It's Saturday morning at 7:20 and I have no plan. My co-workers like to say that I am the only person they know who gets up earlier on the weekend than on a weekday. This morning at 6:25 I was listening to the birds chirping outside my window and thinking how true that is. I guess I live for the weekends!
For today, this is my quiet moment. The man is out building a not-so-rustic house out of intermodal containers. The little man is asleep. The dog is in his kennel (whining to come out.) Ah, sweet peace and goofing off, I love thee.
But the real reason I take flack for being a weekend-only "morning person" is hunting season. All winter long I would get up at 4 am to drive to the Butte Sink to hunt ducks (and geese if they flew nearby). But on your average work day I am struggling to get up by 7 am. Now that I am a mother they don't mind so much, I get a lot of leeway from co-workers and managers now that I have a child. But the honest truth is, I will go to a lot more effort to have fun than to make money. Which leads me to my next problem: duck hunting and motherhood is a poor combination.
Enter the intermodal container home. The unexplained cost of parenting is the vacation home that allows the kids to toddle about while Mom and Dad nurse the hobbies that have to be put on the back burner for 10-20 years. That vacation home has to be large enough to house the family unit and whoever you brought along to play with or watch your kids while you go out and goof off. This could mean two tents, a condo, a hotel room or, in our case, two 40-foot sea containers, welded together. We admit we are over-doing it a bit, but we are social and when friends come hunting we may want them to bring the whole family. So, we have built 700 square feet of home on a hundred-year-old duck preserve, mostly on the man power of all the other husbands out there who still want to have fun and want their family around.
My first ever blog post is a tribute to my husband, aka the man, aka baby daddy. That's a lot of work to keep our hobby alive. He is a good man, the only person I know that works that hard to have his family around and have fun. He was up at 4 am today, so he could be working by 6:25 am.
