24 Years of Living

                                            

I once remember a conversation I overheard between two older men that really stood out to me. The one-man was turning eighty and his friend was laughing saying, "I bet you're not looking forward to this birthday!" 

The older man laughed like he had heard that before and replied, "My birthday is my favorite day of the year! It's the only day of the year that is mine and I make sure to celebrate myself on that day....you may as well celebrate your birthday because no matter if you do celebrate or you don't, you are still going to get older."

That totally changed my perspective on birthdays and so I make sure to celebrate mine and encourage others to celebrate their birthday as well. Especially after having given birth and experiencing the miracle and goodness that life is, a birthday feels far more significant and special to me. 

Today I am twenty-four! On January 12th, 1998 my mother gave birth to me, her first child, in Maple Ridge British Columbia. I was very independent from the start of life and explorative. These character traits have led me to have some incredible life experiences already! Here are some of my favorite photos chronicling the past twenty-four years.

I couldn't be more grateful for the life God has given me and for all the people I've met along the way who have made this journey memorable! Looking forward to where this next year of life will take me.

 

2021 at a Glance

 

Wow! Never have I had such an unplanned year turn out so extraordinary! Well...I had goals and hopes I had penned out at the beginning of this year but God had other plans for me and I’m glad I said yes to them. 

So highlights of this year! 

                         

I think it was New Years last year when I moved in with Aiden. It was a big change after having lived on my own for so long, but it was a surprisingly smooth transition and I’ve never enjoyed living with someone so much in my life! 

In February, we ended up with Aiden's son fifty percent of the time. This happened unexpectedly and It wasn’t an easy transition for me but I love the little boy so much and miss the days we don’t have him.

In March, I made the tough decision to not go tree planting due to
arthritis in my wrists. Instead, I got started on our rather large garden. 

In April, we did a family trip to Squamish and I also found out shortly after that I was pregnant!

In May, we moved onto Aiden’s Grandpa’s farm in my camper.

Aiden and I did a lot of road trips this year! We did one week in June to Jasper and other parts of Alberta. We did Alberta again in October and did a couple two days trips into the interior looking for old trucks. 

During the summer, I took an online entrepreneur course and started my bunny business with the goal of bringing joy to people’s lives through interactions with bunnies. This course provided me with new connections and skills that will help with the business aspect of our farm projects. 

By the end of November we were able to move into the cabin we had started building in August. It’s so nice to have our own warm, cozy, and customized space on the farm to raise our family in. 

Then in December, I gave birth to our beautiful daughter Sequoia! I had thought I’d never be able to have a child due to endometriosis but we have been blessed with a beautiful and healthy baby girl. 

Not a scrap of this year was planned but I allowed myself to be spontaneous and it has paid off. There was never a dull moment and I doubt that there will ever be with Aiden by my side which is one of the many things I love about our relationship! It was one of the toughest years to date with a lot of changes within myself ranging from mental, physical, to spiritual. It has been all worth it though! With all the changes and events this year, I’m excited to see what adventures the New Year will hold! 

Favorites for 2021

My favorite song is a tie between Bucket List (Mitchell Tenpenny) and Hard Dirt(Hunter Brothers)

My favorite movie I saw was Anna

My favourite TV Show was Yellow Stone

My favorite moment was when they put Sequoia on my chest after I birthed her

Goals for 2022:

I’m not going to set too many but a few worthwhile goals are healthy:

Do my best at everything. My best will change every day based on how healthy, happy, or sleep-deprived I am, but I will give 100% of what I've got every day

Develop more Spiritually. Continue seeking God, praying, and being open to hearing his voice, and being willing to say yes to his plans. Living every day with gratitude. 

Take time to be the person I was before being a Mom. The doctor's suggestion to help me transition mentally into motherhood. Even though our children take up a lot of my time now, it is important for my mental health to still try and make time to do the things that brought me joy before.

Do the garden again. I feel I did pretty good for my rookie year of gardening and am excited to have a little bit less of a learning curve and a better start-up plan so we can feed ourselves again and maybe make some profit!

Work on my Africa trip memoir. It's all edited! Just need to figure out if I want to self-publish or try going through a traditional publisher. 

Improve our homestead/small-scale farming in a business aspect. Going to take what I learned through the business course this summer and possibly take a more farm business-related course this winter.

Get my gun license. A good license to have when you have livestock and a farm 

Hopes for 2022

Our kids and ourselves stay healthy

I’d love to get an Alpaca for fiber

Get back into Jiu-jitsu 

Get more dental work done 

See my Ontario Family

Thank you to everyone for all your help and support this year! In particular, for all the baby gifts sent for our little princess and to those people who helped us build our cabin both by physically helping or financially supporting us. This year wouldn't have been possible without all your prayers, help, and support! Wishing you all the best in 2022! 

The Birth of Our Daughter

 

The baby is finally here! What an experience it was bringing her into the world, yet what a joy to look upon her every day!

On my due date December 14th, Aiden, his son, and I had a dance party to see if that would get stuff moving a little faster. Sure enough, at 2am the following morning I woke up feeling wet and when I stood up I started leaking everywhere. I went to the barn and had a shower and then tried to sleep since I wasn’t having contractions yet. However, I was so full of adrenaline I didn’t get much sleep. 

By 8am we decided we should probably get checked at the hospital even though I wasn’t in labour yet. Sure enough my water had broken but I still wasn’t contracting. At 2pm I agreed to be induced since things weren’t moving along. I then spent the next twelve hours hooked up to oxytocin and baby monitors slowly starting to feel contractions intensifying. At around 2am the following morning I felt the need to push really strongly so the doctor checked me and I said I was 10cm dilated and it was time to push. I pushed as hard as I could putting everything into it for about half an hour....no progress. A new doctor who had just come in for her shift came to check on me and the resident who was tending to me. “ She is only 3cm dilated,” the doctor said. I don’t think I have ever felt so defeated in my life. They all left the room to asses the situation while I laid in the bath starting to feel a lot of pain and not in control of the situation. They came back and tried to explain the mistake to me while I moaned and half processed what they had to say. It turns out the front of the cervix had thinned right out but the back had not and the resident hadn’t checked the back since my baby’s head was right there in the front. I agreed to an epidural as I was exhausted from pushing and having been up for over 24hours: They kept saying the epidural would be there in 5min, one hour later after several rounds of laughing gas and a shot of fentanyl, the specialist finally showed up. I barely remember any of it, not even the needle going into my spine, I think I finally found sleep around 4am, and woke up feeling incredibly numb around 7am. 

I called my Mom explaining the situation and how I didn’t think I was going to deliver till the afternoon. After the call, the nurses were debating if they should check my progress. The one nurse decided to give it a try and turned to the other nurse looking a little shocked and was like, “Yeah, the head is literally right here.” Apparently I looked shocked and confused, having zero trust after earlier that morning. “You can feel her head if you would like,” the nurse suggested. Sure enough, I felt her little head of hair with my finger. She was right there! Soon a different resident and the doctor from earlier in the morning were there and I was instructed to push like before. I couldn’t feel a thing, it was all rather surreal and strange. They set up a mirror That helped a lot as I could see my progress since I couldn’t judge by feeling. 

At 8:06am December 16th, just as the sun was starting to make an experience over the ocean horizon that I could see from my hospital window, our little Sequoia entered the world crying and pretty instantly trying to find a breast to feed off of. She was a healthy 7lb 9 ounces with a head full of hair and able to lift her head on her own. I delivered a pretty massive placenta with a chunky cord and I lost a lot of blood and tore a lot! Thankfully, didn’t really feel any of this because of the epidural. We stayed till Saturday evening in the hospital  as I needed a couple blood transfusions and iron drips; I lost a significant amount of blood!

It’s been a week since her delivery and I don’t know if I could have been blessed with an easier baby! She gets up twice at night to feed, she is a breast feeding champ, and only cries when she has a dirty diaper. I feel so blessed to be her Mom and share her with Aiden and see the joy she brings everyone in this family. I couldn’t have asked for a better Christmas present! 

As for myself, I’m starting to putter around the barn again and feel my old energy come back. I feel pretty hormonal sometimes and even miss being pregnant on occasion. I miss falling asleep feeling my baby in my womb! These weren’t feelings I had expected and sometimes I struggle to process them. However, I’ve never felt so blessed nor so happy in my life, and to share this little bundle of joy with a man I love very much, to have a child we can call our own is an amazing and beautiful thing! He proved himself a phenomenal partner and was by my side the entire delivery and I feel so much love watching him play and cuddle with our daughter. My biggest take away from this whole experience is that God is Really Good! 

Our Story

It has been one year since Aiden and I met and we have come so far in just that one year! Here is our story so far...

Covid was making life kind of boring. It was work, go home, work, go home. After having lived in a community all summer while tree planting I was feeling pretty lonely. This ad for Bumble (a dating site) kept popping up on my social media so one afternoon I decided to set up a Bumble account. I wasn't really looking for a relationship; Just some free dinners and getting to meet some new people during my spare time. 

I got free dinners and met quite a few interesting people, but my date the evening of November 3rd, 2020 at the Yellow Deli with Aiden changed all that. Within ten minutes of talking to each other, it was like we had known each other our entire lives. We quickly met again, and soon we were seeing each other almost every day. 

The thing that really stood out to me about Aiden was the way we wanted to live life and the things we were interested in aligned quite well. I had seen couples struggle on a daily basis because they were so opposite of each other and I wanted to find someone who was on board with the same things I was. We both wanted to farm, we both enjoyed being out in nature, we had similar views on raising children. All the boxes kept checking off. He was respectful of my faith and wasn't pushing me to have sex with him which made me feel free to be myself and helped me trust him. 

We clicked so fast; As friends and as a couple. When Aiden proposed to me that November 30th, 2020 I surprised myself and said yes! People may think that was rather fast, but it was one of those situations of "When you know you know." It seemed to be silly to say no when I knew intuitively that I would say yes eventually. 

In January I made the decision to move in with Aiden. He had been driving almost every day to see me from Campbell River to Courteney which is about a forty-minute drive. Wanting to get started on some projects right away together, it just made sense to live with one another. 

Originally we had thought about converting a Grumman van to live and travel in for a while and we had started on the project. However, in early February life changed rather quickly for both of us. We suddenly ended up with 50/50 custody with Aiden's son from a previous relationship and we went from being a couple to an instant family pretty quickly. It was a challenging time for me suddenly being thrown into this parenting role and having to confront Aiden's past life face to face. Thankfully, Aiden's son took to me rather quickly and Aiden's family supported us a lot through this time. 

Up until then, Aiden and I had been practicing abstinence in the hope of being able to wait till we could be married. However, life circumstances were not lining up for us to be married anytime soon. The effect of being very in love and living together was starting to make things difficult. On February 20th, 2021 we decided to marry each other in our own way and say our own vows to one another until the stars aligned better in the future for us to have a real wedding. 

In March, Aiden and I started on some farm projects like our garden and started introducing livestock onto his Grandpa's farm. I left my job at the Comox Therapeutic Riding Center as the hours weren't working out anymore and the distance to and from work every day was not financially viable. It still was my favorite paid job to this day though. However, it has been great being one's own boss and although we have made some mistakes from our attempt at farming this year, I feel we learned a lot and should do better next year. 

In April, a couple days before Aiden's birthday, I took a pregnancy test on the beach. I had missed my period which was unsual. I chose the beach because it seemed like a far more memorable place to find out you are pregnant than the bathroom. Those two pink lines popped up rather quickly. We both were ecstatic when we found out! 

In May, we moved onto the farm and started living out of my camper. That's when our farm life really started kicking off. 

Near the end of June, we decided to do a road trip to Alberta together. We ended up meeting a rancher out there. In July Aiden would go and work out there for the Buffalo Rancher every other week while I stayed at the farm. 

In August, we decided a cabin might be a better plan for housing than a van with two children and our farming plans. Aiden and his friends are pretty skilled in the trades so the frame of the house was all up in one month's time!

In the fall, we managed to harvest enough produce from our garden to last the winter as well as had our meat birds properly butchered at a nearby facility. That feeling of having your own food to last the entire winter is such a good feeling! 

Now November 2021 is almost past! I am 38 weeks pregnant, the interior of the cabin is almost complete. We produced enough food to last us the winter and have started making a return on the investments we put into our livestock. Now we are starting to nest and get this new home of ours all set up for when our daughter is born. Could be any day now!!!

It has been one heck of a year together but we have grown so much as individuals and as a couple. I have never felt so happy or like my life has had this much purpose before. By all means, like any couple, we have our struggles with one another every once in and while. Our love for one another is quite strong though, and we are each other's best friends. Some people might say we moved ahead too fast but honestly we don't care what some people say because we are happy with where we are at and neither of us have any regrets.