Challenges

Finally...the weather matches my mood.  It's a chilly and blustery stormy day.  I feel like hunkering down by a fire under a blanket with a bowl of soup.  Not many days like that here.  Maybe that's why I've been feeling so out of place lately.  It's so beautiful here, it just seems ridiculous to have a rough day.  But that's what we've been having.  I've been wanting to update you all, but waiting until things start falling into place to post about it.  Well, I'm just going to have to go ahead without the convenience of life looking good.

So...I knew that marrying Jonathan meant grabbing his hand and jumping off the cliff into the enormous ocean of adventure that life is.  I spent the first 5 years of our marriage resisting the jump, (you know how when you stand there long enough looking down you can totally psych yourself out), but moving here was finally really trusting him to stay with me when the waves got rough.  And that has proven true.  We are with each other more than ever in this challenge to create a family life here. 

Our Plan A dissolved, and we've been so busy just getting by that we didn't realize how discouraged we were.  We've finally started to let go of the ideas we had about how life would look here, and only then will that create some space for Plan B, C, D, or Zed to emerge. 

Our small nest egg from the estate sale is long gone.  We've stopped "needing" things so we can hang onto our last $40.  We have just a bit of cash flow now with harvesting the bananas and selling them to the local fruit stand.  About $100 a week.  The nature school Jonathan was hoping to work with is on hold indefinitely in the wake of the death of Matt and Kimberly's baby.  We have been talking with several other folks who are starting something similar, and perhaps that will prove to be the next curve on our path. 

It baffles me how we earned and spent several thousand dollars a month back in Minneapolis, and now we are living on a fraction of that and making it work.  Well, sort of making it work.  We are quite stressed, really, about the cash flow thing.  We've got a lot of possibility for investments for the future, but not much immediate return.  We have starts in the greenhouse finally, and some plants in the field.  We have rough plans for having a couple dozen chickens here for eggs, but still need to build the infrastructure.  We are busy all the time, and rarely get a break. 

We miss you all, and I miss our old house and our old garden.  I think it's just the feeling of familiarity that I miss.  The comfort.  The theme song from Cheers keeps playing in my head..."Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name...and they're always glad you came..."

Anyways, enough about the challenges.  On the flip side, the girls are doing well.  We spend 90% of our day outside.  We've been slowly settling in, and we're using our resources here for some fun projects, like making coconut milk.  There are hundreds of coconuts around here, just waiting for us to do something with them.  Look forward to some photos soon.  We've also been spending a lot of time in the kitchen with Julie, making sauerkraut, water kefir, gingered carrots, homemade yogurt and yogurt cheese.  The girls especially liked the pink sauerkraut, made with green and purple cabbages.  We eat out on the lanai (porch) for every meal, unless we decide to throw down a blanket under the ice cream bean tree for a picnic.  I will do a little video tour soon, so you can get a sense of what our life looks like now. 

Jonathan is currently on a little solo camping trip, back down on the beach where he was living when I met him.  He's also taken a camping trip with Maya for some special daddy-daughter time.  Here's a photo from their beach adventure, hiking three beaches over for drinking water.

Maggie got to sleep out in the tent the other night with him, back in the "secret spot" that he discovered, behind the naupaka.  He's a hot commodity these days, everybody wants special time, including me.  Here's a picture of him up in the monkey pod tree getting a better view of the sunset.

And here's a few other shots from the past month...

Windblown at the beach

 The Easter Bunny came a day late this year because we forgot to dye the eggs til Sunday morning.  This is the table on the lanai where we all eat, and the view from where we sit.

Frozen pea snack

Hollerin'

 A tea party under the ice cream bean tree, with a new friend, Meila.

That's all for now.  I'll post more photos soon of our place and some of the projects we've got going on.  I hope you all are well.  Happy Mother's Day to all you moms out there!  Goodnight!
Love,
Heidi