birth tub trial run

I had a plan for my post on this, the first day of spring.  It was going to be all about spring green, a little bit of knitting, a little bit of life.  Only as it turns out, life at the moment doesn’t include enough sunlight to properly photograph knitwear.

Yesterday we took a walk through sleet to see the new lambs.  This morning we woke up to an ice storm.  Waking being relative for those of us who didn’t spend much of the night asleep.  Part of the plan for today was a project involving tracking the movement of the sun across the sky.  So much for that.  Thwarted again.

I’m finishing up little odds and ends on my “to-do” list.  Six weeks or so ago I was having a little private nervous breakdown regarding the over-whelming list of things that I felt had to be completed in a short period of time.  I started talking to Steve about it and in an effort to talk me down he asked me what one thing we could start working on to make me feel better.  I looked at him like a deer in the headlights and after several anguished moments finally said, “we could prioritize all the things that need to be done”.  He may have laughed.  Then he suggested I make a list and we would look at it together.  When he checked back in I had a list six pages long with no less then three entries that referenced other lists for details.  Everything from registering the kids for baseball and working out our beef order for the year to rearranging car seats, lanolizing diaper covers and making mobiles, with a couple of pages of knitting, sewing and home improvement projects in between. I don’t think he was expecting that.  He looked at me somewhat flabbergast.  I said something along the lines of, “see???  This is how my brain always works, and you wonder why I panic sometimes?!?!?”  To which he replied, “Yeah, no, my brain does not work this way at all, it’s mostly just a blank page with occasional old song lyrics scrolled across.”  This for the record isn’t even remotely true.  Just last week he drove past his exit on his way home from the job that he’s had for ten years now because he was so preoccupied with trying to solve a technical problem he encountered that day.  But it is most definitely true that we tend to fixate on entirely different sorts of things.

At this point I feel like the tremendous list is mostly under control.  All of the really important stuff anyway, as I keep reminding myself over and over (and over) again.  There is some food in the freezer.  After an epic battle with both moths and mice, from what turned out to be a very poor storage solution, I now have the ability to actually cloth and diaper a baby, at least for a little while.  Fruit trees have been ordered.  The midwives have been paid.  There are trays of seedlings on our window sills.  Herbal baths and tea blends have been mixed.  New slings have been sewn.    I have homeschooling plans all worked out, though I fear that I haven’t done enough.  I always worry that I haven’t done enough.  There is always more that could be done.  And so I keep telling myself, over and over again, that we are ready enough.  That we’ll get by.  All is fine.  Anything else that I manage is just a bonus.  Sometimes (rarely), I even manage to believe myself.