My Life – Page 6 – a hippie with a minivan

Highest Tides, Magnetic rides and Longest Bridges…

We are back from our first Family Camping trip!

We left bright and early on the morning of the 23rd of June… actually… scratch that… it was dark and early when we got up at 4am…

(Do you have a minivan? if you do, you can understand that packing a tent, sleeping bags, food and clothes for 6 people is not an easy task with all the seats in place!)

We started driving and made great time even though we stopped on the way quite a few times. We arrived at the campground in Fundy National park 12 hours after we left home with a few hours to spare as we pitched our tent and settled in. Fundy National park is on the New Brunswick side of the Bay of Fundy and boasts the highest tides in the world and we looked forward to discovering it all… our friends arrived soon after us and settled into the neighbouring camping space and the kids played in the small ravine and creek than ran between us… The black flies were horrendous, the mosquitos and noseeums were biting but it didn’t stop us from enjoying ourselves… ok, ok… we did complain a lot…

Our first night and day were beautiful and we headed to the iconic Hopewell rocks at low tide and walked on the ocean floor. The flower pot ricks were gorgeous and the thick red mud was irresistible to the kids..

(click on any pic to see it larger)

The rest of the time in Fundy made camping a bit rough, the tents were not pitched correctly because of the rocky terrain, the temperature was quite cold, the nights were rainy, the mornings foggy, but once we got down the mountain we had cloudy but reasonable weather and we were able to discover the beaches and tidal pools, enjoy the scenery and discover a beautiful waterfall…

(foggy morning)

Village of Alma at low tide…

Dickson falls is one of the favourite trails in Fundy National park and though it is not a long trail, it is full of stairs and slippery boardwalks that go next to and over waterfalls and amazing clear and crisp waters… The humidity in the area is o high that my camera lens was fogging up each time I took it out of my bag and the colours of green from the moss and vegetation was intense, truly a different type of ecosystem that we are used to here in Quebec.

The boys enjoyed their first sprint of camping though they too had enough of the bugs and the cold after a few days.

Colin learning to use the axe…

Telling ghost stories around the fire while roasting marshmallows with friends…

After four nights of camping the the rain, freezing nights and foggy, cold humid days that made everything damp we were happy to leave and head to our next leg of the journey.

We headed to Magnetic Hill in Moncton before parting with out friends and heading to Prince Edward Island. Magnetic Hill is tourist attraction and a strange one at that…you park your car at the bottom of the hill, put it in Neutral and the let it do its work… slowly you start moving backwards and then as you gain momentum you car heads uphill backwards without power. Of course, it has nothing to do with magnets but it is a very cool illusion 🙂

We parted with our friends and then headed to PEI… Prince Edward Island is an Island just off of the coast of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and is the smallest Canadian province. It used to be accesible only by boat but in 1997 the longest bridge in the world was completed and was opened to the public. It is a pretty majestic structure that spans over the ocean for 12.9 KM (8 miles) and takes about 10 minutes to cross… the boys were excited!

I will be covering the PEI part of our trip in the next post…

Places we stayed: Chignecto Camp ground in Fundy National Park

Places we went: Fundy National Park, Diskson Falls, Village of Alma, Hopewell Rocks, Magnetic Hill, Cape Jourimain Nature Centre, Confederation Bridge

Today, after more than two years…

My period is back…

So is the bloating, cramping and lack of energy and the overall feeling of Blah….

For 10 years now, on and off, I have been following my cycle, charting days and taking temps, or I have been pregnant or in the limbo of the post partum phase…. this next phase feels like the close to all of that.

We knew that Wilhelmina would be our last child and last year decided to finalize that decision with Simon getting the big V… I went through the slight tang of wondering if we were doing the right thing but having my period back now makes me realize that it is done. I am now out of my last limbo phase after the birth of my last child and I am now leaving the “maternity” phase completely.

There will be no more pregnancies, no more babies, no more little kick and sweet smelling newborn heads… Each phase that Wilhelmina is going through will be the last time I see one one my own children pass though the same. There will be no more breaks until my body decides to stop on its own.

There are no regrets in these words… just realization…

My family is done expanding, now the focus is on maturing.

Two special days…

Happy Mother’s day to all of you moms out there!!

It is hard to believe that I became a mom nearly 9 years ago and I am now a mom to four amazing kids.

(My first pic as a mom July 16th 2002)

but nine years ago today, I was not yet a mom…

I was 8 months pregnant and Simon and I were celebrating another milestone… our 3rd anniversary…

(May 8th 2002)

Another “hard to believe” moment… 12 years ago today, I was getting married to the love of my life and my best friend…

what an amazing journey these last 12 years have been….

Little steps

I wrote something in the comments of the last post that I would like to expand on… “I am ready for some changes in my life and the easiest place to start is with myself.”

I have some big plans for the future. We would like to sell the house and move. Maybe back to Montreal, ideally, out of province. However, it is hard to leave the stability we have now and take the plunge into the unknown. The more I think about it, the more I want it, but because we are not ready yet, it just becomes depressing to think of what could be. I am one of those people that when I want something, I want it now, and when I can’t get it I feel discouraged and live in a standstill… living in wait of something, instead of living in the moment.

I realize though, I can’t control big changes like this. Our Mortgage is up next year, if we sell now, we would have a penalty to pay which we can’t afford. Simon has a a stable job, which he hates, and we hate that he has to do something he hates each day, but it is a steady income that is hard to leave behind. One day we will be ready, but it isn’t at this moment. I need to accept that. Not that I will not change our dream and work towards it, but I realize that it takes little steps.

I may not be able to control the big picture at the moment, but I can control small changes, changes within myself, external and internal. A haircut, may be just a haircut, but it also a symbol for me that I am ready. I have dropped 10lbs in the last 2 months and I plan on losing a whole lot more. I no longer feel attachment to most of the stuff in my house and I just feel like getting back into that active mode of decluttering I was in a few years ago and getting rid of as much as I can that we don’t use or need.

I might want the big change now, but I am accepting that it might take longer then I wish. But, the little changes, I can control them. The little changes I make now can only make us more ready for the future and in the meantime I will not feel at a standstill, I will be able to keep moving ahead and hope that our big dreams will be realized sooner than later.

How far I have come…

I have said it in the past, yet I will say it once again. I have always wanted to journal, yet never found the medium that inspired me to keep at it. This blog is what changed that for me. Now, as more years go by, I am enjoying going back and seeing how much I have evolved as a parent and as a person… as I updated the blog I happened to find myself re-reading a few old posts. It is amazing to me how far I have come in the last years.

When I started this blog I was a mom of two… Xavier was 2 and Colin was about 9 months old, I was the moderator of the AP board on a very popular mainstream site and needed a place to rant. I defined myself as “AP” though I was past that “list” stage, yet it was still was a way to find like-minded people. I was not yet an “unschooler” though I did know that we would be homeschooling with little to no structure. I had ideals, I had a parenting philosophy, I knew what was important to me, yet I did not have the experience. I read what I wrote so many years ago and realize how I was so “new” at being a parent.

So many things have changed over the years, yet it has only evolved in what I see is a positive way. I remember being told “oh, you just wait and see…your kids are young/you only have one/you only have two” when it came to subjects that were not in the mainstream, as if my ideals would change as my children grew or I had more. I agree, they have, but they have not been crushed or been left behind, they have only evolved or have been reinforced.

I used to have ideals that I believed were true and possible, now I have the same ideals that I know are true and possible. I have seen my children learn to fall asleep without ever being trained or crying and without having sleepless nights, I have seen my children wean without weaning them. I have seen my children learn to walk though I always held them and wore them. I have seen how EC works and how amazing it can be to have a baby not wear diapers. I have seen my children learn to read without having taught them. I have seen my children learn boundaries without punishment, whether it be physical or emotional.

It is what I have seen and experienced that has made something change in me.

I no longer have the rants in me that I once had. I saw that shift when I decided to change the name of my blog from “Paxye’s Rant” to “a hippie with a minivan” back in 2007…

I knew that I didn’t need to rant as much anymore but I don’t think I understood why as much as I do now.It is in this respect that I see how far I have come…

I now see that my rants were often signs of defensiveness. Not defensive because I felt I was doing something wrong, but because it was all still so much of an unknown. I was parenting in a way that was foreign to the way that I grew up, that was foreign to the way those that surrounded me parented. I knew in my heart that it felt like the right to parent for us, yet I did not yet have a concrete example of the results that would be attained by doing so. Of course, I am still learning each and every day how to break the cycle of the way that I was brought up. I am still a fairly “new” parent with many trials ahead of me.There are still many mistakes to be made and that have been made, that I have learned from and am still learning from. But, I can see that it is no longer as easy for other parents to say “just wait and see”, I am now a more seasoned parent of four that is not only talking the talk, but has been walking the walk.

I look forward to seeing this post in another 6 years and again understanding how far I have yet again come from where I am now.