Before we even had a place to call home, I had a long list of homesteading goals in mind. My brain is always ten steps ahead of my life, making lists and planning every detail of the future ten years before it's even a possibility. It's a blessing and a curse. I come into all projects (probably overly) prepared, but it leaves little brain space to actually 'live in the moment' - and I usually annoy Alex with my perfectionist habits and ability to shoot ideas out of my head like laser beams. When you spend years thinking through an idea, you have a pretty solid picture of what it's going to look like and that's hard for me to let go of. You can imagine what raising kids does to me and the level of stress that I'm at with this whole building a house ourselves journey that we've set out on. So far everything has gone smoothly - well except for we're out of money. . . and my shower drain is crooked! There, I said it! The guy who did our concrete did a fantastic job (seriously, I didn't know concrete could look so beautiful), but he didn't straighten up our square floor drains before he poured the concrete, so they're just in there all willy nilly like. I'm trying to embrace it as a quirk - you know, 'it gives it character' kind of thing, like the written temperature guess-timations on our oven dial in Brooklyn. It's one of life's cruel jokes that it's in a place I will undoubtably look at every day.
Anyway, my approach to farm life isn't any different, of course. Joel Salatin talks about the aesthetics of a farm and how they don't matter so long as things are functional. Blame it on me being a lady or whatever, but I have to disagree. I'm fascinated by pretty much anything he writes, but I was an art major after all. I'm all about some aesthetics. I can't help myself. I feel like we aren't just creating a farm. It's not just about some animals and some food. We're creating a lifestyle, a community, our haven. I have big dreams for this overgrown piece of dirt of ours and it doesn't involve building things out of plywood (well, not too many things). When people come to visit, I want them to forget about the world for awhile. I want them to come in search of a pumpkin with their family, savor their time here, and leave with peaceful memories, like they just returned from a mini vacation. So I'm all about doing things right (and beautifully) the first time around. My mind has been racing and it's all swimming around in there with no place to land, so I put pen to paper and came up with some basic plans. Gathering inspiration is probably my favorite part of any project, so of course I have way too many unrealistic ideas you can sort through here, if you're interested in getting lost in the black whole of the internet (Pinterest). If I could spend my mornings making lists and sipping coffee, I'd be a happy woman. I'm already a pretty happy woman, but you get where I'm going.
FIRST YEAR
- build a house, of course (a blog post is in the works, but if you don't want to wait you can see our progress at #thejacobshomestead on instagram)
- fence + establish a garden plot
- build some coops and raise some chicks for our egg + meat flocks
- clear some land for pastures
- put up a clothesline (because money saving goals are the best goals)
- build a patio + pergola
SECOND YEAR
- start planting fruit trees in the orchard in the Fall
- fence in our pastures
- buy and breed milk goats
- buy and breed heritage breed pigs
- build some pens and raise meat rabbits
- build a tool shed
THIRD YEAR
- invest in beekeeping supplies + start our hives
- build a root cellar + greenhouse - venture into the business world selling produce + eggs + other handmade goods at the farmer's market/online
- buy and breed sheep for wool
- finish planting fruit trees + berries in the orchard LONG TERM
- live debt free
- drill a well
- go off grid with solar panels
- buy pasture land nearby to raise cattle on
- build and rent out an AirBNB cabin - offer farm tours + u-pick strawberry/watermelon/pumpkin patches + possibly CSA boxes
Our overall goal in homesteading is to become self-sufficient and a big part of that is learning new skills, so I have a long list of personal goals that includes things like canning, bread making, spinning wool into yarn, dying fabric with natural dyes, learning how to make pottery... but mostly turning my black thumb into a green one because no joke, I haven't been able to keep one single plant alive in the last six years that Alex and I have been married. Realistically, we might kill everything we lay hands on in the next three years, give up, and move back to the city. . . but let's hope not. That would make this the most expensive science project in history.
Right now, all this just seems like a pipe dream, which is kind of why I sat down to make this list in the first place. Instead of this cluster of overwhelming ideas floating around in your head, you have a physical breakdown of all that you need to accomplish. Plus, I'm a believer in putting your dreams out there - not in a kooky, 'the universe will reward you' way, but more as an act of bravery, a flag flying high saying, 'this is what I'm fighting for.'
What is your family fighting for? What goals are you trying to accomplish, homesteading-related or not? I can't wait to say your flags raised in the comments!
I've always been a wildly indecisive person, dipping my toes into all sorts of hobbies, projects, places. I used to think that meant I was irresponsible. It was something I tried to stifle inside myself, especially after I became a mother. Even before my journey through motherhood began, I held onto a promise to myself that I would never make my kids feel like an inconvenience, that a day would never come when they thought that my wants were more important than their needs. The further I get into my relationship with them, the more I see this is as a delicate tiptoeing act. You see, my spirit longs to sample each and every bit of life like sips of wine. Some are swallowed with a grimace, but I'm glad to have tasted them nonetheless. Some are savored, so I choose to return to them. Some have been stored away, waiting for the right season of life to be opened and tasted. Some are tasted in good company and some are kept secret until I can indulge in them without sharing. I've been a lot of things and seen a lot of things in the past, some are still tucked away and some were just a breath, gone now. I've always thought of our journey as a linear one and pushed the idea of it being a full circle out of my mind, not wanting to end up where I started.
Where I started never felt like home. We've already done this once. It feels like something beyond deja vu and more akin to time travel, like we might be redoing our time from before, a time I was comfortable not visiting with again. Everything is exactly the same as it was before, and yet nothing about us is remotely the same at all. It's the same place with the same people and the same culture that almost buried me alive, and I was so relieved to have made my way out, and now I'm here again. Sometimes I wake up wondering if we ever really left, or were the last five years all a dream? A surge of gratitude follows as I accept that it was in fact our life and I'm thankful for all of the happy memories from all of our places we've made home.
The first thing people ask me when we reconnect here is, 'Are you glad to be home?' I never really know what to say. A lot of times I just look at Alex and let him answer, most of the time I just shrug, 'sure,' but what I really want to say is, 'Nope!' or 'Please don't say home.' or 'I don't really want to talk about it.' The older I get the more I admire blunt honesty. The truth is, this is the hardest thing I'ver ever done. Some days I wake up and make the best of it. Most days I wake up angry and contemplate hauling this camper out of here and driving as far away as I can until the damn thing falls apart on the side of the road somewhere. Leading up to the move, I just emotionally detached myself from the reality of it and buried myself into the newborn phase. For six weeks or so, I was Switzerland, neutral. Then as I stood out on our patio of our Albuquerque apartment watching Alex put the last of our things into a moving truck, the dam broke. I passed the baby off and hid in the bathroom and let it all come out. It was only a year ago today that we even left Brooklyn and then there was reacquainting ourselves with Albuquerque, saying see you in four months, being pregnant in Missouri, becoming re-reaquainted with Albuquerque, then saying goodbye to the beautiful lady all over again. You see, I hadn't even had a chance to mourn Brooklyn properly, so when I say I've been an emotional mess the past few months, I mean it. I feel like I should have a perpetual 'I would rather be in Brooklyn.' bumper sticker stuck to my forehead - because I would, and I will, always. After the mourning passed, I resigned myself to anger and that's sort of where I've been camped out now for the last few months. It's a hard anger too - it's the kind that eats you up, but you have no one to be angry at except maybe yourself and no way to fix it. Along with that comes a lot of guilt because oh my goodness - how many times have I moved my kid around now? And this was not the way I wanted to spend our first year with a new human in our family.
This is what we're meant to be doing, of course - building a home, giving our kids something stable, planting ourselves in a place where they can run barefoot and wild - and I've always known it, but it's confusing. Our barefoot and wild place was supposed to be off the coast of Washington, deep in the Oregon forest, or out in the beauty of Alaska - not among the haunts of our childhood. Does this mean I failed? I left with no intention of coming back, but here I am. We fought our way to Albuquerque and it effortlessly felt like home. We fought our way through Brooklyn and there isn't a day that goes by that I'm not reminded of her from some otherworldly force out there. No matter how hard I try, I will always wake up wishing I was in Brooklyn. So, I guess I've learned that home is wherever you fight like hell to be. I've been doing an awful lot of fighting here, so maybe this will come to feel like home after all.
When I set out to (re)name this little space, we were in the beginning stages of moving to Brooklyn. I knew the kind of 'feel' I wanted the name to have, the image I wanted it to portray, how it would sound when I said it, that it would represent our family values in some way - it would say in a subtle way, 'This is who we are!' I even knew it should be four words because I'm a symmetry freak. It took me months of pondering to arrive at The Long Way Home. I was on a wandering walk through our old neighborhood, pushing Ev along in front of me when I asked her if she wanted to take the long way home - and it stuck. I came up with several others that escape me now, but finally decided, much like naming my children, that this space couldn't be anything but The Long Way Home. Little did I know how ironic this name would come to be.
It's painfully obvious even to this day, but I loved living in Brooklyn. I loved our quiet little apartment on our quiet little street. I love that it always looked thrown together no matter where you put anything. I loved that our mattress was on the floor right next to Evie's and we used to fall asleep holding hands under my pillow. I loved the old hardwood floors that used to frustrate her to no end as she'd try to stack block upon block and they would fall no matter how careful she was. So she'd gather them all up and stake her claim on a different, hopefully flatter piece of floor with a determined and slightly concerned look on her face. I loved our insanely pricey rent that felt like a bargain compared to the rest of the city, mostly because we had a real kitchen. I loved listening to the city come alive each morning and watching our brick wall view turn a golden hue that only fellow Brooklyn-dwellers have seen. I loved using the word 'bodega.' I loved the corner cafe with $20 sandwiches and cereal bowls of coffee. I loved our tiny mailbox and our obnoxious door buzzer. I loved the bagels. Oh, how I loved the bagels. I loved being able to buy a slice of pizza for a dollar. I loved the way the guys at our favorite pizza place said mozzarella. I loved that our church was held in a school auditorium. I loved that we gathered in people's impossibly small apartments during the week. I loved the Manhattan view we'd get on our grocery shopping nights leaving Fairway. I loved and hated Fairway. I loved that everyone had a love/hate relationship with the city. I loved our watermelon picnics. I loved that the playground was never empty the entire time we lived there. There was always someone there for Ev to play with.
I loved the subway smell. I loved the R train, the consistently late R train. I admired that about her, I accepted it because I'm consistently late anywhere I go. I loved that we lived at the end of the line and knew we were home when we heard, 'This is the last stop on this train. Please leave the train. Thank you for riding with MTA New York City transit.' I even sort of loved feeling like steamed broccoli in the Summer heat. I loved our secret Staten Island beach spots with oily water and sand full of trash. I loved the handfuls of sea glass we'd walk away with. I loved walking miles to get anywhere. I loved the street sweeping day, car moving scramble that happened each week. I loved the sidewalk horses that Evie went nuts over. I loved New Yorkers and their constant use of the F word. I loved how people really lived in the Spring, Summer, and Fall because the Winters were so unbearable. I loved that you could go for a simple walk and never be bored. I loved how beauty could find you in the most unexpected places. I loved our view of the Verrazano and watching boats pass by on the Hudson. I loved how people celebrated their New York-iversary. I loved that people complained so much about living there, but refused to live anywhere else. As Anne Lamott says, '. . . [I loved] the feel of being part of a healthy mob, part of a pulse, part of a collective heartbeat. . . [I loved] what it felt like to be part of a huge struggle, where people were winning and losing and triumphing and being humiliated and for once it wasn't you.' I love how living there was kind of like childbirth - after a while you forget how hard it was. I loved it all. I would be a lifer. Sometimes I lay in bed and imagine walking along those Bay Ridge streets with my two kids. It's hard for me to comprehend that a place that is so much a part of me, will never be a part of both of my kids. I sometimes forget Noble wasn't there with us.
As much as I loved Brooklyn, there is a bit of my soul that is nourished by New Mexico. I love the sunsets, each one different from the all the rest, but beautiful in a way you'll never forget. I love the adobe houses with turquoise trim. I love that you get to experience all four seasons, but you really only have to experience snow when you feel like driving up the mountain. I love the freakishly bipolar Spring weather. I love the Cottonwoods. I love that the days are so consistently beautiful that you wake up never thinking about what the weather will be like. I love the Christmas luminarias. I love the old man at the farmer's market that never stops shouting, 'Fresh tortillas!' in his Spanish accent. I love that you can tell what neighborhood you're in by how many Subarus are around. I love their strange exclamations like 'Eeee!' and 'Ah-la!' I love when someone calls Evie 'mija.' I love the trees outside our window that Noble strains his neck to watch from the rocking chair. I love the bike lanes and trails scattered all over the city. I love the love that the lifers have for this city and the effort they put in to keep it quirky. I love living three blocks from the zoo and that it's basically become our backyard. I love that we're surrounded by so much beauty and mountains are always in our background. We'd never make it through our 'places to see' list if we lived here for a lifetime. I love that feeling I get when we're coming home from the East and we spot the mountain silhoettes off in the distance. I love that you can wear whatever you want here and no one will look twice. I love that you can practically wear sandals year round and most people do. I love the frequent Indian Summers in the middle of Winter. I love that it's never hard to find something interesting to do here. I even kind of love the lack of a good Chinese food place. I love that the vast majority of people embrace local, organic food. I love the ridiculous amount of breweries and that you can buy craft beer almost anywhere. I love that both of my babies' birth certificates say 'Albuquerque, New Mexico,' a place where people are advocating for a mother's right to birth the way she wants. I love that that this place will always be a part of them no matter where we go - it called us back twice after all. There must be something special here for them. Even though there is so much to love about each place we've lived, we've known that they all wouldn't be forever.
After months of unrest and everything feeling clumsy, not quite right - there it is, the morning of our past, unexpected but cherished. We all awake with a smile and exhale. We begin breakfast, all of us moving around each other without a word, tending to our contribution. The coffee is brewing. The pancakes are on the griddle. The bacon is sitting on a paper towel, grease soaking into the stamped circles. I exhale. We gather together without thought, unintentionally. We're drawn to each other in the moments of waiting, while the bacon pops are too wild for comfort or the coffee isn't ready to be stirred yet. We look in each other's eyes and smile, saying nothing important with our words, but everything we've all needed to hear from one another in the hard moments of memory with our body language. 'I'm here. You're here. This is what we do. We drink. We eat. We cook. We laugh. We dance. We sing. We love. We kiss. We hug. We exhale.' is what our mornings spent in the kitchen say.
I almost labeled this 'a sarcastic home tour.' I got an email the other day from someone asking me to post a tour of our apartment. I was drinking coffee at the moment - hot coffee, and it most definitely came out of my nose. We love this place. We love our neighborhood. We love living here. It feels like a dream come true every morning that I wake up here, but it isn't home yet. We haven't had the energy or finances to make it home yet, but it has some fantastic potential. I can picture it all and that's what keeps me from ugly crying in our living room floor on our only piece of furniture.
At random intervals through out the day, our goings-on (going-ons?) are accompanied by the background noise of an annoying car alarm, but not just any annoying car alarm.
This has become our reality. The first time we heard it, we looked at each other with stunned faces and shouted 'IT'S LILY'S CAR ALARM!' and ran to the window. Why we ran to the window, I'm not sure. We couldn't see the car. Our view never changes. It's always this. . .
. . .or this. . .
. . .or this.
And yes, our windows are extremely dirty.
After we'd heard the alarm a handful of times, we started to get annoyed and talk about how pointless car alarms were. Now you can find us standing in the kitchen, cooking dinner, woo-wooing along with the car alarm. What city living does to people is quite fascinating. You just have to embrace it all to stay sane.
Three weeks after we moved into the apartment, 48 hours of unending torrential rain made it's way through our ceiling. It was like the diamond cave in The Rescuers. We had almost every dish out of our cabinets and scattered around. It got so bad that we had to call the super and even he was a bit worried and brought us a five gallon bucket and a bag of thrift store t-shirts to put in the places we had run out of containers. We laughed it off for the first few hours, but started to get worried when chunks of plaster started to fall from our ceiling. The holes are still there a month and a half later and plaster sporadically falls from the holes. We usually just look up, look at each other, and shrug. New York City landlords are quite fascinating too. I say all of this for the sake of transparency (and a tad bit for humor). Moving to New York City always sounds glamorous, but for the majority of the people that move here, this is what your beginning is like. Almost anyone you talk to can tell you, with a smile on their face, about their first small, probably-should-have-been-condemned apartment and first year or two of struggling. It's sort of a rite of passage. I can't with any conscience argue for New York City with anyone. My love for this place is irrational. The fact that anyone moves here is irrational.
Our floors are fascinatingly uneven. When Evie pours her blocks out all at once, they scatter and roll in different directions (mostly under the couch, of course). We like to laugh about this too because it also reminds us of Lily and Marshall's apartment they buy. (If you couldn't tell yet, we're big fans of HIMYM.) You could probably start at one end of the apartment and roll to the other side on a skateboard without ever letting your feet touch the ground. Ev likes to build 'tall towahs' with her blocks. You can watch her try to set one up, have three blocks stacked that continue to fall, look intently at the floor, then move it all to a different (flatter) spot because she's figured out the floor must be crooked.
Every night, at the same time, the people up stairs watch the news at what I'm sure is the highest volume level their TV reaches. This annoyed us for the first few weeks we lived here. Now it's become a sort of comfort. All is right with the world if the news comes on upstairs around 8:30.
The state of our furniture is amusing. Our bedroom looks like a campground - two mattresses pushed together and a bike propped in the corner. Our living room has a couch in it, a poor couch that has been through so much. We bought the old girl four years ago, right after we were married, living in an apartment in Birmingham smaller than a single room in this apartment. It has traversed it's way across the country twice and lived in four different houses and is mauled by a baby daily and needs replaced badly. In said living room there is also a plank of wood set on two sawhorses to serve as my sewing table. No, I'm not kidding. You can't make this stuff up.
Three of the most important things that I noticed our first day here, all of which have to do with my love for Breakfast at Tiffany's: We have an intercom box thingy that buzzes people in. I can never hear anybody on the blasted thing, but it makes me happy. Sometimes I won't be expecting anyone, but it will buzz and I will press the talk button, 'Hello?' then I will forget to press the listen button and wonder why no one is responding, so then I hello them again - I don't know why I bother because all I hear is 'wahh wahh wahh wuh wah,' like Charlie Brown's teacher. So I hope it isn't a serial killer and push the button to let them in anyway. I hold it for a whole ten seconds or something because I never know how long it takes for someone to open the door and every time someone buzzes me in the door locks again just as I pull on the handle and I have to annoy the person with that dreadful 'buzzzzzz' again. Why isn't the listen button just built in you ask? Who wants to talk without listening immediately afterwards? Who knows. Anytime I need buzzed in (I've said buzz so many times, I'm wondering if there's a different technical term for it?) I always want Alex to yell, 'HOLLY GORIGHTRY! You distuhb me! You must get another key made!' and then I will respond with, 'It won't do any good, darling. I'll just lose them all!' Sometimes he plays along, but most of the time he looks at me like I've finally lost it and asks, 'What is that from?' just to annoy me.
In our lobby there are tiny mailboxes all in a row. Someday soon I will hide my lipstick in there and paste a small mirror to the back, even though I hardly ever wear lipstick. We've lived here for two months and have gotten approximately three pieces of mail, so I called the post office to see what the deal was. The slightly loud and rude lady asks me if my name was on the mailbox. I said no because I've never had to write my name on any of my mailboxes before. It has my apartment number on it after all and some foreign guy's last name on it who lived here before us, so I guess that can be confusing, but HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT?! It seems she thought I was as dumb as a rock for not putting my name on the mailbox and expecting to get mail, but we keep getting mail for people who don't live here anymore, so what's up with that? My grudge for the USPS worsens.
We also have a fire escape. A few days after we had been here and Ev had fallen asleep, we decided to climb out our window and sit on the fire escape so Alex could smoke a cigar. I don't know why he sporadically thinks smoking a cigar is a good idea because I always ask him if it was good and he always replies with, 'Eh.' Anyway, sitting on the fire escape scared the living day lights out of me and I was a nervous wreck the entire time - but to complete the Breakfast at Tiffany's dream I've always had in my head, I'm determined to curb my fear and play Moon River on a ukulele out there, even if it's only once. I'm also determined to one day own a claw foot bathtub couch and keep my phone in a suitcase.
Showering here is like showering at Summer camp. You never know what's going to happen in that shower. You get the temperature just right and then a squirrel climbs up the rain gutter or a pigeon lands on the roof and it's gone, your perfect temperature has now turned to boiling with no warning whatsoever. The water doesn't change like this at any of the sinks, however, so we're thinking of changing the handles. It probably won't fix anything, but it will make is feel like we're being proactive. Also, whoever hung the curtain rod for the shower curtain hung it just a few inches too high, so it's impossible to find a curtain long enough. We've given up and just let water drip off the bottom of the curtain wherever it wants. The bathroom is completely tile after all, which is strictly a New York City thing. No where else that I know of do people tile the bathroom completely. I believe they would have tiled the ceiling if they could have.
After we had lived here for a few weeks, I got bored and decided to clean the stove knobs. They were plastered with other people's food gunk and I thought I would soak them and scrub them with washing soda. I scrubbed all the numbers off and it's made a new game out of finding the right oven temperature when you want to bake something. Now that we've figured out some of the temperatures, the husband decided to muster up his worst handwriting and take a permanent marker to the knob.
Our fridge is an 'apartment' sized fridge - not mini, but not full sized - but it's in a full sized hole. Our kitchen is seriously huge for a NYC apartment, so I wonder, do they only sell apartment sized fridges in this city? Is that why our fridge is thrown in this full sized fridge hole all willy nilly like? We obviously had a full sized fridge in our house in Albuquerque and it was always full, even if we didn't have anything to eat. It has now become one of the greatest mysteries of my life because this 'apartment sized' fridge is never full. It's impossible to even fake it being full. We bought $250 in groceries almost as a test and that didn't even fill it up. I'm constantly wondering what I did with all that prime fridge real estate back in Albuquerque.
Our super's name is Sammy and he is a black man that only speaks Spanish, which really threw me off the first time we met. Ev thinks he's the best thing since sliced bread. Anytime we go down stairs, 'Where Sammy? Where Sammy, Mama?' If she happens to see him she chuckles and says, "Saammmmaayyy!' and he chuckles right back. The lovely man also carries the stroller up the steps for me anytime he can and that's pretty much the sweetest thing you can do for a Mama in this city.
Thank you for touring our lovely abode. Souvenir pictures can be purchased at the booth on your way out.
I stumbled upon the ten on ten project a few months ago and the idea really resonated with me, but we were staying in D.C. and at that point in our lives every little thing was heavy and hard to manage. I read the words 'finding life and beauty in the ordinary things of our day to day' and thought yes, that's something I can get behind and participate in. There is so much noise on the internet these days and the world is so linked through blogs and news and Pinterest and Twitter (and whatever social media app I'm trying to ignore because when will it end?). I would love to be apart of spreading snippets of beauty into people's lives and bringing them joy. That's really what I want this space to be about everyday. That's really what I want my life to be about everyday. Technically this is ten on eleven, but I knew that I would want to document Mother's Day and I've been trying to live out our days a bit slower with less technology involved, so I didn't want to be behind the camera all day two days in a row.
It's been a little over a month since we moved here and I've just now begun to have the energy to attempt to get into a rhythm again. One of the funniest things about moving to a new place for me is that even if you worked hard to get there and you want to be there, it never 100% feels like home from the start. This is the closest I've ever been to feeling 100% at home right away, but it has still taken some effort and adjustments and we're still working on making this place feel like ours. Most days we still feel tourists just fumbling around the city. I'm convinced that there are certain days and moments and places that all add up to make a place home. It's like a cosmic jar of fireflies, but coffee shops and laughs and wanders through the park replace the fireflies and they all come together in layers to paint a picture that makes you say 'this is home to me and I never want to leave it.' I've been craving a day like that, a moment like that since we got here as a reassurance I guess. I'm not sure. I know we're supposed to be here. I spent the last five or more years of my life homesick for this place, a place I was never able to call home until now. I used to come and see those city moms with their city kids and I'd carry a longing home with me to someday raise a baby here, but I was sure it would never come to be. So I know it's home. I just need to collect a few more fireflies for that jar of mine.
We got a good start on that this weekend. Alex wandered down to the corner bodega (It's really just a grocery store, but I can't help but love that people call them bodegas here.) the night before and surprised me with a bouquet of flowers. He'd been gone for four days and if you know us, you know we don't fare well apart so when I questioned him about the flowers he responded 'I had to come home with flowers. It felt like I was coming home from a deployment!.' I opened the door as Ev rounded the corner at a marathon pace squealing with uncontainable joy. Papa was on one knee to scoop his girl up and she spotted those flowers and pulled them right out of his arms - 'FWOWAHS! Oh, dank you, Papa! Dank you.' and she sniffed and sniffed them. For as long as I've known him, I've told him not to buy me flowers. There's something morbid about watching something so beautiful die a quicker death than if you just left them in the ground where they belong. I'm warming up to the idea as the years pass though. Among many other reasons, that's how I knew he was a keeper - I told him not to buy me flowers and he did anyway because what kind of woman doesn't like fresh flowers? He always manages to pick the ones that really do look like me.
So I woke up to these flowers on Sunday morning and smiled. I appreciated them the only way I know how - with a camera in my hand and the morning light streaming through the windows. We cooked a banana pancake breakfast, packed a picnic, and caught the train up to Park Slope for church. Ev was proud to present a Peony to me after church and this may sound ridiculous, but it was absolutely the most perfect flower I've ever held in my hands. I never knew it, but it seems Peonies are my favorite flower. We walked a few blocks to Prospect Park and staked our claim on a patch of shade with adequate grass. Picnic spot picking is always a big production for this family. The weather was flawless. We finished our picnic and put Ev down for a nap. We sat in the grass next to her and we both exhaled for the first time in weeks. We talked like we haven't talked in months and sat in silence like we haven't sat in silence in months with the sounds of a guitar playing nearby. Ev woke up and we all wandered and took pictures and wandered some more until our feet were blistered and our legs were aching. It was a heart filling, soul nourishing kind of day.
Do you ever think back on a time in your life and 'I don't know how we made it' fills your mind and overwhelms you? Even though it's over, the anxiety and the struggles and the fear from those moments still haunt you? I think I will always feel that way when I look at this picture. We're here. . . in our home. . . in this city I've dreamt of since I was a little girl and I still can't wrap my mind around it. I still can't shake the cloud that's been following us around the last few months. Through the trials and uncertainty and basically just loss of our lives as knew them, we were all a little battered and broken down and now I sit here and think 'what now?' And I know the answer, but the question still remains because the answer is so broad, so uncertain. We dream bigger. We explore. We try to forget about the things that have always been taken care of no matter how much worrying was done about them like money and jobs and debt. We love. We seek beauty. We find joy in unexpected places. We build relationships. Building a new life is beautiful and exciting and overwhelming and nerve wracking all at the same time. I find myself thinking thoughts I haven't had since high school like 'What if I can't find any friends?' Then I realize I'm just a mess, a grown woman worrying about making friends.
It's been pretty quiet around here over the last few weeks and even after the move was finished, we were all busy just living - cooking dinner together, watching movies, unpacking boxes, all the things we haven't had time to do in months - and it felt good. This whole process has been sort of unreal. When this idea entered our minds, Alex and I looked at each other like, "You realize we're crazy, right?" We had just bought a house. Albuquerque was finally starting to feel like home. It wasn't just the two of us anymore - we had a baby. We were comfortable and it was nice, but I think it scared the hell out of us too. For as long as I can remember, we've strayed away from anything resembling the American dream and then without any warning we backed ourselves into a life that felt exactly like what we said we had never wanted. So we threw this dream out into the universe with doubtful thoughts like 'this is going to take a miracle' we took it step by step, day by day wondering when the door would shut and tell us to just go home, but it never did. Every prayer was answered, every problem was solved and the entire time we had no idea what was going on, we had no control over any situation, which is why I'm baffled when I wake up and this is our reality now. A pang of sadness hit me like it always used to as a camera panned over New York City on a TV show we were watching last night and it stopped me in my tracks - we made it. That's in my backyard. That's a subway ride away. New York City is our home. It isn't a lost or waiting dream anymore.
So a new chapter for our family has begun. We drove into the city on Wednesday (04.09.2014) to shouts of 'NEW YORT! OUW HOUWSE!' from the backseat. Ev was so happy to have some resemblance of a normal life back. I held the hand of the man next to me who has driven us to every new home over the last five years and we just smiled an exhausted smile. It's all we could do. It took all the strength left in us to unload the small trailer and pull our things up to our third floor apartment. Even after getting rid of at least 75% of our things, we're still finding things we don't need as we unpack. After hauling it across the entire country and letting it sit in storage for three months, some things just don't seem as important as when we packed them away. When we were leaving Albuquerque, I remember standing in our house with boxes of things all around me at 2:30 in the morning and looking up to Alex in the doorway with a defeated look on his face - 'I'm sorry babe, nothing else will fit.' So we spent hours whittling it all down, sitting cross legged in the floor pouring over each box, examining the contents and searching ourselves for some sort of comforting thought to make it easier. We worked hard for what we had - we didn't want to just give it away, which is selfish in retrospect. As we pared down our belongings, I'm confident God was whittling down the last hold we had on things in our life. So I prayed what probably seems like a ridiculous prayer to most people. I prayed for God to send the right people into the right place to find these things we'd worked hard for. I prayed it wouldn't all end up in the trash. I prayed it would all bless someone out there who needed these things but couldn't afford them any other way. I thought that I would leave that house uneasy, but I haven't felt that at peace in years and as we unpacked our things into this apartment, I could think of very few things we left behind that I wanted back.
The next morning, after we had moved into the apartment, we all sat on the floor and ate leftover pizza for breakfast and headed off to IKEA. We bought a few things we needed and it felt good to start making this place a home and talking about plans, but I started to feel anxious at the same time. It's so easy for me to let covetousness creep into my heart and to want what we can't afford, so I'm trying to hold onto this experience we had of simplifying our things and remind myself that things are just things. We want to make this place a home because we haven't done that in any other place we've lived and that will require some buying, of course. And I have desires like every other woman that all boil down to beautifying our life through furniture and clothes - it's what women were made to do, but whatever we bring into this home I want to be sure to hold onto it loosely.
We sort of have a track record of doing things unconventionally, so it's no surprise that we've been met with questions of why and how and 'don't you want to give your kid a normal life,' but I don't have the answer. It's as simple as the fact that we couldn't imagine living any other way. We want to live simple lives, travel more, actually accomplish dreams, and give our child experiences over things; in a city of consumerism and busy lives, people just don't see how these line up, but we do. We want to look at life and not ask what is the next thing we can buy, but what is the next thing we can do, the next place we can go? We want to start focusing on things in our family that have long been crowded out and ignored. We want to have time to sit down and breathe, picnic in the park together, visit museums and not be too exhausted to even enjoy ourselves, and find time to go to the beach and just soak up the sun. Life is beautiful and thrilling and worth living even without all the stuff and I want that to resonate with my daughter through out her whole childhood. I really think that the idea of the American dream is a trap - it's so luring and makes you think you're in control, but you're really just spending your life looking for something you'll never find. You'll never have enough. You'll never be happy enough. Your life will never be perfect. Once we came to this realization, life became a lot more fun to live. It became more about adventures and less about vacations, more about doing the things that we love to do and less about job promotions and salaries, more about relationships and less about filling our time and life with things. Life is short. Here's to more adventures and a new beginning for our family! Let's do this.
05/31/2013: A few moments of beauty in our front yard.
A few weeks ago, I blogged about a parenting book called 'Simplicity Parenting.' Alex and I have been talking a lot about ways that we can make our life simpler, so we had discussed plenty of the ideas that this book presented, but reading them from someone else's perspective was really encouraging and motivating. Anyone that knows me, knows that I am a list maker, so naturally my house has been scattered with lists and pens lately. I've basically been dissecting this book and trying to implement the words that spoke to our dreams for our family into our daily lives. I thought I would share some of what is going on inside our heads, the changes I'm trying to make as an individual and in our family.
The book starts with the words, "Parents are the architects of the family's daily lives." I didn't even have to read past the first few pages before I sat down with pen in hand and started 'building' an image of daily life for us. You can see what is important to a family by observing their everyday lives and I knew that we needed to do some rearranging. We've been letting too many things that don't matter rule our schedules and household and are ultimately unsatisfied with most days because we spend too little time doing the things that allow us all to feel whole. We've been distant, unloving, and impatient with each other too often. There have been too many days in the last few months that have ended with burdened spirits and tears, and while most people say, "Well, that's life," we don't want that to be life for our family.
I created a list of priorities in each area of our lives: home and family, Evie, personal, and marriage, then I thought of ways we could be sure to give these things the attention they need each day. The things I want to focus on for our family and in our home are cooking and enjoying meals together, having regular family 'dates,' and creating a simple and comfortable home space. The things that I need, personally, are relaxation breaks throughout the week (yoga, read, take a bath, etc.), time to invest in a creative outlet, a consistent exercise routine, and time to spend on something that will give me a feeling of accomplishment. Evie needs more explorative play and time outside, a calm, predictable rhythm to her days, and more exposure to other kids. Alex and I could really use a date night each month, which will probably be the hardest thing for us to accomplish on this list. It's not easy for me to let just anyone watch Ev and a lot of our friends already have children, so I feel guilty asking them to take on another one. In the realm of paid childcare, the cost of a babysitter usually matches the cost of a date and we aren't in the position to afford a $100 night out every month. Regardless of these things, I want to make it happen because our marriage is important to me and lately it's been getting the leftovers from each of us.
In all honesty, I feel discouraged just looking at this list. I find myself trying to manage all of these things already and fail. Being a stay at home mother in today's society is hard - Alex is busy and tired, there is no family around to carry some of the burdens or give me a break, and I have so much to do at home that getting out of the house usually turns out to cause more stress than it's worth. But I press on and try to see the beauty in each day and extend grace and patience to Alex and Ev because, well, what is the alternative?
Another thing that helped me determine what changes need to be made in our schedule and lifestyle was to imagine a typical day and ask myself what difficulties arise and what times of the day are consistently stressful? Meal times have been hectic and unnerving for awhile now. Evie is usually running wild, destroying everything I spent all day cleaning, pulling dishes out of the cabinets and scattering them everywhere, pulling on my leg and asking for food, and flopping herself on the floor in a fit of rage because it isn't done yet. I've tried giving her snacks between meals and we just go through the same routine and then she won't eat her meal, which is equally frustrating. I've found that the one thing that helps lessen the stress is to have unwavering meal times, especially dinner. An early dinner time usually works to our advantage, so I'm trying to make an effort to make a more detailed meal plan and start on dinner around 4 or 4:30. This makes it really hard to get out of the house in the afternoon, but has made meals a little more enjoyable.
The next stressful thing in our house is keeping up with work around the house each day. I've been trying to find the best times to fit in housework in regards to Evie's mood without compromising nap time because that is the only time that I get to spend doing things solely for myself like blogging or sewing. Lately I've been trying to accomplish a lot of the cleaning in the morning, between breakfast and nap time and that's worked pretty well, especially if I take her for a bike ride or walk after I've finished. I've also been attempting to wake up a hour or so before her, which sounded like lunacy before, but I've actually started looking forward to this time now. I usually make myself some coffee, do yoga while it's brewing, then sit down and journal or read. It's been a nice, quiet time to wrap my head around all the thoughts floating around up there that reduces my stress level on most days by half. I'm attempting to sit down and write out a rhythm (I can never spell this word write no matter how many times I write it.)
Have you read any parenting or family related books that you really enjoyed lately? What kind of rhythms do you establish with your child(ren) that help your days run more smoothly?
I realize this post might have been the most boring one in the history of this blog to most people. Brain vomit is my specialty. You're welcome.
Since the three week road trip that we took last month, I've been trying to catch up on posts, but it's hard with an ornery toddler (How do I already have a toddler?) attached to my leg. So I'm working slowly through nap times and night time, editing pictures, and leaving pieces of the past few months here as I come across them. Bear with me.
04/12/13.
We've been in Albuquerque for two years and the weather still surprises me every year. The winters are always colder and last longer than I expect and the summers are never as hot as I anticipate. Nonetheless, as soon as the first hint of Spring arrives we get hiking fever and today was no exception. We took a long hike with some friends of ours through the foothills (for Albuquerque readers, these were taken at the Elena Gallegos Open Space) and sat down for a picnic just as the sun was going down, so we got to witness one of the most beautiful sunsets we've seen since living here. When the sun had completely fallen behind the horizon it got a little cold, especially for the babies, but it was worth it. (From the picture above, you can see that Evie obviously agreed.) We feasted on wraps, crackers, goat cheese, fresh fruit, and fresh veggies. It was one of those days that make you a little sad when you reach the end of it, because you know you'll never be able to experience it again. We've been talking a lot about moving and where we might want to settle down in the coming years. I've found the desert to be unexpectedly beautiful and inspirational from an artist's standpoint. The crisp desert air and beautiful sunsets make me never want to leave New Mexico, but we're getting antsy and we're still young. We're nearing the point of being ready for another adventure and I often wonder if this feeling will ever fade or if we'll always be wanderers at heart? Each time we have moved, Alex and I have asked each other if the other is sad to leave and we both always say, "Home is wherever I'm with you." We've never felt ready to lay down roots, even now as a family of three. I only hope that this doesn't become something we regret later or that Ev holds against us.
