Rural Dreams

Nausea

Thanks so much for all of the well wishes. It's nice to feel like there is still a mama community, even without a message board.

I think I need to dedicate an entire post to nausea because it's pretty much consuming my life right now. And I refuse to call it morning sickness - the idea that it only happens in the morning is ridiculous. It is every minute of every day sickness. I have been keeping it manageable by eating constantly all day long. I feel insane - eating when I feel nauseous in order to not feel more nauseous. I never ever feel hungry. I got a bikini wax today and for the ten minutes that I was getting waxed I didn't feel nauseous. I kept smiling at the woman with every rip - the pain was a refreshing break. I think that for me, the nausea that I have in the first trimester is worse than the pain of childbirth. Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, I ended up with an epidural when Aidan was born.

I talk to every mom about it - I crave comiseration, that my suffering is legitimate. Often, I feel like a big baby. I talk to my MIL about it and she is sympathetic - but she had nine kids. Her oldest daughter doesn't remember her ever suffering openly. Jes and Maia had it through their entire pregnancies.

I am actually suffering much less than with Aidan. Partially, I think, because I am dedicating my life to eating, and that is helping. It's good to be with Steve's family right now because they will sometimes entertain him while I eat - prepare food - eat some more. I am drinking TONS of ice water, which is wonderful. When I was pregnant with Aidan I couldn't keep water down, and I remember thinking that if it were the summer I would end up in the hospital from dehydration.

I'm also eating healthy foods. Peaches, Nectarines, Yogurt, and Cottage Cheese are my everyday staples. I am not craving sweets like I usually do - they taste too strong. I feel pretty good about this. With Aidan it was hard boiled eggs, baked potatoes and cereal.

And a little OT - I told Aidan about the pregnancy this morning. He was so cute and excited about it. He wanted to know how it got in there and how it was going to get out. He told me that I didn't have a hole down there and I assured him that I did and that that was how he had come out. I wasn't as good at explaining how the baby got there, but he didn't press the issue.

We are going to Montauk for about three weeks in a few days. I might not be able to post from there.

Thirty

So today's my thirtieth birthday and I'm pregnant. I had my last period on Mother's Day which makes me about 6 and a half weeks along. And I am sick and remembering how much I hate being pregnant. I was thinking that I would try to really enjoy my pregnant body this time around but I'm failing so far. I had about 10 pounds of new weight that I was planning on losing this summer - I think it was partly from the cold winter and partly from Aidan's decreased nursing burning up less calories, so I feel fat and my clothes are all too tight already.

In some ways I'm doing better this time around. I haven't thrown up yet and I'm thinking that I might not have to. I think that I was operating under the mistaken notion before that I would feel better if I threw up, but it wasn't really so. And Aidan is a nice, constant reminder of what I get out of all of this, and that helps.

We just told Steve's family a couple of nights ago. I wanted to wait as long as possible, but I felt too sick and grouchy and I figured pretty soon they would decide that I was just a bitch. They're actually too nice to think that, but we told them, and I felt like I needed to disclose that I had had a miscarriage before I had Aidan, something they didn't know. I just didn't want them telling the neighbors and their extended family just yet. I can't tell you how many time I've heard about some neighbor or distant relative "losing a baby". So we also decided to not tell Aidan yet, though I am starting to regret that. I'd like to share it with him, and I honestly think that he can handle whatever happens.

Blogger migrated me to their new system for my birthday. Thanks, Blogger! It's great, I love it.

Hey does anyone have the book, Super Immunity For Kids? I need the pre-natal vitamin list from it.

And by the way, the solstice was so disappointing. We had like three weeks of rain, including the solstice, so it was like the longest day of the year was the gloomiest, longest day of the year. The sun was hiding. I didn't get up at dawn anyway, but it was hard to feel celebratory about it at all.

Solstice Ceremony

Mama Donna sent an e-mail with the following Solstice Ceremony:

Essence of the Season - Summer Solstice
by © Donna Henes, Urban Shaman

The Summer Solstice is the longest day of the year. How long is that? The only way to really understand how long it is, is to experience it. Get up with the sun and stay in its presence until it sets. Do what it does: Declare your finest intention at first light and follow it as it rises with the day. Express the fullness of your own inner illumination, your high noon zenith. Shine light and warmth into the evening. Set after a long day with the satisfaction of the lightness of being.

A Simple Solstice Ceremony

o Get up at dawn.
o Watch the sun rise.
o Greet it.
o Bless it.
o Put a circular mirror outside in a sunny place.
o Fill a glass container with cold water and several tea bags ?
black, green or herbal ? and place it on top of the mirror.
o Go about your business for the day.
o The mirror reflects the strongest sun of the year.
o The tea steeps in it.
o Watch the sun set.
o Drink the tea.
o Look into the solar-powered mirror.
o Bless your self.

I send you all sizzling solstice blessings,

xxMama Donna

That's tomorrow folks, up at dawn tomorrow.

Urinetown

For Mother's Day, Steve got me tickets to see Urinetown the Musical on Broadway, a gift that I have been asking for for years.

When I went to acting school in Chicago, one of the great local theater experiences was the Neo-Futarists' show, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. TMLMTBGB is an attempt to perform 30 "plays" in 60 minutes. Each play is written by a cast member. Often, that cast member was sort of the star of the play, but not always. The play could be something like a tableau that illustrates a memory, it could be a quick story, they often made political statements. One play was called "truth" - the audience got to pick a cast member and the cast member had to answer yes or no questions presented by the audience truthfully. The 30 plays were numbered and strung up on a clothesline. The audience called out the number of the play that they wanted to see next when each play ended. There was a darkroom clock set for 60 minutes and if the company got through all 30 plays, they ordered pizza. A die would be rolled to determine how many new plays would be written for the next week's show.

After I was back in New York for a couple of years, the Neo Futarists sent a group of actors to start TMLMTBGB in NYC. I was so thrilled and I went to see them every chance I got. It was like food for the soul. The actors included Ayun Haliday, Greg Kotis and Spencer Kayden. There were three other players whose names I can't remember - two men and a woman. Ayun liked to show the audience the bagel on her belly during scene changes. Greg's plays were often political, though he and one of the other male players had a lot of plays with potty humor. You know, like farts. Ha ha. Spencer was our favorite. She was strange and subtle and very very funny without ever being a ham.

At some point they stopped performing in NY. Ayun and Greg got married and had a baby, the first thoroughbred Neo-Futarist. Ayun wrote a puppet play about her daughter's birth called Neo Natal Sweet Potato, performed by Ayun and Spencer. I saw it with Steve very early in our relationship and it made a huge impression on me in terms of the experience of childbirth and hospitals and storytelling. It is one of my favorite plays ever. I tried to homebirth Aidan, but he ended up being born in the same hospital as Ayun's daughter and I found myself thinking of them there.

I connected with the HipMama community because of Ayun, who now writes a zine called the East Village Inky and wrote a book called The Big Rumpus, both about her kids and parenting.

So then Greg wrote Urinetown and over the last few years I saw it go from the NY Fringe Festival to Off-Broadway to Broadway. I didn't even realize that Spencer was in it for some time. Frankly, I'm not sure that I would want some one to shell out the Broadway bucks if she wasn't in it. So we finally saw it last night and it was great. I still like Neo-Natal Sweet Potato better, and I would have much rather seen it in a more raw (and cheaper!) setting - but how cool is it to see this group of actors make it? And there were so many NYC TMLMTBGB elements in it: Greg's potty humor taken to the extreme, the Broadway parodies, the political commentary.

Here and There

I've been thinking that I will probably spend a lot of blog time now talking about the differences between Columbia County and Long Island. I've even blogged in my head about it a lot, but now that we've been here for almost two weeks I'm actually getting used to it and don't feel so much like a fish out of water.

One big thing is that upstate there were two health food stores within 15 minutes of our house where I could buy organic produce AND bulk dry goods. Here, with probably 20 times the population density, maybe more, I have to drive 45 minutes for something like that - and that just isn't going to happen. So I find myself making a mental grocery list for when we go upstate.

I noticed the other day that during normal daylight hours when it is not pouring rain you can almost ALWAYS hear the sound of a weedwacker or a lawnmower or an edger or a leaf blower. Aidan commented the other day that he heard an airplane. You hear airplanes here pretty regularly, but I realized that he wasn't used to hearing them all the time.

I don't miss the ticks and how smelly and dirty Wes gets this time of year upstate. He's suburban dog now.

We went back to the barn to get our dressers and futons to bring down here on Tuesday and my landlord had done all of this wacky stuff - trying to get us to fill his oil tank - and then piling and rearranging all of our stuff in this really obnoxious way. Anyhow, it made me not feel nostalgic for the barn when we were there, which is a really good thing.

I went up to check on my compost pile while we were there. Composting pleases me immensely. I had a pile of grass clippings next to the bin and when I was adding them to the pile I uncovered a nest of baby mice, hairless with closed eyes, a whole bunch of them. I was able to bring Steve and Aidan up there to show them without feeling at all conflicted about these mice eventually entering our home and shitting all over my kitchen counter. And Wes wasn't there to gobble them up as is his tendency when he finds a mouse nest.

Progression

One family dreams of making a community and after several failed attempts at traditional housing, mentions this dream to another family in great need of housing. The second family is interested and says that friends of theirs have talked about this same thing.

The first two families get together with other families who decide that they would like to just make something like a four family home with a courtyard because anything bigger seems overwhelming.

The first two families decide that this is too intimate and might stagnate quickly. They decide that they want to make a bigger co-housing community and they really like the idea of an eco-village.

These two families need housing right away, maybe they could buy a big piece of land and build simple shelters on it until the community gets going. One family is a little more adventuous about this than the other family, which has just spent a very cold winter in a very cold barn and didn't like it.

This idea starts to feel like it would involve a lot of comprimises and wasted money. If the families make a community, they want to do it right.

They decide that the next thing that they need to do is find more people who share their vision. This community thing is not going to happen overnight no matter what. Where will the families live in the meanwhile?

Someone mentions buying a duplex together. They are cheap generally, each family's share of the mortgage might be as little as $550. Everyone thinks that this is a good idea: it's feasible, it's a specific step toward a larger goal.

They exchange copies of The CoHousing Handbook and Serious Straw Bale.

to be continued...

This Old House

We're on day three now of renovating the room that I mentioned previously. One of the amazing things about it is all of the stories that it is generating - and then how different people tell the same story. It's making me want to make a record of house stories to keep in the house, "If These Walls Could Talk". Might make a good blog.

We stayed up late last night spackling and were going to spend the day today sanding, but the weather is so wet and damp that the spackle won't dry. We tried to take a trip to Home Depot for mouldings and more spackle but Steve's car died on the way there which was a whole other adventure. It's running now and we're only out $20 thanks the the fabulous family friend mechanic, but the whole day was lost. Days are like that sometimes.

Renovating this room is really hard work, I can't believe Steve does this stuff and worse every day, all day. It's making me feel like we might have been miserable fixing up the Hillsdale house. Part of the problem here is that we don't have our own space until it is done, so we want it done quickly, and that makes it less fun and the work not really up to Steve's standards.

Bye Bye Barn

Well we did it, and let me tell you, it was so sad driving away from the barn. It had a lot of faults, but the whole thing was really a wonderful experience. Aidan still doesn't get it. Grandma whisked him away, so he didn't see the final emptiness (and cleanliness). He saw that I brought a mylar balloon of his and he said, "Mama, why did you bring that here?" I sat him on my lap and tried to explain, his face got all twisted up like he was going to cry and then he moved onto something else. We've had several episodes like this. Grandma got him marshmallows at the grocery store and he wants to take them back to Larry's barn - we've had fires there the past three nights. Plus, I think that Larry did something stupid like tell him he can come visit any time he wants. You can't say stuff like that to a three year old - they think you're for real.

I think that this would be a lot less confusing if we knew where we were going after here and he could think about that. Geez, we were telling him for months that we were buying that house in Hillsdale and he'd have his own room. Now his thing is that he wants us to build a house - a big white house.

It is the most gorgeous time of year right now at the barn - the weather has been perfect and cool. The past two nights we stood outside before we went to bed and listened to the racket coming from the pond, it was amazing - actually hilarious. Silly frogs making jokes all night long.

Roxy didn't magically show up as we were putting the last boxes into the truck. We were kind of hoping for that. Aidan has been talking about her a lot lately, as if she were coming back.

I feel so bad for Wes that we've removed him from dog paradise.

more rainbow pics: 1, 2