This post should be locked into the top of my journal. Thanks, author_by_night!

( Ahavah's Emergency Contacts )

Hello! Long time no see. I've pretty much disappeared from LJ entirely, and I'm sorry about that. Looks like I haven't posted since Jan. 1. I had a bit of a writing problem, but I'm plowing through that now. I haven't been reading either, I'm afraid. I'm going to try to clean out some old communities and focus on keeping up with friends more.

In January, my sweetest, most wonderful best friend Achaiah took pretty sick. I did everything I could, and I thought maybe we could save her, but after eleven and a half years together, she died in my arms. I took it pretty hard. I'm not even going to lie, I don't think anything's been that hard since mom's accident. Soul-hard. It seemed like I should have written a great post about her or told at least part of her story, but I just couldn't do anything. There was so much I could say, and nothing I could say at all. Maybe one day I could do some justice to honoring the honest-to-god greatness that was Achaiah. It's not now though.

It's also that awful time of year, the anniversary of mom's accident. Mother's Day. Hard stuff. I've tried to make this a healing year. I'm so grateful to peaceofpie, who gave me a healing attunement for a special healing ceremony I had planned. I've really felt a huge difference. I've been able to write again, and this week I've started going through some of mom's stuff, mainly her old writing. I've really been doing a lot of great healing/reiki/shamanic work lately, and it feels good to be getting back in alignment with myself again.

There's a lot of good. Maya took her first steps this very evening! She's only eight months old, but I knew this was coming early. She's such a great joy. She's truly an adult just hanging out in a baby's body. She's been mobile for months, walking today, I swear she's said "I love you!" or "love you!" on several occasions. She knows many words, though she's stubborn/coy and won't often say them when you ask. She signs a few. She's got a great sense of humor and totally gets everything around her, and she's so expressive even when she's not saying anything. She's a giant lovebug, though more with me than with anyone else. She'll get all smootchy and want to roll around smootching and hugging. Up until I cut my hair, she'd grab me with two fistfuls and just lay big slobbery ones on me. She's almost always smiling. She is awesome in so many great ways.

Eden's really grown up since we all had a baby, in more ways than one. She's a big help and a little mommy a lot of the times. Sometimes a bit bossy. Starting to see a lot of me when I was that age, and I know mom's just a laughing. Eden's gotten a bit purposefully sassy though, and I was never like that. I was a bossy and a know it all, but I never gave such sass to my mom. I wouldn't have gotten away with that. But we're working on that, and she really wants to go to Camp Wholekids this summer, so hopefully we can get that premature teenage attitude thing under control. She's stepped up in the chore department though, and she's doing a lot around the house now, so I'm really proud of her there.

Ivy is also a big help, though she does try to play up the "I just can't do it myself" thing. I pointed out all of the chores Eden's taken on though, so Ivy knows she's getting off easily. She's starting to volunteer to help a lot more when something needs to be done. And she's finally starting to get a real better grasp on reading and writing. She can sound out words very well now, and she's started writing some of the shopping lists for me. She's also very helpful with taking care of all the animals.

We have a new flock of chickens now. We got more Buckeyes and Ameraucanas, and we're trying out Phoenixes and Welsummers this year. Josh has four phoenixes. He's finally starting to settle on some names. They're a little over two months old now, I think. I love my chickens. I can tell all of the Ameraucanas and most of the Welsummers apart, and I'm working on names for most of those. My favorite is a big black & gold Ameraucana named Ereshkigal. Eden has a Welsummer rooster named Dave. All of our Welsummers were supposed to be girls, but Eden seemed to know right off the bat that he was a little guy named Dave. We had a cool one who had a scissor-beak, Roadrunner, but we lost her this week. I'm not sure what happened to her. She was really special, so that was hard for everyone. The buckeyes still all look the same and we have more of those. I can tell who a few boys are now though.

I do a lot of posting on our Grateful Stead FB page. I started that on Jan 1st too, I believe. Lots of cool homesteady stuff shared there. Some people really suggested I start a blog, so after some musing, I decided to. But I figured I shouldn't neglect the blog I already had. You might also have noticed that I changed my username! I had originally wanted Ahavah, but it was already taken. I snagged that up as soon as it became available. Yay! So I'm going to try to start posting here again, and I'm also going to try to do homestead posts at GratefulStead.com. It's a just getting started, but a friend is helping me figure everything out.

Since my healing ceremony, I'm writing a lot more. I'm working on another novel. This time I tried outlining, and I actually have a pretty good idea of a real stopping point. It's slow going, but I'm really enjoying it. The working title is the Neon Giraffe, which has nothing to do with anything. It's an apocalyptic survivalist-type story. I'm only just starting, and I'm working on part of chapter one in both 1st & 3rd POV. I'm not sure which way I want to go, but it's fun trying it both ways. I think I have an inkling of which one feels a bit more 'right' than the others, but I want to have a couple beta readers look it over when I'm done and see what they say.

I'm not working anymore. I'm glad to be staying home with my babies again. Routines & homeschooling tend to go slightly better when I do. It was kind of scary, because Josh got laid off right after we decided I should start staying home again. I freaked out a bit, but Josh actually found a much better job fairly quickly. It's hard, physical work at a saw mill, but he likes physical work. And it's only a few miles down the road, and our kinda-neighbor works there too. They carpool together, and then we usually get to go visit him at lunch, which is Maya's very favorite part of the day.

So, that's pretty much how I've been. Trying to get serious about my farm, trying to get serious about my healing, trying to get serious about my writing. Basking in my family. Going to try not to be a stranger so much anymore. Let me know if I've missed anything wonderful (or not so wonderful) in your lives! I'm going to try to read my f-list a lot more, but it probably won't be keeping up with every post like I used to when I was active on here. I have missed it though, and I hope some of you are still here with me!

Now that 2011 is ending and 2012 is about to begin, I thought I should revisit our farm mission101 list. I don't know that I've updated it since we first made it a year and a half ago. So many wonderful things have come to fruition! I'm especially excited about our newest addition and finally having a wonderful homebirth. We've also officially chosen a name for our little homestead, and I've been working on a website.

But in some places we were derailed or changed our minds about the direction we want to go. Time to update and revise the list. I'm also redoing my sections, as going by dates isn't necessarily working.

Start date: Friday, July 23, 2010
End date: Friday, April 19, 2013

completed
in process
new

( Our Farm 101 )

Who's participating in National Novel Writing Month this November? I will be giving it a shot for the fifth time, if I remember correctly. Shooting for my second win. I finally won last year!

I just did a NaNo post. If you're on my NaNo filter, you should be able to see it here. If you're not on the filter and want to be, let me know. Or if you're on there and no longer interested, let me know that too.

I'm Ahavah on the NaNo forums, if you want to be a writing buddy.

I've found NO writing groups or NaNo meet ups around here. I'm considering trying to drum up some interest and host them myself, although I'm not sure if I should try committing to that with a new baby and a job (hopefully) this year. I really do work better with buddies and regular write ins though. We'll see, I guess.

After being sick for a week and a half, I was feeling much better on Sunday, August 28th. The family all worked together to get the house cleaned back up, more by necessity than any nesting urge. I had a feeling that the baby would come soon, since I was feeling good, finally had energy again, thought I might have lost my mucus plug that morning, and I was having contractions off and on all day. Not regular, and none lasting for very long. Some of them were pretty strong, enough that I had to sway or dance to help the pain in my back. Some of them I couldn't even feel, and we'd just feel on my belly to see how tight it was to determine if it was a contraction or just the baby pushing out on it.

Josh cleared out the big clutter-corner in the kitchen for me since I wanted to set up our birth pool by the window. I don't know whether it was my nice, clean, roomy kitchen or my crazy nesting/cooking baking urge kicking back in, but I got the itch again and wanted to go nuts. I ended up making smoothies and crock pot bread pudding, which were less messy than all the stuff I really wanted to make.

( Birth Story & Pictures )

I just wanted to make a little announcement for those folks not on my facebook (where I've been hanging and posting lots of pics!).

We did indeed have our baby in the early hours of Monday, August 29, during a surprise unassisted birth. The birth went absolutely beautifully, and I've been meaning to get my birth story written up all week. Unfortunately, I've been dealing with some blood pressure issues all week and have just been too headachey, weak, loopy in the head, unable to concentrate, dealing with ER trips, and other crazy things of that nature. I'm on meds now and it was lower today, so even though I'm still having pretty bad headaches and sleeping a lot, I'm really hopeful that we're getting it under control.

We had a third baby girl! She is absolutely gorgeous, and we're all so very in love. It took until today to settle on a full name, but we've named her Maya Sky Trancoso Mack.

I'll be posting the birth story as soon as I can! It happened too fast for any pics or the birth video that I wanted, but I definitely want to share the birth story while it's still relatively fresh. I'm hoping to get it written up tomorrow, if I'm feeling any better.

I have a lot of new friends. Welcome! Most have come from my due date community, I think, and many of them have done nifty Intro posts. I'm going to do the same, but I plan to break it up into a few different posts. Here is where I introduce you to my family.

( With pictures! )

I do believe that this baby might be coming soon. I just hope it waits until at least Tuesday! Although tomorrow *night* could theoretically work...

I was so tired last night & this morning. My legs and back were really sore, so Josh cleaned out the tub and made me a nice bubble bath with rose bath salts (which he made for me). So sweet! I got out and Josh said it looked like the belly had dropped even MORE. Interesting.

Then I slept until noon today. Josh laid his hand on the big old belly to try to feel Guillermo wake up...and the very second his hand touched me, I got the most overwhelming urge to make sugar cookies. I told him, and he just laughed and laughed. Then I said, "No, you know what would be even better? Monkey bread! My god, I haven't had monkey bread in 10 or 20 years. I really need to make some monkey bread and sugar cookies today."

Josh: "You're having a baby!"

For those who don't know, I don't bake. Josh is the baker in the family. Even when I try baking, it never turns out well. The ONLY time in the history of my life that I have ever had the urge to bake - and actually done it well - was right before I had a baby. Every time. I don't clean when I get the nesting urge. I bake. With Eden, I freaked out and started declaring that I couldn't be a mom if I didn't know how to make cookies and bread. I made cookies, bread, and even fritattas for two or three days leading up to her birth. I tried biscuits, but they sucked. With Ivy, we were staying at my mom's (car troubles) and she didn't have a working oven. She only had a toaster oven. I made my sister Liz teach me how to make her pineapple pie. And more cookies. It's all that would fit in the toaster oven, even if I wanted to bake bread again.

Today, monkey bread. Out of nowhere.

I have been positively manic about this damn monkey bread today. I've spent most the day working on it. I have my stepmom's sugar cookie recipe that I plan to jump on as soon as I give my poor old back a rest. And I really wanted to try this crockpot bread pudding recipe, only Josh forgot to pick me up an apple at the store. So that has to wait until tomorrow.

So, I really think it might be soon. I'm both excited and nervous about the prospect. Tomorrow is supposed to be my Blessingway! At my midwife's house, which is 2-2.5 hrs away (one way)! The day after is Ivy's birthday, and she still really does not want to share her birthday. So I'm hoping that I have until at least Tuesday. I guess we'll see. Maybe I just got a wild monkey bread hair up my ass today...

Folks have been asking if I've popped this kid out for about three or four months now. I got big suddenly and obviously. The due date is still about a month away (August 26), but I still don't think it will be that long. I'm 36 weeks today – and running out of room!

We had our final midwife prenatal yesterday. The MW measured me at 39 weeks and her assistant measured at 38.5, so I'm measuring ahead. She's actually suggesting that I get a growth ultrasound to check things out, but that will depend on whether we can find a place that will accept medicaid. I'm not too overly concerned about it. A lot of it could be fluid, but it's also probably a fairly decent-sized baby. MW is estimating 8-8.5 pounds already. The girls were both only 7-something. As I said though, I'm not too concerned. Now that I know baby is head down, I'm calm and prepared for a fantastic, easy, empowering birth experience! I'm very excited about a homebirth. Can't wait!

I felt the baby drop a bit about a week ago. Woke up one night and knew it had, because I was suddenly peeing every hour throughout the night for two days. For a while, I was pretty concerned that baby might be transverse. I kept feeling two distinct bumps on either side of my belly. All week, I've been doing inversions and finally tried out the breech tilt Wednesday night. Josh did some reiki/hot hands magic on my belly, and we felt the baby shift around. When I stood up, it seemed like it'd dropped further. Had a lot of pelvis and back pain, too. Josh came away sure that it was head down, but I was worried. Terina (the midwife) and her assistant verified that it's head down on Thursday. WAY head down. I'm at 0 station already and 70 or so percent effaced. Terina's betting on another fast birth. Hopefully she'll make it on time! We're hoping it hangs in for another week at least, since I should really be 37 weeks for a homebirth. I've felt definite changes this past week though. No baking/nesting yet though, so no rush. Ha!

Terina is planning a Blessingway for her August clients on August 14. It would be nice to have a Blessingway before labor, but I'm not adverse to having this baby soon. If we based the dates on LMP instead of conception, that would make my EDD 5 days earlier, so I'm not sure which is more accurate. The girls were both based on LMP and came 15 & 10 days "early". We'll see. It was very nice of Terina to plan a Blessingway, since I had been a bit sad about not having one or a baby shower. I just don't have anyone around here to do something like that with, so I thought that was so sweet. I cried.

I'm still planning to hold my own Blessingway/ceremony with the girls. I think it would be good to do something powerful to acknowledge and welcome our new baby – and to teach them a bit about birth and female power. I'm not 100% sure what I want to do, but we definitely need to do something special. It's a right of passage that really shouldn't be ignored, especially now that they're both old enough to understand what's going on. I had them both draw me pictures of us all birthing together here at the house. We're going to make some kind of "Birth Board" (vision board). Their pictures are lovely. They both drew me in water, with the head poking out, surrounded by the family – including Achaiah. Love it! For some reason, they also drew some of the fams suspended in the air from trees or something, but that's cool. Adorably cool.

I'm going to bust out my box of old magazines and look for good birthy type pictures to create a real vision board with some good focal points. The girls love arts and crafts stuff, so I think this will be a great project for all of us. It's been a long time since I did a proper ceremony, so I may also ask them to help me make prayer ties and string them somewhere outside. I would like them hanging around for the birth.

If you would like to participate in our Birthingways, I would really appreciate it! Here are some things you could do that would mean a lot to me:

1. Send prayers, reiki, energy, light candles for me and the other women Terina will be honoring on August 14.

2. If you happen to have a neat bead on hand, infuse it with positive energy and send it to us. If I get enough beads, the girls and I will make a birthing necklace or bracelet to wear when I'm in labor. Men & women are both welcome to contribute, but I think this will be a nice way to talk about and conceptualize being surrounded by friends & family even though we're far away, as well as discussing the link between all women who have birthed or supported birth throughout all time.

3. Send a blessing, prayer, poem, or a pretty family/birthing picture for our Birthing Board.

If you feel like sending something to us (on a physical level, that is), my address can be found here. If you don't have access to that post and want it, just let me know and I'll be happy to add you to the filter.

So pretty much, things have already started changing and it's looking like we'll pretty much be ready any day now. I'm picking up a second day each week at work, to make up for the time I lost while visiting NC. I've ordered my homebirth kit and bought a rather large kiddie pool for birthing in. salleesuewho and Terina both gave us a bunch of cloth diapers (and some gifts for the girls!), so I am especially excited about that! I've never done cloth before and am looking forward to trying it out. salleesuewho also sent a boppy and a ring sling, and I've been buying an outfit here or there for the past several months, so we're pretty much all set at this point. No bed/bassinet yet, but I may qualify for one through WIC, and if not, we'll just co-sleep until we get one. I lost all of the casseroles/frozen foods I had been saving up when we accidentally turned our fridge off when leaving town. That sucked pretty badly, and we've been suffering over that idiocy, but I'm picking up an order of Angel Food tomorrow morning and plan to do some cooking over the weekend to restock. So...yeah, give us a week and we're pretty much ready!

Here's something awesome:

I haven't posted all that much lately, and when I have, it's mostly been about the baby. So I thought I'd do a post on the girls! Their unschooling has been going wonderfully lately. Lots of good progress in several areas.

First and foremost, they've finished their first year of dance (ballet/tap). My uncle Ron & aunt Linda came from IL to see their recital, which was a huge deal for the girls. They had a lot of praise, especially for Eden's gracefulness. This is awesome, as Eden was quite clumsy & coltish when she started. Both girls did a lot of practice during the week between classes, and, honestly, I think they did better than a lot of the older girls who'd been in it for years. They were both on the fence about whether or not they wanted to do it again next year (Eden was very much considering drum or martial arts lessons), but their recital experience won them over and they both want to try a second year, which would include jazz. It ended up being way more expensive than we anticipated, but we're really going to try to make it work if they want to stick with it.

My facebook buddies have seen these already, but I'm a proud momma and should share them here too. The first vid is their ballet number. Ivy is second from the front who stays first to the far right for the most part, and Eden is the redhead who is third from the back.



This is their tap routine, which I'm able to stay a bit better centered on both of them without having to go back and forth. Eden's mostly on the left and Ivy is the middle of the three shortest girls there on the right.



Another awesome development is that they'll get to do a summer day camp this year! There is an awesome local camp that has a sliding scale fee based on your income. This lets us give them a great camp opportunity that we'd otherwise never be able to afford. They'll be able to get horseback riding and swim lessons every day, and each week has a theme. They start Monday. They have the option to do four weeks, but we're going to try one week first and see how they do. It's an all day thing, from 8-3:30, so that's the closest 'school' experience they've ever had. Ivy's a bit nervous about being split up from sissy, but I think they'll both love it.

Calvin & Hobbes had the desired effect, and Eden is now quite a voracious little reader. Still not the best speller (she seems to have inherited her dad's mad spelling skills), but she is a fantastic reader now. Not just comics, either. She's started branching out into chapter books. Ivy has been practicing her alphabet a lot as well as having her own (smaller) spelling lists. She still does a lot of letters and numbers backwards, but she's had some remarkable improvements.

I've started teaching them some sign language, and fingerspelling has actually made a huge difference with Ivy! For some reason, even though recognizing and writing letters is difficult for her, she's picked up a lot of the fingerspelling alphabet really easily. I tried something new this week to combine the two, and while practicing their spelling words, I would fingerspell the word and see if they could tell me which word I spelled. Even with Eden's words that Ivy didn't know, she was the one who could name each of the letters while I spelled it out. This is a really great thing for her! She's able to recognize letters AND is better at it than Eden, who took to writing much easier than her. It's really boosted her confidence. I haven't even taught them the whole alphabet. I taught them everyone's names and a few of the letters, and fingerspelling the words was just a spur of the moment thing. We're working on learning all the letters now. I think it'll be a great help to Ivy.

We've also been learning about mythology lately. I've shared a few creation myths. We read some about Egypt's gods and goddesses after theafaye's son, who pen pals with Eden, told her about some of his learning - and she heard that ancient Egyptians used to worship cats. Well, she liked the sound of that! We've started looking at Norse myths, since Ivy decided she has a little crush on the Thor guy from the new movie (which we haven't seen yet). ladysmith (I think it was) suggested this book as an interesting read for both kids and adults, and times_suspended surprised us with it within like a day or two of me adding it to my amazon wishlist. It's not the most serious approach, but it's funny and the girls love it. And they're very intrigued by Loki, but I think this is mostly because they have a very good friend in lahermite's son, Loke.

Eden's been writing a lot of her own stories and comics lately, and Ivy enjoys drawing hers and telling us about it. So today we had a little English lesson, and I explained what protagonist, antagonist, and setting were. We talked about some of their books and decided who would be the protagonist or antagonist. Then they got their school books and made a page for each in their own story. The drew a picture, gave names, ages, super powers, and sidekicks, because apparently everyone needs sidekicks. They really enjoyed that little project. They came up with some pretty good stuff.

Those are our recent adventures. Everyone's really excited about this camp coming up, albeit slightly nervous about the girls being gone all day. I'm hoping this means that Josh and I can get super-productive around the farm though. I have no garden yet! The yard is only partially wrestled into submission. The house is much better than it has been in a long time, but we're still trying to declutter and prepare for the baby's arrival. Lots to do! But everyone is thriving, we're all really happy, and all is well.