What a season y’all

A couple weeks ago I made a post on one of my private facebook groups, Abundance+, because I’ve often found it to be a supportive platform to voice long and seemingly incremental progresses towards homesteading goals. I’d commented and posted a few times previously, about this or that, bouncing ideas off more seasoned gardeners and picking brains for new ideas, but I posted this one in the form of a “season” recap because that was easiest for my brain to churn out.

This season of life that I’m in seems never-ending. We welcomed our son in early March, our first baby, in the thick of Covid, and with both sets of baby’s grandparents in tow we continued our daily grind. It was clear from the get-go that my postpartum experience was going to be rough, but I’m glad we didn’t understand how bad it would feel to go through this season of life beforehand. We’ve needed the blind hope to keep us going.

When I posted my season recap on this group, I was completely unprepared for the response. I was expecting a couple “good job!”s and “Keep at it mama!”s, but what I found over the next couple weeks was an outpouring of response about my story. The nature of the telling, the content, what it inspired in their own hearts, all of it. To the tune of 64 heartfelt comments.

These comments included a gracious invitation from Dr. Chris Boman, Pediatric and Prenatal Chiropractor and host of The Healthy Perspective podcast, to guest speak on his podcast. I was a bit flabbergasted and TOTALLY STOKED, so I immediately accepted.

Three days later we were facetiming and recording our conversation about the nature of mindset change when you’re thoroughly in a season of never-ending crisis, and how that relates to a sense of self-value. I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but I did want to share the initial post I made that inspired my connection to Dr. Boman and the celebration amidst the pain that I’ve been holding dear in my heart since. Yea it sounds sappy, but every fraction of joy I can snatch and stash in my heart makes a difference right now.

So here’s the post…plus some added pictures and comments from present-day Jessica =)

This was a huge year for me.

In January I created my business - all the back end stuff, website, cards, stickers, licenses. I invested a total of $1500 into my business.

This was when I decided to revamp my webpage, and use it as a blog too.

In February I signed up for my town’s farmers market, and had no idea what would sell but I could bring sourdough bread, eggs, and plant starts. I planted the majority of my seed stash that had been sitting in a box in my closet for years.

I grew two batches of starts - one as a test, the second to fix the inevitable mistakes I made with the first batch.

In March I had our son Hugo our first baby. December 2019 and January 2020 I’d had two surgeries for a scary partial molar pregnancy, and realized I was at high risk for severe postpartum depression.

We couldn’t believe he came out with hair, I was bald till I was three!

In April we realized, yes, postpartum was going to be a very long road of recovery for me. I started seeing doctors and working with therapists. One of my permits, the more expensive one, stalled and selling bread at the market was out.

Five days after his birth Hugo needed to go back in to the hospital because he was horribly jaundiced. My milk took five full days to come in, and he lost 11% of his body weight during that time. Eight weeks after that I had surgery to correct an extremely painful anal fissure, brought about by the birth and exacerbated by my postpartum anxiety and postpartum ocd. I looked like this every second of every day for months.

In May I started the farmers market season two days after a minor surgery to correct a painful complication likely from the birth. I took oxy for the first time in my life, rather than miss my first day. Only brought plant starts, because so many other vendors brought their eggs. Even duck eggs.

Mine and Hugo’s first market day. I had no idea if we could really do it, and asked my mom to come help because I’d just gone through outpatient surgery and my energy was very very low. My goal was to do the market season WITH my baby, to try and make the space for the mama-baby bond I hadn’t yet felt.

By June I was selling over $100 of plant starts per week, and I couldn’t believe I was actually doing it. I’d signed up to share my booth with another first time vendor, also named Jessica (it was a sign) and I’d already managed to pay off my half of the market fees and accumulated a couple hundred dollars worth of profit, and a handful of repeat customers. It was also the time when my postpartum started to get so bad I wound up staying at a hotel for three days to separate myself from our baby, at the very strong suggestion of my doctors.

The farmers market was one of the only times I felt like a human being. At home I was struggling to connect with anybody, and became more of a danger than a caregiver to Hugo. The picture on the right is of the amount of hair that I was shedding daily, huge handful sized clumps, all plastered to the shower wall of the hotel I stayed in for three days while my amazing partner caretook full time. I wish I could say it helped or fixed my postpartum struggles. What it did do was allow me to not feel violent towards my son, that’s it, but we made that progress work.

In July I started delivering starts and bread to whoever wanted them, and to my astonishment, people really wanted them! I kept going to my doctors appointments (some virtual, some physical therapy) and my body continued healing.

I sold about a loaf per week for $5 a loaf. It wound up connecting me to additional buyers for my starts and seeds, but it was worth it just to get me out of the house once a week. Plus, sourdough breadmaking is a cheap form of therapy IMHO.

August was slow, as far as money goes, but it was also the month I reflected most on what had worked and what hadn’t so far and what changes I could make. I took $500 of my proceeds and bought a GOOD upright deep freezer for our garage. Regulars came to see Hugo, even if they weren’t buying from me, and told me to keep going

The lack of sales in August really let me sit back and take a look at what I’d created. I found myself wanting to document my experience through video and pictures more, as writing was still really hard. I wanted to write but I couldn’t finish my sentences before my brain went totally blank. Pictured above are my thumbnails from my Rye Harvesting video and my Postpartum Resources video on my youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buRl_DxuUUA&t=471s

In September I realized I might actually get through this market season. I took $200 and bought 48 lbs of grass fed organically raised beef from my friend who had purchased 1/4 cow and offered to go in on it with me. I immediately stuck it in my freezer, and with the salmon fillets my dad had caught for us my freezer was suddenly 3/4 full of good fresh (frozen) food. It was bittersweet, and I was exhausted.

This was such a fun evening. We opened up Katy’s garage, laid out all the meat from the boxes she’d just picked up from her local butcher, and divvied up the cuts per what we knew we wanted, and what I wanted to try out. I can’t even COMMUNICATE the texture difference between the best store-bought organic meat I can find at the store, and THIS STUFF. This meat is vastly superior, and the fat is like actual butter in texture and flavor. I didn’t know it could DO that.

October was over in a flash. Just two market days in October, and in between them a six day road trip from Sedro to Palo Alto California so we could avoid airports - just me, my mom, and my baby, the hubby had school he couldn’t miss. He’s getting certified to be an EMT at the refinery he works in, and I’m so so so proud. In California I got to introduce my grandmother to her first great grandchild, Covid be damned.

In just the span of 10 months I’ve flipped our family’s food supply on its head, and mine is still spinning from it. My goal was to take that $1500 investment and grow a business that could feed our family for a year in the most literal sense, and I can’t tell if I fell short or massively beyond that goal. Gardeners in my community know my business by name, if they don’t know me personally now, and I’m “in” with a farmers market that DOUBLES food stamp money that people bring in. You bring in $40 of food stamp money, you get to spend $80 at the market on everything from fresh produce to plants to seeds to plant your own garden. Nothing made me happier than giving away extra plant starts to anyone kid who wandered too close to my booth.

I don’t have words to explain the feeling of having so much food, and knowing it all has quality I can’t even PAY for in the stores. Store-bought produce and meats taste flavorless and stringy to me now. I’m totally totally ruined. This holds an extremely high value in my home and heart.

All this to say: it’s really nice to have a space to share these types of personal victories, and to know there’s other people who care as deeply as I do about food here’s a pic from my last market day (today). I was this week’s featured vendor and I might just frame the little print out I’m so proud.

This picture was taken October 13th, on the last day of the Sedro-Woolley Farmer’s Market season. Our market is quite small, maybe 20 vendors at the very most, but usually closer to 10, and still brought about incredible change in my family and in the lives of the regulars who I developed working relationships with. It was truly surprising to me just how much I had tried to belittle my own impact both in my household and in my community, because this wasn’t my idea of “large scale change”.

LESSON LEARNED.

Farmers Market Update!

Start growing food for other people and you will be fed.

I give away starts all the time because money isn’t where I reap, it isn’t the reward that I’m sowing or harvesting. The miraculous promise of a garden, or farming, is planting a few seeds for a few plants or raising a couple animals for meat and somehow everyone is fed by the end of the season. What I sow and reap is nourishment for myself and others and the wonderful thing is giving it away only makes it grow.

I started out this year with a list of dreams and goals, and I’m somewhat in disbelief of how many of them are reality now, knowing how much work it took to get here. And how much money and time…*shudders*

One huge item on my list was to become a vendor at my local farmers market. Not only have I been a real life vendor for a whole month (WITH A BABY), I’m actually on track to make back my capital investment-about $1600 worth of licensing, labeling, and growing supplies so far-by the end of the market season.

My “whys” have become ultra clear over the past few weeks, for how I choose to spend my time and define my worth. I still work from home for a local surveying company but I have had to drastically reduce my hours as I adapt to being a new mother. Working to secure life insurance for myself and my husband I’ve learned just how much less I’m valued by society when my income drops-currently I qualify for a third of the coverage my husband does, thanks to my labor being unpaid. Labor that directly impacts our ability to own land and a home in a state with a very high cost of living. The work that both of us do enriches my community financially through the taxes we pay, but I am considered financially expendable by that same entity, or at the very best a dependent on my working partner. For someone who has built a life on measuring their worth by their achievements, this transition has been a serious internal blow to my confidence.

May 19th 2021 - Week one

Add on to that the constant costs of good mental and physical healthcare (even with our great insurance we pay for through Jess’s workplace), and the full time job of managing the logistics of both for myself and our son? I feel like I got a serious managerial promotion with the caveat that my new salary is pizza parties and a fat stack of Bed Bath and Beyond coupons. But that’s another post for another day.

My garden is the loophole in what I feel is a seriously messed up system. Feeding people is my love language, and I fantasize about having stores of homegrown ingredients at my fingertips to make my family and friends feel nourished inside and out. All that food costs a LOT of money, even when you buy directly from local farmers, and you dedicate time and space in your home to preparing and storing it yourself.

May 26th 2021 - Week two

In the last six months we’ve made big changes to where and how we shop for food (thank you Azure Standard!) and have managed to reduce our monthly grocery bill to an average of $500. Considering we had been paying double that this time last year, this is a HUGE stride in money management and community sustainability for us. We’ve refined our time spent by batch cooking, food prepping, and investing in an old deep freezer we keep in the garage. Now we’re at the next step- offsetting that $500 per month cost entirely.

We’ve identified our food staples, and have sorted out what we want to grow and what we don’t. We know we appreciate local naturally grown meats, but don’t want to raiser butcher livestock for meat on our farm. We’ve found that our passion for growing, harvesting, and cooking our own produce is absolutely enormous. Crucially, growing produce and raising livestock for eggs takes little time per day and has been a huge mental health boost for the whole family.

June 2nd 2021 - Week three (A scorcher! Part of our annual “false summer”)

At the start of the season I took stock of all my seeds and started recklessly sowing them in the greenhouse. I purchased only what I had to in order to legally sell what I already had, and splurged on economical multi-use branding (website design, informational stickers, innovative plant caddies for market customers). By the time the market started I had hundreds of healthy seedlings and so far have averaged about $80 worth of sales per market day. I have about 18 more market days this year; an opportunity to make my investment of $1500 back as cash in my pocket. I’ll be using this $1500 over again this fall to buy local meat for the next year, as well as all the seeds I’ll need for next year’s garden and farmers market.

June 9th 2021 - Week four

If I’m successful, our grocery bill this time next year might be reduced to the few items we eat that don’t fall into the category of produce or meats- about $100 worth of goods per month. What I grow in our garden will pay for seeds and meat for the following year, and the only component that won’t be sustaining itself will be that last $100 per month of canned or processed goods.

Suspending my disbelief long enough to ignore the inevitable losses and mistakes that come from any enterprise, I stand to transform a yearly $12,000 grocery bill into a $1,200 grocery bill while improving the quality of food I can provide my family and my community.

*Breaking that down into an hourly wage:

10 hours of labor per week for 6 months = roughly 270 hours

$10,800 divided into 270 hours = $40 per hour

Not bad! Offsetting almost our entire grocery bill 18 months into this project? Pretty awesome.

Post-market mayhem (week 3)

Having months worth of fresh and healthy ingredients at my fingertips and having the time to cook for my family and friends? Immeasurably valuable to me. A miraculous kind of value that not only regenerates, but takes root in the lives of everyone who contributes and spontaneously provides for them too.

Birth Story - Hugo James Cartwright

MAY 21st

Wow it’s been a minute since I wrote a blog entry. It feels like a full year has passed between my last one (37 weeks pregnant) and this one (2.5 month old Hugo is napping next to me in the co-sleeper) and words are hard to get from my head onto paper.

Before I forget the feeling of the experience I wanted to get Hugo’s birth story down in writing. I was so lucky to have an incredible experience transitioning him from inside my body to outside my body, and as time goes on I’m just more and more grateful I put so much time and energy into finding a team and setup I felt so safe with. 

Hugo’s birth story sort of starts with my previous pregnancy because it was only upon the recommendation of an emergency room nurse in Sedro-Woolley that I made the appointment with a new OB/GYN in Island Hospital. Apparently, quite a few nurses liked the care there, and the birth center setup, so I followed suit not knowing that the pregnancy I was carrying was unviable and would later require extensive treatment to recover from.

FEB 17th

Fast forward (or rewind? time means nothing to me right now) to the end of my second pregnancy, my doc and I had bonded over my successful treatment and recovery, and I’d learned a LOT about how I might react postpartum and was up to my eyeballs in preparation for it. The birth was something I hoped the team I was birthing with would take care of - my “birth plan” was a loose collection of “less medication or invasive procedures the better but I’m not a doctor so please tell me what needs doing” phrases. The day after my 37 week checkup (where I was informed that I was now one centimeter dilated and sitting VERY low) I wake up in the night with a back cramp on my left side that kept coming and going for an hour. Eventually I fell asleep, then realized the next morning that I could very well have been experiencing early signs of labor - from what I had understood, braxton hicks contractions involved the front of the belly at least somewhat and my cramps were only in my back, and only on the left side.

FEB 19th

I got a certain suspicion that I would deliver before my due date rather than after, and called my mom to ask if she could come stay with me during Jess’s work days in case I went into labor and had to go to the hospital FAST. Since she and I both work remotely, we wound up thoroughly enjoying being eachother’s coworkers for the next couple of weeks (I’m not even being sarcastic! The cats were also thrilled). I also facebook messaged a friend who had managed to capture my “good side” on the fly in a few theater productions we had been in together, and she graciously volunteered to take my maternity pictures on her phone within 24 hours. Seriously guys. She was a godsend.

FEB 20th

My mom and her #AuntieSquad threw THE MOST AMAZING virtual baby shower for me. Since vaccinations weren’t on the scene yet, it was still peak quarantine season for myself and my parents, and even the thought of coordinating a safe outdoor shower was at least overwhelming, at worst impractical and illegal. Mom offered to coordinate something and asked me to provide her a list of all my friends (I gave her all five names hahaha) and then on Saturday the 20th a packed screen full of friends and family got to try out all the wives tales with me while I ate nonstop snacks. And then I didn’t have to clean anything up, instead I wandered around the misty spring afternoon with Jess and my amazing impromptu photographer Emily. It was a perfect day beginning to end, with so much genuine heartfelt celebration and defiance of any and all obstacles that it makes me feel fuzzy head to toe remembering back on it. Everyone needs a couple perfect days every now and then, this was definitely one of mine.

FEB 22nd

I came down with a really annoying head-cold, and got a bit excited because old wives tales suggested this may be a sign of impending labor within a week or two. At my 38 week appointment I still measured a centimeter dilated and baby’s head was still very very low. So low, in fact, that she couldn’t get an accurate ultrasound measurement of baby’s size and had me sneak into the quarantined birthing center attached to the hospital to get an ultrasound without having to venture through the main part of the hospital proper. The goal was to make sure baby was continuing to grow normally, to avoid a situation where my placenta finished up before my body was ready for labor, which would have starved the baby very suddenly and with possibly lethal consequences if undetected. Due to a mixup they didn’t realize I was chillin there in one of the birth rooms, and I had a 3 hour rest on the bed in there while the machines monitored my vitals - and it's a good thing they did because we learned that I was definitely in strong, steady labor, just couldn’t feel it at all. I had no idea that was even possible, but hey I’m not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth.

Once the tech finally found me scurried away in one of the several birth suites the center had, the measurement was taken very quickly and easily. The better ultrasound machine that she’d wheeled in with her measured baby at the 11th size percentile though - a concerning drop from the 75th percentile size measurement baby had registered on scans up until this point. The tech conferred with my doc and the consensus was:

If we wait too long, the happy squirming baby might be at the mercy of a possibly expiring placenta and we could have a situation where baby needs to be gotten out of mama FAST. Like, emergency c-section fast. Or, I could follow one of the alarming Covid Era patterns that was emerging of sudden onset eclampsia, since women she had seen exhibit it over the last year showed no symptoms except having an unusually small baby. However, since there's not really a way to predict when a placenta will crap out, and since my blood pressure was within normal ranges, the healthy blood flow measured with ultrasound equipment could be indicating everything is in fact just fine and baby is just going to be slightly under average size when born. 

The only red flag that suggested either issue might be on the horizon was the fact that within one month, baby’s size percentile had dropped from consistently measuring in the 70’s down to just 11. 

My doc suggested I wait a week and count kicks religiously, and if I hadn’t gone into labor by 39 weeks, schedule an induction. In other words - waiting long enough that an induction might be pushing our (so far good) luck, but also not jumping the gun and inducing labor right there that night to give my body a chance to handle the birthing process completely on its own. Since I was starting to dilate and was showing strong and steady (and invisible) contractions, we might not have long to wait. 

Jess and I both agreed with her risk assessment, and packed me and our bags (that Jess had JUST arrived to the hospital with as Murphy’s Law dictates) back into the *Mom Rocket and headed home.

*The Mom Rocket is our beloved 2005 Toyota Sienna Mini-van, which I have fallen head over heels in love with.

FEB 23

To try and get labor going me and Mom took a long ass walk on the trail next to my house, and unfortunately, got caught in a hail/wind/rain storm. We decided birth could wait and went home to warm up. Jess caught a vibe in the air and began FEROCIOUSLY nesting.

FEB 24

We opened all our baby shower gifts via zoom with Jess’s parents, who delighted and oggled over every item. It was absolutely gratuitous and lovely, and a very good idea because I don’t think I would have even opened up the boxes had Jess not gotten a wild hair and arranged the zoom unboxing himself.

FEB 25 

Returned to the birth center for a non-stress test (not sure why it’s called that since all the tests thus far had not purposefully induced stress?) to measure baby and mom’s vitals. Everything was great, and I was still showing steady and strong contractions, to the point where my nurse was asking me if I wanted anything for the pain and asked if I knew I was laboring. I asked her how was I supposed to know if I was laboring isn’t that something you tell me, and she seemed less than amused. At this point I realized I might not know if I go into labor and started proverbially sweating bullets.

FEB 26th

Had slightly painful belly cramps on and off for about an hour, then diddly squat.

FEB 27th 

Got cabin fever and got my birthing nerves out by planting in the garden - 150 red onion sets, and plugs of mustard greens, dino kale, spinach, brussel sprouts, artichoke, and leeks.

FEB 28th 

Woke up tired and grumpy as HELL. I went for a walk on the same trail by our house, this time with Jess and with much better weather, and I was waddling and struggling the entire time (up until this point I hadn’t felt tired or waddly). When we got home Jess grounded me to the couch because I was too grumpy to hang out with while I was standing up.

MAR 1st

On the eve of my 39 week mark, my doctor called me to check in and told me to come in that night.

And go straight to the birth center.

With our bags.

I was THRILLED. 

I don’t do well in uncertainty, so the idea of induction was something concrete I could cling to far better than “let's wait and see what happens”. I had no idea what was even supposed to happen, and everything that had been happening (contractions, dilation) had been happening completely without my knowledge. What if I gave birth in my sleep or didn’t realize I was in labor until baby was shooting out of me like a loose cannon?!

We checked in happy and excited at 6pm, and a little papery strip with cervadil was stuck up my hoo haa by 9:30pm. The night nurse, Brin, tucked me in and told me to ring if I needed anything. The chemical cervadil kicks your labor into gear by getting your cervix mushy, as a precursor to something more intense like pitocin that makes your contractions ramp up. 

Unexpectedly, my contractions got pretty intense and lacked any break for the subsequent 11 hours, but didn’t dilate me past 2 centimeters. Eileen, the day nurse/magical midwife started me on pitocin at 8:15am in an effort to get me to dilate, and again, unexpectedly, pitocin toned down and regulated my contractions but did not dilate me any more than I already was. Something was clearly holding up the process.

By 9:50am my doctor had arrived to assess my sitch and performed a membrane sweep, which revealed two things. 

The first was that the baby was so extraordinarily low that she could feel hair with her fingers. He was basically about to be chillin in my birth canal, perfectly positioned to shoot out of me like a bat out of hell.

The second was that there was a lot of scar tissue on my cervix (most likely from a LEEP procedure I’d gotten almost a decade earlier to remove precancerous tissue) that was so inelastic that it had formed a solid ring, keeping the rest of my very stretchy and willing cervix from opening enough to let the baby out. 

There was a third bonus discovery for just me - that breaking up cervical scar tissue manually while in labor was the most uncomfortable experience I had ever felt in my life to date. It was the feeling of intense diarrhea, but from the soul, and located in the vagina, all coated in a candy shell of intense head to toe pain.

As is very logical following this bonus discovery, the lovely anesthesiologist was brought in to consult with me on the procedure for getting an epidural. Since we had yet to try the Foley Balloon, I deferred till later to see how far I felt comfortable going without numbing the experience at all. 

After a quick lunch at 11:40am of delicious beef broth in a cup (again, not sarcastic, Island Hospital has scandalously good food). My doc came back, checked that I hadn’t continued dilating, and installed the Foley Balloon at 12:30.

It was at this point that I realized the temporary hell of a membrane sweep could extend indefinitely, sending my whole body into such pain and panic that all I could do was poop as if my life depended on it (bonus points for me, it was in the bathroom and not on any of the staff) and mutter “oh my god oh my god oh my god” while Jess found a nurse and let them know I’d absolutely love an epidural at their soonest convenience please and thank you.

The epidural was in and working by 1pm, and god bless Carisa who helped Jess hold me down on the table in a sitting position while the anesthesiologist skillfully plugged a web of fibers into my spine and down my back. The sensation of these fibers entering my body (even though I’d been thoroughly oriented with the process) and then releasing fluid into my cramping and resisting tissue freaked me all the way out and back again and then all the way back out for a second time and if Jess and Carisa hadn’t each been holding an arm and a shoulder to the table I would have crawled up the drapes and broken out the hospital window like a rabid racoon.

At 1:30pm I realized I would live and took a much needed nap after the survivors' high wore off. After we had checked in last night Jess had gotten a few hours of sleep, but the onset and lack of breaks in my contractions had kept me awake and laboring up until this point. As I drifted off, Carisa upped my pitocin intake, rolled me on my side, stuck magical pillows in between all my joints and in all my crevices, and left to let it all work its magic.

At 4:30 the doc checked me again and we all celebrated the sight of the wicked Foley Balloon, released from the grasp of my stubborn cervix at last! The way the balloon works is this - a deflated sack is shoved up inside the cervix up against the baby, and a tube inflates it in stages so that the pressure from the inside of this inflating balloon expands the cervical tissue and allows you to reach the stage of labor where you are fully dilated, and ready to help the baby out of the body via the vagina. The Foley Balloon is about 4 centimeters in diameter, which means that when it falls out, the cervix is dilated to at least 4 centimeters.

At this point, the doc goes ahead and breaks my water per our previous planning, and tries to manually break up the rest of the scar tissue parts of my cervix that still haven’t elasticized. This time I felt none of the discomfort, the epidural having numbed the skin of both my legs and the ability for me to move one of them. All in all, I felt much more than I had dared hope with none of the pain and realized that my anesthesiologist must in fact be a very powerful wizard disguised as a mere mortal. 

At 5:30pm Carisa comes back and rearranges the magic pillows, and places a giant peanut-shaped inflated rubber thing (creatively named a Peanut Ball) between my knees to try and bring baby back down into the birth canal. The nasty stupid Foley Balloon had pushed baby back into a higher position in my body, so the goal was to get him back to the super low position he had been in for likely weeks. The side supported position was so comfortable that I promptly fell back asleep until 6pm. What a slacker, I know.

At 6:30pm I suddenly became overtaken with the idea of pushing a baby out of my vagina. I know, it sounds incredibly weird, but just the concept of it was suddenly all consuming. I wondered out loud to Jess when I was “supposed to be pushing”, and I could tell by the look on his face that biology was now in full control of the situation. He very astutely told me “please don’t even think about pushing” and very quickly let the nurse know I was “wondering when I should be pushing”. I noticed that my legs were shaky every few minutes, which I assumed coincided with contractions (thank you epidural wizard).

By now Brin was back and hung out with me while Carisa, having checked me and stated calmly “oh I can’t seem to find your cervix at all, let me just go get the doctor” damn near ran out of my room and down the hall. Within minutes my whole team, Jess, my doctor, and nurses Brin and Carisa were gathered around me at each corner of my body, ready to coordinate delivery. Upon arrival, the doc had confirmed that baby was at a +3 position, meaning head inside the birth canal and on the move. I have no idea how my body could tell this was happening, since sensation-wise nothing had changed for me. Clearly my mind was tuned in to the process though because it had registered my stubborn cervix was finally out of the way and the rest of me (which had been primed for days by now) took over. 

Humble brag - my doctor said that I was an absolute champion pusher. I started “pushing” at 7pm, coached and counted through each contraction by the nurses and by Jess respectively, and at 7:30 I could reach down and touch my baby’s head. Yes my brain exploded that this felt biologically normal. And then it exploded a second time because I could feel hair too! It felt like I was giving birth to a squishy foam ball with fur, and somehow that was normal for the moment.

At 7:38 my doctor helped pull out my baby, and I heard Jess announce that he was a boy. His first cries were almost musical, and didn’t really sound like crying to my ears, just the perfect soundtrack. He was passed up to me and I felt myself take him and lay him on my chest as he cried his first cries, and I couldn’t believe he had just entered the world. I cried a lot, and didn’t stop. 

We all waited for my placenta to come out on its own, but after half an hour, my doc had to go spelunking in after it. We think my molar pregnancy had possibly created a sticky tissue patch on the inside of my uterus that clung on to my placenta, since the tissue inside my uterus had to be scraped down twice over to extract the molar tissue that was growing inside of it. Fortunately, my doc is amazing and got everything out and I didn’t hemorrhage at all, just took an antibiotic via my IV as a precaution against any infections that could have tried sneaking in. 

I cried and oggled at the creature I’d just somehow shoved out of me for about ten minutes, then caved and took another nap till 10pm. I woke up to Jess cradling our little baby Hugo on his bare chest in the big armchair next to the bed, and was beyond amazed all over again. At that point the magical epidural was magically reversed (witchcraft of the highest order) and I got up, used the bathroom, and then was wheeled over to the recovery room with Jess and baby in tow.

That night and all the next day I learned what waking up every two hours to hand squeeze colostrum out of my boobs felt like, and just stared every moment I was awake at the little face that was peeking back at us from the bassinet. He had been born with no complications, no swallowed meconium, and all his exams showed a perfect bill of health. I couldn’t believe how lucky we were. That afternoon, we got to take him home where he met two of his four adoring grandparents, and where Jess and I spent every second for the next 24 hours falling in love with him over and over and over again. Continuously, because I don’t think we slept. But we had our little baby boy and it all felt magical and fuzzy and rose colored, and we soaked it all in. 

When life is messy

We often hear bloggers or influencers talk about difficult “seasons” of life, spaces of time in our lives that challenge us but that eventually give way to easier and more enjoyable ones. That’s all well and good in retrospect, or when you can escape the trials and tribulations of your current “season” by getting out of the house or paying someone to come in and help you, or when you can lean on your community for guidance and a helping hand.

And sure, we’re privileged and lucky enough to have that backing us up in theory.

But in practicality? We’re still up to our eyeballs in The Unfinished. And it is incredibly draining, and mentally defeating.

I’d like to say this blog post isn’t meant to be a downer or discouraging in any way, but that isn’t the reality that a lot of us are in - right now, and just in general life. There are very real times when you carry the weight of knowing your struggles now are small compared to the struggles you are about to face once you actually achieve your dreams, and that can be incredibly spiral inducing. Asking the universe for a family means you have to take care of that family and withstand the growing pains, asking for a farm means bringing in the harvest and preserving it any way you can even if you’re sick as a dog. It sometimes means letting months and months of work rot in the ground because there are some days or weeks where you just can’t or don’t get it done.

These are hard, unrelenting, and mentally jarring seasons to be in for years at a time. And that’s assuming you’re living your dream.

The grueling, backwards turning, seemingly infinite road to even get to that point is even harder.

So how do you handle it? How do you handle cleaning and scrubbing plywood because you don’t have a real tabletop, or the one you do have disintegrates on contact with your sponge? How do you find a way to look the drywall and mudding look nice because at least it’s not the gaping hole in your ceiling that used to be there? How do you turn a blind eye to your one incontinent cat who decides to pee just inside every front door you’ve ever had, even when there’s clean litterboxes all over the place? How do you deal with with the stacks of groceries and dishes that end up on every surface because the few cabinets you do have in your under-construction kitchen have mice running through them half the time?

How do you carry that mental load when you know it’s your job to figure out how to care for all the things and creatures living inside your house that are all simultaneously dragging you down into tar pits of depression?

How do you take care of the very things that are driving you insane?

I won’t say there aren’t any solutions out there. Some people get rid of everything and everyone in their lives. Some people go into massive debt and end up solving all their problems in the end, and some people struggle with years of pill popping or alcoholism to get through it till the momentum of their work provides relief. Some parents trade years of love and respect from their children for the chance to be a loving ally in their lives while their kids are still living at home, even though the stress of not being around to comfort them or the toll of prioritizing their own to do list makes them physically ill. A lot of people turn to faith - all kinds of faith - and immerse themselves in their practices to provide a much needed buffer.

It’s hard to throw stones, especially when I know damn well that those stories are the ones that inspire me the most to keep going.

Finding a way to curate the massive piles of stuff I can’t afford not to try and sell before donating while simultaneously trying to plan for constantly changing dietary requests - and therefore constantly changing budgetary demands - has an excruciatingly slow process. It’s not a #Goals feeling when our garage dining rooms are still stuffed full of possessions, even though it has all been meticulously sorted through and organized into keep, sell, donate piles. It doesn’t give me hope that the keep pile is rather small, because the task of learning how to handle the sell pile takes all of the brain space back up again. The hubby is on an amazing fitness and self-healing journey that is impacting everyone in his life in compounding positive ways, and with that comes the disassembly and reassembly of grocery lists, product sourcing, and budgeting of our largest household expense besides debt payments - our food bill. Our savings are impacted when changes need to be made that don’t fit into the budget allotted and lately….there have been a lot of changes. Those changes are for the better, but they all come with a price tag. Investing in a home gym so we can live a more home-based life and buying in bulk to ultimately save money down the road all carry high up front costs.

Don’t even get me started on the thousands and thousands of dollars worth of medical bills we leaned on my family to help manage in the last two years to get healthy enough to have children. If it weren’t for my family’s help we would not have been able to invest in our own health the way we did and that scares the utter crap out of me. Asking for help when your own body is the thing you have to love and care for while it simultaneously causes you daily pain and anguish is both humiliating and shame inducing on a whole other level.

I feel the absolute need to share these harder parts of our homestead path (sounds so clean and spiritual, don’t it) because when I stumble across a youtuber who inspires me, or a blogger who makes me binge-read the last ten years of their posts, I find myself scanning and searching desperately for the dark spots. I want to read about the times they go into labor and their entire crop dies and they have to get back on federal food programs and they can’t afford to buy seeds to plant their gardens and how every time they feed their children it triggers a panic attack because they don’t have anyone to help them and all their kids will eat are tortillas all day every day for a week.

I need to know that they’ve felt crushed under the burdens of their own dreams because I need my dreams to be justified by their eventual success.

I need the crippling fears and doubts and knowledge of hard seasons to eventually be worth it because wondering if any of it is worth it has caused me more pain than the actual struggles.

This month has been (and will continue to be) a mixed bag. We signed refinance papers on our house that lowered our monthly mortgage by $150 and locked in the lowest interest rate we will likely ever qualify for in our lifetimes, but traded about $10K worth of principle payments to do it. We’ve made some grocery orders through a new supplier I’m over the moon excited about (lookin at you Azure Standard) because it will save us thousands in the long run, but having to switch over what we consume means stocking up all over again on “new” essentials and we blew the budget. Our hospital bags are packed, I’m about to hit 37 weeks in my pregnancy, and we still haven’t fully put together the bedside nursery. We don’t even have a changing station, and I’m not sure if the disposable diapers I was gifted are going to be the right size. I’ll have to learn how to use the fabric ones I’m also being gifted, and I’m terrified of coming across as ungrateful as I deal with the mental stress of learning how to care for an infant for the first time considering how many baby supplies we got for free.

I told my remote job that I’ll need two weeks of light work around the 9th of March so I can deal with giving birth…and I’m scared that will turn into a month of no paycheck, and no mental space to rejuggle our finances to accommodate. I want the option to keep earning money if I can, since hubs is taking advantage of the best paid family leave any US resident has ever experienced to date - a total of four months paid leave over the course of this year.

Well… mostly paid leave. One month of full pay, three at significantly reduced pay…which we might just barely manage to make work, as long as we don’t have any unexpected costs. And piles and piles of paperwork to fill out in order to get those benefits, and hours of troubleshooting confusing documents in the mail “rejecting” the request to take leave because we don’t have a birth certificate for our unborn child yet…even when the documentation needs to be submitted 30 days in advance.

Here’s where we’re at right now.

All in all we’re continuing with our daily grind, and still (call us crazy) carving out time and conjuring dollars out of thin wallets to work on our passion projects - the activities that make us feel like ourselves so deeply that we’ve both sobbed on days when we’re too mentally or physically depleted to participate in them. Even though right now in this “season” none of those activities are arguably justified, and the stress of caring for those dreams makes us even more anxious than the idea of maintaining the daily grind while learning to be new parents.

We’re still eating the elephant one bite at a time, even though it seems like the elephant just keeps growing the more we eat. And I’m writing this blog even though I have nightmares of reading this post a year from now feeling even further inundated and behind, or worse yet, having nothing to show for the whole year’s passing.

And if you’re in a place where you’re about to loose your home or your car because of debt, or you if your kids say they hate you every day and you drink to forget that once they’re in the beds you found for them off a no-buy facebook group, or if you have a comfortable life and your crushing depression is totally “unjustified because other people have it so much harder”:

I relate more to where you are than any influencer - even the ones living my “dream” life.

And your stories are the ones that make my insane dreams feel justified and worthwhile.

CHEERS

The grocery store no one is talking about

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azure standard

A few weeks ago when I first started taking steps to follow through with the idea of documenting my homesteading journey using this blog, I started reaching out to companies that were a part of my 2021 dreams and goals - independently owned, regional, high quality at an accessible price - to put together an idea of what I would need to do in order to become an affiliate once I got more established.

I was absolutely stunned when, within just a couple days, I received an email reply directly from an Azure Standard representative asking when we could connect over the phone so she could explain their blogger affiliate program to me.

When we connected, she explained that even though I currently have next to zero traffic, an amateur website, and about two weeks worth of “professional” writing experience (my words, not hers), she thought I was a great fit to represent the company through the blogger affiliate program they offer. AND SIGNED ME UP!

Let me explain what this means for me:

• A $30 special “blogger” credit is added to my account each month that a new customer orders $100 worth of goods through Azure. This is designed to replace free samples they would give me to try and write about, instead allowing me to pick and choose what I or my audience wants to test out.

• If 90 days passes with no new customers signing up and purchasing (say four people sign up and purchase within the first month, but then no one for the next three months) then that credit just goes “dormant”. Meaning - Azure respects all stages of blogger growth, and does not remove affiliates from the program for lack of new customers or foot traffic, they just suspend the $30 monthly blogger credit until new customers sign up and make the necessary $100 purchase again.

Something exciting to note:

This special blogger credit is additional to the “normal” $25 credit all customers (not just bloggers) earn each time they refer a new customer to Azure, and that new customer orders $100 or more worth of goods.

Meaning, if I refer your grandmother to Azure Standard, she can turn around and provide her own personal Azure link to her friends. If her friends check out Azure through that link and make $100 purchases within 60 days, your grandmother will get a $25 credit for each of them applied to her account - even if she doesn’t support me with a purchase. She doesn’t need a blog, she doesn’t need to make a purchase that gives me a credit, she just needs to make an account like she normally would and she’ll be all set to share Azure with her friends and receive those normal $25 credits herself.

This level of universal customer appreciation makes me extremely excited to be a part of Azure Standard’s blogger affiliate program. To read all the terms of their affiliate programs, check this out.

There are a few ways Azure keeps track of which new customers were referred by which affiliate or customer. Here is how they do it, using my own links and codes as examples you can click on, or learn from to set up your own (lookin at you grandma):

• Steering new or interested customers to a landing page that allows them to make an account and enter a code unique to the person who referred them. After doing this, that new customer’s purchase of $100 or more will count as a completed referral and provide the normal $25 credit to the person who owns that unique code.

  • EXAMPLE: Go to azurestandard.com/start and enter my personal code: JessicaCartwright2 when you check out

• A link that affiliates or customers can share with their friends which, when clicked on, automatically notifies Azure and allows the company to recognize if that new person makes an account and a $100 purchase within sixty days of clicking the link - even if they sign out of their account or log off their computer between clicking on the link and actually placing their order.

  • EXAMPLE: Click on this link, it will take you to Azure Standard’s home page and give Azure a heads up that I sent you.

• Product links! This one works exactly the same as the link I just mentioned, but instead of taking you to Azure’s home page it takes you to a specific product.

  • EXAMPLE: Check out the organic rye flour I’ll be experimenting with over the next few weeks in my sourdough recipes

Another important note:

If you clear your cookies, this erases the “heads up” that clicking the links gives Azure. If you are someone who clears your cookies frequently, definitely go with the first option of going to azurestandard.com/start and entering a personal code.

Ok, now that’s all out of the way, the real reason I’m writing this post - I’m excited about what I found, and wish I’d found it a year ago. Here’s why.

I’ve loved Fred Meyer for years because I can get pretty much everything I need in one place. When 2020 hit, I switched to ordering online through their website and selecting the “pickup” option to maintain social distancing. Though this worked well for me, I always felt terrible for the employees rushing through the still crowded stores to fulfil orders - and felt even worse when they had to explain to angry customers why some expected items were missing from their order. Issues with supply chains, extreme demand, and brand new order fulfilment systems handed down the growing pains to the people being paid the least and showing up the most.

In January 2021 I realized a huge goal of mine included a more hands-on approach to feeding my family. For me, that means growing more and being smarter about where I buy what I don’t grow or raise myself. I also realized in order to do that I would have to consider going beyond the convenience-based “one stop shops” like Fred Meyer and include a variety of local gardeners, farmers, and feed stores in my monthly budgeting and planning.

Needless to say, the more needs I pinpointed within my household, the more frantically I started looking for ways to consolidate my sources. I found a promising lead through homestead YouTube channels who mentioned bulk food orders through Azure, and found the Elliott Homestead recipe for chicken feed particularly inspiring as I discovered the high cost of organic chicken feeds that gave me the option to ferment and fodder.

Eventually I thought, why don’t I just put together a theoretical grocery order using Azure’s website and see if they had everything I needed - or at least comparable options - so I can get an idea of how much more I’m going to have to shell out every month to upgrade the quality of our homestead food.

First of all - Azure had almost every single item I was looking for on my list, PLUS what better options for what I did already have. My normal supplier of organic heirloom seeds, Baker Creek Rare Seeds, has been closed down on and off for the last year, but Azure currently has 183 options for organic heirloom seeds, as well as options for food and water storage.

Second - Many of the dry ingredients I’ve found to be staples in my pantry were available at a cheaper price than any other grocer I’ve used, and were grown and processed in the United States.

Third - What I found on their site was healthy. I’m talking organic, or at least natural. By natural, I mean contained ingredients I agreed were healthy for me and my family (and my flock) to consume.

By this point I had reached out to Azure about blogger affiliate programs, and when they replied so transparently and supportively about wanting to partner up I decided to become a customer so I could review their products for myself.

Below is my actual grocery order I picked up on February 4th, 2021 at my local drop site, with the prices of each product, and a list of what the same grocery trip would cost me if I had purchased through Fred Meyer.

Grocery List: Azure Standard

• SN514 - Clif Bar Oatmeal Raisin Walnut Bar

  12 x 2.4 oz $16.35

• SN1256 - Clif Bar Chocolate Brownie Bar

  12 x 2.4 oz $16.35

• SN807 - Clif Bar Blueberry Crisp

  12 x 2.4 oz $14.70

• GY817 - Pacific Foods Creamy Tomato Soup, Organic

  2 @ $4.45 each / 32 floz $8.90

• HB224 - Daye Vitamins E, A & D 20,000 IU

  2 oz $5.72

• CH282 - Sierra Nevada Cheese Company Graziers, Sharp Cheddar, Raw, Grass-Fed, Pastured, Random Weight

  8 oz $5.16

• DP176 - Rumiano Natural Butter, Unsalted, rBST Free

  1 lb $5.90

• MT109 - Organic Valley Turkey Bacon, Uncured, Hardwood Smoked, Frozen, Organic

  8 oz $7.05

• DP006 - Nancy's Sour Cream, Organic

  16 oz $4.41

• FG1002 - Thousand Hills Chili, Bone Broth Paleo, Grass-Fed, Frozen

  16 oz $10.15

• PA397 - Azure Market Organics Spaghetti, Semolina, Organic

  2.5 lb $6.71

• DP200 - Nancy's Greek Yogurt, Whole Milk, Plain, Organic

  24 oz $7.74

• MT182 - Hardgrass Beef Shoulder Roast, Organic, Frozen, Random Weight

  3 lb $38.61

• DP554 - Alexandre Family Farm Whole Milk, A2, 100% Grass-Fed, Seasonal Full Fat*, Organic

  2 @ $8.32 each / 48 floz $16.64

• NS0206 - Azure Market Organics Pea Protein Powder, Organic

  2 @ $8.88 each / 1 lb $17.76

• GR425 - Azure Market Organics Buckwheat Groats, Hulled, Organic

  33 oz $5.15

• GR124 - Azure Market Organics Barley, Hulled, Organic

  33 oz $2.53

• CE229 - Azure Market Organics Oats, Steel Cut, Organic

  35 oz $3.63

• CE202 - Azure Market Organics Oats, Rolled, Organic

  21 oz $3.98

• BE010 - Azure Market Organics Lentils, Green, Organic

  36 oz $5.49

• BE246 - Azure Market Organics Garbanzo Beans, (Chick Peas), Organic

  36 oz $6.19

• FL125 - Azure Market Organics All Purpose Flour Unbleached, Organic

  5 lb $6.97

• FL037 - Azure Market Organics Dark Rye Flour (Unifine), Organic

  5 lb $5.93

• GY0314 - Safe Catch Skipjack Wild Tuna Steak, Elite Pouch

  3 x 3 oz $7.90

• GY1039 - Natural Value Tomatoes, Crushed, Organic

  3 x 28 oz $6.93

• CE382 - Nature's Path Corn Flakes, Gluten Free, Organic

  26.4 oz $7.45

• TE203 - Winterwoods Tea Company Homestead Peach Loose Leaf Tea, Organic

  2 oz $9.75

• TE397 - Winterwoods Tea Company Inland Grey Loose Leaf Tea, Organic

  2 oz $9.75

• CE007 - Golden Temple Wild Blueberry Flax Granola

  5 lb $15.76

• SN957 - San-J Black Sesame Rice Crackers, Gluten Free

  3 x 3.7 oz $9.36

• GR073 - Lundberg Rice, White Basmati, Organic, Gluten Free

  5 lb $14.04

Grocery List: Fred Meyer

• Clif Bar Oatmeal Raisin Walnut Bar

  $12.99

• Clif Bar Chocolate Brownie Bar

  $11.49

• Clif Bar Blueberry Crisp

  $12.99

• Pacific Foods Creamy Tomato Soup, Organic

  2 @ $3.49 = $6.98

• Nature's Bounty Vitamin E Oil

  $7.19

• Sartori Aged & Sharp Old World Cheddar Cheese

  $5.99

• Vital Farms Pasture-Raised Unsalted Butter

  2 @ $3.69 = $7.38

• Simple Truth™ Uncured Hardwood Smoked Turkey Bacon

  $3.99

• Nancy's Organic Probiotic Sour Cream

  2 @ $1.99 = $3.98

• Kettle & Fire Beef Chili With Beans Bone Broth Soup

  $7.99

• Bionaturae Organic Spaghetti

  1.5 @ $2.94 = $4.41

• Simple Truth Organic® Plain Strained Greek Nonfat Yogurt

  .75 @ $5.29 = $3.97

• Simple Truth™ Natural Bison Chuck Roast

  1.5 @ $14.99 = $22.49 NOT ORGANIC

• Simple Truth Organic® Whole Milk

  2 @ $5.29 = $10.58

• Jarrow Formulas Organic Pea Protein

  2 @ $11.85 = @23.7

• Bob’s Red Mill Organic Whole Grain Buckwheat

  2 @ $5.57 = $11.14

• Shiloh Farms Organic Hulless Barley

  2 @ $4.47 = $8.94

• Nature's Path Organic Steel Cut Whole Grain Oats

  1.5 @ $4.89 = $5.62

• Simple Truth Organic® 100% Whole Grain Rolled Oats

  1.15 @ 2.68 = $3.08

• Simple Truth Organic® Dry Green Lentils

  2 @ $2.49 = $4.98

• Shiloh Farms Organic Garbanzo Beans

  2 @ $3.44 = $6.88

• Simple Truth Organic™ Unbleached All-Purpose Flour

  $2.71

• Arrowhead Mills Organic Rye Flour

  4 @ $2.36 = 9.44

• Safe Catch Skipjack Wild Tuna Steak, Elite Pouch

  3 @ $2.99 = $8.97

• Simple Truth Organic® No Salt Added Crushed Tomatoes

  3 @ $1.79 = $5.37

• Nature's Path Organic Corn Flakes Cereal

  2.5 @ $3.79 = $9.48

• Organic India Tulsi Loose Leaf Tea Canister Original

  .6 @ $9.99 = $5.99

• Organic India Tulsi Loose Leaf Tea Canister Original

  .6 @ $9.99 = $5.99

• KIND Healthy Grains Vanilla Blueberry Clusters With Flax Seeds

  8 @ $4.49 = $35.92

• San-J Black Sesame Rice Crackers, Gluten Free

  3 @ $2.99 = $8.97

• Lundberg Organic California White Basmati Rice2.3 @ $7.49 = $17.23

Azure Grand Total: $296.53

Fred Meyer Grand Total: 296.83

So - what do I have to say about Azure Standard so far?

Advantages:

• The price is equal to or cheaper than one-stop-shop grocery stores for the average grocery shopping trip, and for stocking up on certain ingredients it would be a drastic price improvement to go through Azure.

• Customizable levels of processing - for instance, I can buy heirloom organic grain seeds to plant, organic wheat berries to grind into flour, organic flour to cook with, or breads made from organic flour - that is four different levels of processing that each provide their own savings in terms of either price or convenience, without sacrificing quality at any stage.

• More ethical production and distribution model than grocery stores I’ve been shopping at, and in terms of Covid safety have provided customers with a reliable source of food and supplies while respecting the safety and dedication of their own employees.

• Better selection of organic dairy and meat products than even most specialty stores I’ve shopped at due to mindful partnerships with farmers. Azure also partners with small independently owned businesses through their Indie program.

• INCREDIBLE deal if you’re looking for bulk ingredients - think grains, flours, legumes, dried fruits and vegetables, spices, all of that - but don’t want to buy in typical bulk quantities. There is very little difference in price per pound between low and high volumes of the same food.

• If you are looking for bulk quantities of bulk ingredients or animal feed, they very much accommodate, including all the expensive stuff that you normally have to buy in super small quantities and high markups (organic vanilla extract, honey, maple syrup, spices, etc.)

• Low waste - the outer packaging for my order consisted reused sturdy cardboard boxes and only one piece of brown paper padding, all of which I was then able to recycle. Most individual products were packaged in recyclable materials as well.

• The sheer variety of quality products is astounding. They have everything I need for my hobby farm, at extremely competitive prices with convenient and safe shipping and pickup options.

• They are extremely customer driven - many products are only sold by Azure because customers have requested them, and each time I’ve reached out (through emails or phone calls for various reasons) I’ve spoken with representatives who were able to answer all of my questions, and were forthcoming about ways they want to see the company improve.

• They address the problem of food deserts, inside and outside the scope of Covid impacts.

Disadvantages:

• Slightly less convenient than a grocery store you can order and pick up from from within hours. Some drop sites only get monthly deliveries, so you have to plan for the whole month. Because of high demand in my area, my particular drop site gets weekly deliveries so I can order what I need on a weekly basis if I choose, and only have to make sure I’m available during the 48 hour pickup window.

• Is not part of SNAP food benefits program - you best believe I’ve already submitted customer feedback regarding this.

What I’ll be buying next (besides my groceries):

• Organic, fermentable, fodder-friendly chicken feed I can mix myself

  As I gain experience raising, breeding, and harvesting eggs from chickens and ducks I realize more and more that having a large quantity of good quality food on hand pays off in pretty much every way. The perceived convenience of pouring unrecognizable crumble from a bag every few days is measured against the inconvenience of egg inconsistency and questionable bird health over many seasons. By mixing my own feed I will be maintaining the current feed costs I have, but will be providing all organic grains and supplements I can ferment or sprout for my birds depending on the season and on their needs.

• Organic heirloom seeds and starts

  The sheer selection of organic heirloom seeds I can buy through Azure Standard makes my wallet nervous. The fact that I can seed save from these plants because they are organic heirloom varieties makes my future splurge inevitable, the temptation and potential future benefits are simply too great.

• Food and water storage containers

  I’ve got my eye on several barrels and spigots and quite a few bucket and top combinations all from their Barrels and Buckets section, ultimately to be able to store rainwater for my garden and feed for my birds. Right now feed bags hang out in the trunk of my car, and since we have a home with a garage, a shop, a coop, and 1.8 acres, I really have no excuse not to create a customized easy to use storage area outside my car.

I encourage you all to check out Azure Standard for yourselves,

and suggest them as an ethical resource for anyone looking to consolidate their household or non-profit food/supplies management. If you are covered, then think of people in your circle of friends or workplaces - Azure even has a charity affiliate program in addition to the customer and blogger affiliate programs. After the insane supply chain and manufacturing disruption 2020 presented, it is very likely someone or some business you know has been unable to secure something that Azure sells - or has been the victim of price gouging if they could get it. Since Azure has so many truck routes, those needs may be easily and safely fulfilled by this company.

A great aspect of working with Azure Standard is that not only can I provide the somewhat mundane option to readers of supporting our homestead by becoming Azure customers, I can create a pathway for anyone to benefit regardless of their interaction with me or my account. And if I or anyone else has critical feedback for the company, they have a clear and direct method of communication to intake that information.

That level of respect is something I’m proud to pass on to my readers, family, and friends.

CHEERS

Homestead Update: Farmers Market

Something that’s both inspired and intimidated me in equal measure since moving to this small town in 2017, and a huge component in taking my homesteading to the next level:

Signing up to be a vendor at our local farmers market.

I’ve come up with dozens of excuses over the years to avoid taking this exploratory step, one I know will push me even further along my path of homesteading and community building. Here’s some of the more persistent ones:

• I don’t have anything to sell

• It would be too expensive to get all the permits and paperwork done

• I would never find the time

• No one would want to buy * enter idea here *

But this year I sat down and reassessed, trying to find any truth to these thoughts or else dismantling them with actionable solutions.

• I have thousands of seeds, and a giant garden plot to grow them in as well as a greenhouse to start them in

• I have a change jar that’s been sitting on my counter for years

• I spend more time daydreaming about it than it would actually take me to do it over the course of a year

• There is a 100% chance no one will buy what isn’t for sale

After looking at my actionable solutions list, I felt momentarily bolstered enough to figure out what hoops I would have to jump through to get the proper licenses and permits. After about two weeks of phone calling and internet searches, I narrowed the immense bureaucracy of paperwork and permitting down to the following:

• Cottage Food License $230

• Business License with Nursery and Egg Handler/Dealer Endorsements - $228.58

• Set Up an Egg Cleaning and Handling Station - $100

• Well Water Test - $50

Estimated Grand Total: $608.58

The amount of rolled coins and crumpled bills in my change jar: $149 plus a handful of change

Aaaand momentary bolstering gone. So how am I going to stretch $150 bucks to cover $608 worth of expenses? Well I’m not a magician but I do have a credit card and the ability to use Google Sheets, which in my opinion gets me about 86% of the way to being able to work actual magic.

Since the farmers market starts up in May, I’ll have about three months to sell some untapped assets and track my profits from the following:

• Plat starts - around $2 each

• Duck eggs - around $4 for 6, $7 for 12

• Loaves of sourdough bread - around $5 each

• Tubs and tubs of clothing left over from a previous business idea - around $2-$5 per item

• Website revenue (thank you Patreons, you’re the real MVP’s)

In May, post-partum willing, I’ll be able to sell:

• Plat starts - around $2 each

• Duck eggs - around $4 for 6, $7 for 12

• Loaves of sourdough bread - around $5 each

• Saved seeds - around $1 per pack

• Fresh seasonal produce from the garden

The overall goal? To break even by January 2022.

Since this is a a pretty big project that costs a lot of money and takes up a lot of time, what’s in it for me? How does it help me achieve the kind of lifestyle I want to live?

How does it help me find peace?

Well, I’ll be honest. This experimental year will be a test to see how much I can get out of my own way. I have the resources and the products to make this enterprise successful on paper, but more than that I know cooking and gardening are an important form of self-care that I often let fall by the wayside. Working outdoors is also a key component in my physical health in addition to my mental health - shoveling and wheelbarrowing raw materials really does wonder’s for the rear end.

And as I take up the #HardestJobOnEarth - becoming a first time Stay At Home Mom - I realize I need to protect and cultivate aspects of my life that are purely for the sake of my own joy. Parents who work inside the home serve others around the clock for years on end, and rarely if ever get a “break”. As society crawls towards recognizing the unseen labor of these parents I need to celebrate “unproductive” endeavors within my own life as much as I do within the lives of my friends.

The greatest obstacle to this project is my own tendency to manufacture unnecessary and unrelated expectations surrounding my actions. The idea that my joy must have an associated cost, which in turn must be offset, is so deeply ingrained that disregarding this notion is going to be massively uncomfortable. But I know that this is a lesson I have to not just preach, but practice in my own life if I want to cultivate peace within my home, my head, and my heart - no matter how busy my season of life is.

More updates to come as I check these items off my list! Until then, I’ll be panic-eating this quart of strawberry ice cream.

cheers

2021 dreams and goals

What’s in store for J&J Acres in 2021?

In 2021 I’m taking our homesteading to the next level. I’ve spent the last month looking back at the work we’ve done, and spent the last couple weeks taking stock of where we are now. In this blog post I’ll be sharing a few of my biggest dreams for the near future.

Right now we’ve got five major dreams that we’re actively making a reality:

• Growing our family

• Keeping our day jobs

• Growing our brand from a hobby to a business

• Renovating our home

• Setting up our home to be multi-generational

Some major steps towards these dreams include juggling life as a first-time mom with my day-job and my passions. There are a lot of things I’ll be trying for the first time this year. Letting go of the expectation of success is already a struggle, and it’s only January.

I’ve sewed hundreds of seeds in the greenhouse, and they’er all going to need potting up.

We have more eggs than we know what to do with, and feed costs keep rolling in.

I’ve got 1800 square feet of winter rye growing happily in the back yard that will need to be harvested sometime before July.

And I’m almost 8 months pregnant, tired, and as of last week constantly nauseous.

So how are we going to do it all?

Spoiler alert - we’re not.

But here’s what we are going to do: we’re going to plant a lot of the seeds that have survived in our hearts through all the neglect and denial we’ve rained down on them while we got ourselves in position to take off. The ideas that nag at us as we try and fall asleep, and make us order catalogs for things we can’t afford and drive really slow past certain parking lots or stores to look at our dreams in real life.

To provide us with the means to chase these crazy wild scary dreams we’re committed to keeping our jobs through this global pandemic and beyond. Yea, it may sound a bit obvious, but it’s time to get a little real here. We have been extraordinarily lucky to have two relatively covid-safe jobs that have not only paid the bills, but let us purchase a small investment property to help us achieve our long-term financial goals. And it’s even harder to get up in the morning and actually keep doing it while the world is a raging dumpster fire.

We like our schedules, we even like our jobs. Making them a priority and solidifying in our hearts that they support our dreams is high up on the list for us. Burnout is real, we’ve been through it before and are making it a priority to make the room for recovery.

We’re saving up for a tractor - even though we’re in debt. We spent months in the past couple years working bloody blisters into our palms and inside our shoes moving literal tons of earth, sand, manure, gravel, and wood around our property, and soon we’ll have little ones underfoot - we won’t easily be able to take a long weekend and install a new chicken coop, harvest grains by hand, or double the size of our garden. When we have to re-gravel the driveway or upgrade the septic we’ll either have to find a way to do it ourselves or pay out the nose for someone to do it for us. And if we do it ourselves, we’ll need to find a way to do it quickly.

It seems utterly impossible - we’ve already had to pull from our modest funds we set aside for it to purchase flooring for the master bedroom. We know we’ll have to pull from it again if we run into any unexpected bumps in the road next year, and Jess - the main wage earner in our household - will be the one taking family leave, along with a significant decrease in income while he’s home learning to be an amazing father. Combined with the complications of covid, we know our families are behind us every step of the way but anticipate challenges to make sure everyone is provided for safely.

Despite all these fears, we still dream of having a little tractor with a bucket on one end and a scoop on the other. A little tractor that we can use to maximize our connection to these 1.8 acres, and to build the homesteading lifestyle and community we’ve been dreaming about since before we knew what it even looked like. So it’s on our list.

I’m building a second chicken coop and run from materials we already have laying around. Every time I see a picture of colorful eggs in a basket, I think “that could be me”. Every time I see a post on social media advertising rare-breed chicks for sale in the spring, raised on organic grains and green grass, I think “ that could be me”. Every time I run across someone in town who has a basket of rainbow eggs casually sitting on their counter ready to be turned into a delicious meal for their family and friends, I think “that could be me”. And yet I’ve never once considered buying the right chicks or getting the right permits to sell eggs.

So this year I’ll be figuring out and building an imperfect coop specifically for chickens who lay rainbow-colored eggs. I’ll be placing it by the garden, close to green grass and the compost pile, and I’ll be tackling the process of getting permits to sell eggs in a more professional setting.

Oh, and speaking of that more professional setting, I’ll be joining my local farmers market. I don’t know anyone who runs it, or who sells their wares there, or even if they’ll let me in since my farm is still in the beginning stages. All I know is that I have more eggs and vegetables and starts than I know what to do with every summer, and every time I pass a farmers market I still get the thought “that could be me”, and a deep indescribable sadness that it isn’t.

I may absolutely hate it, I might fail completely and not make a single sale, I might end up closing up shop and dedicating my time to postpartum recovery and learning to “mom” for the first time, but I’m signing the papers and giving myself the chance to to fail instead of no chances at all.

And throughout all these projects and all this planning and scheming and move-making the hubby and I will be taking messy steps towards finishing our home remodel, and setting the ground work to age in place. This includes planning out a vertical expansion to our home to allow for inter-generational living once our kids are grown, or if we ever want to provide a safe living quarters to our parents and bring them closer to their grandkids while they enjoy the final years of their lives. For all we know, we might be the ones who end up connecting with their grandchildren in our final years while allowing our children to save enough money to make their own dreams reality.

We would never have been able to build our dreams the way we have without our families. The idea that children are born, grow up, then separate completely at age 18 and are seldom seen or heard from again (the lifestyle that was all around us growing up) never resonated with us the way we thought it should. In the last couple years we’ve begun to full on question the notion that children are meant to fly the nest and instantly live independent lives, the way we are sometimes taught they should. We also realized that if we wanted our children to know their grandparents as more than just the people that gave them birthday money (or worse yet, become those figureheads in our own grandchildren’s lives) we would have to take real steps towards making age-appropriate spaces in our home, and soon.

Finally, we’ve decided to start taking more pictures. Write down our thoughts more. Put all the work we’ve done so far into a format that we can easily see, so we don’t forget to celebrate the fruits of our labors. Use our dusty business license to build a platform where we can share what we build, because over the last year I can’t deny any more that people actually want to see us build our dream. Like, are willing to click several buttons to see more of our projects, watch us take more on and even to be there for us when we inevitably have monstrous failures.

Which reminds me, stay tuned for a greenhouse update * cries internally *

I contracted an SEO and branding professional to help me build foot traffic to my website with the ultimate goal of earning actual real in-my-bank-account money from blogging and selling helpful tools and experience. This idea absolutely horrifies me to my very core. I cannot stress enough how absolutely bone shakingly terrified I am of this dream. The idea that I can write about the aspects of my life that feed my soul, and that indirectly money can come from that, and actually pay my bills? It’s made me cry more nights than I’m going to admit here. I don’t know why things that make us happy scare us more than anything else in the world but if my level of fear is any indicator, I really really want this. So, I’m going to build and monetize J&J Acres as a family business.

Even though sharing all this publicly gives me cold terror sweats as I imagine myself in January 2022 laughing at my naive 2021 dreams, it’s an important step to recognizing the real worth in dreaming. Dreaming lights a fire under my ass like goal-setting and planning and gym memberships motivates some of my friends. It’s part of the process of making space for the kind of person I am, not necessarily the person I want to be or think I should be, but the person who is here now doing all the work.

That person deserves to have their dreams recognized and respected, and to have the opportunity to love all over the dreams of their friends and community members.

See y’all in the next blog post,

And happy dreaming

What makes a homesteader?

What gives me the right to call myself a homesteader?

I was born and raised in Bellevue, Washington, arguably the capital of Pacific Northwest suburban lifestyle. Lawns were large, empty, and green, and if you wanted to reconnect with nature you enrolled your children in horseback riding lessons. If you tended a flower garden you were considered downright agrarian.

My husband was born in Seattle, Washington, and moved to Bellingham, Washington at the age of 12 as his parents sought much of the same. Friendly neighborhood kids roamed his cul-de-sac in small packs till nightfall when they didn’t have after-school sports practice, weren’t skiing the slopes of Mt. Baker, or couldn’t sneak away to a best friend’s house to marathon video games together.

His mother grew flowers in every spare corner of their front and back yards, and he learned to tend to and sell their wares within the scope of their home-based flower business. His sister saved up her share, and bought her first car with the profits, and he bought his first and only mountain bike that we still have tucked away in the garage. My mother had the legendary ability to kill anything green, including bamboo planted in the ground and air plants.

I first met Jess when we were both attending the same college in Seattle, and I was growing a tomato plant in the corner of my rented attic room like the rebel I was. He took me camping for the first time in my life and we both fell in love with the woods in ways we hadn’t anticipated. We dated, fell in love, and moved into the worst house anyone has ever rented north of Bellingham right after I graduated.

This house was not only falling apart at the seams, but the parts that weren’t actively dissolving around us were only being held together by the thick interconnecting layers of black and green mold growing out of every damp corner. Our heating bill was astronomical (because of all the holes in the walls and roof), and our landlord was absolutely scamming us. What made us stay for over a year?

It had land.

Not just a yard, but real open space with gravel and dirt and grass and trees. Every morning I saw green out my window and heard birds instead of being able to check out what my neighbor was making for breakfast. We had an actual wood stove where we made real wood fires.

When we finally got our poop in a scoop and moved out, we were devastated to leave it. We settled into the smallest, cheapest 2 bedroom apartment in town we could find and decided to save up to buy a starter home for a year or two. Even on the brightest day no light reached our bottom floor, inward-facing apartment. Our “green space” was the strip of mud and grass between our side and the opposite side of the complex, and our “balcony” was the two foot wide strip of gravel on either side of our front door that served to drain the river of runoff every winter. But, the heating was cheap, the rent was manageable, and they allowed cats- it was what we needed.

Four and a half long years later, we had paid down enough debt to be considered for an FHA loan. Realizing we might actually have space for a garden soon instead of spray painted plastic bins stacked on the front walkway and trees to look at again instead of neighbors and pavement lit a fire in both of us, and gave us an unreasonable amount of hope given how tight our budget was.

We toured our first prospective house. It was in a town we’d never visited, up a remote mountain road I was surprised we could even navigate, and sat on five gorgeous acres. The inside was rustic and partially remodeled, and the backyard had what looked like a chicken coop. The basement was...completely flooded.

The second house we were scheduled to tour a few days later was in a tiny town we drove through before I’d noticed we had reached it. It was the compromised waste of time before we looked at the house I actually wanted to see nearby, and had power lines in the front yard according to the overhead picture. The front looked like a mobile home with a garage slapped on one end- a look I was raised to believe was unsafe and a sign of failure.

Remember that overly expensive moldy house we’d rented for over a year? Yea, privileged suburban ignorance runs deep.

I was riding shotgun with our realtor while Jess drove his truck, and I felt a dread creep over me as we headed down the picturesque state road after we’d passed “town”. The mountains rose up to the north and the south, and the trees showed off their stark winter beauty. I did not want to like this house, but I REALLY didn’t want my husband to like it before we even had a chance to see my pick off the realtor’s list.

Jess beat us there, and as we parked and got out we could see him running from the large shop to the front door of the house with a fools grin on his face. I broke out into a cold sweat. We toured the house and saw two standard bathrooms and three fairly sized bedrooms, including a master suite. The living room was generous, and the kitchen and dining room had a layout that suggested an open floor plan with a little renovation elbow grease. From there we wandered into the shop, a 24 by 48 foot pole barn construction with a spacious lean-to, fully stocked with wood-working equipment. Utterly defeated, head hung low, I headed back out to the front yard (an ACRE of dry grassy play field, I hadn’t even noticed the power lines because they were hung so highly and discretely) to find my husband happily chatting with the neighbor at the fence line. A neighbor who just happened to be his coworker.

We put in an offer the next day, and within three weeks we had made the smoothest home purchase I suspect has ever been made, from an owner who not only went above and beyond to make sure we were had the option to purchase all his woodworking tools, but who spent a pretty penny fixing up the plumbing on his own dime after we had already signed the offer assuming we would be responsible for those repairs.

We moved in while I was working full time, in school full time working towards my second bachelor's degree, and just after the community theater show I was in performed it’s final weekend shows. The next year of my life was a blur of final projects, volunteer work and internships, establishing a career at an engineering firm, and navigating homeowner learning curves while attempting to maintain a connection with my husband who seemed to be taking it all in stride by comparison. It was the worst year of my life.

The cost of finding and getting us safely into our dream home was high. Higher than I was prepared for, and I crashed and burned in real life even while on paper I was thriving. To give myself the chance to not only recover, but rediscover why we even bothered with all these crazy purchases I started making the changes I had spent the last five years preparing for - and the absolute bone shaking terror of those changes brought me even lower.

We had up and moved an hour away from our friends and family, in a tiny town we’d never heard of. We bought a house at the top of our budget, and I was transitioning to work from home at an enormous pay cut. We had started dozens of house projects we did not have the experience or resources to finish.

We also had kind, wonderful neighbors who always offered to help us and feed us. Our drives into town were Bob Ross worthy, in all four seasons. Food was local, organic, and cheaper than we were used to. My time at home gave me the opportunity to learn the home renovation skills I lacked, and to cook my meals for the first time in years.

I’d like to say these revelations lifted me up and inspired me to start our homestead and finally plant that garden...but that's just not what happened. Seeing everything I had ever wanted right outside (sometimes inside) my front door but that I had refused to accept and love as my own finally brought me down to absolute and total rock bottom.

I spent a good six months, maybe a year mourning the loss of that time. All those memories I had refused to make and all the distractions I had sunk my time and energy into, instead of accepting the risky dangerous UNFAMILIAR idea that we were now clutching our dreams. Instead of continuing to take the risky dangerous and frightening steps to see those dreams unfold and take root and bloom.

All this to say, how did I get from there to calling myself a homesteader?

Well, being a homesteader isn’t about where you come from or what you know. It’s about what you love. And sometimes you can love something you’ve never even seen before so deeply that when it doesn’t light your soul on fire with inspiration it’s terrorizing your nightmares and intimidating the poop right out of you when you’re awake.

I started calling myself a homesteader years after friends and family did. My imposter syndrome raised its ugly head and told me that I was a glorified gardener and that all these people didn’t understand what homesteading meant, otherwise they would realize I didn’t fall into that category. I wasn’t canning, I wasn’t growing my own food, I wasn’t raising animals and my household wasn’t fully self-sustaining. I barely owned more than an acre of land, and we were massively in debt. Despite all of this, they called us both homesteaders- not gardeners, not hobby farmers, not hillbillies or dreamers or irresponsible or immature or delusional. This tangible momentum that everyone around us saw clear as day FINALLY broke through my wall of self-preservation, and things started falling neatly into place.

It was like the stars aligned just for us, over and over and over. My husband’s lemon of a truck broke down for good, and within six hours we found a better truck. For half the price of his lemon, and willing to finance with our terrible credit. In town. In his favorite color.

They even towed away his old truck we couldn’t get out of our driveway.

We hired an engineer to tell us how much it would cost to move the load-bearing walls in our house so we could continue with our home renovation. It turns out our roof is engineered so that all interior walls are removable- meaning, we didn’t even have load-bearing walls, and we could finish the work ourselves on our shoestring budget.

We looked at our soil to try and prepare a site for vegetable gardening. Not only is our soil mainly quick-draining sand with no rocks - talk about easy digging and planting - but one of our neighbors offered us organic cow manure to help start our beds.

Eleven metric tons of it. For free. It’s been a year, we still haven’t worked through half of it.

I needed a work-from-home job I could handle remotely while my stressful operations internship wrapped up at a local business, and I found one on craigslist that fit my needs perfectly, and I gave myself back the wage I had been earning while I worked for a large engineering company. I set my own schedule and was able to increase my hours during the lockdown, doubling my take-home pay and allowing us to continue paying down our sizable debt, and invest for our future while we prepared to start a family.

When we ran into painful and scary family planning obstacles, the medical team I had just signed up with turned out to also be the specialists I had no way of knowing I would need. I had lucked into an immediate appointment with them when I had first conceived because a new doctor had just joined their practice- a woman who is now an irreplaceable component in my physical and mental health.

Every obstacle that I had been able to define slipped from between my fingers, reversed, and slapped me in the face as a huge advantage. Eventually I learned to let go of my obstacles so my hands could be free to catch the perfect spirals life was irrationally throwing at me. I gave up trying to play every position on my team and just started booking it downfield towards the homesteading end zone, trusting my community and my previous moves were going to throw me the ball. I can tell you, I’ve gotten a lot farther this way than when I’ve tried to carry the ball all the way over the line myself, even though it’s a lot more horrifying letting go and just hoping your dreams will be there to meet you on the other side.

But enough with the poorly construed sports analogies. The reason I call myself a homesteader is because I am head over heels in love with the idea of myself being a homesteader, so much so that it is actually impossible that I am not becoming one. Every time I make a small decision to source my supplies locally, plant a seed in the ground, stay up too late reading about Nigerian Dwarf Goats, I am living my dream homesteading life.

Allowing ourselves to love what we love so hard that we see it everywhere everyday in every aspect of our lives (whether it’s physically there or not) is what makes me and my husband homesteaders.

Allowing ourselves to love what we love so hard that we see it everywhere everyday in every aspect of our lives (whether it’s physically there or not) is what makes me and my husband homesteaders. Cheers to spring, y'all.

The “Before” Pictures

CONTENT WARNING - FAMILY PLANNING AND LOSS

This new year I’ve been walking around the house, the property, just around in general, reflecting. In 2020 I set my focus on the future, hardly living in the present, and NEVER dwelling in the past if I could help it. Every messy area nagged me and drove me to work and fix and plan and dream and sometimes that was a great thing. Eventually though I realized all I saw around me was one giant “before” picture and the stress and pressure I put myself under to get to the “after” soured my day sometimes.

I also realized in 2020 that even one day when my expectations bullied me into anxiety and depression is very unnecessary.

2019 was not my year. In January I discovered retinal tears in my left eye and had them lasered, which fixed the steadily increasing blurriness in my vision thank goodness. In March my last remaining wisdom tooth became so sneakily infected that I thought I had antibiotic resistant bronchitis or pneumonia for months, until a routine dental checkup finally identified the problem in JULY. I had my tooth taken out two days later, and crashed for about a week while my body finally kicked the infection. The brain fog and wet smoker cough cleared up within a month and I felt renewed enough to take the next steps in mine and Jess’s family planning journey.

Since January of 2019 we had been trying to conceive, without success. As far as we knew age and health weren’t factors in this delay, but I thought maybe all the medical mishaps of the year may have contributed- I had experienced only about 3 cycles in the past 12 months by that point. Come October I began to worry, and consulted a fertility specialist around the middle of the month. I was prescribed a two week course of progestin, a synthetic form of progesterone, which would theoretically trigger my cycle after the course ended- but again, the progestin course ended with no sign of my cycle.

What was even more worrying was that I was beginning to feel pressure and pain around my ovaries, and constant dizziness, nausea and fatigue.

Can you guess where this is going?

A couple days before thanksgiving I took myself to the ER convinced that I had a malignancy around my ovaries or something else even more upsetting going on inside me, but never imagined that I would walk out with pictures from an ultrasound tech of what looked like an 8-12 week old baby INSIDE MY BODY. I watched the recording of it’s heartbeat a thousand times that week. After not having a cycle for six months, and taking progestin to trigger my cycle, I had NOT expected to already be pregnant. The blood test at the specialist’s office in mid October had even showed a negative result, they had made sure to check just in case, and Jess and I had been sure to “manage ourselves” in a very trackable way since the beginning of the year.

We celebrated the surprise with our families over thanksgiving and I found an OB/GYN in a nearby town that came highly recommended. There was no wait list, just a couple weeks delay until they could get in the lengthy first appointment. I took my mom with me so she could see the ultrasound monitor for the first time, we were both excited and a little nervous. The news that we got blindsided us in a way I can still barely wrap my mind around.

Not only was I no longer pregnant, what was growing inside me (and continuing to grow) had never really even been what I thought of as a “baby”. I had shown no signs of miscarriage at all, and had even begun to show. Everyone has different beliefs and conceptualizations of life, so I’ll give the scientific version so you can get a picture of the information we were given:

What had occurred was that two sperm had managed to fertilize one viable ova, or egg. This extra set of genetic blueprints from the spare sperm prompted out of control tissue growth, first in the actual fetal tissue, and then in the placenta. This rampant tissue growth, when unchecked, turns into a cancerous placenta that spreads to the lining of the uterus, then into your lungs, and soon thereafter your brain. The level of betrayal I felt at this potential experience was mind boggling, and just so incredibly painful.

The miracle was that this specific kind of tissue growth (known as a Partial Molar Pregnancy) is incredibly treatable- I’m talking success rates over 99%, and recovery times of just a few days. Over the next few weeks I underwent two minor surgeries, the initial D&C the week before christmas to remove the malignant tissue and verify that pregnancy was indeed molar, and then a second D&C soon after new years based on a gut feeling I had that something wasn’t right. After inconclusive scans following my first procedure, my incredible medical team had taken me at my word that I was beginning to “feel pregnant again”, and scheduled me for a second D&C just in case malignant placental tissue had begun to regrow and flood my body with pregnancy hormones again. It turns out that there was tissue regrowth, and it was successfully and completely removed by a veteran surgeon who had been performing the exact procedure I needed since the year of my birth. I was very, very lucky.

I woke up groggy and hazy to her right at my bedside, and heard her say “You made the right choice. We found it and got it, it was about the size of a quarter.” My mom got me home- she’d been my wingman through both surgeries- and from that day on I finally, finally began the long road of grieving and recovery. From... pretty much the entire year.

My follow up appointments after that were weekly. Every seven days or so I would go back to my awesome team and have blood drawn to verify that my hCG levels- a pregnancy hormone produced by living placental tissue- were decreasing as they should, indicating that no new malignant placental tissue was growing. In extremely rare cases malignant cells that had managed to cross into the main body cavity would begin growing in a difficult to remove area, at which point localized chemo injections would almost invariably kill them off. Still- that was not an experience I was hoping to have. We kept our eyes on the declining numbers and crossed our fingers.

Simultaneously, the accepted literature surrounding molar pregnancies had been redacted (the timing, I tell you) and was being revised. Very little information turned into absolutely no information. Originally, I had been told that though this phenomenon was extremely treatable, the monitoring time to ensure complete recovery was at least one full year. Meaning, one full year of weekly blood tests and abstinence, then a couple monthly blood tests to seal the deal and get my stamp of approval to try again for another pregnancy at no increased risk. The consequences of an unexpected pregnancy during the year-long monitoring period would be a theoretical masking of potential malignant tissue regrowth, which would not only threaten the life of the new baby but also my own as it wouldn’t be detectable during another pregnancy.

While I was mourning the confusion of my miscarriage, the idea that I would have no choice but to relive the experience for a full year before moving on was devastating. My chemical depression due to the sudden hCG drop (I was coming down from about three times the “normal” levels due to the rampant tissue growth) was compounded by the thought of never-ending follow up appointments, and I spent the next three months re-learning to maintain a train of thought, hold a conversation, retain basic information.

By spring my body finally felt the way I remembered it should, and my slowly returning energy felt like lightning running through my numbed veins. Just as I came back into my own Covid hit and changed the entire outlook of the world outside our doors, but inside them I was experiencing a renaissance. In the forced calm and isolation of quarantine I processed the fear and trauma of the past year. Jess and I were left alone to re-connect and celebrate our home with renewed opportunity to tackle projects we didn’t anticipate having the time for with a new baby. My appointments were moved to an every two week schedule due to Covid precautions and I cried from even that small reprieve. Soon the updated medical advisement for treating partial molar pregnancies was released, and my year-long monitoring was reduced to six months, plus three weeks. It seemed too good to be true. Right before my birthday (late May) I received the official “all clear” from my medical team. We celebrated in June with champagne, and, well, other stuff, if you know what I mean.

And then, to my great surprise, I found out in July that we had conceived.

To make an absurdly long story short, I felt like I had BEEN one giant walking “before” picture during my recovery and renaissance of 2020. I was always holding out for the next blood test, the next project to distract myself, the next culmination of years of work and struggle- inside my body and mind, and out of it. January 2021 gently slapped me upside the head and reminded me that the choices I had made in 2019- to transition my career to work from home, to completely alter my lifestyle and daily routine, even my recreation and fitness- all of those changes saved me in 2020. I could work from home the entire year despite my medical needs. I could rest when I needed to during both pregnancies, and take time to process pain in ways I hadn’t made time for before. I set new kinds of goals and reached them consistently. I started dreaming again.

I can feel the pressure of the “before” state of mind lifting, and today when I walked around my property I didn’t care what the “after” will look like.

I just felt joy that my carefully cultivated “now” is not only here, it never actually goes away. It’s my new ever-present, my constant amidst the chaos of everything in the world that no one can control. I partook all day in the series of small celebrations that link together to form the chain of my ever-present “now”, and will go to bed tonight (probably at an unreasonable hour) falling asleep to surprisingly uncomfortable baby kicks.

And I feel extraordinarily lucky.

Goals vs. Dreams

When you really want to do something, sometimes your own thoughts cave in and crush that idea flat as a pancake. The difference between goals and dreams is that goals stay flattened,  but dreams tend to sprout up through the cracks of that crushing doubt and self criticism and, infuriatingly, flower in your minds eye day after day, month after month, year after year.

Dreams are the seeds that contain the blueprint for our own happiness and goals are the trellises that can either cripple these living things or support them as they germinate and grow. 

When your life is made of a series of goals checked off an ever-growing list, a sense of accomplishment can still seem lacking in some way. Learning that what you thought were dreams are actually a series of goals can be disorienting and frustrating, because achievement is good right? And dreaming is aimless, non substantial, and doesn’t pay off right?

Since I was born a rule-breaker I wholeheartedly suggest taking at least one full year (sometimes two back to back lends even more clarity) searching for your dreams, as misaligned and random as they are, and recording them in some way. Your goals will still take care of themselves, by now you’re in so much of a habit that it might be a deep and depressing rut, so you don’t need to worry about continuing to achieve while you locate some wayward dreams, that machine will take care of itself.

A couple months in, you might feel a need to “refine” or “edit” your list of dreams because:

• they don’t make sense

• they aren’t practical

• they would take too long

• they may seem downright unhealthy

• they would remove you from financial, emotional, or physical security

DO NOT EDIT YOUR LIST.

What you may find two, five, ten years down the road is that your circumstances have drastically changed and your concerns are no longer applicable. The world changes, and you may find that what was once a risk is now a necessary part of life (as terrifying as that may be in the present).

If anything on your list simply seems...dead...let it sit there and look for the living ideas sprouting up through the weight of internal pressures, storms, or devastating loss. The most frustrating thing is that they keep coming up, and the more you find the more seem to spontaneously sprout. The feeling of having lost something you’ve never even attained will make you hurt, and feel sad, when you see your little collection of neglected seedlings and don’t see anywhere you can plant them. This part sucks. It never really goes away, no grief ever really does. 

When you can’t stand it anymore and make a drastic risky change in order to plant one of your dreams (when, not if) you’ll be trading some goals for one or two dreams. In a year’s time you’ll have made more little changes to plant more dreams, and let more goals sit abandoned in the background. After two or three years some of your dreams (maybe most of them) will have been planted, struggled, and died. 

One or two will be THRIVING.

Five or ten years down the road, even those may have shriveled and died, which is mind-bending, and also perversely comforting. Living things have a life cycle, and it’s a rare thing to be able to predict the timing. The absurd miracle of the experience is that nurturing living things naturally results in an inherent provision, a form of intangible sustenance, sometimes poorly communicated using the metaphor of a vegetable garden, but still not fully defined.

The trauma of dreaming is that not every dream gets a chance to live, and even the ones that do will die at an unpredictable time. There is absolutely no indication that our chance interaction with them will supply more than they deplete.

The miraculous absurdity is - it does.

Looking back - May 31st, 2016

The day after my 26th birthday.

Jess (then fiancé, now husband) and I were saving money in a sketchy 2 bedroom apartment that cut every corner and pinched every penny. We considered ourselves lucky to have an “extra bedroom” despite the fact that the apartment was essentially eroding around us and police roved the complex nightly. We had no outdoor space or parking spots, just a two foot strip of gravel next to the front (only) door - and all I wanted was a garden.

My 26th birthday present from Jess was a hose and bucket that hooked easily into our kitchen faucet for watering the storage bins I had spray-painted green and planted up with potatoes, tomatoes, salad greens, herbs, and other miscellaneous garden plants that never sprouted. These bins eventually broke, most of what I planted never grew, and still it fed something in me to the point where I felt I was no longer starving.

Eventually we got our finances in order enough to apply for a home loan, and bought the second of two options we had within an hour of our jobs. Today I work from home and my garden is the size of a tennis court. I have dedicated greenhouse the square footage of those two gravel strips that I now use to start seeds year round. It took us five years of success, failure, blood, sweat, tears, and stress to plant my dream, and we let others shrivel up and die to keep nurturing this one, and it still keeps me up at night.

What I’ve learned over the last few years is that some seeds will grow, some won’t, but the one ones that keep finding their way up through the cracks are the ones that feed you no matter where you are along your journey, and that is worth remembering.