time to relax

First it was my first market, and then a rally, now we can relax. The Young People in the CRC Maritime Provinces get together twice a year and take turns hosting what we call 'rallies'. We just hosted one and we are exhausted. There were 80 people at the camp and Michael and I planned and co-ordinated the three day weekend. Our theme was taking care of God's creation. We did different activities like a beach clean up, visiting elderly people and planting trees. It rained for most of the weekend but the kids were good sports and we had a lot of fun.
My first market last weekend went really well. I made a small profit and met many different people. The question I was asked the most was "Who are you?". I wished I had an answer. Thank you so much for your responses to our blog about our farm name. I forgot to mention that the land where I am planting most of the veggies has this strange rock in it. It is black and lightweight. It looks similar to Obsidian, so I thought I could go with Obsidian farm but Michael laughed and said that it sounds like obscene. I can't name it something too descriptive of what I am selling because that is bound to change. I also can't name it something that describes the area because we might not always farm there, (that is another story). Right now, I am really liking Anavah Acres, which is Hebrew, not Greek like I said it was. Also, I apologize to my family because some of them did give me feedback and I grouped them all together and said they didn't.
Maetia is doing well. She is growing and changing all the time. We wish we had high speed internet so we could put videos onto the blog. She is a really funny little girl. She has learned to crawl up and down the stairs safely. She is eating better now and gaining more weight too. Horray!! She is very vocal and has many words that are quite clear. Her favourite word is Daddy which means: mummy, daddy, man, opa, water and look at that. She only says mummy when she is hungry, but I can understand that. She is currently getting all four top teeth at the same time. Needless to say, those herbal tablets that Anne Contant recommended are my best friend. We can see all of her first teeth just sitting in her gums, ready to come out, even the molars. She is going to the Asthma and Allergy specialist tommorow so we are hoping to have some more answers on what she can and can't eat, hopefully some ideas to get her to eat more and hopefully they will tell me I can take her off her medication soon and give it a try.
We are having a late frost her tonight so I am worried about my little plants that are barely covered. Hopefully this is the last one. We are also putting a deck onto our cottage. Our back yard is full of mud and water because there was a stream running under the house that we found when putting in the retaining wall.
We are having trouble posting photos so we will try again tommorow.

Farm name

We are only 4 days from going to the market for the first time as a primary producer, not selling for someone else, but my own stuff!! Unfortunately due to the cold spring we are experiencing, there is not a lot to sell. I am planning to collect edible wild plants like fiddle heads and make some bouquets out of pussywillows and dogwood. I do have a little bit of lettuce and arugula so that will have to be good enough for this week. It is really all about exposure for myself and to pass out my CSA survey (thanks Dan!). There are two very experienced vegetable growers that will be there with at least 20 different varieties of vegetables, so it is hard to compete. I am hoping that by showing my face and my interest in local agriculture, I will eventually get a clientel that I can depend on and hope to sell straight from the farm. Michael is going to take Maetia and help me until she gets tired and then will go home. We are transporting our tent, table and produce on our new truck. The Nissan 'Wave' is a little light weight truck that we bought from my Opa (thanks Opa!!) and it should have a little more room than the Toyota Corolla. The main reason for this blog is to get some feedback about our farm name. We have struggled for a year with this and still have nothing. It isn't even like we have to have a name right away, but we thought it would be nice. I wanted something with my father's farm name (Annashoeve), and my uncle's farm where we lived (Foote Family Farm). Other than naming it Annas' Foote, I haven't come up with much. There is a stream on the land, but it has no name. I found that Anavah means gentleness in Greek which I liked but got no response from my family on that one. I was also thinking of Linley Farms, or Linley Acres. Linley is a woman whose two sons were so good to us when we lived in Australia. It also sounds somewhat like Lyn which is my middle name. Any ideas? We would love to hear from you. Here are some pictures too because we know that is why you really are looking at our blog, but who could blame you.

pictures

Here are some recent pictures that we would love to share


This is the painting Michael did for our Doula, Rosella Hutten.


This is Maetia's favourite 'toy'


Just lounging around

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Maetia and Daddy kissing


Maetia in her new chair. She has a little trouble getting in but no trouble jumping out.


This is our new dog Red whom we have renamed "Drake".


Already sharing their water.


Silly girl with silly hair.

From zero to one

Here is zero

Here is one




Well it all happened very fast and now before we could catch up, Maetia turned one!! A brief summary: She is a beautiful little girl with so much personality and spunk. She is a little elvish and we think she will be sneaky at times and try our patience. She also seems very clever (all parents think this of their children we know) and she already has a love of music. She is wiggly and wiry with her little bum still in the first size cloth diapers. She can clap and wave, shake her head and scream (sometimes all at once). Her sounds are: baba, bye, bubu, mama, mmmm, dada, dudu, dodo, dogga, gaga, gigi, kitty, tees, hoss, hi, and hya. She loves all animals and will point out animals in every picture, painting or sign. She points at everything and when she gets really excited she falls over from pointing so vigorously. She eats almost all food both purees and finger foods and we did decide to give her meat in the end although we debated. She does not have any dairy products and minimal soy. She seems to do better without them. She has always been a skinny little thing and the doctors have done multiple tests to see why she is so under weight. They have not found anything wrong with her and we feel that she is just a little person, not unlike some of those little Footes and Contants in her ancestry.
As a couple, we went from living with my sister and her children for a summer (2004)and thinking we knew quite a bit about parenting, to having a baby of our own and realizing we didn't know that much after all. To be honest, Maetia's colic and breathing difficulty put a strain on the enjoyment of the first few months. It was hard on our marriage, hard on our bodies and minds. Once she began to settle, we started to meet this little girl whose belly didn't seem to want to let her relax, and we fell even more in love with her than we already were. Most of our pictures of the first three months she is sleeping because otherwise she was often crying or moving. We also spent a lot of time with her upsidown with our finger in her mouth. When she learned to sit up and was able to sleep on her own for more than 20 minutes at a time, we all felt better. She smiled at 3 weeks, laughed at 7 weeks, ate cereal at 4 months, drank from the sippy cup at 5 months, sat up at 7 months, scooted around at 9 months and can almost walk unassisted at 12 months. Maetia spent (and still does spend),a great deal of time in her sling and we walk everyday loving the fresh air and wind in our hair.
This has been a journey of learning. We have learned how to be parents, learned how to share each other, and learned how to live life outside the womb. As with all journeys we learn as we go and we get a little wiser the more we experience. We expect the next few children will not have to experience quite as much trial and error and for that we will apologize to Maetia in the future. On the other hand, she is the only one who will get our undivided attention, all of her siblings will have to share us with her, and she had us all to herself. But just so you know, there are no siblings brewing.
We tried to make a slide show but with dial-up internet and not being very internet savy we didn't do such a great job. So we have pictures on the Kodak photo page: www.ofoto.com You can sign in with our account which is: contant_love@artlover.com and password is maetiaalese. The album is called Maetia's first year. We hope this works for you. If not we can try again on something like Flickr.
Thanks for loving us as a family and for sharing in our joys and struggles. We feel like we have been given the most precious gift we could ever get and we hope and pray that we will do a good job caring for her.

Adoption

Thank you for your encouraging comments everyone. We really appreciate knowing that friends are reading our blog and sharing in our experiences. It makes us feel closer to all of you. We wish we were physically closer too!!
After much deliberation, we have decided to adopt a dog from the local animal shelter. Well it isn't so local. We have been looking around and there are not a lot of dogs in our immediate area so we had to extend our search region. We searched online and found a dog at the SPCA in Yarmouth. The last dog we had adopted, Ford, had been abused and all the love in the world could not stop him from eventually being aggressive and biting Michael. So we said the next dog we got would be a purebred. We hoped this way we would be more sure of its breed characteristics. We also said we would get a puppy because then we could train it and make sure it had not experienced any mistreatment or abuse. When the time came to really find a dog, we could not justify the cost of a purebred dog ($500-700) to a mixed breed who needed a home. We had been looking at the Nova Scotia Duck Toller breed as one of our options for purchase so when 'Red' came up for adoption, we decided to go take a look. Arriving at the shelter, we were met with meows and barking. We walked into the kennel where immediately 15 dogs begin to bark even louder and Maetia starts to cry. It was so hard to look at each of them and give them all treats and base our decision of who will have a new home on that two minute interaction. We wanted to take all of them!! Not to mention the 20 or so cats. So it was hard but we went with a purpose and after meeting Red and taking him for a walk, we decided to.... go home and think about it. So we drove back home for 2 1/2 hours with Maetia crying much of the way. How would you go to an adoption agency in say China and pick out a child to adopt? How would you actually choose the one you like the best when you don't know any of them? Michael said it is like choosing the personality you are going to deal with for the rest of your/its' life. I know a dog is not at all the same as a child but for these dogs, we are picking one that will have a good life, not a perfect life, but a good one and it is really hard to decide which one is guaranteed that. Red has a nice temperment. He is 7 months old and is a Duck Toller mix. He is very hyper but gentle with Maetia. He likes cats and water which we have at our house. He also has a bum leg, kind of like Max/Tripod (Eric's dog) but not as bad. We decided to adopt him because he was the one we felt the best connection with. We will send pictures when we get him. He is currently awaiting the dreaded neutering process.
Here are some photos of Maetia instead.


Dordt Poster child



She can go up but not down

Dancing

So last Friday I got the call I have been dreading. It was my boss from my job with the Department of Natural Resources. He was calling to ask if I had decided if I was going to come back to work or not. In Canada we are allowed to have a whole year of maternity leave so I haven't had to make a final decision until now (I know we are lucky). For the past few months I have been going over it and over it in my mind; what should I do? I liked my job and it could potentially lead to a better job, making contacts and getting experience, but...... I never was a career minded person but I do like working outside, in the woods. And I liked to think I was making a difference, as far as promoting sustainable resources use went. I just couldn't leave her, in my heart I knew what I had to do. By the way Chole, your post about not going back to your job helped me verbalize what I had been feeling for so long, thank you. But when I got the call in the middle of our dancing session to my favourite song "Bridal Train" from The Waifs it was still hard to let go and say 'no thank you, I want to be a stay at home mom'. I question my expensive education and when I will use it again. I wonder if I will get enough intellectual stimulation just by being at home and in the garden. But as my daughter is weaning herself from me and I am mourning that phase of our lives, I am reminded of what a good friend said to Michael and I when discussing our financial situation=need to work. He said 'you will never get that time back' and I believe it. So I hung up the phone and pressed play on the the player and we finished our dance.



Maetia helping in the kitchen



Michael bonding/feeding Maetia



Together with the Youth Group from our church, we participated in a service project over March break. We all learned a lot by serving homeless and hungry people on the streets of Halifax. We are so proud of these kids!!

Icebergs

For the past week, we have smelled spring coming up through the ground. It is a nice feeling to walk outside and smell the earth again. Very refreshing and encouraging. Just when you think you might not be able to handle any more winter, spring arrives. Part of spring that we have learned about by living on the Bay is the chunks of ice (as large as cars) that are breaking off of shorelines and esturaries and drifting into the bay to eventually make their way out to the ocean. Or at least that is what we think is happening. Right now they are floating in the wrong direction but we believe it is because of the tidal impact and ocean currents.


There might be something in the water or in our genes but this little one is the final baby in the countdown of the VanHattem cousins to have a baby in the past year. There have been seven girls, this latest cutie is Madeline Grace.


This beautiful girl made my day and helped me celebrate my birthday by watching the moonrise and lunar eclipse with a great view from the shore.