Hearth and Home

2014 promises to be an enormous year.  Good stuff, bad stuff, lots of stuff in between - busy busy busy!  Hopefully also amazing, but I'll take productive and be happy with it. :)

January and February are also notoriously difficult for me.  It took me years to figure out that I should wait to make major, life-altering decisions until March because before that, I'm a complete and total mess.  Antsy.  Edgy.  Depressive.  Prone to rash decisions that don't reflect life outside of January and February.  I find I do better coping with either a lot to keep me occupied or something new to be excited about.

So, for January and February (and hopefully longer), I'm setting up some new household rules.  Because they're radically different from where we are now, they're likely going to be difficult and take some serious getting used to.  I need them, though.  *We* need them, if we're going to keep our heads above water in the sea of change.  Plus, they're just better for us and I've been wanting to implement them for years!

New Hearth Rules:

1. As little tv as possible during the day, working up to no more than one hour a day for Berrykin and one day every week without ever turning it on.  

2. Make all of our food at home, as healthfully and cheaply as possible.

3. Play outside at least 3 times a week, weather permitting.

4. Take at least 1 (inexpensive) Berrykin outing every week; make a cash fund expressly for this purpose.

5. Take a me day once a week so I don't go crazy.

Planning Hiatus

I love planning things.  Plotting things.  Spinning out possible outcomes and imagining hurdles that might require finessing.  It makes me happy.  (I would call myself weird here, but I just heard of a study that said we should all plan vacations we never go on.  Apparently, we get a huge high off of the excitement of choosing what we're going to do, but that boost of positivity and happiness doesn't follow once we're actually on the trip.  Too much stress!)

But I'm declaring myself on planning hiatus.  Well, socially, anyway.

I like planning parties.  I like hosting them.  I wish we had a better space or more friends to invite, as those things pretty well limit what I can do.  But overall, if I had a big house and a big pool of people to cook for and plan for and find fun things to do for, I would throw parties whenever I could.  (Well, my kind of party, anyway.  They don't typically include alcohol, but that's largely because I can't handle people drinking it in small, enclosed spaces.  Both the energy and the smell overwhelm me.)

We hosted Thanksgiving this year.  Aside from a turkey that dried out a bit and Berrykin throwing up just as we sat down to eat, it was a lovely day.

We hosted Christmas, and nobody came.  Jeremelon had to work.  My sister spent it in Texas with her boyfriend's family.  My brother and cousin were sick.  My aunt wanted to catch up on sleep.  So it was just the Berrykin and me, hanging out with Christmas music on.  I made oatmeal and sausage for dinner instead of aebleskiver, sausage, and a giant fruit platter.  I thought I'd spend all day in the kitchen making cookies, but I got worn out too fast.  So I made a single, tasty batch that I forgot to put in a container, allowed them to dry out, and now nobody will eat them.

To say it was disappointing would be an understatement.  (Especially since we have to add in it being the anniversary of my grandmother's passing.)

I also planned and plotted and brainstormed and researched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the publication of my first novel.  It was exciting, thrilling, exhilarating!  But it was also exhausting (oh, how often all those ex- words go together).  I learned a lot, and now I'm learning to exercise my patience again.  Hee.

But after a good holiday, a disappointing holiday, and wearing out my planning brain, I'm done.  I was going to host a 12th Night board game party on the 5th, too, but I don't have the oomph.  Or the will.  I told my sister if she wants to plan it, I'll happily help.  But I have no friends to contribute, anyway, so it would mostly have been hers to begin with.

My brain needs a rest.

Not that it will get a whole rest, 'cause I still have a novel to revise and at least one novella to write... :D

November?

It appears I have stopped blogging.

Prepare for the coming apocalypse.  (I would suggest long underwear, mittens, and some kind of sustainable energy source that doesn't require sunlight.)

I tease.  Mostly myself. ;)

Hrm.  I didn't realize how often I use the 0 key until it broke.  Now I am very aware of how often I use parenthetical phrases and smilies.  :/

Anyway!  November blew by pretty quickly.  I published my first novella (Woohooooo!) on the 4th.  You can go check it out on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.  If you feel like reading it and don't own an ereader, you can download the kindle reading app on your mobile device.  If, like me, you don't have a fancy-schmancy mobile gadget, you can also download the Amazon cloud reader and partake on your computer.  It's $2.99 right now.  If that's still too rich for your holiday pockets, I'm going to run a 99c sale shortly after Christmas.  I only get a 30% royalty on those instead of the usual 70%, but that's okay.

So far, I've sold a whopping 10 copies.  All of them to relatives or friends of relatives.  I've given away 4 for a contest on Facebook, and 1 to the person to whom it was dedicated.  Of those 15, I know 3 people have read it all the way through (my dad, his friend, and a contest winner), and at least 1 (probably more, I just don't know about it) bought it with no intention of reading it, just to support me.  8 of the purchased copies went out in the first three days.

It's a good thing I didn't go into it expecting to make it big - or rich - quickly!  Hee.

That consumed the first half of November.  I also had a couple holistic health classes that month.  Originally, I signed up for them to be able to apply them to my work as a doula.  Except that (also in November) I finally resigned myself to letting go of that path.  As much as I love birthwork, my life isn't really structured well to be a doula.  It's supplemental...and I really need a primary source of income before I add a second supplemental income (the first being my writing).  Plus, becoming a doula was something I did intuitively, I think, to help me heal from my experience having the berrykin. As my post from August showed, it did that very well.  No regrets!  I still have the knowledge and skills, and at least for now doulas don't have to be certified so I can always go back to it if I feel like it's a good fit.

The classes were exciting and tremendously interesting, anyway!  I am now a Certified Level 1 Reiki Practitioner.  That doesn't mean a whole lot except that it's something I've been wanting to do since freshman year of college.  It also showed me just how weak my upper body is - I can't even stand with good posture for twenty minutes without lopping my right arm off.  This was a problem, given that I had made a career choice that kind of depended on upper body stamina.  I committed to improving my upper body strength, only to have that career choice pulled out from under me.  Ah well.  At least I can retain my commitment to healing myself!

We caught a cold as a household at the end of the month, just in time to not be contagious by Thanksgiving.  I hosted.  The turkey was too dry, but I made some amazing cranberry sauce, so it balanced out.  Except that Berrykin threw up right as we started to eat.  I thought he'd just stuffed too many carrots in his mouth and gagged, but over the next few days that was obviously not the case.  He threw up off and on for about that long, and then we dealt with explosive diarrhea for two weeks.  Let me just say that Pull-Ups are not made to handle that kind of capacity.  O_o  I caught the same bug (though thankfully not with the same effects), and threw up three times...which I mention only because that's about as much as I've thrown up in the last decade.  I'm thinking maybe my stomach had finally healed some after being on Prilosec for two months so it could do what it's designed to do.  I dunno.  Wasn't pleasant.  But when it was over, I crossed a weight threshold I hadn't seen in two years, so that was a nice reward for being so icky.

Now I have to prep for Christmas!  I'm making our traditional Danish aebleskiver...for me, the berrykin, the Jeremelon, and my aunt and cousin.  Because although two of my siblings have been living with us, neither of them will be here.  This makes me tremendously sad.  I miss my brothers and sister.  But they have lives and I accept that.  Jeremelon has to work for six hours that day, too, so it'll be...I dunno.  Weird.  Maybe we'll all take Berrykin to a movie while Jeremelon works.  That's how we spent Christmas a couple years ago, and it was one of his family traditions.  So I guess it works. :)

A couple of months ago, we took all of our excess stuff out of storage and brought it home.  It now fills up every closet and the entirety of our dining area.  It used to take up a good chunk of the living room, too, but I've wheedled it down and rearranged.  Enough so that I had space to put up all of our Christmas decorations!  Yay!  But it's still a lot of stuff, and most of it needs to be sorted into giveaway/sell, toss, and keep boxes.  And then the keep boxes need to be sorted into proper storage form and better containers.  I'm hoping once I'm done, it'll all fit into a small (and therefore cheap) storage space.

Berrykin is getting better at talking, little by little.  He now uses some words I can actually understand, and is willing to try more (unlike before, when he refused to even try).  Still no verbs, only nouns.  No complex two-word phrases except we've upgraded "Tahnk" to "Tahnk oo."  He understands, he just doesn't talk.  It's still really hard listening to moms with kids a year or more younger happily exclaim over their kids' best phrases.  It makes me worry about him every time, but at least now that he's trying more words I have faith he'll get better.  Before, I thought there might be something more wrong with him than his genetic predisposition toward stubbornness.  He's a typical three year old aside from that.  Throws his tantrums, shrieks constantly (which is probably worsened because he can't tell me what he wants), follows instructions when he feels like it, draws on everything, sings, dances, acts out his favorite shows while he's watching.  He loves Mickey Mouse, books about bunnies, play food picnics, and cars on tracks.  He's finally started playing in his room by himself again, at least a little.  Potty training stalled out, and then nobody had any energy with everything else we had going on to encourage him back on track.  It would have been VERY helpful during the tummy bug incident, but ah well.  Jeremelon is taking him to see the grandparents next month and I'm staying home to write without distraction.  So I'm not going to worry about it until they get back, as driving long distance is a LOT easier when Berrykin can just go when and where he needs to.

And there you have it!  My exciting life. :)  I'm going to try to update more commonly.  We'll see if that actually happens, though...