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So I was just commiserating the other day about how I’m not sure how I’m going to get through Portland’s drizzly cold (relatively) fall/winter as a baby wearer. I mean, how do you keep yourself and the tot warm without a coat and just, well, how is this possible?!

So some one (THANKS JENNY!) recommended the site CottonBabies for some of my cloth diapering questions and I found this product. As Seth and now Ethan would say: “what.” This product is the bomb diggity. (which is not something either Seth OR Ethan — OR anyone with an ounce of coolness would say.)

I guess it never occurred to me that the geniuses out there who invent stuff would have this babywearing in the winter thing covered. Neat.

I just gotta put a little sumthin’ sumthin’ away before, say, the end of October, so as to get myself one of these bad boys. Passing along the info in case anyone else had the same conundrum. (I really like that word, how it just rolls off the tongue… CON NUN DRUM! …Okay. It’s time for bed.)

“This is the stuff blogs are made of.” I said to Misty as we began watching “Preparing Herbs for Holistic Purposes” VHS rented from the library. If ever a chic flick were made especially for people like us, it would be this film.

Perhaps it was the name of the presenter, the totally flower-child name “Kay Moon Dreamer”, that convinced me to pick it up from the non-print media section at the library this weekend. I saved it for the perfect night too…

First, our basement flooded. And who lives in the basement? Yep. I do. Luckily, this was the laundry room; some how the washing machine disconnected and spilled out several inches of water on the floor below, making its way to the carpet as well as many cardboard moving boxes still piled in the corners. Great!!! I didn’t quite know what to do. The One Who is Due Any Day Now and my machismo hubby began moving things around in a plan that only they seem to understand, and since Verity was screaming her brains out I was able to retreat for a bit until things calmed down. Hubby plunged the drain and got the water to filter down while they mopped up and sopped up and moved out and all that good stuff. One of the fantastic aspects of living in community with others is that there is never a shortage of people to call for help. Call Heath! Call Dan! Call Tom! Tom answered and had the wet vac we were after, so Seth brought it home and the men got to work finishing up the water spillage catastrophe. Now all we can do is summon the gods of NO MOLD with incense and burnt offerings.

What did I do this whole time? Seriously, I was like, “Um… I’ll just go bake cookies.” And I did. I literally threw stuff together and called them “A Wing and a Prayer Cookies” and you know, these little double chocolate pecan chocolate chip crunchy cookies were pretty good! A little red wine and coffee were prepared for every one having a mental breakdown and wa-la, the night was ready to be completed by the Herbal Hippie Video of the Century!

Lacey, Misty and I gather in my room with the cookies. The video begins with a lovely a capella hippie song about giving thanks to the garden and the earth and the gnomes and the little purple elephants with angel halos… My jaw literally gaped open in disbelief. I was secretly SO tickled that the video was starting THIS BAD.

The lovely host, Kay Moon Dreamer, turns out to be Ben Stein’s voice inside my step-mother’s body twenty years in the past. Susan, I love you, but why oh why didn’t you tell me about your starring role in herbal videos in the early 90’s?!?! And I love the name you gave yourself as a cover!

Otherwise, the video was pretty interesting, if you are interested in herbs, that is. I definitely want to know more now!

At the conclusion of the film, a series of related videos produced by the same group are previewed. The one for energetic yoga featured a bearded guy in briefs head banging on his knee, lightening speed Cat-Cow curls, and air humping. Supposedly, if you do these things, you will instantly have greater energy. Or just a headache. But suffice it to say, the three of us were laughing so hard that tears and pee were said to have come out. (Okay, it was only me who said that. Shoot. I’m such a bad exaggerator.)

Oh, but I sure needed that! Thanks, girls, for joining me on this memorable evening. It will be so disheartening to return Miss Dreamer’s film to the library, but I find solace in the fact that it will bring some one else great mocking material someday

Among the changes I wrote about yesterday, I’m also shifting a bit with my work-at-home-ness. While I continue to work on an as-needed basis for one client, it looks like my other long-term work relationship will be getting even more so as my role will be expanding a bit. Adding another title to my list of Random Things Vivian Does For a Living; namely, “Blog Editor”. Which I love - just the word “blog” gets me all smileys. :)

I worked on my new business website from Vivian Writes to Virtual Creatives last winter and while I haven’t had a chance to go back and improve the functionality yet, I’ve finally just let it be out there for the public because even unfinished it represents what I do much better than Vivian Writes did. I’ll be taking down the Vivian Writes site soon, I suppose. As of now, I’m not looking for another on-going client, unless Chris and I end up having him join me as an independent contractor and he would handle administrative tasks for a new client relationship. We’ll see. It’s a thought.

Well, baby is losing a lung right now she is crying so hard, so I better jet. Just wanted to throw this little tid bit out there.

Boy, I feel a bit out-of-body lately. This tends to happen when major life changes are upon me. I just check out to survive it, check back in when things are a bit more calm! Me and my gosh darn less-than-optimal coping skillz.

Let’s recap…

I moved into a community house with another family in March. BIG CHANGE! A very, very good one, I might add!

I had my second baby in April, at home in my shower no less. BIG CHANGE!!! An awesome one, of course.

I’m starting to unschool/homeschool again and actually getting together with other moms weekly and so on. And once you’ve got a homeschooling “group”, it’s like, official. All of that is also a good thing! The more I invest in Ethan’s life, the more in love with my kid I fall. And the more I see him with his peers, the more I realize he is just fine. Right on track, actually, lol.

For another thing, my husband and I have just celebrated our first year married. I say that because I really don’t feel we were ever married before he began recovery. We have discovered in this year an ever increasing intimacy with each other, something that can only come out of a relationship of honesty and respect. So WOOT for that too!

Okay, so what about the not-so-great changes???

I’ve slowly gotten back to work over the last 2 months, as Verity is now 2 months old (yeek!). But Chris’ work is slowing down and any day or week now they will finally clue in their employees on their official layoff date. The combination of my lost income from unpaid “leave” of my freelancing during Verity’s arrival with my husband’s impending layoff has left us with little option but to declare bankruptcy. A big, big decision, I know. I’ve written before about our use of credit cards to make ends meet (above our means!) through college, and how we joined a consolidation service 1.5 years ago. That was a saving grace up until now, because the loss of my income for the last few months made it impossible to pay our creditors on time, and now they have begun to withdrawal us from the program along with it’s wonderfully low interest rates. Catching up, which has seemed to work well for us in the past, is no longer possible. We simply have no way to pay back our debt at this point, and we have made the decision and begun taking steps to file.

Lucky for us, this should be a very straightforward case, one that I’m so far confident that I can actually do “pro se” (without a lawyer), but we’ll see. Being that we have zero assets (no home, no car, no investments, no nothin), we make well below the state average (to pass what’s called the “means test” for filing Ch.7 bankruptcy), and we have been in a counseling/consolidation service for 1.5 years until this recent double whammy of new baby and layoff, I’m convinced at this point that hiring a lawyer to protect, well, the zero assets we have is kinda pointless. So for the next few months (hopefully less!) I’ll be studying my arse off to learn all I need to file and get started on a new life of actually having the money to pay my bills each month without playing the catch up game. Here, here!

Which leads me to the OTHER big, BIG change… hubby has an appointment to get snipped in a few weeks. AH! This is a tough one for me. I can’t say that I never want to have another child, in fact I’d love more than 2 kids. However, all things considered, I believe its the wisest decision for us. Will I be freaking out and wondering how I feel about this for the next few weeks? Heck yes. But perhaps once its over and behind us, I’ll be free to consider the future without the possibility of more children and move on. I love kids, but I fear that having a “quiver full” wouldn’t be the best decision for us, given all the relational, parental, and financial issues we are muddling through. I trust God to not give me more than I can handle, but I also like to think He trusts me to utilize my common sense. So… yeah, I dunno.

Oh Lordy. Yep, 2009 will be THE YEAR of big changes for us. We’ll just have to roll with them, one day at a time.

What does it mean to live a full life? To live every moment to the fullest? Sometimes I look at my life and think… my… this is rather drab.

In doing some, ahem, research for Chris’ soon-to-be-launched dadblog, I discovered this guys bio and thought, now that’s an interesting person, lol.

You know the feeling, the itch, the urge, you get every now and then to DO SOMETHING GREAT? I get bored easily, I suppose. Having a baby was my last big accomplishment, and it wasn’t that terribly long ago (8 weeks almost! Woah!) My next big accomplishment will likely be declaring bankruptcy, which is not exactly something I’d put on my list of things I’m proud of

Now, I know the everyday tasks of working and mothering are pretty grand, as uneventful as they may sound in comparison to riding elephants in Sri Lanka! But I don’t really want to look back on my twenties and remember ONLY the unspectacular everyday things I did. So many moms say this but, but… “I used to have dreams!” lol

Okay, I’m getting to a point here, I swear.

Chris and I have been talking about backpacking Europe (probably staying in hostels and mostly doing just one location — we are thinking Barcelona) for our 10 year anniversary. Which is in 3.5 years. We’ve had this idea for some time, and I personally wanted to take off to Europe with a backpack since even BEFORE Rory and Lorelai did it

This will require much planning, much saving, grandparents willing to watch the tots (this shouldn’t be too hard! lol), … and a vasectomy. But I want to announce it on my blog because I want a bit of accountability to work towards this goal.

Sometimes the survival of the “day to day” keeps us from seeing too far into the future. I hesitate to make a playdate for next week! But I don’t want to neglect the importance of making room for a few great experiences too. Life HAS to be about more than just paying bills on time, heh?

I’ll try to keep the blog posted as we intentionally work towards this goal. I’m going to start a little push pin board in my room dedicated to this plan. A nice little visualization tool, ha!

So, back to my original question- what does it mean to live a full life? What does it mean to you? Do you have some rare and amazing adventure to look back on or that you are planning for? I wonder what you guys dare to dream about…

Every day that passes, I find more joy in knowing they have each other.

“What makes people smart, curious, alert, observant, competent, confident, resourceful, persistent - in the broadest and best sense, intelligent- is not having access to more and more learning places, resources, and specialists, but being able in their lives to do a wide variety of interesting things that matter, things that challenge their ingenuity, skill, and [...]

I mentioned last week that I’ve started reading “Mothering Without a Map”. It’s been very interesting, and hard for me to read without putting it down to sit and think on it before picking it up again. Clearly, I have mother issues, lol. (I guess most of us do!)
Having been raised by my father, a [...]

I am exhausted (and possibly feverish?) and low on words this evening, but I feel the need for even just a quick, public response to Chris’ vulnerable and endearing post last week. I haven’t written at length about the process we have been on as a couple, and I’ve tried to seldom speak for him about the changes he is making.

Happy fathers day!!!
Don’t have time to write much but lots of pics to share! Enjoy the slideshow!