We're starting to try to figure out what we are going to do with this place, which is a little different from the dreaming that we've been doing since we got here.

When there was a foot of snow on everything and no possibility of really getting anything done, it was knock off the back of the house and make an extension. Not a huge one, but enough of one so that we could have an enclosed mudroom, a half bathroom and a laundry room all on the first floor. Maybe we would bump out the second floor above it and add a small bedroom and reconfigure the bathroom. Then I realized that the south side of the house is the back of it. There is one window on that whole side of the house and it is in the bathroom, upstairs. The house is pretty dark. The kitchen is along that back wall, so shouldn't we put in some windows there? Or maybe a window paned door. But that's where the mudroom/laundry room/half bath were going to be. Should we waste the southern wall on those things?

The other big thing is that we want to knock down all of the outbuildings and build a nice two story barn/garage/workshop/carriage house kind of a thing. Garage/workshop space on the first floor and an open studio space on the second floor. The second floor could be a space for an office or meetings or classes or a guest room. It would have a wood stove and a small bathroom.

Then there is a list of imminently important things. These include a fence, a propane tank and a new gas hot water heater (we don't have a dryer until this is done because ours is gas), gravel for our driveway, window coverings and paint for the house and removal of a huge dying tree with four giant hanging broken branches threatening to squash all who enter the mobile home park.

There is going to be a small amount of money and time to do any of this stuff, so now that it's all real and we can start working on it, I'm campaigning to drop the house renovation fantasies. How would we pay for it and where would we live while it was happening? Even if we were totally insane and lived here through it, we would have no kitchen for an unpredictable amount of time.

I also want to dig into the yard this summer in a sort of structural way. I don't think I am going to try to do a lot of planting this year. Maybe by the fall I'll feel ready for that. I'd like to take some time to see how the sun falls and how the trees fill out first. Goals include paved and/or gravel walkways (there are absolutely none right now), a patio and an outdoor oven for baking. I'm awfully tempted to get some chicks for Easter but I don't know...

I'm thinking that for the long term, if we can get the barn built, then it would be someplace we could live if we wanted to renovate our house. If I had enough lead time I could just freeze tons of food and then we wouldn't need much of a kitchen.

It's so easy to get caught up in the future and what you don't have yet. I was just realizing this evening that a few months ago, the burning question for me was whether or not I would have a home birth. Now I'm on the other side of that and there's a whole new set of anxieties. I'm feeling like I want to minimize our stresses right now and just enjoy what we have. I don't really have much of a choice about that. There are a limited number of things that a person can do with a baby in a sling.