onions, beets, cucumbers and turnips.
I did make cherry preserves a couple weeks ago with the cherries I got to pick. Unfortunately I didn’t cook it quite long enough, so it was very thin. We’ve been using it anyway – we just pretend it’s cherry syrup. 😉
H was getting worn out from going to the farm on Tuesday and then school on Wednesdays, making Thursday really hard every week, so we switched his school day to Tuesday while E and I are at the farm. He seems to be doing much better with that schedule, which we are all happy about.
Last weekend we went to the Adams County Fair. Our friend, Richard, got us tickets to the truck pull and a parking pass, and my mom and Manuel had food coupons and a parking pass as well, so they joined us. We had a GREAT time. H loved the truck pull with all the noise and the big trucks (though I was cringing terribly from all the black diesel exhaust I was watching needlessly billow into the air – oy!), and we had a blast riding carnival rides, eating yummy carnival food (like the giant brat Rick got) and playing games. We stayed until past midnight! It was a fun treat for everyone.
This weekend I gave the bees their second jar of sugar water. Originally I wasn’t going to supplement our bees at all, but we started getting a little concerned that they might not get enough honey built up for the winter after their late start this spring. Not sure if we’ll give them more, but hopefully that will help them get a little extra stored for the winter.
We picked a lot of green grapes from the neighbor this weekend, but I’m not sure what to do with them? Anyone know of a way to preserve green grapes? Maybe make raisins?
At any rate, here’s the update:
Plant something – Rick planted beets and spinach in the strip by the driveway.
Harvest something – eggs, turnips, onions, cucumbers, zucchini, beets, tomatoes, green seedless grapes from the neighbor across the alley from us!
Preserve something – cherries into cherry preserves; onions hung up in the crawl space; 4 gallon size bags of corn on the cob and nearly two gallons of beans in the freezer; shredded 35 cups of zucchini: froze 30 cups and made five loaves zucchini bread; dried corn husks for making tamales this fall; made and froze double batches of pizza dough, doughnut dough, potato soup (1.5 gallons).
Waste Not – compost and recycling, scraps to chickens, etc.
Want Not – nothing.
Build Community Food Systems – nothing.
Eat the Food – we’ve been grilling pizzas using farm tomatoes, the last of our sausage, and farm basil. Otherwise, just been enjoying all the yummy summer bounty!
I’m officially a certified childbirth educator, complete with birth charts, business cards and a WEBSITE. Please make sure to check out SweetSprouts.org!!! You can also become a Fan on Facebook or follow SweetSprouts on Twitter.
The blog has been up for a while now (since the beginning of the year), and my readership keeps increasing, slowly but steadily.
I had my first class last night, the first of a four-week series on Thursdays from 6:00pm to 9:00 pm at Sweet Beginnings in Littleton. I have three couples, and all of them seem really fun.
June classes are on the schedule for Thursdays as well, and I have a couple signed up for a private class in June too. My summer six-week Childbirth Education Series begins on July 12th and continues until August 16th on Mondays from 6:30 to 8:30pm at the Malley Center in Englewood. I am a little stunned at how quickly my classes are taking off and feeling like this is going to be a very busy summer!
The four and six week series cover all the same information (both series’ include 12 hours of instruction). Student preference and my schedule will determine the four or six week format in the future.
I have also teamed up with a doula from Metro Mama Birth Services to buy a new DVD, scheduled to release in June, for screenings of the movie called, DOULA! The Ultimate Birth Companion. The first screening will be for expectant families and birth professionals, date to be announced.
Please feel free to check out my site – it’s still in progress but the basics are there. There will still be a little tweaking, with pictures and formatting, etc. But you get the idea.
Well – here’s part one of my new business: the blog. It will eventually be a part of my main website, but I’ve hired someone to build that for me and it’s not done yet. But I can do the blog part myself, so this is what I have so far – more to come, as time allows!
http://sweetsprouts.wordpress.com
Expect to see changes in the next few weeks, especially when it gets connected to my main site. But feel free to check out what I have so far. Also, don’t be surprised to see a few repeat posts now and again… some things (like quiche and birth in commercials) are just too good not to share.
Thanks for hanging in there with me!
…pretty please!?!?
OK, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve REALLY been having a tough time keeping up with my blog lately. So what have I been doing? Well, mostly between parenting and checking Facebook, I’ve been studying to get my CBE test complete, finishing a few sewing projects (coffee cozies, a blanket for H, another mei tai), getting a location and dates set up for my futures classes, picking my business name and buying a domain, working on my site content, starting a fan page on FB, and setting up a birth-focused blog (no, I’m not leaving this one, just going to have two!). So mostly birth stuff, I guess.
I’ve been going in and out of feeling completely overwhelmed and totally excited. Sometimes I just can’t wait and other times I think I must be crazy. But I am close, oh so close, to being done. Really. Truly. I know I’ve been saying that. But really. Nearly there.
There was a local article about birth today on 9news.com. Water birth at University hospital. So nice to see positive media for this kind of thing….. More Expectant Moms Choosing Water Birth at Local Hospital
Look for some changes to this here bloggy soon, as well as my new site announcement coming up. In the mean time, I scheduled a few Thrifty Thursday tips and such to keep you around, if you’re still checking after this long hiatus I’ve had. Missed you all.
Is that February I see? The first month of 2010 has FLOWN by! We’ve had a hard time catching up since the holidays (as evidenced by my absence from the blog), but we’re looking at a few clear weekends, then a trip to the Tucson area to visit friends, and then a (hopefully) nice relaxing break from the hustle and bustle!
So in the last month, I completed my student teaching for my childbirth education certification, worked on the test, nearly finished the reading, and scheduled my last required observation. I picked a business name (stay tuned for it, complete with links), and bartered a web design. Yay!
Additionally, E is now up to six teeth, we had several dinners with friends, a game night or two, bartered hunting for mechanical work on the truck (hallelujah!), had to post bail to get Josie out of doggie jail (she made a break for Hampden and got picked up), and held a Mad Tea Party for Rick’s and my un-birthday! The last was so fun, and I made an amazing hat thanks to a great tutorial, and a little friendly encouragement.
It’s been 37 weeks since I started tracking our family with the Independence Days project. I use the term ‘tracking’ loosely, however, since I have not really kept good track for the last ten or twelve weeks. This is what I can say for sure, from my memory. Every day we collect three eggs from our five hens. Pretty good since it is the dead of winter and we don’t give them a heat lamp or anything.
We have not planted or harvested any veggies whatsoever, but Rick did go make hamburger and sausage with his uncle and grandpa. We used all the lard from the hogs (this years and last years) for this. So we added about 30 pounds of ground meat to the freezer. We also found pints of blackberries on sale for 77 cents each once, and bought like 20 and frozen them. We should have bought more though, since we’ve eaten them all already (Rick went on a smoothie kick last month).
As I mentioned above, we bartered hunting for mechanics – and I say this totally falls under building community food systems. Our friend is a mechanic and replaced the belts and water pump on the 4 Runner for us, with the promise that Rick would teach him and his family to hunt this year. He saved us over $900! I say we really got the better end of the deal in some ways because Rick loves hunting so much, and he is very happy for another reason to spend more time outdoors doing it.
We have surely been eating the food as well around here. Most weeks all we buy at the store is dairy, bread, rice or beans, flour and sugar, coffee, peanut butter, maple syrup, and sometimes eggs to supplement what we’ve got from the hens. And bananas, as I think Henry is addicted. We’ve been eating veggies and meat from the freezer, our peaches, pickles and jams, frozen fruit – delish!
We’ve been talking about the garden a lot the last week or so. I think that the sun coming up at 7:00am again is making us think Spring is around the corner. We received the Baker Creek heirloom seed catalog in December, and have since been lustfully drooling over every page and variety since.
Alas – my writing time is up today – E is, shall we say, requesting – my presence.
More to come soon.
From gardens, bees and backyard chickens in the heart of Denver to starting from scratch in San Antonio. Our family of five is striving to find the simple life - the easy way.
The Lazy Homesteader 