Posts Tagged "Eliza"
Parenting Together
Welcome to the February Carnival of Natural Parenting: Love and partners! This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama. This month we’re writing about how a co-parent has or has not supported us in our dedication to natural parenting. Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants. ****** I think for most of us, parenting is an expression of who we are. It is a natural outpouring of everything that makes us, from our experience being raised by our parents to our own adult values and life situations. Along the way we add in books we’ve read, conversations with friends, advice from strangers (sometimes unwanted and unasked for) and then it gets distilled through our practical experience learning with each of our children. We add pieces from here, pieces from there. I don’t think there are many of us who say “What is my parenting ideology?,” then go buy the book and follow it to the letter. (Are there?) The hope along the way is that our highly individual concept of parenting will at least co-exist if not be cohesive with that of our fellow co-parent. That’s not always the case and there are often considerable challenges in aligning parenting styles within a partnership (and even more so when co-parenting happens outside of a partnership). When I think of a question like “What does your co-parent do to support your dedication to natural parenting?” the first thing that comes to mind is sincere gratitude that my husband and I travel this path together. It isn’t so much a matter of Aaron being supportive of my dedication to parent a certain way but rather that he shares my dedication to parent in a way that reflects our shared values. We were married after seeing each other for only three months. For a lot of people that would be a recipe for disaster. When people hear about marriages like ours, a little red flag goes up and they sort of hold their breath waiting for the marriage to dissolve so they can say “Ugh, I saw that coming.” We’ve been married for seven years and we have two children. One of the main things we attribute our success to (besides believing that you have to work hard at marriage) is that despite our wild differences, we share similar values and upbringing. This isn’t to say that we just went about raising our children exactly the way we were raised. We certainly do things differently than our parents did, but we’ve been able to adopt a shared vision of parenting because we started out with some shared reference points. With this solid foundation, another important factor is that we try to make parenting an extension of the way we live. We have terms like natural parenting and attachment parenting as descriptors to explain to others what kind of philosophies we are drawn to, but we don’t follow a particular ideology in a prescriptive way. As such, our parenting style becomes a partnership that is an extension of our marriage, of our life together, of our joint choices, rather than a dogmatic battleground. We lived in a 40 foot converted school bus when our son was born. There was no room for a crib, no bedroom door to shut out the cries of a baby crying-it-out. At first there was no plumbing either. Before I got pregnant, we spent a year carrying in our water in 4L jugs to drink, to cook with and to boil for washing up. We spent five years using a port-a-potty that had to be emptied weekly. We were intimately aware of what we consumed and of how much garbage, compost, waste and gray water we created. Co-sleeping, cloth diapering, and breastfeeding were obvious choices that were aligned with all of the other day-to-day choices we made simply by choosing to live in 300 square feet. These were not individual parenting choices that had to be hammered...
Read MoreJust Renting
Bear with me for a moment while I do something taboo and talk about finances – you know, how much money we make (or don’t make). My husband and I are the last people we know who are still renting. Seriously. I don’t just mean the last in our group of friends. I mean all of our friends and acquaintances and the new people we meet all seem to own a house, a townhouse, a condo, something. It’s like we’re the last people in our demographic who are still renting. Although, what demographic do we really fit in anyway? If it’s age, that’s easy. But income? Class? That’s a little trickier. I have started to notice the subtle ways we apologize for things we think society finds objectionable, like renting. When we moved to our small town in 2008, everyone assumed we were escaping the Big City real estate prices and were surely buying a place. When we moved from our 1 year lease last summer into our current house, everyone assumed we’d bought our cute too small war time bungalow. Our answer is always this kind of bashful “No, we’re just renting.” Sure, some of it is by choice, but really, honestly, truthfully, we can’t afford to buy. It’s hard not to feel apologetic when you’re revealing a semi-embarrassing class barrier. Especially when all of your friends are on the other side of it. The people our age who own a house, have done so because: 1) they are professionals 2) their parents have helped them out SIGNIFICANTLY 3) they were the recipients of an inheritance We are not professionals. I am a stay-at-home mom and former administrator. When I went on maternity leave, I had been working my way up at the company I worked and was getting to the place where my salary was not too shabby. But I’d be back at the bottom if I returned to work now, after all the time off. My husband is in the trades. The non-unionized trades. So no big bucks there. Most of our married life we were paying off my student loans for my General BA in the humanities – you know, the degree that gets you tons of high paying job offers? There was no chance to pull together a down payment for anything. Our parents will not be helping us out. Our parents are working class. My in-laws are farmers in Saskatchewan. My parents are former Nazarene ministers who lost a house in the early 80’s. (Oh, yeah and those student loans I was paying off? Also because I wasn’t getting help from my parents. I’m ok with that. I do think it builds character. But it definitely changes things when you leave school with massive loans. That’s a totally different blog post though.) Our extended families are also working class. There will be no surprise inheritance from a great-aunt or aged grandparent. Even if there was, we’d be splitting it 36 ways with cousins. And for the few friends I have that were able to buy a place because they’ve already lost a parent? I can’t think of anyone who envies them their houses…they came at a price far far greater than any mortgage. I stay home with our kids – with two, I’d have to earn a lot to cover the childcare anyway. Aaron just started his own business so the banks won’t be looking at us seriously for a few years. For some reason, I feel apologetic about that. Every time someone asks me if we own our house, I forget the choices we made and I toss in that little just, “just renting”. So after all this whining about class and income, why am I saying choices? Because there was a time, before we had kids, when we lived in the Big City and were both working when we probably could have bought a place. But we consistently made choices not to buy real estate. Aaron’s parents did give us a bit of money. At the time, it would actually have...
Read MoreR-value
Living in a metal house gives you an interesting perspective on the weather. In the winter it’s like living in a tin can. In the summer it’s like an oven. We’re hoping to build our next house out of straw bales – the complete opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to R-value. When we first bought the bus, we paid $80 a month to park it in a field in South Vancouver between a gorgeous market garden and the Hari Krishna temple. The narrow strip of land was essentially a rutted mud pit in the winter. The row of trees bordering the temple side of the property provided screening but not a lick of shade in the summer. The sun would beat down on us and we would watch the chinese ladies harvesting veggies next door wistfully, jealous of their pointed straw hats. Of course, we worked during the week and spent our evenings in our East Van bachelor suite (with off-suite bath). Summer weekends we spent at The Cabin. We would have a cooler packed and a bag of clothes ready so that we could head out straight after work on Fridays. Arriving around 6:00 pm, the sun would still be high in the sky. Poor Eliza had sat all week, windows closed, doors locked, sun beating mercilously down and nowhere to get away. No shade. No breeze. Aaron would boost me up so that I could unlock the padlock on the Emergency door at the back and get in. The air inside was boiling, stagnant and oppressive. The trip to the front of the bus only took seconds but felt like an eternity, gasping for breath and sweating profusely by the time I clambored over all our junk and made it to the driver’s seat to untie the door handle (high tech security) and throw open the door for Aaron. I don’t miss that trip from back door to front one...
Read MorePriorities
Have you ever wondered what you’re made of? I always thought I was kind of a wimp. Cold all the time. Can’t lift much. I complain about papercuts. The first year in the bus made me realise that I was a lot tougher than I ever gave myself credit for. We had this idea that the bus conversion would go quite a bit more quickly than it really did and we moved in before much—ok, let’s face it—before anything was completed. For the first year, we gave up some pretty basic modern conveniences: No furnace. We had a small woodstove but the fire would go out after about 3 hours. This was a bit of a problem during a Canadian winter but thank goodness we live on the West Coast. We could see our breath in the morning when we woke up and when we got home from work. We gave new meaning to the suggestion to “wear layers.” No plumbing. We bought a port-a-potty after the first month peeing in a bucket. We got the Canadian Tire 24L camper model. With regular use they break after 1 year. We replaced ours yearly. We showered and did laundry in my sister’s place. Not a huge big deal but it did mean walking outside every time we wanted to have a shower. We kept a couple of 4L jugs full of water in the bus for washing up and we had a small Rubbermaid basin for doing dishes. No water heater. We boiled all of our water for dishes and washing up. We kept a pot of water on the woodstove at all times too. No stove. We had a single propane burner that looked like something from chemistry class. It was hooked up to a 20Lb propane tank (like you use for bbq’ing) that we kept inside. I used this exclusively for cooking that year. We boiled our water on it too. No fridge. Ok, that’s an exageration. We had a mini-bar fridge. It could hold a 2L of milk, a couple of Tupperware containers and a few veggies. A head of green lettuce stacked on the containers would fill it completely. No wiring. We had two extension cords so we could have power. For lights we used those small indoor Christmas lights. Aaron calls them fairy lights. We also had a lamp that Aaron made himself out of wire & cardboard and a desk lamp. No curtains. There are 11 windows on each side of Eliza, not including the back windows or windshield. Considering that we were parked on a corner, on a bike route in a fairly big city, beside a busy park that held a farmer’s market on the weekends, this is a big deal. Aaron used butter knives to stick blankets into the seams between the walls and the ceiling so we could have some privacy. We did have a phone, a computer and high speed internet though. Was it the internet that gave me the strength to weather all these other hardships? Or was it something inside...
Read MorePropane
It is 2:00 am. I am snuggled in bed. Down duvet. Down pillow. Aaron and Rain are cuddled next to me. It is raining outside and I can hear the steady drum of drops on the metal roof, lovely lullaby because I’m not out in it. Being January, the temperature outside is probably hovering around zero. A sound rouses me from deep sleep – the steady whirring of a fan blowing. The propane furnace runs periodically and we are used to it. But there is something different about it. With dread, I drop my hand over the edge of the bed to hang in front of the vent. Cold air blows over my warm fingers. Out of Propane. I slip out of the covers and walk to the fuse panel to turn off the furnace. No point letting the fan blow cold air all night. Returning to bed, I pull the blankets as tightly as I can and squirm close to Rain to warm up. The temperature in the bus has already started dropping and I want to stay warm as long as possible. I nudge Aaron “We’re out of propane.” Groan. There isn’t much that compares to the sinking feeling in that groan. The knowledge that all night the temperature inside will keep declining, until morning when we’ll be able to see our breath inside. It’ll likely mean hitting the snooze button many times because it takes an iron will to get out of the warm bed in the dark to get ready for work in a propane-less bus. It’s even worse because you’ll forget and think “At least a cup of tea to warm up while I eat my cereal,” only to remember an instant later (or when you try to light the burner under the kettle) that no propane means no furnce, no cooking, and no water heater. It means washing your already cold hands and face with frigid water and dressing quickly, making the space between getting out of bed and leaving for work as short as possible. For those who get to go to work. For me, it means sleeping in as long as Rain will let me, then bundling myself and my toddler to head out in the winter weather. Unhooking the small propane tanks in the rain, icy fingers slipping on the wet couplings, and driving down Grandview to have them filled at 8:30am as sleepy commuters shuttle past. The attendant filling the tanks in his regulation issue SuperSave Gas parka looks at me like “Great day for a bbq.” I don’t miss that one...
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