Rural Dreams

Life Through The Baby Monitor

I never had a baby monitor with Aidan. We lived in an apartment, and I could pretty much always hear him when I needed to. Now we have one set up in our bedroom with the speaker part in the kitchen. The sounds that come through it are fascinating. It must be set up to amplify certain frequencies more than others because voices come through it with more clarity than if you were sitting right there.

The best thing about it is I can hear Aidan playing. He talks the whole time he is playing and through the monitor I can listen to his play from downstairs and hear what he is saying incredibly clearly. I'm afraid that part of this phenomenon is that I tune him out a little bit when I'm in the same room with him, but it's also like listening to talk radio while you are doing dishes or folding laundry, except the topic isn't politics or health or car maintenance. It's the story of how Zurg is sad because his missile blew up and Jessie is in jail because the bath toy puppet isn't very nice and he put her there and how is she going to get out and... it's a constant narration. I wish that I was better at remembering the specifics of it.

When Aidan has a friend over I can hear both of them. They are young enough that it doesn't feel quite like eavesdropping and it's terribly cute. I don't warn them that I can hear them, I guess I can't imagine that they care. I wouldn't be able to hear them if they would just play in Aidan's bedroom, but for some reason my bedroom holds an attraction.

It's not just kids voices that get picked up though and the other day Steve overheard me talking to Tyson on the phone through the monitor. There was a bit of a misunderstanding about something he heard me say. It wasn't a big deal, but the potential for problems is pretty huge. I always forget when it is on, maybe in time I'll develop more of an awareness of the potential for broadcast.

The whole point of the monitor is to hear the baby, but more than once I haven't recognized the sound of him when he starts to get fussy. I'll be listening and identifying different sounds - the train, cars going by, the dog's toenails on the floor - and he'll make a little barking sound and I don't recognize it as a baby sound at all.

Sleeping Brothers

Will is six weeks old today. He started smiling like crazy this week - at everything. It's delightfully goofy. I still haven't filed his birth certificate.

Everything is getting much easier with both kids. Will is sleeping longer at night - his patterns now are more how I remember Aidan being, which makes him a very easy baby. I hate it when people ask if he's a good baby, as if there are BAD babies.

Aidan is getting easier too - gentler to the baby, less bed wetting, actually pretty sweet and helpful. This morning after I got up I caught him holding the baby's hand in his sleep. What more could I ask for?

House Plans, The Big Picture

We're starting to try to figure out what we are going to do with this place, which is a little different from the dreaming that we've been doing since we got here.

When there was a foot of snow on everything and no possibility of really getting anything done, it was knock off the back of the house and make an extension. Not a huge one, but enough of one so that we could have an enclosed mudroom, a half bathroom and a laundry room all on the first floor. Maybe we would bump out the second floor above it and add a small bedroom and reconfigure the bathroom. Then I realized that the south side of the house is the back of it. There is one window on that whole side of the house and it is in the bathroom, upstairs. The house is pretty dark. The kitchen is along that back wall, so shouldn't we put in some windows there? Or maybe a window paned door. But that's where the mudroom/laundry room/half bath were going to be. Should we waste the southern wall on those things?

The other big thing is that we want to knock down all of the outbuildings and build a nice two story barn/garage/workshop/carriage house kind of a thing. Garage/workshop space on the first floor and an open studio space on the second floor. The second floor could be a space for an office or meetings or classes or a guest room. It would have a wood stove and a small bathroom.

Then there is a list of imminently important things. These include a fence, a propane tank and a new gas hot water heater (we don't have a dryer until this is done because ours is gas), gravel for our driveway, window coverings and paint for the house and removal of a huge dying tree with four giant hanging broken branches threatening to squash all who enter the mobile home park.

There is going to be a small amount of money and time to do any of this stuff, so now that it's all real and we can start working on it, I'm campaigning to drop the house renovation fantasies. How would we pay for it and where would we live while it was happening? Even if we were totally insane and lived here through it, we would have no kitchen for an unpredictable amount of time.

I also want to dig into the yard this summer in a sort of structural way. I don't think I am going to try to do a lot of planting this year. Maybe by the fall I'll feel ready for that. I'd like to take some time to see how the sun falls and how the trees fill out first. Goals include paved and/or gravel walkways (there are absolutely none right now), a patio and an outdoor oven for baking. I'm awfully tempted to get some chicks for Easter but I don't know...

I'm thinking that for the long term, if we can get the barn built, then it would be someplace we could live if we wanted to renovate our house. If I had enough lead time I could just freeze tons of food and then we wouldn't need much of a kitchen.

It's so easy to get caught up in the future and what you don't have yet. I was just realizing this evening that a few months ago, the burning question for me was whether or not I would have a home birth. Now I'm on the other side of that and there's a whole new set of anxieties. I'm feeling like I want to minimize our stresses right now and just enjoy what we have. I don't really have much of a choice about that. There are a limited number of things that a person can do with a baby in a sling.