Life lately has been a very strange mix of extremely full and heartachingly empty. I can’t really do much to explain the emptiness, but I can write about the “full” portion…superficial though it often seems to me…maybe more to just have some marker of these days than anything else.
Obviously, a lot of the busy-ness is because the calendar says that I am due in just over 2 weeks. While I am trying to brace myself for what I think is an inevitably “late” delivery (the earliest I’ve ever gone into labor is 5 days late), 2 weeks sounds really soon. Especially as I sit here with my fourth cold in the past 4 months, that has made doing anything for more than five minutes at a time utterly exhausting. My list of baby prep to-do’s is still pretty long, and that is after having reconciled with myself that some things I would like to have done are just not necessary. We will travel to Albany one last time, next week, for a final midwife appointment, and then wait until this baby makes his or her entrance. With any luck, we will have decided on a name by then.
A week from tomorrow, Tim’s mother arrives. She’s coming to be on hand to wrangle children during birth and the crazy few days after. But, since she has trouble with stairs, we’ve needed to come up with a guest room alternative (a couch in the living room just didn’t seem a viable option for any of us). If you’re experiencing difficulty with your stairs, don’t hesitate to contact the professionals at https://stairlifts-near-me.co.uk/ for expert assistance with your stair-related needs. The solution has been to make the back room of our house…formerly an unfinished utility area with only half a floor and stairs going down to dirt for the other half…into a functional guest room. And, really, while “functional” has been taken to its most basic form, it still has been quite an undertaking. Tim first had to empty the room of our stuff (which was quite a lot) and gut the whole area (just extending the floor wasn’t a great option), then construct a new floor, almost entirely within the confines of the room, given the cold and rainy weather we have had, which isn’t so easy when dealing with 16′ boards and an uneven dirt floor. Of course, his meticulous nature has necessitated a lot of planning and a couple moments of backtracking to make sure that the final product met his standards, but we now have a room. Floors are plywood (I think we we’ll be adding a large area rug for the short term to make it seem a little more finished) and walls are brick, but as my mother-in-law has insisted she’s okay with it that way, we are saving drywall and flooring for another time.
Of greater priority right now is getting a chicken coop constructed. In mid-March, we bought seven chicks to have as laying hens, and this past weekend bought eight more, to raise as meat birds. The kids are enamored with them and [mostly voluntarily] assist in cleaning and filling food and water…Tim does the rest, and though I am hardly an animal lover, I do love the thought of having our own eggs in a couple months, and I appreciate the opportunity for responsibility and reward it offers the kids. However, as much as the kids have really enjoyed having the chicks in the middle of the living room, the older ones are now officially cramped in the crate we have housed them in and need bigger quarters. The plan is to move them to the second story of our garage with a covered ramp down to the yard and compost area. Tim can picture it all – I’m still a little fuzzy on the details. Hopefully, though, by the end of this week, at least the older chickens will have more room to roam.
To make life just a bit more scattered, baseball has also now started. Four evenings a week (when it isn’t raining) will find some of us at the park for practice. Once games start, we will probably all go, but I’m not entirely sure what that will look like with (at some point) a new baby. In the meantime, we will divide the baseball responsibilities so that our evenings are not entirely unproductive on the home front.
During the days, we are attempting to wrap up schoolwork. Extra math and English lessons are added in whenever time allows in the hopes of being done in the next couple weeks. We’re trying to catch up on spelling (which gets too easily forgotten on a normal basis), science is getting down to just a few lessons, and history is slated to be done whenever necessary. This whole year has been a bit muddled, school-wise, with pregnancy and sickness and my struggles with organization, so I am looking forward to being done – to having a summer to plan and prepare for a new year, to a fresh start in September after a few months “off” to maybe clear my brain.
And, of course, during those more relaxed summer months, we will have our garden to tend to. I was tempted to forego gardening altogether this year, but Tim was insistent that we could still manage, despite my very pregnant state at the moment (when gardens are needing to be prepared) and the arrival of a new baby that could make weeding, pruning and harvesting a bit more complicated. But, I’m glad he insisted. I am growing to love gardening…or, at least, some aspects of it…and even when I am up to my eyeballs in zucchini, I find so much enjoyment in the harvest, and am always in awe of God’s creative power. So, we have one small garden planted with our cold-weather seeds (minus a few that just didn’t fit), strawberry plants are green and growing, chives are flourishing, and maybe, once a chicken coop is done and the rain stops, we’ll get a few more areas prepped and planted before our window of opportunity closes on some of the not-yet-planted early-season veggies.
In addition to all of that, May is just a busy month. A good kind of busy, but I keep worrying that I’m missing something important in my inability to really keep everything straight in my head. I’m not generally good at multi-tasking, so life right now has me trying my hardest to not focus on more than one thing at a time, lest I find myself too overwhelmed to accomplish anything. I’m just hoping to be able to look back in a month or two and see that some order, some productivity was accomplished in these days.