Author: christybacon3

I feel like it is safe to say that I am TERRIBLE at this whole blog thing. Like AWEFUL. I am fine with that and I hope you are too!

I have written posts. I just haven’t published them. Life got busy. I never looked them over AAANNNND by the time that I did, they felt very dated. Maybe sometime in the future, they will make their way around to relivancy again. You know, like 90’s fashion has this year.

For the past year, I have just been annoyed at the whole social media thing. FB shut down my personal page, someone hijacked my Instagram and it was hard not to feel disenfranchised by all of social media, which was a terrible time to be disenfranchised, since I had started my etsy shop last November. When you are selling things, social media is a great tool, But the thought of starting all over again. Was. Exhausting. While online doing somethings for the shop I decided I needed to hop back into the pool. I started a new Instagram page. I started updating the Facebook page. I can’t just mope about forever without fixing what I was unhappy with right? of course not!

During my updating and copying and pasting links adventure, I of course came here. I read my old posts. Checked out what I had saved for future posts. Then I looked at my about me. WOW. I was a baby. My kids were babies! We have done so much. We have grown so much. I updated my about me, not changing all of it, but I just do not want to forget where I started. So I am copying it here, lest I never forget. This has been an amazing journey. One, that one day, I hope to be better at sharing with you than I am today. Here it is.

About Christy…. I have three little bacon bits and live in the state where Hell (the city) actually does freeze over. I have two dogs and a couple of chickens, some quail, a few bees, rabbits and I’m dreaming of an indoor aquaponics system. As a mom of three I am constantly trying to find ways to keep my children entertained while turning our forever house into a home.
To go in to more detail is more difficult. I am 34 years old and strive to end everyday being the best versions of me. I bought a house that I am slowly turning into something wonderful. It isn’t easy, I really don’t’ have any skills, but I am pretty good at winging it. I cook, I clean, I mother. I practice animal husbandry. When it is warm out I garden. I create. I am not what you would call an artist. I don’t use canvas and paint (I leave that up to my 11 year old) but I do make things because it is a wonderful escape.
I am looking forward to sharing my adventures. My life is pretty simple but it definitely isn’t boring!

I was so looking forward to doing a series of blog posts last month about our build a Christmas adventures… Until I realized that doing a step by step photo shoot of how to make my favorite 2020 Build a Christmas presents isn’t REALLY an obtainable goal when you live in a small house and homeschool two out of three of your children AND your third is your editor. So feeling a little guilty, since I had JUST vowed to love my blog more, I decided to just not do one. Sure, I could have written about cookies or fudge or the family bonding I force upon my Bacon Bits with fun family activities, but I didn’t. I decided to save those partially written blogs and photos for next December. They will be retro!

The beginning of the new year, for me, brought a sense of tranquility, as long as I stay away from the news or talk about politics, that is. Since last March I, and surely so many others, have felt like we have been in a kind of suspended animation. Big decisions were put off while telling myself “Let’s just wait a little longer, until we know what is going to happen next”. Even when forced to make decisions due to time constraints, you just take that one step. Then hold your breath. You wait. It is almost if you could see each decision falling like a stone into water and watching it ripple out, highlighting flaws in our plans, other questions that need answers. It all felt so big! Right? So you just wait. You stop dropping stones.

Last year at this time I was SICK. I was called into work for the first time in 15 years sick. I was call my sister and make sure that if I died she would take an raise my youngest as her own sick. I was looking at prices for tree urns when my family cremated my body sick(These are actually really affordable). I was afraid to go to the doctor. I knew I should probably be in the hospital. But I am a mom. Who would “mom” in my place? What do you do? I vowed to just not die. My lips were blue. My blood felt thick like sludge flowing through my veins. Can you feel your blood thickening? Maybe not, but I thought at the time I could. I couldn’t taste anything. My bones ached from the inside out. I had this deep body racking cough, like my body was trying to rid itself of something, probably my abused lungs, but just couldn’t. I was hallucinating. It was terrifying.

I bathed in practically boiling water. FOR HOURS. Multiple times a day. It was the only relief. I would fill up the water to the brim of the tub and try and let the heat soak into my skin, bringing color back to the surface. Letting it soak into my bones. I cried every time I got out, because even with the heat set at 90 and the fireplace on the world was too cold. I would move to the couch where our family pets would curl up in a row along my body offering me their warmth and the weight of them giving me comfort.

“I was lucky”, I would tell myself. I guess I still tell myself that. My big kids were old enough to take over doing the farm chores and house chores, even though I would drag my sore, blue lipped body around the house, picking up shoes and putting dishes in the sink once or twice a day, I could for the most part, parent from the couch. I would have the kids check the fridge and the cupboards while I put in my Shipt order. Stories were read, homework was checked, laundry was folded. The big kids took turns droping off and picking up my youngest from the bus stop while I watched from the window. Things could have been worse.

To my sisters insistence over the phone “You don’t sound good. I think you have that new virus that everyone is talking about. Maybe you should go to the hospital?” I would just reply “I am fine! I sound worse than I feel, really! I have Gatorade and Tylenol. I’m FINE! But if I die. You’ll take Thomas right? Haley is too young to take care of him. Gavin will go to Doug’s house and Haley is fine on her own, but you will take Thomas. Not that I’ll die. I’m a mom. I don’t have time to die. I will be fine.”

I gave myself a week to try and get better. I took a whole week before I went back to work. It was hard. I work from home and it was still hard. I was falling asleep between work calls. I was forgetting things even with notes and alarms, things were slipping through the cracks. At the end of everyday I would descend the stairs leading from my room to the living room and lay on the couch where the dogs and cats would take their self assigned spots on my body, getting up only to soak in the tub and then returning to the couch. I was failing. I felt like I was failing my work. I was failing my children. My body was failing me.

I lived, obviously. But I was sick for months. I was sick while prepping for a pandemic that I was already personally in the thick of. I was sick while trying to prep for a recession and the job loss that I knew was going to happen. I was sick while trying to plan birthdays and Easter and even Christmas months in advance. Because we really weren’t sure what happened next, but whatever it was, I would be prepared.

This year, I feel tranquil. A sense of peace. A Feeling that has been gone for so long. The panic and the angst that have been part of my day to day life, as either long Covid symptoms or due to the ins and out of living through a pandemic are lessened. I remembered that there is always an “Unknown”. It is a part of life. A year ago, or even two years ago, there were just as many unknowns. They just looked a little different than the ones that we have been living with. This realization helps things seem brighter.

I decided to not let the unknown define how I live my life anymore. It is OK if in person school never happens. My youngest will still learn. If my old company doesn’t survive? Well, my little business is still plugging along. There are family votes on what direction things should go. Should we just focus on shop sales, or push forward our plans by a year and start renting out bee hives? Maybe I will want to get a second form of income again. I can choose that. I can’t control the whole world or the things that we see happing on the news or with the government. But I can control the world around me. As the uncertain things that present themselves, I myself, and we as a family can shape and mold those unknowns to work for us.

Soooo, I have been thinking about my poor neglected blog for a few days. I feel all the feels when I think of this blog. Happy, because I like the past posts, sad and guilty because I never gave it the time it deserved to become what I wanted it to. Nostalgic, because man, were those simpler times or what? With the nostalgic feeling taking hold of me, yet again, I pulled up my word baby and saw my last blog post…. FROM 2017?! What?! Where does the time go? What have I been doing with myself? Is “life” a valid excuse? So I have made the vow (again) to love my blog a little more and to write more regularly.

2020’s finish line is in sight and boy has it taken everyone for a ride. A global pandemic, the crazy stock market, mass school and daycare closings, toilet paper shortages and in the US this was an election year! Let’s not forget the fact that in the US we had murder hornets and meth gators, all of Australia was on fire, and locusts were eating everything in sight in Africa. All of that paired with the protests that have been happening all over the world… The stress of it all has been a lot.

All these things caused SO many changes in our house, and at the same time, not so many changes at all.

The company that I worked for, who is still an amazing company and does good work, had to let almost everyone go. We are talking bare bones skeleton crew. I was not a bone in that skeleton. For the very first time since I was a teenager, I didn’t have a job. Heck, I normally have TWO jobs. Because I am a work-a-holic. I felt (feel?) totally adrift, like stuck on a dingy in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight and no anchor to hold me in place while I  got my bearings adrift. I LOVE work. I love doing good work. I have always defined myself by my ability to be the best at that work, and if I am ever not the best I will work my tail off to learn all the things to try to become the best. It’s just that “Working Christy” has always been a large part of my identity. A piece of me is now missing, you know?

It’s not like I didn’t have anything to do. I am a mom of three kids and a urban farm. There is always stuff to do!  Armed with a list full of house projects and the determination that I will do something with my life, I tried to put a bandaid on the hole created by that missing piece. I was going to fake it till I made it!

I have worked from home ever since I became a single parent back in 2008, so my day to day changed only in the fact that I wasn’t hooked up to my computer for 8 hours a day. Well, and I also added a second student to “The Bacon House Home School For Kids Who Still Need To School.” school. Luckily, Haley graduated this year so she only had to turn in a few things online to finish off her school year, and was responsible enough to be able to do that on her own. This was going to be a piece of cake!

It was not a piece of cake. It was hard. It IS hard. Homeschooling a first, now second grader is hard. Don’t get me wrong, Thomas is learning and he LIKES learning from his mom, he likes snuggling while we go through the curriculum sent out by his school and reading together. He is growing. But I am not a natural teacher. Gavin, who has been homeschooling since 6th grade, has always done it through a virtual school, so it is a pretty big adjustment. I find it hard to make time during the day to do school stuff. I am the type of person who wakes up, makes the coffee and starts moving. I am cleaning or working on a project from the moment I wake up to the time I go to bed. I even knit or crochet while I watch tv, so sitting and being present for JUST school was hard for me. I would just tell myself “It’s fine, everything is fine. This isn’t forever. You have a limited amount of time to get this and your projects done. You want to feel accomplished and have everything done before work starts back up, right?”. A few months I thought, maybe until autumn. Then life would have to start getting back to normal.

But it didn’t. School was not going to just restart back up. It looked different. Everything looked different. Things were still up in the air at the company I worked for. Not knowing where the next step is going to lead everyone is paused one foot in the air. Not that I speak with my coworkers with any regularity and could know for sure. Speaking with them makes it real. If I don’t talk to my coworkers still there, it stays just an extended vacation right? Everyone always says they could use a little R and R. I’m lucky, right?

With the realization that things need to change. I needed to change AGAIN and God do I hate change. I had to come up with a plan.

I have sold honey and things that I make locally for years. Nothing big, just honey and eggs at the stand, and the occasional craft or project when someone comes to me with some hope and an idea, things I make with the wax from my bees. I have played with the idea of expanding for quite a while. I have even had offers from some local stores (pre pandemic) to carry my wares. It was part of my ten year goal that I started a few years back. I knew I wanted to try, but it was such a big step.

With nothing but a black void in front of me, I took a breath and took that step, finally setting my foot down.

Because of the way things look with Covid, I figured that an etsy shop would be my best bet. With it being almost Christmas, I started with putting up ornaments. I try to post new stock on my shop about every two days. It takes me two days to get pictures I like and write out what I want to say about my products and feel good about what I am posting. It is scary. What if people don’t like the things I make? I like to be the best. What if I fail? I might. But you know what? That hole, that lack of purpose, it isn’t gone, but it feels like it has healed a little bit. Maybe writing not just about the going ons on our little farm, but also about our change, about my healing and rediscovery, will help someone else going through the same thing.

Have you ever thought,” OMG! Not another holiday where kids get hopped up on candy and get more stuff!”? I introduce to you: The Family Easter basket!

See, about a year ago, I noticed that I had lost my fun. Has that ever happened to you? You wake up one day and realize you have just been going through the motions of your daily life. Not sad or unhappy, but not really happy either. I don’t know where it went or how long ago I had lost it, but I didn’t want to go through life just living. I felt like I owed it to my kids to give them the gift of fun. I felt I owed it to myself. So all last summer I tried. We did bonfires, family movie nights, but I still couldn’t find my fun. The kids noticed it, too. “It seems like we used to have more fun.” My daughter said one day, “Where the heck did it go?”

Christmas rolled around and it was hard to even get into the spirt. The kids were very “Meh” about decorating. We made ornaments, but didn’t get around to hanging up our stockings. It was just a blah year. I was thinking about how to fix this conundrum, when I remembered something I had seen in the fall. Easter basket ideas. More specifically THE FAMILY EASTER BASKET idea. I loved the idea right off the bat and knew what had to be done. I was going to make “The Summer of Fun Easter Basket”. Google and I started planning our summer of fun. I would enter in “Different fun summer activities”  and Google would give me it’s very best ideas. Slowly, even though I hadn’t GIVEN the kids their Easter goodies yet I felt the fun coming back. I was present. The fun was contagious. It started slowly oozing on over to the kids. This was going to work.

One thing I realized is I put too much on my plate. I mean, I’m a single parent. I am outnumbered three to one. I work PLUS we have our little urban farm. In the spring we are bursting at the seams with babies and doing garden prep. All of this is placed on top of end of year IEP meetings and concerts, talking kids through the stress of end of year tests and the normal antsy feeling that they get when the end of the school year is looming ahead of them. Because I feel like I have to make the most special memories for the kids. We make homemade chocolate Easter eggs stuffed with homemade marshmallow and lemon curd. Last year I even wove Haley her own Easter basket for Pete’s sake. I made the decision to simplify our holiday. The kids still got their homemade candies, including the chocolate Easter eggs, but I took short cuts to simplify the process. Homemade marshmallows are AMAZING, but purchased marshmallow fluff makes life easier and tastes just as good in our chocolate eggs. No homemade woven Easter baskets were to be had and just because I CAN make the noodles for our pasta salad from scratch doesn’t mean it needed to be. Did I mention Amazon? Amazon along with Amazon Prime happened. Like in January. You heard me right. I bought my Easter goodies during all the after Christmas sales.

The night before Easter I literally stayed up most of the night cleaning my house so that it doesn’t look like people live here. I don’t know why. We don’t have Easter company. It just makes the actual day less stressful. Probably because I am too tired to care about the fact that the kids are sugar fueled maniacs. I hid all the eggs, inside and out. Then I got all the goodies out of the trunk. No more baby summer toys for my big kids. I admit it. I went crazy. I am not a big fan of making Easter into another Christmas, but we were in search of our fun remember? There was lawn bowling and giant yard tumbling tower blocks, a projector for movies outside by the bonfire and a giant net  with giant balls and rackets. Puzzles for rainy days. Last but not least the crème de le résistance, the big purchase,  laser tag guns. I started looking at them at around Christmas time and was lucky enough to grab them on sale back in January. They were hidden ALL this time. They were going to love them.

After I got everything all set and got ready for bed I realized I had to sleep on the couch…. Because there were Easter eggs “hidden” on my stairs, but that was fine. It gave me the view of seeing each kids face when they took a look at our basket of summer fun. There it was. We found our fun. It was in a bright pink baby pool that the ducks are going to take over as soon as it has water in it, snuggled in besides the chocolate bunnies. We played all the games, we broke out the laser tag guns and ran around as a family. Even my “to cool to be seen with her family” almost 15-year-old was running around like a fool. She took everyone down with her laser tag skills. While cleaning up the kitchen she told me. “This is what we have needed. Today was pretty much perfect.” And she was right.