The Summer of DO!

You know when you (or people) are all talk and no do?  We've been like that for a long time, and this past summer has been the DO summer!!!

We successfully and safely birthed our second daughter in our own home (our bedroom in a birthing pool in front of a 55 gallon fish tank and little fishies watching over me to be exact).  We have talked and talked about a home birth and I chickened out with Natalie and went the hospital route.  Well going the hospital route is what pushed me into a home birth this time.  It isn't for everyone (as my midwife says, you should birth where you feel safest, at home, at a birthing center, at the hospital, etc.) but it fit our goals and lifestyle.

We raised a semi successful garden this year.  Our 4th garden, and first garden to really produce anything worth canning.  I think we did close to 80 jars of green beans (we have a fall crop coming on now), and some spaghetti sauce with our tomatoes.  My strawberries died, our melons were very seedy, our peppers did well, cucumbers died, and the squash died.  We are lucky if half of our fruit bushes survived.  So when you see all my "success stories" on facebook, be reassured we are still in the very VERY beginning of the learning stages of all of this and we have just as much (if not more) failures as successes.

We don't have fruit trees, so we hopped 10 minutes west of us to the Apple Orchard.  We are still in the process of "processing" those and hopefully I will have some totals for the next post!  We've learned that when apple pie syrup boils over, it fills your house with a lot of smoke.  That wasn't cool....
Thankful for a glass top stove and the burned nastiness comes off great with a razor blade!

I said I was going to cloth diaper...and we are DOING IT!!!  Oh my, the savings of cloth diapers are unreal!  And my husband who said "I'm not changing a cloth diaper"..... is in fact changing cloth diapers!!  Now I will be honest, I put a disposable on her at night (this child does not nap well during the day, but can sleep 13 hours straight at night!!), and put disposables on her when we go to the Homeschool Academy.  The poor nursery workers have so many kids, I think they might slug me if I ask about cloth diapers.  But, it is so much easier than I thought!!!!  And who doesn't like a cute bum?

I've become a "baby wearer".  My littlest wants to be held (she was "held" inside of me for 9+ months so this makes sense!).  She takes all of her day time naps while in her wrap.  It's been a long couple of months of figuring her out, but she's an individual, completely different from her sister...and I'm bound determined to figure out what works and what doesn't....and we are getting there!

Speaking of which, little Emri is almost 11 weeks old and is exclusively breastfeeding!  So this is huge for me....Natalie didn't do so well with this so we did the pumping thing for 6 weeks, formula for 2 weeks, and goats milk until she was 1 1/2 years old.  I  was so depressed.  I was determined to make it work this time around, and after a few days, it was a breeze.

I've come to face the facts.  When Natalie was born, I was depressed that we hadn't moved to our new house yet, so I didn't have a nursery to decorate, and felt like my child was going to be missing out on something and "deprived".  What was I thinking?  A newborn could care less about the color on the walls and if you have cute little bears hanging on the walls, or a bear head from the taxidermist hanging on the wall.  This time around, I was thrilled to be sharing a room with our baby and not having to fret about putting a nursery together.  

And our second biggest change this summer (first being the birth of little Emri), employment changes.  I will be home with our girls, teaching piano lessons, and teaching one day a week at a local Homeschool Academy.  Blessed?  Yes!

So Summer of 2012, you were the summer of DO!!  Probably some of our biggest life changes, and when we really took what we were "talking about" and turned it into "doing it".  We have a long ways to go, (still a lot of "talking about" that needs to be changed to "doing it") and I'm excited about the journey!