It doesn't get any better than this...

Hanging out with my baby girl listening to Bob Marley. Life is grand.

Our new house has a little mouse problem. Well, I guess it's only a problem if you don't want mice playing in your walls. I guess the more accurate way to say it is that *I* have a problem with the mice currently residing in our house. And while I totally get why they want to live inside our nice cozy, insulated walls, I'm not 'ok' with it. And while living with mice is nothing new to me (I'd say roughly 80% of the places I've lived I've shared with rodents - it's just what you DO in northern climates), I've never shared space with mice AND a baby. And while ordinarily I would just get some mouse traps and set them up, I'm really trying to up my karma, and I don't think squishing mice is the way to go about that.

It's like I want to sit them all down, and just let them know that they're more than welcome to hang out with me, if they'll be so kind as to not touch anything OUTSIDE of the wall area. Do you think that will work?

A Reflection on Parenting

Almost every parent has hopes and dreams for their children. Most hope for their child to be successful and to 'have more than they did growing up'... whatever that means (because we're all so poor and oppressed here in North America). I've heard more than once that 'maybe Stella will be rich and she'll buy you a nice house to retire in'.

I certainly hope not.

No, the dreams that I have for my child are much different than those of most parents. I have no desire to see my daughter become 'rich'... rich people are unhappy. How do you think they GET rich to begin with? Through placing money and the pursuit thereof as foremost on their 'to do' lists. No, I wouldn't wish that on my child for anything. When I think of her future, the only dreams I see are that she grow up knowing that she's loved. And I mean really, unconditionally loved.

I was watching Dr. Phil the other day (ok, go ahead and laugh, but he's the only one in America with any sense!) and he had on a family where the daughter had gotten pregnant at 16. The father refused to speak to her, because she had 'shattered all his expectations of her'. I was overwhelmed by the need to go pick up my daughter, hug her, and tell her that no matter WHAT, I would NEVER just abandon her like that. Who am I to 'expect' things from her? Now, I'm not saying that I HOPE my daughter becomes a teenage mother - far from it! But if that's something that she's dealt in her life, I'll be right there with the huggies and the baby wipes, every step of the way.

I had a pretty ok childhood, all things considered. And I think my parents did a lot of things right. First and foremost, they let me be myself, without trying to fit me into a mould of 'the perfect child'. No, I'm not a doctor (not yet) or a lawyer, I don't have a lot of money, and I've made a lot of mistakes in my life. But you know, I have a really strong sense of myself and, more importantly, I'm HAPPY. I wouldn't trade the life I have for anything in the world. Well, maybe I'd get rid of my student debt (damn OSAP, the monthly payments are the same as a mortgage payment!), but everything else is exactly what I imagine happiness to be. It's taken me a while (probably because I never had anyone tell me 'this is what you should do'), but I'm finally starting to figure things out. And because I've done it on my own, I know for certain that the choices I've made were the right ones. And THAT is all I want for my daughter.

A Meditation on Location

I'm beginning to get the twitch to move away from my small little town. Sure, we've got some of the best wild spaces in Canada only a stones throw from our front door. If you want to go camping it's literally a half hour drive to a remote location that's totally isolated from the modern world. And don't even get me started on the many oportunites for bigfoot sighting. Unfortunately, while these things all make for a really great vacation spot, they don't make for a very convenient place to live.

First, and more trivially, I'm starting to get frustrated at the lack of employment options in any field other than 'telephone sales agent' or 'counter attendant'. I'm doing a masters degree - I want jobs like 'researcher' and 'head of public relations'. Not to mention that my chosen field - wildlife conservation/conservation awareness - is something that most of my neighbours regard as 'hippy nonsense'. I know I'm not going to find a job that I enjoy doing unless I move about 2500km's in a westerly direction.

On a more serious note, I'm also having a really hard time with the lack of a buddhist community anywhere within an 800km radius. I have so many questions and I really feel that I need a serious teacher if I'm going to move forward in my practise. Indeed, the sangha is one of the main components to Buddhist practise. Without a spiritual community, one becomes isolated and practising seriously becomes really difficult. I strongly feel that in another life my place was in a monastary - indeed, if I didn't have my little family, that's where I'd be today.

When I sat down to write this post I had an entirely different topic in mind. Funny how things just flow from you without your even knowing that they're there. Remind me tomorrow to talk about anger- the post which I was 'trying' to write the first time.

I've got a rare moment where the babe is sleeping in her bassinet, rather than attached to me, so I thought I would post. The last week has been pretty chaotic around here, with the baby deciding that if she isn't touching someone 100% of the time, life isn't worth living. We have however started almost sleeping through the night. By allowing her to cosleep with me from the very beginning of the night, we're getting about 6 hours straight sleep. Of course, that's with a baby on my stomach, but she's happy and I get sleep, so who can complain, right? I continue to be convinced that my attatchment parenting methods are producing a fabulous little person, and I'm glad that we've made the choices we have.

Now that the baby update is out of the way, I wanted to share a moment of 'accidental dharma', which I may write up a little better and send over to Peter at the Accidental Dharma blog (go visit, it's a good read).

Anyway, as many of my readers know, my husband and I are currently living with my family. Lately we've been feeling the itch to GET OUR OWN PLACE ALREADY (!!), and so we were looking at buying, since the rental market here is ludicrous. I've been putting off the idea of buying a house because we're so uncertain about where we want to be in 5 years that I didn't want to buy a house only to have to sell it in 6 months because we're moving across the country. But, since we've been looking for a rental for the better part of a year and haven't found anything suitable, buying seemed to be the only option.

We spent almost two weeks dealing with banks and mortgage brokers and the general nonsense involved in borrowing money. And, after getting approved, the bank promptly took back their approval when they found out I was on maternity leave (something I told them up front, but that apparently got lost in the confusion of 26 different people looking at our application). We were pretty crushed, because we thought that we'd have to stay with my parents until I got a job again (something I wasn't planning to do for another 2 years). It seemed that once again I was going to have to put aside my goals of going to grad school, go get another unsatisfying job, and put my child in daycare - all things that we were passionate about avoiding.

I was feeling pretty down about the whole thing when my husband called me from work to say that his boss, who has a few rental properties just had once become vacant. She would rent it to us for less than we would have been paying for a mortgage, and would we be interested in taking a look at it. We immediately went to look at it, and it's just perfect for our little family. A cute little 3 bedroom,with a nursery for the baby off the master bedroom. We'll finally have a yard and a garden and our own space to come home to. And the best part is, when we're tired of living here and want to move away, we don't have to sell it.

I don't know why I ever doubt that the universe provides. Sometimes, when what we want so badly is denied to us, it's hard to see that it might be because something better is just around the corner. I have a really hard time letting go of my idea of what my life 'should' be, and I often find myself frustrated that a situation hasn't turned out the way that I've hoped. I'm regularly (and sometimes brutally) confronted with the fact that expectations only lead to suffering, and as soon as I've made peace with the fact that what I want really isn't going to happen, something even better tends to drop out of the sky. That's been the story of my life so far, and you'd think that after nearly 25 years of the same lesson over and over and over again, I'd finally get it!

Today's lesson: Attachments and desires = suffering and pain. Class dismissed.