An author's collection of thoughts and stories
Even my 6-foot tall thistle got et by bugs.
I know this probably makes me a weirdo (I totally am anyway), but thistles are one of my favorite plants. They look so mean, yet the purple flowers are exotic, and they get monstrously huge.
And even that wasn’t enough to save it.
Curse you, grasshoppers, curse you.
For some time now, I’ve been thinking about loosening my veil of anonymity, but I haven’t done it yet because it’s – well – scary.
But hey, it’s 2020. YOLO?
I live in Utah. Since that always makes people wonder, the answer is: No, we aren’t Mormon. We have five kids because we like having kids, and religion/God never factored into it.
I grew up in Utah with a fairly boring and normal life, until I met my husband and he dragged me around the country on a number of adventures. Our first baby was born during our “off-grid” phase, and when she was a few months old we returned to Utah.
Living off-grid with a baby is flipping HARD. I do not recommend it.
But enough of it got into my blood that I can never return to being a typical suburbanite after that experience. We homestead — and we aren’t the only ones in our neighborhood with backyard chickens.
However
I hate gardening.
I know. Pinterest has everyone convinced that homesteading revolves around picturesque raised garden beds, but we don’t do that at all.
A few years ago, we planted a bunch of perennial herbs straight into the ground, then let them grow wild and untamed (just like my spirit, lawl). The strawberries and raspberries were also plopped into the ground and left to do their thing, with some maintenance weeding every now and then.
Anyway, the reason why I hate gardening is that it requires an enormous amount of work to set up, followed by endlessly watering and weeding, only to have the end result always be this:
Alas, the sad fate of our potato plants this year.
We don’t use pesticides because of the children and animals, and there are an insane number of insects and slugs around our property. We’ve tried a number of organic methods, but they are ultimately ineffective. The bugs always win.
Hence why I hate gardening.
Temperature has been getting into the upper 90s. I’ve been giving ice to the animals to help them stay cool, then retreating to sit in front of the air conditioner with ice cream. I sorely miss going out to play in the public swimming pool, but that probably wouldn’t have worked with a 1-month-old baby anyway.
*Insert whining about the heat*
My mind isn’t terribly active at the moment. Too busy whining about the heat to think of anything interesting to say. Lol.
I’m really just checking in. Hello, nice to see you all again, and I hope this was an enjoyable 60 seconds of your day.
I need some ice cream.
Because it is hot.
And my feet hurt.
I’ve hit 30,000 words with Alice and the Warden. While I had originally intended it to be a cutesy little side project, I just keep having more ideas. Thus, the story is still ongoing, and I haven’t even proven who the real murderer is yet.
At this point, I’ve realized that if I properly fleshed out the descriptions and gave it a (very) solid round of editing, I could publish it as a novel. Insert philosophy about additive writing, blah blah blah, etc. Basically, with my writing process, I metaphorically paint in broad strokes with the first draft then go back and add the details in later. That means that 30,000 words is going to end up being longer in the final version just from adding in details.
Not right now, though. Right now it’s July. My brain is melting out of my ears, and I’m having weird dreams about my children eating moldy cabbage. Like they’d ever willingly touch cabbage. I do not handle this part of summer all that well.
Anyway, it is kind of funny that my little romantic story has taken on such a life of its own.
I haven’t even gotten the two of them laid yet. XD
One of the cats got into the chicken run. Not entirely sure how she pulled it off, but she’s the one we joke about being part liquid, so she probably turned into some sort of gelatinous blob and slithered in while we weren’t looking.
The chickens FREAKED. The cat FREAKED. Every animal involved was terrified out of its mind.
The chickens eventually retreated into their coop, and we got the cat out of the run.
A little bit later, my husband asked for help because one of the chickens hurt the comb on top of its head during The Great Panic. We went out to the coop with a bottle of iodine and a flashlight, because it was getting dark.
My husband picked up the hurt chicken. With the flashlight, we can clearly see that its comb was torn off and quite literally dangling by a thread.
He said, “I’m going to need the scissors.”
I replied, “You’re on your own now.”
True story.
A couple of weeks before baby #5 was born, someone passing by saw me out in the yard with the children, so she stopped and asked, “How do you do it with so many kids?” The answer is actually quite simple:
Delusion.
Or, to use the more socially acceptable term: Attitude.
I could wake up every day and tell myself that I’m overtired and underappreciated, but that would be such a drab way to live. So I don’t.
I’m a guardian angel.
A mischievous fairy.
An empathetic goddess.
With heavy doses of apathy.
More commonly referred to as, “Picking your battles.”
Some days feel more like a giant game of ‘pretend’ with real chores and real tantrums, because pretending to be a graceful princess is more satisfying than brooding over how much I hate washing the dishes.
It’s better to think of myself as ‘irreplaceable,’ than ‘underappreciated.’
And who knows, maybe I really am a fairy changeling.
😉
I always confine myself for awhile after giving birth, mostly to protect my baby from THE WORLD and all the diseases that come with it — a mild cold for an adult can be a hospital trip for a newborn, after all. So, baby’s first month is always spent in the safety of home.
This time though, I feel like I’ve been “lying in” since March (y’all know why). I’m already feeling restless, and I really want to go out and buy some fabric, or something. I’m not really picky, as long as it’s different scenery. Even *I* have my limits.
Which is making it hard to think clearly.
But I’m not taking a tiny baby OUT THERE. Especially not this year.
I can’t help but suspect that this restlessness is the reason why I can’t stop rewriting the same paragraph over and over with my fiction. It always feels wrong, and I just can’t commit to it. So I delete the words, type new ones, and decide I don’t like those either.
Ugh.
Maybe I can get my husband to take us all out on a long drive this weekend.
I’ve come to think of this as the theme song for Alice and the Warden.
We had another girl, born at 7lbs 13oz, and she’s a perfect, princess-angel-blossom in every way.
Highlights include: sending my husband out for donuts during labor, because I had a mad craving and I knew there was still plenty of time; my first water birth; and, remembering that newborns really are that tiny.
Even though this is my fifth baby, it’s still amazing that I created a new person. I also still frequently wake up to check if she’s breathing. Some things never change.
I’m thoroughly enjoying my “baby-cation” of lazing around and snuggling, but I’m also getting a liiiitle bored of watching movies. I’m not sure how coherent I am at the moment, but I think its time to get back to creativity despite that. That’s what editing is for, anyway, lol.
Last October, one of our rabbits was stolen right out of the backyard hutch. Naturally we told everyone we knew, but as time passed by, it seemed like our bunny was gone forever. I wondered about adopting a companion for our remaining bunny, but decided to hold off for the time being.
Completely out of the blue, one of our neighbors told us that she had a white rabbit in her backyard. My husband and two older children ran over to catch it, and sure enough, it turned out to be our stolen rabbit.
Her teeth were badly overgrown and her foot was injured, so we got her into the vet right away.
I’m going to interject here and say that it seriously pisses me off that people will acquire animals then not bother doing a quick Google search on ‘basic care.’ Rabbit teeth never stop growing, so having something to chew is just as important as food and water. Obviously, our poor rabbit was not adequately cared for.
Anyway, the foot injury is bad enough that she has an impending toe amputation, and she’s on painkillers and antibiotics.
That very same night, our cat went into labor.
We didn’t plan on her getting pregnant when she did, but with everything that started happening two months ago, we forgot to pay attention to certain things. We didn’t realize our mistake until she was halfway through her pregnancy and started getting fat.
That morning she was flopped over the back of the armchair, and looked miserable. Having felt that way myself a few times, I knew that she was getting close to the end, but the vet had estimated another week and she hadn’t done any nesting behavior. I thought there was more time.
In the evening, I found her lying on the living room floor and having contractions. I moved her to our bedroom closet, away from the kids, but when I tried to go back downstairs she followed me.
Which is how I ended up sitting on the hardwood floor inside our closet, stroking her back as she pushed out five kittens.
At first, I wasn’t sure how involved I should be. While I was growing up, I had always heard that cats needed to be left alone while they gave birth, and it was something I have never been part of before. However, as our cat grew more exhausted, the more my mama instincts kicked in and I couldn’t sit and watch. I grabbed a towel and helped clean them up.
Unfortunately one of them was much weaker than the others and didn’t survive long, leaving us with four kittens.
This, of course, all happened when my husband had a big deadline with work, and he was stuck at his computer while I kept him informed through text.
So, while I was planning on spending May in a comfortably lazy routine, I’m thoroughly exhausted with a traumatized rabbit that needs medicine twice a day, a postpartum cat and kittens that I’m anxiously checking on all the time, and a pelvis that hurts like @#$! from sitting on the hard floor for too long.
Yet I feel so good about it all.
Having everything happen like that is so wild, I had to write about it.
By Autumn Rain 