Posts Tagged "Eliza"
Project Energize Progress
Here we are: already the second week of April. I had intended to do monthly updates on our progress on our new farm plan, and on our word of the year, energize…but the weeks have slipped away in a sleep deprived fog as Silas continues to be an incredibly crappy sleeper. Yeah, I know he’s a baby, but this is crappy sleep even for a baby. Really. Jumping straight in then, since this will have to be a big update: January Progress – Getting Organized: I joined pinterest as a place to start saving inspiration for our Farm Plan. You can follow me there at abluebirdmama. My boards that are relevant to our Farm Plan are: Cabinspiration, Farm Plan, and Shelter: Handmade & Tiny Homes. I started my planned computer clean up by migrating most of my bookmarks to pinterest. Unfortunately, the purge is stalled there because the rest (sorting docs, downloads, emails) is too boring compared to playing on pinterest. I have our household binder 90% complete. Unfortunately, I only use it 15% of the time. We got a new (to us) van and we vowed 1) to keep up with the maintenance and 2) to keep it clean. February Progress – She’s Crafty: We finally completed and signed our Lease with the farmers where we are moving! This was a big deal for all of us. The process of writing the lease was lengthy and filled with yummy dinner meetings, and screaming-baby-filled-conference calls. It was a good beginning exercise in getting to know each other and learning to be vocal about needs, wants, hopes, expectations, and boundaries. Signing those pages was also very scary – no going back now!! I had a few nights of panic. Might as well lay there awake panicking while you wait for the baby to wake up again right? We celebrated our last baby’s first birthday. I got crafty. I made a birthday banner. I made a birthday crown. I also stayed up until the wee hours of the morning making wee mice in wee tins for the wee ones’ Valentine’s Day gifts. I made a cloth tote to keep stuff organized in the van. It holds snacks, spare diapers, a few baby toys, books. In the summer, it will also hold a spare towel, bug dope and sun screen. You can also follow Things to Make & Do on pinterest. March Progress – First Things First: We cleared and leveled the (formerly forested) lot where our bus (Eliza Brownhome) and cabin (the Annex, the Panic Room, or the Pannex, whichever you prefer) will be sitting. We sent trees from the lot to the mill to be milled into the beams that will become our cabin. We dug a trench from the barn to our site to begin running our electrical, phone and water services to our site. By we, I mean Aaron. He did a lot of organizing, tree work, and got to drive a bobcat. I put in extra hours at the midwifery clinic. I neglected to do any work at all on the kids’ baby books which was my assigned project for the month of March. I celebrated my birthday by: 1) going for “breakfast” with a friend and accidentally staying for 3 hours of catching up on adult conversation that was totally free of kid-interruptions and included a delicious eggs benny AND dessert, and 2) getting my hair cut for the first time in 1 year and highlights for the first time in 7 years. That’s the part where some self-care energized me so that I would be able to energize our projects. Except I also got the worst flu I’ve had in years and took my first real sick day since my oldest child was born. He came from school and found me in bed. Ordered me to get up and when I wouldn’t, he cried and asked, “who is going to take care of me?’ Hmm. Good question. So much more to do before June 1. Stay tuned to my PEP (Project Energize Progress) talks to...
Read More2012 in a word
Yesterday, I looked back. Today, I’m looking ahead. And there are big. HUGE. things staring back at me. In addition to the revelation of my word for the year, I guess I have an announcement to make: I’m excited and terrified to announce that Aaron and I have made arrangements to move back into our bus, Eliza Brownhome, this coming summer. We converted and lived in her in the middle of Vancouver for 5 years, part of the time with a baby and a black lab. She’s pretty comfortable and we’re intimately acquainted with life in a small space like that. However, we’ve never done it with 3 very loud kids before. With these kids in the middle of a rainy Wet Coast winter, I often feel that our 1900 square foot rental is too small so I’m really not sure what it will feel like to squish everyone back into Eliza. On that front, I’m feeling some, um, trepidation. However, I’m so excited about how this fits in with our bigger dreams to eventually live rurally, build a house, garden, support local agriculture, create community, reconnect with my sister’s family and centralize home life – that is to say, live, work, learn and play all on the same site. I realize that I haven’t publicly described this vision before so some of this may seem fuzzy to you…but suffice to say, that moving back into Eliza for the summer is the first tangible step in the direction of making our dreams a reality. The initial plan is to do this for the summer and reassess in the fall. The hope is that some of the considerable money we pay in rent will be freed up for investing in our dreams. It will be fun, and exciting, but we’re also facing a lot of hard work to make this happen which brings me to my word for 2012: ENERGIZE. en·er·gize verb /enər jīz/ Give vitality and enthusiasm to Supply energy, typically kinetic or electrical energy, to (something) This word came to me late at night on New Year’s Eve, as I lay in bed tossing ideas around. I had considered DO, ACT, ACTION, COMMIT but they all seemed a little heavy, a little bossy. You see, I was looking for a word that would mean just do it, don’t be afraid, quit procrastinating, you can do it, you have it in you, go for it. Even without this bus plan, I have a handful of projects that have been hanging over my head for quite some time: finish the kid’s baby books deal with the clutter spots (closet floor, top of dressers, junk drawers) clean up computer (sort 5 years of digital photos, clear out inbox, purge favourites/bookmarks) back up computer make slideshow/video for Silas’ first birthday finish making a useful household notebook organize all the loose paper recipes laying around And now, on top of those, I have to sort, store and declutter so that we can fit the five of us in 500 square feet. These projects will be very freeing, but they take time and require action and commitment. They can be boring, easy to start dreading and easy to put off. My plan is to assign one project to each month and do it, no more excuses. I like the word energize because: It’s a verb so it suggests action. It reminds me to be enthusiastic about my projects. It encourages me to put in the energy, not to procrastinate. I love the bit about vitality and enthusiasm – it means that with our energy we can bring life to our dreams. There is room for me to prioritize self-care so that I feel energized too. The flip side of our plan to live in the bus again this summer is that we’ve also agreed to help a local farming family with some of their projects, to help make their dreams more attainable and I look forward to bringing our energy, vitality and enthusiasm to their farm. It’s going to be big year. I can’t...
Read MoreCrafting My Life Guest Post
“The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.” – Robert Kiyosaki I’m excited to say that I’m guest-posting on that very theme over at Strocel.com today as part of Amber’s awesome Crafting My Life series. This is one of my favourite things on her blog and I’m honoured to have been able to contribute. She’s busy putting together a Crafting My Life e-course and I highly recommend that you check it out. And in the mean time, I hope you enjoy my post today. I have a dream. This dream began as a talk about what my husband Aaron and I envisioned for our retirement; then it morphed to include what we hope to provide for our kids as they grow up. A random conversation evolved into an elaborate picture of what we want our life to be like and I’m serious when I say elaborate. …Read the...
Read MoreWrite Your Bio Challenge
Last fall, I wrote an essay and submitted it to Mothering magazine for publication–it was politely declined–and one of the submission guidelines was to include a short bio. More recently, I started working part-time as the office administrator for a local midwifery clinic. They have requested a bio and a picture for their website. These two unrelated events have shown me that nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a dirty toilet bowl, can strike me with paralytic procrastination like a request for a bio. I might even have scrubbed a clean toilet bowl rather than write these bios.(Ok, not likely). The bio for my essay did get done eventually, but the other one is still in extreme draft stage, probably due in part to the added difficulty of choosing a photo to go with it. Why is it so bloody hard to write a bio? I’d wager that part of it is that it really is hard to sum yourself up in just 2 sentences unless you’re one of those die-hard people that lives exclusively to throw themselves off cliffs using various types of sporting equipment. It seems easier to tell people what you’re all about when you’re extremely into stuff than if you’re a dabbler. What about when you’re a mom of young kids that take up a lot of your time, energy and focus? What if you haven’t earned a pay cheque (other than maternity leave) in the last 4 years? What if you never had a career and your degree was in General Studies? What about when your hobbies are a melange of this and that, with nothing that really stands out as defining you? I have seen introductions on various parenting boards that go something like this: “Hi, I’m Jane (32), wife to John (36), married on June 23 2001, mom to Jack (4) and Hannah (9 months),” and I vowed never to have a bio like that. I vowed that my bio would always be about more than the dates of when I got married and had kids. I vowed that there was more to me than that, despite the fact that my family really is that important to me. Especially lately I feel that the things that were defining parts of me have slipped away and I sometimes don’t know what’s left in this in-between-projects stage. Two years ago, my bio would have said this: Alison lives with her husband in their converted 40′ school bus, Eliza Brownhome. She runs an online store selling homebirth supplies and advocating for midwifery care. She is mom to a 2.5 year old boy and is expecting her second child in July. She likes to play with web design and is learning to knit. The current version of that bio goes something like this: Alison lives in a house that she keeps tidy but only moderately clean. She has a beloved empty 40′ school bus growing moss in a friend’s yard. She is a wife and a mother to two kids (4.5 and almost 2). She drives them around in a mini-van. She wastes a lot of time on twitter and facebook and though she knows how to knit, she only finishes 2 projects a year. Ok, so part of the problem is that I really am between things right now. Life has been in transition for the last two years and I was completely ok with waiting that out. But now, I see that we’re at a place where I can start moving again. And I’m faced with those Questions: What next? What do I want? Who am I? The other part is one of perspective and attitude. Though I was joking around, you can still tell that the second bio is written by someone who feels lost and doesn’t give herself credit. If I was looking at my life from the outside, would it be easier to see the themes? If I was looking at my days through a positive lens, would it be easier to talk about accomplishments? How about you? Would you find it...
Read MoreLeaping
The summer of 2002 everyone must have thought I went crazy. I started dating a friend (who was also the ex-boyfriend of a long-time friend of mine) and by the end of the summer, we announced that we were getting married in September. When I called my parents to tell them I was getting married they didn’t even know I was seeing anyone. That was only half of it. We also bought a 1984 Bluebird schoolbus and told everyone that we were going to convert it and live in it, in the middle of Vancouver. We owned it for a year and were slowly trying to do the conversion on the weekends and not making much progress. We thought if we moved into it, our progress would be quicker. My older sister and her family were moving to Vancouver around that time and we came up with the idea to try to find a house for them to rent where we could park the bus in their backyard. We thought we would subsidize their rent for two years before looking for somewhere else. We started keeping our eyes open for good potential houses. As we went about our business in the city, there was one house that we always noticed had the perfect space. It was on a corner, backing on to a huge green park with a lake complete with swimming beach and where the farmer’s market is held on Saturdays. On Sunday nights, there is firespinning in the park and every summer there is a lantern festival that attracts 10,000 people. The park is in the middle of metro Vancouver in a vibrant diverse multi-cultural neighbourhood. The yard was perfect and had just the right space for a 40′ long bus. My brother-in-law came to Vancouver to house hunt for his family and one evening, after dinner, we drove by the house just to give him an idea of the kind of sweet space we were dreaming of. A few days later, Stewart came back from his search with the classifieds and grinned “You’ll never guess what house I just looked at!” We couldn’t believe our luck that the house was actually for rent! We went to the open house with the landlord and there were a lot of other contenders. The rental market in Vancouver has been tight for a few years now and the house was reasonably priced. We thought it best to be upfront about our plans to park a 40′ bus on the property rather than ending up with a mad landlord on our hands later. We were very worried that the landlord would never want to rent to us with our crazy idea to park a bus there. The weekend passed slowly with much hand-wringing and driving by the corner wistfully staring. At the end of the weekend, the landlord called to let us know that he had decided to take a chance on us and it was ours. We called it the Destiny House. We stayed for 5 years. We got to know all of our neighbours. We built a parking pad for the bus, redid the whole yard including putting in a 40′ long veggie garden beside the bus. I developed a close relationship with my sister who I’d never been close to as she is seven years older than I am. Both of my kids were born there and all of our children grew up more like siblings than cousins. We became fixtures in the neighbourhood and we learned the meaning of the word community. What started as a bunch of crazy spontaneous ideas in 2002 became the most magical experience. I could never have imagined such a perfect vision of this dream made into reality. I wanted to live in the bus in the city and by taking a leap of faith, it came out way better than I even envisioned it. We’ve moved on now but we’ve been having a lot of discussions with my sister and we now share the mondo beyondo dream of creating a...
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