Instant Pioneer Life

I once went away for several days and stayed by myself in a cabin by a lake in British Columbia. I had to carry water from the tap up the trail, and cook on a woodstove that required gathering wood and stoking the fire on a regular basis. The rest of my time was spent walking and reading. I've always remembered it fondly and remember thinking at the time that a certain kind of life requires most of every day just to live it. Not there, in what was essentially a rustic resort, but life along the lines of Thoreau's Walden, where I'd actually have to find or grow or mill the food I eat and cut the wood and tend the fire and maintain my cabin myself. I daydream about a self-sufficient life--tending chickens and preparing food would be my main occupations and I would never have to commute or sit in a cubicle.

I realized yesterday that working full time with a 4 month old baby at home is it's own version of 24 hour subsistence living. My day is chock full. I have two hours each workday morning before I go to work: feed baby, change baby, eat breakfast, check email, clean kitchen, wash bottles, pump breastmilk, feed baby and then out the door. This followed by a full day's work (at a job I love), then home for feeding, cooking a decently healthy and environmentally friendly dinner (interrupted by entertaining cranky baby who's dad needs a break after all-day caretaking), feed baby, get her to sleep, check email, waste an hour maybe, then bed. It's an all-day every day job. Sometimes we go on a family walk. Sometimes I read aloud to Kolya before we go to sleep. (We're reading Out Stealing Horses right now. It's a perfect read-aloud book: spare language, even tone, and slowly unfolding story.) Every now and then we go to the grocery store or farmers market. There's nothing pioneer about it, though my days are spent working to ensure long-term viability for small farms and hopefully to preserve some farmland for someone else to raise chickens and food for me. Mostly it's a busy urban life with a big dose of rural awareness.

Since I started work again a month or so ago, I seem to be accumulating tiredness. I'm satisfied with my work, enjoying my family, and getting tireder by the day.

Calamity Jane Is Not Your Darling

Go to this blog, and replace "Chuck Norris" with the real first and last name of my daughter, and pretend it's the blog I designed in my head this morning.

I was talking to Kolya about the hilarious blog we could create if we were willing to use our daughter's full name on the Internet, and it would all be about how tough she is, and people could add to it with all the "CK will kick your ... " sentences. It would become an internet sensation overnight.

And then he said, "You've seen the Chuck Norris blog, right?" And proceeded to run in the other room and read it to me. Curses, foiled again. It was a brilliant idea and a blog about my baby daughter the badass would have been funny. Oh well.