All about poop

     My April update had turned into my May update… such is my life these days in the slow lane! With most things lately, parenting a newborn baby has meant slowing way down in the productivity department. I sympathize with this momma tortoise, because that is about where I am at, moving at the speed of molasses with a needy little one in tow. To be fair, I had mentally scheduled us a few months of “get absolutely nothing done on the homestead” after the birth, so I am pleasantly surprised that we are accomplishing just a little more than expected.

      It has helped to have an absolutely fabulous little baby to care for, who is generally  good tempered and a good sleeper. As soon as she goes down for a nap, I stealthily tip toe away and furiously set to getting chores and assorted to-dos done in the unknown window of time before I hear her little groggy cry calling for me. Another god-send has been the handwoven baby-wearing wrap that talented weaver Connie Westbrook made for us. Several times a day, Caris consents to being stuffed into the folds of cloth hugging her to our chests, where she dutifully passes out while being jostled around in the course of eating, doing dishes, taking walks, talking with friends, working in the garden or the like. Each day, all planning goes out the window and we don’t quite know what to expect, thereby being pleasantly surprised when we stay on top of more that we thought possible.

      Much of our new role as parents seems to revolve around tending our baby’s needed inputs and outputs. Breastmilk in (requiring very little effort on my part) and a mustardy yellow poop out. I don’t think I had ever given poop very much thought in my life, but lately it has been featuring prominently in my days... And nights for that matter. Because I am now the adoring servant of a 2 month old, I don’t resent this new proximity to her poop. Rather, I have accepted it as part of the package of parenthood, as has Mike, who swaps out with me tackling her excretions.  

     Since we have been getting so many inquiries about what we are doing for diapers and such, here goes an explanation….  Thus far, we have opted to use various hand-me-down cloth diapers from friends, being the eco-thrifty people we are. While it is tempting to save ourselves the trouble of washing diapers, the thought of what the total pile of dirty disposable diapers would look like if it was sitting on the floor of our house was too overwhelming (diapers make up somewhere between 2-5% of landfill waste… yuck.) There are some cool hybrids on the market now—biodegradable “Tushies” or flushable insert + cloth cover “G diapers”—but they aren’t cheap, thus every few days we pull out the scrub brush and washboard and clean cloth diapers the old-fashioned way. Total cost= $0. Total time it takes= 1 hour every other day. Is this trade off worth it? To us, for now, yes. I thought I would dislike the task of diaper washing, but it has become much like washing dishes… a mildly off-putting yet strangely meditative task once you get into it. The sun and clothesline help bleach out stains and disinfect before the diapers repeat their thankless duty.

     Our daughter’s poop is only one stop on the poop tour of our homestead, lucky you! The next stop is our composting toilet. This might be the most off-putting feature in our unconventional home. Because we don’t have a flush toilet and septic tank, and also because we figure we can put the poop to better use than hibernating underground until pump-out time, we have opted for a “humanure” system. It is pretty simple—do your business in a dressed-up bucket, cover with sawdust, and then empty once a week into a specially designated compost pile to decompose. (This is the low-tech version of a composting toilet. There are many companies that make fancier versions requiring less hauling). Does it smell? If using the right amount of sawdust, I will say not really… After emptying the bucket, we will wait several years for our humanure pile to heat up and decompose to the point where all pathogens are killed before using it around our fruit trees. I do know people who use it in their gardens, but I personally would rather not risk the direct contact with produce. We instead opt to put other animal’s decomposed poop on our garden beds! (We were very excited to receive a recent load of finished horse compost for our garden.)

      If the thought of humanure makes you a bit grossed out, let me point out that first, it is a very old and venerable practice. Traditionally, in China, farmers would put outhouses on the edge of their fields so that those passing by would leave their contribution to the farmer’s field’s fertility. Second, humanure is an industrial-scale modern-day practice in the US! If you live in a city or suburb and you have ever wondered what happens to your poop after you flush it down the toilet this is it--cities treat sewage until it is safe to apply agriculturally and then sell it to various rural localities and fertilizer companies. Each city has a different brand name for their fertilizer. For example, from Minnesota you can buy the twin cities’ municipal solid waste under the name “Minnegrow 5-4-0” from your garden supply center. The only cringe-worthy part of the whole operation really is the increasing amount of pharmaceuticals and antibiotics that get passed from toilets back into the soil and from there into streams and rivers. That is cause for concern. If you, like me, find this topic strangely fascinating, I recommend listening more about it from the archived Radiolab broadcast, “Poop Train” at- www.radiolab.org/story/poop-train . Also check out The Humanure Handbook  by Joseph Jenkins to learn more about composting your poop. But all this is to say, I like knowing the source contributors of our soil’s fertilizer and keeping them very local!

     The next stop on the poop tour is our outhouse, situated in the hugel-swales of our orchard.  We designed our outhouse so that it was light enough for two of us to lift and move from location to location as holes filed up. The screened-in sides keep things nicely ventilated and flies out so that one can have a scenic and not too stinky depositing experience. As the shallow holes fill with manure and sawdust we bump the outhouse down the row of trees, leaving little fertility pockets along the swales. Each outhouse in our community has its own clever name and slightly different system. For example, our neighbors use their “Saloon,” (emphasis on “loo,” thus named for its swinging doors.) Down the road is the “Phu Ping Palace,” (pronounced, you guessed it, “poo-ping,” named after a fancy skyscraper in Bangkok.) Ours is called “Poo with a View” for its scenic outlook over our homestead.

    Well, if I haven’t grossed you out too much yet, for the last stop on the poo tour is over the creek at the neighboring homestead. Our neighbor Brian just finished building a brick and cob oven in their outdoor kitchen and has been firing it up for baking bread and pizza. The secret ingredient in the exterior plaster? Their cow’s poop of course! Animal manure is used around the world as a strengthener in clay plaster and earthen floors. Perhaps because its fine fibers or enzymes, it seems to add extra strength without the stink you might expect. The only reason it isn’t in our house’s plasters is that we don’t have a ready supply to manure the way our neighbors do with their cows, Crème Brule and May Apple. At any rate, the results are delicious and hopefully for our stomachs, long lasting!

Oh Baby!

    Our last month here at the homestead has flown by in a succession of visits by family and friends and midwives, and now, spring seemingly has arrived in the wake of events and I am realizing it is time for another update! Commanding central orbit of all of the last month’s activity and attention, of course, is the newest addition to our family, our baby daughter Caris, who is now a happy, healthy three-week old sleeping on the sofa next to me as I type.

      In my last post I wrote of my sense of impending urgency leading up to her birth, trying to get everything prepared for her arrival. As the days ticked down to her due date, my parents and sister arrived from out of state to help us with our last minute preparations and to aid our transition to parenthood. Together we finished the stairs, our bed frame, hanging doors and sheetrock, cleaning and sorting through boxes of hand-me-down clothes and diapers to set up some sort of baby-readiness station. Throughout this process, I admit to feeling increasingly nervous about the part I was going to need to perform, that is, the birthing part. We had planned for a homebirth and had been working with a team of midwives to prepare for it. (Perhaps that additionally contributed to my franticness to get our house finished and ready: both for her birth and for her life afterward!) At any rate, whether I was ready or not, our baby was ready to come out by her due date.

   I had contractions start several days in advance of the date. Days and nights I should add, which made sleeping a rather miserable affair, with short 5-minute intervals of sleep punctuated by painful contractions. Contractions that did not meet the criteria of “active labor” because they were not progressing much in intensity or frequency, but that unfortunately prevented me from keeping any food down.  By the time our midwives arrived to help progress my labor, I was exhausted and had to rally the strength to get through the next phase of active labor. Let me fast-forward through one long painful night that took my every last ounce of energy and… our daughter was born! Right in the center of our house, and right on the morning of her due date as it turned out. The nice thing about home birth is that our bed was only a short stumble away and I could collapse into sleep in our comfortable, familiar home knowing I wouldn’t have to move for some time. 

      About that not-moving… While I had been looking forward to having a period of rest after all the frenzied work of construction and labor, it turns out I have a hard time surrendering to non-doing. Despite having the distraction of my beautiful little daughter beside me, I was itching to DO something within days of her birth. Even now, weeks later when I am restored physically from the birth, I am nonetheless limited by my new role as “lactating mammal responsible for a constantly hungry newborn”, and I still find myself struggling to let go of the drive to do other things. Fortunately for me, having family around has helped ground me in my new set of priorities. While I rested post-birth, dishes and diapers got washed, seeds were started, garden beds prepped, meals were cooked, and most hugely, our first floor was sanded, oiled and waxed. For this, the baby and I transferred our residence to another house for a week while sawdust flew back at the home front. The linseed oil finish brought out the rainbow of colors and grain of our red oak flooring, a total surprise to me when we moved back in and I saw it for the first time. At any rate, I realize looking back that we would have been quite lost without the help of family this past month, frantically trying to keep clean and fed while in a zombie-like state of sleep deprivation (which is kind of where we are at now that family has departed!)

     Mike’s parents also came for a week to help out, cook gourmet meals for us, and meet the baby. With them came several pieces of our stored-away furniture that they had squeezed into their minivan with Tetras-like precision. After years of sitting on rough wooden benches, a soft sofa is truly amazing. And instead of balancing our plates on laps, we have a real live table to set things down on! Yes, it now feels like we are living in total luxury with our fancy bed, easy chairs, bathroom, rugs and table…  I write this with much gratitude for the role both of our families have played in our lives this last month. I realize looking back that we would have been quite lost without their help, frantically trying to keep clean and fed while in a zombie-like state of sleep deprivation (which is kind of where we are at now that family has departed!)

      At the moment, it is hard to remember our lowly beginnings huddled in a leaky tent. It is hard, even, to connect all the steps that led us from there to here, finally inhabiting our mostly finished home with our baby. Not that our work on the house or the homestead is done… far from it! Although it is uncertain when we will be able to resume projects with anything like our former vigor, the thought of them lingers in the back of my mind, on pause. Yes, finding the right balance between taking care of baby Caris, keeping up with chores, and taking on new work will take some effort, but we will figure it out, one day at a time.

Last minute preparations

     I’m writing this post from a hospital bed where I have been marooned for monitoring after a successful “external cephalic version” that flipped our formerly breech baby. While I am overjoyed to now be carrying a healthy head-down 38 week old, I am also feeling increasingly panicked about the impending responsibility of bringing a tiny helpless baby into our homesteading lives. As we walked into the OB floor of the hospital this morning, we passed a newborn being wheeled down the hall and my stomach burst into butterflies. Ack! How are we possibly ready for such a little being to become our reality? I would gladly accept the sore feet and back, the uncomfortable sleepless nights, and the constant need to urinate in exchange for a little more time to prepare.

Before, total chaos!

      One reason for this is our house—while we have made good progress in some regards, I can’t help but look around and think “this is not ready for a baby to inhabit”. Perhaps it is a failure of imagination on my part, because I know others have birthed babies into far less comfortable settings (ahem, away in a manger?) In fact, two of our good friends who are moving onto land in our neighborhood this spring just found out that—surprise!—they are expecting an addition way sooner than they intended to be, complicating plans for building a small house and completing a masters degree program. While I feel confident on their behalf that there will be a imperfectly perfect way forward and that all will eventually be well, I can’t seem to muster the same faith in our relatively settled situation.

Shelves in the closet? Happy thought indeed! 

     I’ve gone through a series of conjectures about what missing piece of our house will yield a sense of calm preparedness in me. First I thought it was the flooring: I thought if that was just finished, our house would feel ready. But once Mike installed the final piece, all I could see was the clutter of tools and boxes all over the nice finished floor. So I built shelves in our closets and went on an organizing mission to get everything up and away. This definitely improved the lay of the land, but the feeling has lingered. My next thought was perhaps having the bathroom completed would help the house feel ready for an onslaught of midwives and family and visitors? So we commenced with plumbing and tiling and bathtub moving, as well as sink vanity and compost toilet construction. While the room still needs a door, trim and running water, it feels useable. Still.

      The next glaring deficit has been our stairs, inside and out. We have been using a step ladder for years to climb up and down to our deck without trouble, but now all I could picture was tripping on the rungs with an infant in tow. So one warm day I determined to finish a set of stairs and dragged Mike into assistance with heavy lifting. Another check off the list. But what about inside? Those stairs are now screaming to me “death trap!” Meanwhile Mike has been heroically handling our heavy duty chores—hauling buckets of water from our cistern (which is nearly full of water, but still awaiting a pump to eliminate the middleman step), chopping and managing the firewood and stove, and more—all while also installing flooring around the house. He just finished our upstairs bedroom with beautiful black walnut flooring. Now, as you might have guessed, I have my mind set to building a bed frame and closets, perhaps wishful thinking at this point unless I can transform myself into superwoman!

      We have been postponing unpacking our bed, linens, clothes and baby paraphernalia until the floor was finished. In fact, our changing table has been housing our tool and fastener collection for the better part of a year and has only last week been liberated for domestic duty. Surely having a bedroom set up will help me feel nested and ready… right? While we are forgoing the pregnancy right-of-passage of decorating a nursery, it would probably help to have some signs of an expected baby somewhere in the house, I would think. I keep telling myself there will be time for unpacking before the baby comes, and if not? If the stork comes early? Then hopefully my friends are right when they point out that all the baby really needs at first is us. 

      In case you haven’t noticed the trend, the list of to-dos seemingly grows longer the closer we get. I know there isn’t enough time for the house to be completed by the time I am full term, and inevitably I too will have to surrender to imperfect perfection. Oddly, the deadline is ambiguous—perhaps in a few days or perhaps in a month?

      I write these words to the clicking metronome of the fetal heart monitor—the computer beside me sounds out the beats per minute. 141. 138. A kick or two sends it up to 155 and eventually back down to a flat line lull. The baby must be asleep. Watching the four tiny chambers of the heart earlier with their rapid flutter of valves pulsing in the swirling black and white ultrasound image was a visceral reminder that my will—to finish our house projects and clean and prepare—is only one will in this equation. There are now two wills at work in this body (one that very stubbornly wanted to remain head up until this morning!) and I have to make room. Our friends who are parents assure us that loss of control in the birth process is the first in a long series of surrenders that impress upon you your total vulnerability in the relationship: you can’t control how the birth goes or the health of the baby. You have to let go over and over and over as they learn by pushing further and further away from you, indefinitely. Perhaps accepting that is the hardest work of being a parent.

    Coincidentally I just got the all clear to rejoin the outside world again, so I should wrap up and keep moving forward with the day—into the unknown, yes, but also perhaps to squeeze in a little more plastering while the light holds and I still have a little more time!

Winter homecoming

    Mid- January, Mike and I packed up our old conestoga wagon and made the long trek back to Missouri, arriving in the midst of our first Missouri winter! It has been so amazing to be here in this beautiful spare landscape at this time of year, especially because we can enjoy the beauty of it from inside our own home. I know how basic that sounds, but I have been reveling in the fact of it: the snow is falling outside, the wind is howling, rain is pounding, and the elements are performing their messy winter alchemy while we are dry, warm and protected inside this space. Okay, okay, you get my excitement about our home-dwelling reality... So what about the details? Is the stove working out? The cistern?

    Let me say that things did not start out well. When we first drove up to our house, we had no idea what to expect. Our neighbor Brian had kindly offered to light a fire in our stove earlier on our arrival day, and so despite the frigid temperature outside, we had hopes of entering a toasty house. Wrong. It was just above freezing inside, only slightly warmer. Still, bundled under every blanket we had, we slept warmly that first night with high hopes for our stove’s performance the next day. But the next few days of feeding the stove all day didn’t bring up the temperature inside beyond 50F.  I think we both began to despair that we had failed. Maybe we hadn’t insulated well enough, we overestimated our stove’s heating capacity, we designed for passive solar heating all wrong. Mike pointed out one night that he could see his breath. We were sitting mere feet away from our stove. Something was definitely wrong.

      So what is a frustrated, shivering person supposed to do but problem solve the situation? We couldn’t produce more heat, so how could we lose less heat? I thought about the concepts in "Passive House" design: create a super-tightly insulated envelope so that not much heat or cold needs to be generated to condition it with. To determine the weak, leaky points in the structure, a series of blower tests are used, along with thermal scanners to see where air infiltration is happening. Although we didn’t have access to such equipment, we felt through the house for drafts and such. Perhaps not surprisingly, around several hastily installed windows and doors there were some noticeable streams of cooler air coming in. The glass on our double-pane windows was also frigid, and then there was the most glaring opening we hadn’t bothered to close in our haste to leave: the hole for the stovepipe going through our roof. Goodbye heat, hello cold drafts! There was very likely a thermosyphoning effect going on between the two. The last point we considered was that our thick clay-plastered walls were acting as a thermal mass, retaining the cold as we tried to introduce heat. That effect would reverse with time, but it took a good week or two.

      So after some work installing weatherstripping, spraying several cans of “Great Stuff” insulation, making thermal shades we can lower at night, and sealing up the hole around the stove pipe, I am very very relieved to report that we are warm! Which presents its own problem... how to regulate our stove to yield temperatures above 55F (which seems to be the temperature average when not running the stove for a day) but below 85F (a miserable temperature to try to sleep in), all while also meeting our cooking needs for the stove? A programmable thermostat really has its charms, which are hard to replicate the old fashioned way!

      We have had a learning curve cooking on the stove as well. Our stove gets very very hot, which has yielded some burned dishes and skin (yikes!) as we have gotten used to its subtleties. There is a perpetually shifting range of temperatures on the cast iron cook top, depending on where you place a pot or pan, closer or farther from the firebox. The stove box is also somewhat fickle, ranging from 200 to 700 F (!), but we have found most temperatures cook most baked items decently if left in the right amount of time. Finally we have been able to cook pies, roasts, pizza and other baked dishes that we hadn’t been able to cook decently in our outdoor kitchen. Also, thanks to the cold temperatures outside, we have had “refrigeration” via our cooler. For the most part though, food-wise we have been eating lots of our stored root crops from last year’s garden—sweet potatoes, potatoes, squash, pumpkins, apples—as well as canned tomatoes, pickles, beets, etc. And let me not forget pork! We aren’t sick of it yet but I can see the potential… 

     And though winter, of any season, is the obvious candidate for taking some down time away from work—cooking, visiting friends and neighbors, reading by the stove and making things—our main goal the past month has been to get further along on the house before the baby is due to arrive and our time, energy, and focus shift in a new direction. Currently as I write, Mike is pounding away on floor installation (using a loud, hammer-drive floor nailer… this baby has a promising career as a drummer I think!) I have been tackling work on the bathroom, and am determined to see it functional by March. (Let me just say, an outhouse in January does not have the same allure as an outhouse in May…) To start with, I have plastered the sheetrock walls with a finish lime plaster which I then lime-washed with some blue iron-oxide pigment mixed in for color. Lime is a great natural finish for areas where certain hygienic qualities are desired, as well as breathability, as it won’t trap moisture. My friend Sarah pointed out to me that the cheese-aging cellars in France where she lived and worked were lime plastered for that reason—no strange mold strains growing there! So, perfect for a humid area like a bathroom. Next to come are wainscoting and a tile floor and then our tub can finally get installed. Let me just say that bathing in a galvanized wash tub is also losing its farmhousy novelty!

      As the baby grows larger and larger, my range of motion and energy are shrinking, but I am still awkwardly and slowly able to work. I guess this is around the time in their pregnancies that many women go into a frenzy nesting and cleaning their homes. While I might like to be at that point with our home, our reality is much clutter, work mess, and assorted piles/boxes/furniture endlessly being shuffled around. Still, I can’t complain, especially when compared to the birth stories of many of our neighbors and friends in nearby communities who welcomed babies home to tents or walls of unplastered strawbales and the like. The babies don’t seem to notice, go figure. And to see their beautiful children and homes now, I know we will be there too someday soon… all will be well!

     At any rate, we are still making time to relax and have fun in our last child-free months. Our community gets creative in winter. For example, with ice skating tag in a giant snow maze at our neighbor’s pond.  (I cautiously pushed a chair around like a walker so I wouldn’t topple over, which was pretty soon seated by a small girl too young to skate!) Yes, it is hard to imagine what our lives here will soon look like with a little one in tow. But we give thanks for all the community support around us, near and far, helping us figure out the way into parenthood!