First Wednesday Off

My first Wednesday off of work for my alternative work schedule was a total success.  The weather was gorgeous, so after sleeping in until 8:30, I made two over easy fried egg sandwiches for me and Paul, and then I spent the rest of the morning outside.

I planted the mini daffodils Sarah sent home with me after Jeneane's baby shower, and then filled up the big white pots they had been sitting in and planted the bok choi and kale seedlings I started from seed, along with the last two cabbage plants, because I think it will look really pretty all together until I eat it all!!  And I'm all about my veggies being ornamental and bringing beauty to my backyard until I eat them!  My hands were way too grubby to take pictures of the newly potted veg, but here's one I took earlier of a kholrabi looking fine:

Then I had my hair cut and styled, and went straight to PENNDOT to renew my driver's license.  As I hoped, this is my best DL photo ever.  Totally the way to do it.  Side note: how is the DMV that busy on a random Wednesday afternoon?  I thought I'd beat the crowds by going in the middle of a weekday.  It was still pretty quick and painless though.

Then I came home and went with Paul to finally move our safe deposit box from New Cumberland to a bank closer to our house, and on the way to open the new box we stopped at Starbucks for half-price Frappuccinos (3-5:30pm daily through May 15...Starbucks should probably be paying me).  Of course that was delightful.  I have been 100% disciplined and have not stopped at starbucks at all, even on my most crabby mornings when I am craving it, which is especially amazing since I drive right past it every day.  Most days I have to sit and wait at the traffic light and stare at Starbucks, often with the entrance just an easy swoop to the left instead of continuing to wait at the light.  I went for my free coffee on Earth Day, and haven't been back until today.  Totally worth it, and I enjoyed my frap even more since I haven't had one in so long!

We came home and put bacon in the oven for BLTs, and I even picked a few leaves of baby spinach from the garden to augment the lettuce!  Plus we were eating them on Paul's fabulous home baked bread.  Then Paul went with me to training class with Juno, because next week he's going to take her on his own so I can go to bell choir rehearsal.

So now we're home for the evening and since we've already eaten dinner (quite early for us), we are looking forward to a calm, lazy evening catching up on some Big Bang Theory and finishing off a pint of Hans Vanilla Bean Frozen Custard!  I am definitely going to enjoy this alternate work schedule all summer.  It turns out getting up at 6am is easy when you go to bed before 10pm and it's already starting to get light at 6.  Also?  I think I could be happy running a small farm for a living...anyone want to help me with the start-up capital?  If you do, you can have free veggies for life!  Just look at my handiwork thus far:

Ambitions NOT for this Summer

In addition to all the things I want to do this summer,  there are some much bigger projects on my wish-list that are going to have to wait, probably for years or longer; and my ideal wish for these spaces will probably never happen:

Re-do the bathroom:  At the very least, I'd like to remove the sliding door on the tub/shower, re-tile everything, and add storage above the toilet.  But since the half-bath off the master bedroom is right behind the main bathroom, the main bathroom doesn't have a window; in fact, some of the other ranches in the neighborhood that are otherwise identically laid out to ours have only one bathroom that is the size of both of ours...so I think it might be awesome to totally demo both bathrooms and the adjoining wall, and make it into one bigger bathroom.  It might even work to keep the door from the master bedroom as well as the door from the hallway, and furthermore might make room for a stall shower AND a bathtub/shower, plus 2 sink/vanities, so there would be plenty of room for a growing family.  But that would require hiring a contractor, whereas re-tiling we could do ourselves, so it's probably not in the cards.

Update the kitchen:  Our kitchen has plenty of floor space, and very high-quality hardwood, hand-made cabinets.  I'd prefer a less-reddish wood tone, but my Dad says that God will strike me down if I paint over the gorgeous oak, so they're staying as-is for now.  The countertop is pretty ugly laminant, so I really want to do something about that.  But aside from those possible updates, there isn't much counter space; there's an entire blank wall that could easy have base and wall cabinets for added storage; the oven and dishwasher are both half-sized; and there's a totally supurfluous wall creating a smaller opening between the kitchen and dining room.  So again, if I had the means, I'd love to update the cabinets, knock out the wall between the kitchen and dining room, and just kind of extend the kitchen to make it more seamless with the dining room, including adding more cabinets and counters.

Build a patio:  Our carport has a door out to the backyard, and the shed off the back of the carport has a garage door facing the backyard.  I would love to add a cobblestone patio that starts outside the shed's garage door and extends, with a gently curved edge, across about half the back of the house, with possibly some built-in benchs and a cuppola covered with vining plants for some light shade.  We might actually do this eventually; we'd really love to have an outdoor seating and eating area other than our carport, which is nice but still feels too dark and inside-ish.

Add direct access to the backyard:  I doubt this will ever happen, but if by some miracle we did update the kitchen as extensively as I'd love to with the knocking down of walls, I think it would be fabulous to add a sliding door to the backyard in place of the dining room windows.  But for this reason, if we ever do build that patio, I want it to extend to just beyond these windows so that if we ever have the means, we could put in this sliding door.

Some days, I just hate our main bathroom so much that I feel the urge to take a sledge hammer to it the first week Paul is away at camp, so that I have no choice but to re-tile the bathtub and remove the sliding doors.  A girl can dream...

Progress: Upholstery

I felt a flash of extra-overwhelmed-ness this morning, like "how will I get even one or two things from my Summer to-do list finished," until I realized that by the middle of June, I'll have no more external evening commitments - Juno's training class will be over, and so will choir rehearsals for the summer.  So the fact that I haven't had time or energy to even knit half a row of an unfinished project before turning off the light and going to sleep, or, say, do some more laundry, let alone make any small progress towards the many big things I want to do, is understandable.  It will all get better once other commitments drop away, and once Paul leaves for camp and I am free to go to sleep in a quiet house at 9:30 or 10:00pm.

To keep track of everything, I've created a new page on the blog (see it up there, below the header?  It's called Summer 2011 Projects) that has the same list as the previous post!  Also, I am making a vow to do at least one thing every day that moves me closer to some item on the list.  Even if it's a super-small thing, I will do something!

Today, I created a new Pinterest board to collect fabric samples and upholstry resources, since my list includes THREE (re)upholstry projects.  Here's the first fabric candidate I found:

Source: fabric.com via Meredith on Pinterest

So that counts as a small step towards my goal of reupholstering the old wooden chair in the living room!  What do you think?

Summer Ambitions

I am getting REALLY excited for this summer!  My excitement is bubbling up today because I have made it official at work that I am going to work 9 hour days so that I can take off every other Wednesday, and I am using vacation days to take off most other Wednesdays through the first weekend in September.

I will be using many of my Wednesdays off to spend time at Camp Nawakwa, where my hubby will be spending his entire summer, but I have A LOT of other ambitions for my summer as well!  I decided that I'd be exponentially more likely to do certain things if I actually scheduled them on my calendar, especially the things that involve other people.  I just wrote a bit about this in an e-mail to my mom (as I scheduled a Summer Ambition with her!) and thought to myself, this should be in a blog post!

So here is what I have officially scheduled as of today:

• Training classes with Juno, which started last Wednesday and run every Wednesday evening through June 8th
• A road trip to visit my dear friend Rachel in Raleigh, North Carolina the second weekend in June
• My first sewing lesson & quality time with my awesome Mom the first Wednesday after she's done with school, which also happens to be only a few days before she and my Dad leave on their summer vacation to South America.  Hopefully we will move on to a second and maybe even third sewing lesson.  I feel like I'm ready to take on sewing!  I have daydreams about handbags with perfectly placed pockets, linings and zippers for knitted items, and fresh pillow covers for my Ikea Tullsta chairs!
• A trip to visit my dear friend Crystal in Alexandria, Virginia the second weekend in July

There are tons of other things I'm hoping to do this summer, including:

• Gardening.  Duh.  This should probably go in the "already scheduled" list, since the garden is already planted and I will definitely need to care for it almost daily, but since it's something that I can't officially schedule and will require discipline to keep up with, I'm putting it in this list.
• Eating meals & packing lunches that use whatever's growing in my garden to the fullest.  This will mean planning ahead, making some creative salads to pack over several days, eating more veggies than I would choose to eat if I relied entirely on my carb cravings to make my decisions, and a lot more discipline.
• Bake bread instead of buying it, and use it for copious sandwiches (see previous bullet).  Paul was on a bread-making kick for a while, so hopefully sometime in May we can make bread together so he can pass on his knowledge to me.  I'd love to get a sourdough starter going in my fridge, but I'm not going to hold myself to that, so let's just focus on making some plain ol' white bread for now.
• Finish cleaning out and organizing the basement, and in tandem with that, reorganize the office/3rd bedroom, in pursuit of my goal to own less stuff
• Paint the second bedroom and hallway, including trim, and finally paint the trim in our bedroom
• Paint the nightstand and bookcase in the second bedroom, something that coordinates with the rest of the room, and possibly painting the vanity-turned-changing-table too?  But that is up for debate.
• Hang curtains in the second bedroom
• Paint the fugly fugly vanity in the second bathroom
• Paint, fill, and hang all picture frames, mainly on the entry wall in the living room and in the dining room
• Mount the huge antique-style world map I got for Paul for his birthday last October on the wall above our low dresser in our bedroom (once I confirm that it will fit on that wall...I think it will).
• Revamp the orange wood-framed armchair we got from Poppy - I LOVE this chair, but it needs new fabric that isn't cracked and plasticy, and I think once I have removed the current covering I will take the opportunity to sand down the frame and re-stain it too, like almost black to go with the couch but not painted so the wood grain can still show through.  Then maybe I can find a fabric that has some brown tones like the Tullsta chairs and ottomans, and then it will help tie all the furniture together!
• Reupholster the seats of the dining room chairs, and possibly the back as well (but I'm not at all sure about the backs yet).  Doing the seats will be easy, though.  Possibly using the same fabric as for the chair in the previous bullet.
• I almost forgot to include a project close to the top of my list, even with the other mentions of reupholstering things!  I am going to make an upholstered headboard for our bed.  Hopefully with some button tufting and everything!  And if it goes well, I might even make a second one for the second bedroom.

Wow.  It is going to be a busy summer, and I can't wait to get started!  Well, I can't wait to keep going, since I have already started a few things.  Can I do it??  Probably not everything, but most of it?

Parsing some feelings

This post turned out a lot more incoherent than I wanted it to, but I'm posting it anyway.  Maybe I'll try again in a few months when I have some additional related news to share...in the mean time, don't take offense, just read it for what it is:  a mind dump of feelings and thoughts that I'm still in the process of working out.

A year ago this week, Paul and I started officially trying to have a baby.  It took us four months to get pregnant for the first time.  Four weeks from now is when I would have been due.

A lot of people already know all this, but a lot of people don't.  And that's exactly how it should be; I had all the support I needed, and any more would have been too much.  I was only 7 weeks when it happened, so although it was very upsetting, we were not as devestated as people often wanted to assume we must be.  That was, perhaps, even harder than dealing with the feelings we were having:  it was unsettling to feel like I wasn't anywhere near as sad as some people thought I should be.  I wasn't worried that I wasn't sad enough, I was just worried that it would give people a bad impression of me!  I was exactly as sad as I needed to be.

I'm having some sad feelings this week again because of the timing.  There have been a handful of negative pregnancy tests since November when my cycle came back, and each of those was a bummer, but not much more so than the first three negative tests before I was pregnant the first time.  In addition to the timing of a year since we started trying and getting close to my original due date, this past month I was 2 days late, so that negative test was a bit sadder than usual, but still fine.

See, the thing is, I know I am able to get pregnant.  I wasn't in love with the pea-sized little tadpole in my uterus; I was in love with the concept of being pregnant, but that all happened last October, and now that it's almost 6 months later?  I'm over it.  Really.  So I know it's going to happen again soon.  And all the gardening and planting and planning and yard work we have been doing?  I have been getting SO MUCH satisfaction out of that, out of watching our plans turn into reality, and knowing that all my hard work is going to produce lots of fresh veggies for me to enjoy this summer.  What if I was in the middle of my first trimester right now, during the most critical preparation and planting period?  Paul has been working himself ragged as it is, so without my work on weekends and evenings, I don't think we could have gotten to this point with the garden.  I am going to have to do a lot of hard work by myself while Paul is away at camp this summer, and I'm hoping to be pregnant by then, but I wouldn't trade these past few weeks if I had the choice.  Especially if I do get pregnant within the next month or three, I will consider the timing to be perfect.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the feelings surrounding pregnancy and childbirth.  I haven't really experienced either yet, but my focus stems from the path I'm on, and from watching many of my closest friends go through both, seven times now just counting the people I'm closest to!  I feel blessed to be surrounded by so many growing families.  It makes me so happy to get to know my friends' children and watch them grow, and to hear all their mom stories and know what an amazing support system I'll have once I join them.  Their births were all different: some fairly straightforward, some difficult and traumatizing, some c-sections, some with drugs, some without.  I also feel blessed to have friends who were willing to talk about their experiences openly, and a mom who was willing to tell me about her experiences.

When I picture my own pregnancy and imagine giving birth, I still picture it as idyllic.  Discomfort and pain, sure, but not too hard to deal with when you consider the reward you get at the end of it all.  And I think, no matter how many stories I hear, it wouldn't change that daydream very much.  I'm always going to imagine the best case scenario; it's just my nature.  But I also know that when I do run into problems, complications, and all the other difficulties that I'm sure to experience in some measure, having heard all these stories will help me cope mentally and physically.

The thing that I struggle with most at this point isn't the actual feelings I'm having:  I feel quite confident in my ability to feel and cope with any less-than-ideal situations I'm currently experiencing, and I'm comfortably, contemplatively moving through the slight melancholy from the anniversaries of trying and due date, mixed with the joyousness of Spring and producing beautiful and useful things with my hands in my garden.  Maybe an outsider would say that I feel so driven to knit and crochet things for other people, and put so much work into our garden, as a result of our un-success so far at starting a family, but I don't think it's that deep; I know I just enjoy doing all this creating and producing, and I would enjoy it no matter what happened in the past year; it just so happens to exist in parallel with the other stuff.  Cum hoc ergo propter hoc Correlation does not imply causation.

No, the thing I think I struggle with the most is my perception of how other people expect me to feel, and how my actual feelings, since they don't jive with their expectations, will cause weirdness that I'll have to deal with.  And not expectations of me specifically, but in reading others' stories on blogs I follow, and hearing how people talk about pregnancy and birth, the prevailing attitude of society doesn't jive for me, and it worries me on behalf of my future self once I do get pregnant again and join that world.

I'm also not talking about the popular back-to-nature movement of home births, birth without drugs, anti-c-section sentiments, anti-formula-feeding, etc etc.  I agree that birth has become over-medicalized and over-commercialized; I want to have as natural a birth as possible, at a hospital with a NICU, and then I want to breasfeed my baby exclusively for 6 months, and make all my own baby food.  Sure I want to do all of those things, and I will try very hard to make it all happen, but if I'm not able to achieve some of those things, I will not feel horrible guilt about it.  I will know that I've done my best and made the best decisions I can for the physical, mental, and emotional health of my baby AND myself.  Because if I'm not mentally or physically well, then my baby won't be either.  A friend of mine was unable to breastfeed after the first two weeks with her first child, and she struggled against attitudes that made her feel guilty because of it.  That is ridiculous.  But I also see red when I hear about women who were all but discouraged from breastfeeding by the lack of support and/or pushing of formula free samples.  Basically, either extreme is bad, which is pretty much my feeling on a range of topics, from healthcare to politics to religion.  I feel essentially the same way about c-sections too.

But what I'm trying to get at isn't the mechanics; it's the sentiment of "I loved my baby immediately and unconditionally, and I would do anything to save it."  That's what, historically, we've learned to expect.  But there's also abundant sources of stories and support groups surrounding traumatic birth experiences, and for women who do have very upsetting experiences during pregnancy and birth, and/or who don't experience quite the level of absolute imidiate love for their babies, it has become easy (at least in the online/blogging community) to find an outlet to share those feelings with others who had similar experiences.  But I worry that now that opposite extreme is becoming too emphasized as well.  When I read a birth story on a blog and the birth stories of a hundred women in the comments section, every one is either perfect or traumatic; filled with immediate unconditional love from the moment they knew they were pregnant, or struggling with difficult bonding.  The traumatic ones sometimes have the unconditional love, but my point is that there's never any mention of middle ground for either feeling.

I'm hopeful that it's largely the filter of the internet giving me this impression, because the stories from a few of my friends have been much more middle-of-the-road:  labor was long and tiring, and it was a tough call whether or not to get that epidural; it was surreal to hold that baby for the first time, and breastfeeding wasn't easy at first, but now things are getting better, and I am so happy to have my sweet baby in my arms and so in love.  And in the ensuing months, even while they're still newborns, sometimes you want to scream and sometimes you're as happy as can be.  But online and in some conversations, it makes me sad to realize that parenthood has become another issue where there are two sides to every issue and you have to be firmly on one side or the other; it's another casualty to extremism.

There's one other big area where I get apprehensive, and that's religion.  I've heard this discussed in relation to other topics (major illnesses, natural disasters, etc), but just today in reading one mommy blogger's terrifying birth story with a happy ending, I saw many commenters say, in so many words, that they hoped this experience made the parents realize that God is working in their lives and loves them and has big plans for them.  Here is my problem with that sentiment:  What does it mean for the parents whose stories end tragically?  The baby dies, the mom dies, they're never going to be able to have children, etc?  Obviously those same commentors wouldn't say that God doesn't love those people.  They'd probably say something like God has a different plan for them, but that rings false to me too.  I want people to know that I believe God's plans for us are unknowable, and it mostly doesn't make sense to me to point out God's hand in any one specific event, whether it's joyous or tragic.  I don't know how to reconcile it, but I do know that it's not like that.  Athiests have the same kinds of tragic and joyous stories as Christians or any other religion; God isn't sitting up there deciding how your pregnancy turns out based on how your life is supposed to go; these things happen for the same reason you stepped in a puddle on your way into work this morning, or found a dime in the parking lot at the grocery store.  I don't believe in predetermination or destiny, and statements about God's plan as they relate to specific outcomes of major events imply predetermination.  You can't have free will and God deciding your daily life at the same time.  I'll say it again:  I have no idea how it actually works, I just know it doesn't work like that.

We're all just trying to make the best decisions we can based on what we know and what we're feeling and what our intuition is telling us.  You can give advice until your face is blue, but don't pass judgement on other people.