How could I have forgotten about this?

I was going through my pictures and found this video of Bowie when he was 8 days old. It was taken on Christmas Day. Trout was manning the camera. It is subtle and towards the end:



It gets me teary every time I see it.

The master plan

This past year has been quite an adventure. I wish I could say that I handled it all in stride. But I did not. I think that I've tagged more posts as "pity party" than anything else. Where is the optimist in me?

So why did we do this?

Last year Trout and I were at the MREA fair in central WI. We have attended every year for the past 3 years and love seeing and interacting with a massive crowd of people that believe in the same things we do. I was 3 months pregnant. We stopped at a restaurant on our way back to our house in the 'boo. While having soup, I asked him if we were going to be happy in the long term doing what we were doing. While we loved our house and living in Baraboo, neither of us were having luck finding jobs in the area. Neither of us were truly fulfilled with our current jobs in Madison. That meant we would have to continue commuting. Not super sustainable. And, both of our families are in central WI. I, consciously, did not want our new baby to have the distant relationship with his grandparents that I did with my own grandparents. I wanted them around.

Having just returned from the MREA fair we discussed how we could focus on living our lives in tune with our values. I didn't want to be a commuter. I didn't want to be isolated from family, friends. We talked about keeping our eyes out for opportunities that would bring us back up to central WI so that we could, hopefully, focus on living sustainably. The price for a little bit of land up here is much more reasonable than in the southern part of the state. Trout has always dreamed of living in the country and becoming a organic flower/herb/here and there vegetable farmer. We would live and work at home (mostly, I would probably work outside of the home for a time) selling market flowers and other grown items.

At 8 months pregnant there was a job posting at a college here. I submitted my application 2 weeks before Bubs was born. The job would be part time for a while then full time close to the end of the year. I didn't think I would get the job. But I did. Our chance to make good on this dream could be here!

Right now we aren't as close as we would like to that dream. We didn't end up with any $ for another down payment but we hope that we are able to find a way to make the logistical/financial aspects a reality. Trout is paying his dues and getting practical work experience at a greenhouse and can hopefully find other opportunities to learn more about growing/farming/sustainable ag practices. I have a job that I love and will keep paying the bills as long as nothing catastrophic happens. We can do this. We must do this. Wish us luck.

I don't even remember when I shot this video, Tuesday maybe? Now he is walking and standing for minutes at a time, jabbering away if he doesn't have a nuk in his mouth. His teeth bumps are FINALLY visible, so he has preferred the nuk to chew on something.

What we've been up to

This is one of those posts that might take me days to finish. I have a lot of updates, though nothing terribly exciting, but day-to-day things that I would like to share.

Going back to work full-time has been...rough. Mondays are hard for everybody. Bubs is pretty good when being dropped off at daycare. He has never fussed much. But he does get more distressed now than before. Since I've gone back to work his has been more apt to sitting on my lap and grabbing hold of my shirt collar. Normally he is too squirmy to snuggle. The guilt is a bit blinding.

He is going to be 1 soon, which puts my head into a tailspin. I hoping I can make one of these for his birthday, though given my crafting abilities (re: few), MIL may have to do most of the sewing. I'll just end up buying the fabric.

We've gotten to the unpacking stage of hanging art, so we are almost in the clear. However we have a crap load of art. Trout paints, has a number of prints etc. Luckily, we've found spots for some of the larger pieces, and have plenty of good sized wall space for a lot of stuff.

We even put some art in the kitchen. I have a thing for norweign/german folk art. And the tiles were a X-mas gift last year that didn't even make it out of the box until now:


Other pics of how the rental is turning out:
I'm a little nervous about the book shelves. The bottom shelves are all Bubs territory, but I'm still debating if he'll be big enough to some day topple the whole shebang.

The above picture is a great visual representation of the way things go around here.

I don't have any pictures of the bedrooms because, well, once we got the living room put together, we kind of quite working on "setting" up other rooms. The kitchen was sorted only out of functionality sake.

The above messy face is for fun-zies.

Baby-ness is so short

Walking!

Bubs just walked across the room to dada. And he just stood himself up without holding onto anything. It was terribly cute. He is such a big boy!