Posts by bluebirdmama
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Coping with insecurity On Relationships and Regret. Wouldn’t have moved from Vancouver if I could do it over. Screen time in adults Unconventional life, what’s the worst that can happen, seek out validation Building the dollhouse So, you want to be a midwife Unassisted Birth Instinctive Birth – Silas’s birth story Between Things – The time away from work to raise kids sometimes ends up being permanent as jobs end or we decide to stay at home or open businesses or train for other careers. Between things ceases to be a temporal state and becomes an adjective to describe us. Letting go, unrequited love post – my letter to Rain, can’t promise to keep you safe Necessary baby gear Nursing in public – covers, nudity Impulsiveness – dreaming, going for it Blogging – Mar 25 (Strocel link up) blogging, me, my kids and everything else, what...
Read MoreReality TV & Bus Design
I’m not much of a tv person. I do have a few shows that I like, but I watch them on the computer as I haven’t owned a tv in over 10 years. By watching on the computer, I avoid most commercials and I don’t flip channels mindlessly watching whatever is on. As a result, when I was approached by HGTV Star about having our bus featured in one of their episodes, I had never even heard of the show despite it being in its 8th season. For those of you like me, HGTV Star, formerly Design Star, is a reality show where contestants are given interior design challenges, and each week one designer is voted off until there is a winner. Every season, contestants are also given an unconventional space to design, like a yurt or a shipping container, and this season it was a school bus. That’s where we came in. We were asked to submit pictures of our bus to be briefly aired on screen as examples of real life school buses that showed good design. We submitted five photos and one was used in the episode, along with two pictures of other buses. The school bus episode is Season 8, Episode 6 and you can watch it online here. (We appear at roughly the 4 min mark). I watched the episode this week and was struck by two things: first, I was surprised that our bus made the cut, and second, I was really disappointed with the way the show approached the school bus design challenge. While I love the layout of Eliza Brownhome and I think we’ve done some creative things design-wise, I would say that aesthetically, there are some things that need to be updated. Compared to the other two bus photos used, Eliza is very dark and our soft-furnishings are worn out and dated. I would love to change our paint colour (to something much lighter), re-upholster the seats and get/make new throw cushions so that we can brighten up the place. The other two buses shown look more recent than Eliza. We have to remember that our conversion was started 10 years ago and she’s been extensively lived in during that time (not just part-time for traveling, or as a studio or guest space). Furthermore, our temporary table is shown front and center in the picture that was used, and it definitely makes the space seem unfinished. Eliza just doesn’t have the same polished feel of a newer project. For that reason, I was surprised that the show’s producers still used our photo. But on to the challenge and how the designers fared. The design task was to create a no-limits, creative space inside a bus of their own. The designers were given no constraints for this challenge and were told, “You need to show the panel that you can create something unexpected, unconventional, and most of all, inspiring.” The results were disappointing, but the blame for that goes to the producers not the designers. The mistake was that the challenge had no limits, and that they were designing a creative space IN a bus, rather than FOR a bus. Granted, it probably is important to have at least one challenge where the contestants can really go out on a limb and show their individuality. The problem here is that the school bus itself is the unconventional part of the design challenge – the space inside the bus didn’t need to be the wacky unconventional part. Furthermore, designing a bus presents a lot of ways to show ingenuity, but it was all wasted because the designers didn’t even have to design a bus. In fact, one contestant actually cut off the wheel wells, and another completely painted the inside including all of the windows. The result was long rectangular rooms with low curved ceilings that could have been anywhere and had nothing to do with designing a bus at all. In the end what made their spaces unconventional was their crazy ideas, like a Mad Hatter Tea Party and a futuristic...
Read MoreMothering Without Sleep
A while ago, Evolutionary Parenting posed this question on Facebook: “What was the hardest thing to accept about your infant’s sleep?” and for me, it is this: I didn’t know that my sleep would be disrupted for so long. I expected not to get much sleep in the early days with a newborn, and lasting maybe 6 months. I had no idea it would last at least two years with each kid. At this point, my oldest child is 7.5 years old and I don’t really remember what it feels like to get even 4 consecutive hours of sleep. And the second hardest thing? The sleep deprivation seriously affects my ability to be the mother I would like to be for my children. Before I go on, I want to briefly address the obvious response: “Why be a martyr? If your sleep is so disrupted that you can’t be the mother you want to be, why don’t you change the sleep situation at your house? The mother’s needs are valid and important too. You know, If Mama Ain’t Happy, Ain’t Nobody Happy?” As I’ve written before, we tried a lot of different things to try to improve our sleep, and none of them were easy, and none of them worked very well until our kids just reached a certain age. We are totally committed to not using CIO to get our kids to sleep (even though yes, we admit to trying it in desperation once or twice, and it didn’t work either). There are a lot of misconceptions in our society about what normal infant and toddler sleep looks like and I’ve learned in the last seven years that our experience is not unusual. The lack of sleep we’ve been living with is absolutely not related to some misguided (though well-meaning) decision to put the baby’s nighttime needs ahead of everyone else’s in the family. Put simply: changing an infant or toddler’s sleep temperament is a lot easier said than done. With that in mind, today I want to describe some of the things that I struggle with as a parent with such chronically fractured sleep. This is not a sob story or appeal for sympathy. This is a realistic look at what many mothers and fathers deal with so that other people out there might realize 1) that they aren’t alone and 2) that some parenting challenges are directly related to lack of sleep. In the book Nurture Shock, there is a fascinating chapter called “The Lost Hour” which looks at the effects of inadequate sleep on children. In it, they cite studies which found that “the loss of 1 hour of sleep is equivalent to the loss of 2 years of cognitive maturation and development.” While Nurture Shock was looking specifically at children, it’s not hard to imagine that adults can be affected in similar (though perhaps not as drastic) ways, despite our different patterns of sleep. The Geneva Convention lists sleep deprivation as a form of torture and we all know it to be important. In fact, Dr. Dan Siegel, psychiatrist, researcher, and one of the founders of the Interpersonal Neurobiology movement, identifies sleep as one of seven fundamentals that are necessary for brain growth. So then, scientifically what does lack of sleep do to us? Nurture Shock explains that Executive Functions like “orchestration of thoughts to fulfill a goal, prediction of outcomes, and perceiving consequences of actions” are impaired by sleep deprivation and that lack of sleep is associated with inability to encode memories properly. And here we aren’t just talking about memories of things you did that day, but of everything you might have learned. “During sleep, the brain shifts what it learned that day to more efficient storage regions of the brain. Each stage of sleep plays its own unique role in capturing memories.” All that cultural stuff about baby brain? Turns out that there absolutely is a reason I can’t remember anything or that I find myself standing in the middle of room, unable to remember what I was doing, or why...
Read MoreTo The New Parents
There’s something that no one will tell you. They don’t want to scare you, or be a downer, or maybe they don’t remember, really truly, what it was like. They will wait for you to bungle through it, and hopefully figure it out yourself at some point, though I think a lot of us never do. I’ve been through the new parent thing three times now and no one ever told me, that’s for sure. It’s hard. Wait a minute. Wait. That’s not the secret thing that no one will tell you. Sure, not many people honestly talk to a couple expecting their first child about how hard it is. It’s all congratulations and calling every day asking, “Any News?” Nevertheless, there are probably a few people in your life who tell you that it was hard for them, or maybe you witnessed some friends or family go through it and you were surprised and appalled by their transformation from happy and excited (even glowing) parent-to-be into weeping zombie. I’m sure you sort of expect that it isn’t going to be a cake walk. But part of you just doesn’t get how hard it can be, and part of you doesn’t even care because you’re all hopped up on the delicious anticipation that is pregnancy. Not to mention a little self-absorbed with the idea that pregnancy is really hard and you can’t wait for it to be over. I’ll tell you the secret now. The secret is that there is no solution, no fix for the hardness of new parenthood. (I’d almost go so far as to say that it is supposed to be hard, though it’s possible that wasn’t as true in the old days when we lived more communally.) After the marathon, whirlwind, ordeal, or ecstasy of birth (whatever combo of those you are blessed with), and the initial nights of parenting while you wait for your milk to come in, already exhausted from not sleeping through labour, and then not sleeping because you’re staring dewy-eyed at the new piece of your heart cradled in your arms, and the back-to-back visits from family and friends, and the meconium, and the euphoria of 9 months of waiting has finally worn off, you may find yourself staring into the eyes of a bunch of new challenges. Challenges like: poor latch, mastititis, postpartum depression, failure to thrive, GERD, mother-in-laws, sleep deprivation, growth spurts, pumping, isolation, child care, identity crisis, colic, returning to work, car rides, diaper rash, marital strife, and never having a single moment to pee or shower without bouncing the baby on the damn exercise ball. You’ll call the midwife, the lactation consultant, your mother, your BFF and the nurse hotline. You’ll ask for help, and you’ll receive it (with meals). And you’ll cry alone in your room (and no one will know to help). You’ll read books, and ask google and chat rooms. You’ll fight with your partner. You’ll beg your partner to just tell you what to do, or to stop telling you what to do, or to just take the baby for five freaking minutes even if she’s screaming. You’ll wonder why it’s so hard, and what to do to fix it. Here’s the thing. We’ll listen to you. We’ll help when we can. We’ll offer solutions from our own experience (when we can). We’ll bring you meals. We’ll tell you “Yes. It was this hard for us too.” We’ll loan you our books, and suggest calling the midwife. We’ll share websites that helped us. We’ll tell you to call any time, even though we know you probably won’t know how to ask for help when you really really need it. But we can’t fix it. For the better part of the next year (or two), it will stay hard. You will solve some problems and gain more confidence. And then there will be new challenges. New arguments with your partner. New surprises with the baby. You’ll sort those out. You’ll figure out how to eat a meal while holding a baby. You’ll get used...
Read MoreOn Grief and Dying
{I haven’t talked a lot about the details of our living situation here on the farm, partly out of respect for the privacy of the farmers but for other reasons too. Today I want to talk a little about it, but primarily as background information to discuss my current emotional journey.} We came to the farm in a mutually beneficial arrangement. We were looking for a rural alternative living situation that would be more cost-effective than the urban too-big-for-us houses that we were renting. The farmers were looking for help on the farm. A young couple with a brand new baby, a day job, and a property over 100 acres—they had a lot on their plates. We spent several months writing up a lease, through multiple dinner meetings and conference calls (as our respective kids took turns fussing in the background). As if being able to live on a working farm for reduced rent and creating community with another young family wasn’t great enough, there was a bonus. The farmers’ mother was actively involved in farm life. My heart has been seeking a local wise woman to play a part in our family for some time. We are alone here; no grandparents or other extended family are nearby. Our parenting sometimes feels lonely. I wish our kids had someone local to bake cookies with (in addition to me). I wish I had someone local to ask questions about canning, knitting, or gardening. Oh so stereotypical isn’t it? Still, I yearn for more of a multi-generational influence in our day-to-day life (rather than only in those intense spurts when our families visit). Not that this woman (with family of her own here) would have become our own personal wise woman, but I looked forward to getting to know her better nevertheless. I enjoyed her presence at our meals as we imagined and fine-tuned the terms of our lease. She is a vibrant, zesty and loving personality and I looked forward to the inevitable familiarity that would develop as our two families ventured into partnership together. I felt so blessed that the couple we had found to explore a collaborative living arrangement with was not another of the many young families that we know who are going it alone. Then, a month after we signed the lease and began developing the site where we now live, this vibrant woman was diagnosed with cancer. And here we are, a year later, watching helpless on the sidelines as these young farmers, now our friends, go through the final exhausting and heartbreaking days of losing their mother. We never did get the chance to get to know her. Shortly after her diagnosis, she began her treatments and we’ve seen very little of her since then. I find myself going through a grieving process for a woman I don’t know. I grieve what might have been more than the loss of something I already had. I grieve for all those hopes and expectations that went into writing that lease last winter. I also grieve for our friends who are in the thick of the process of caring for a dying family member, something that is foreign and intangible for someone like me who has never been through this, who is blessed to have all four grandparents and a step-grandmother still living. Some days I watch their little boy so they can go care for their mother. I hold him and we wave at the window wishing Mama a good day before I remember where she is headed. The reality of her days suddenly contrasts sharply with mine. Spring has arrived here. The sun warms our skin now, the flowers are blooming and there are three new lambs in the fields. Yet, there is a certain heaviness blanketing the farm, as the exhaustion sets in. This young couple stay up all night delivering lambs and leave in the morning, for work, and to care for a mother who mostly sleeps and no longer eats. We try to make sense of their grief, of their tiredness, but...
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