Last month we had a brand new baby. This month…I think we’re getting the hang of things!

I really thought that adding a loud, needy roommate to our lives would be a terrible upheaval. Not a feeling of regret, but maybe a heavy mourning for the freedom we had as a couple? The transition has been much easier than I expected – not to say that it’s been easy, but that we were as ready as we could be and I’m not feeling the loss of freedom that I thought I would. I suspect this is because we’ve seriously up-ended our lives several times already: moving to Charleston without knowing anyone or anything about the area, moving aboard a boat, moving into our VW bus and living life on the road.

As far as sleep goes, we both had experience with night shifts while on ocean passages, so I had a pretty good idea of how I would handle it. With both of us fully participating in the game of getting-enough-sleep, we’ve been able to help each other out and so far there have only been a few days where I felt miserably sleep deprived. I did wake up to Kyle trying to use his forklift arms to pick me up off the bed one night, I asked him what he was doing and he said he was trying to pick up the baby. The baby was in his bassinet on the other side of the room! He could probably tell stories about me, too, but since I’m writing this blog you won’t find them here!

I did have one weird recurring thought about how “when this is all over and I can get stuff done again, I will…” before realizing that there is no end date to this project, but I will very slowly regain some free time. It has been very challenging to keep up with general life stuff, especially because we threw a massive wrench into the works this month when…

We bought a house! Atlas was 5 weeks old when we closed on a home in northern Michigan. Ever since then, we’ve been driving two hours to our new house every weekend to work on renovations. Atlas has logged a lot of car time for an infant.

By “work on renovations” I mostly mean supervising renovations, as our parents have all cycled through and helped work on the house (thank goodness for our lure of a grandbaby). Kyle has done so much work on the reno, but I feel pretty useless as I am mainly responsible for keeping the baby happy and fed.

We’re targeting the end of the month to fully move in. Hopefully by then the house has floors. And kitchen counters. And working toilets.

…Yikes.

Honestly, it’s been so hard. So hard. We live in our apartment for 4 days, then we camp in our house for 3 days (it has no furniture besides a bed and a kitchen table). And every single day we need to bust our butts to make as much progress as we can before we switch to the other location. If we didn’t have the help of our parents, there’s no way we could have gotten any work done on the house. We are truly grateful for every bit of help they’ve given us! I’m not sure which was more stressful: not having a place to go when our lease expired, or buying a place that needs work. We got an okay deal on the property, which is saying a lot in this real estate environment, and we love the location. It is a good purchase! But life will be much easier when we’re past these big renovations.

So while we’ve been hemorrhaging money on house renovations and various tools and yard implements and all the things you need when you go from a tiny apartment (580 sq ft) to a giant house (1500 sq ft plus garage). We’ve also been getting hospital bills for labor and delivery. So let me rant about that for a minute. Or two.

We never would have chosen to have a baby in the USA. If it weren’t for covid, we’d be looking at birth tourism in some country with great hospitals and reasonable healthcare costs. For someone with the freedom of choice, it simply doesn’t make sense to put up with the subpar costs and hospitals in the USA. Covid took away that freedom for us.

Since we don’t have access to healthcare through employers, we picked a plan from the healthcare marketplace. It estimated the cost of having a baby to be around $5000. In February, we had a billing question and called insurance, who kind of laughed at us and said “you’re definitely going to hit your out-of-pocket max.” My individual max is $7000. And that’s on top of insurance premiums every month (on average, $300/mo). Plus any costs incurred by Kyle or Atlas. We’ve paid over $12,000 towards healthcare and medical bills this year. How does the average person, living paycheck-to-paycheck, afford to have a baby? And that’s just the cost of HAVING the baby. None of that goes towards infant care or supplies. Don’t even get me started on the cost of childcare compared to wages!

My understanding is that the Affordable Care Act was actually affordable when it was mandated that every person have coverage. We didn’t start using it until after that mandate was rescinded. The only positive thing I can say is that this was a good year to have a baby. Since we’ll be filing 2021 taxes with a dependent, our dependent is entitled to a $1400 stimulus through the American Rescue Act, plus $300/mo through the Child Tax Credit. This won’t do much to offset our medical bills, and in all likelihood we’ll use it to start a savings account for Atlas.

Why am I writing all this? Because I think a lot of people don’t recognize just how insane healthcare is. I’m spelling out our experience because these factors are a huge deterrent for millenials and gen Z when considering parenthood. For people who find themselves unexpectedly pregnant, this could absolutely ruin them financially, leaving them floundering with no hope of getting ahead again. I need to stop here before I get into the politics.

We can afford to pay our medical bills, so we’re extremely fortunate. And we can afford to buy a house, so we’re extremely fortunate. But I wish that all my peers were as fortunate as we are, no one deserves to endure extreme stress about their living situation or pregnancy or parenthood or healthcare. These should be basic human rights.

Ahhh okay, let’s get back to our regular monthly recap.

Atlas started making some heart-melting smiles this month. I can’t get over it! What a cheesy boy.

We realized that our time in Beer City is drawing to a close, as is our nice weather, and we have yet to go to a brewery here (as residents). This was our first just-for-fun family outing! We finally found something that fits in the stroller’s cupholders.

Things went pretty well…until they didn’t. Atlas had a bit of a meltdown, but his dad has the magic touch when it comes to calming our baby!

Do you remember last month’s release doves? Well, I’ve got some bad news. There’s only one now. It hangs out on our railing. We’re not sure what happened to the mate, but at least it wasn’t us or our car that, uh, decoupled this pair.

Our new house has some interesting animals too. We saw a couple partridges, and it seems we have a whole host of black squirrels around.

On October 30th, we had an epic forecast for Northern Lights, with visibility as far south as Indiana and Ohio. I’ve wanted to photograph the aurora for a couple years, but a LOT of things have to go right in order to see a good aurora in Michigan. You need a high KP number forecast, clear skies, a place to view them from (which often means traveling an hour or two, probably to the coast), and a willingness to stay up all night (and if you’ve traveled there, where do you sleep?). And then you need the KP number and cloud cover to actually live up to the forecasts, which is a pretty rare occurrence.

However, with a KP forecast so high, the aurora should be visible even from our low latitudes in Michigan, and my parents happen to live on top of a hill with very low light pollution and very good visibility! And I’m up at all hours of the night with the baby anyway. So, in an act of true insanity, we packed up just enough to survive for one night away from home and committed to getting EVEN WORSE SLEEP than usual. The KP was supposed to be around 7, the highest we actually got was about a 5. So while I technically did see (and photograph) the Northern Lights, I don’t think it was worth the effort. You can see them barely above the horizon in the photo below. Also that barn was all lit up because it was 5am in farmland, and that didn’t help!

While we were there, I discovered my parent’s unusual fall decoration, the pumpkin pile!

Last but not least, Halloween! We dressed up just long enough to take a few photos. Atlas might be more interested in trick-or-treating when he can actually eat candy.

He’s not the snuggliest baby, but I find myself channeling my inner Enrique Iglesias these days: you can run, you can hide, but you can’t escape my love!

All in all, a pretty wild October. November is already looking pretty crazy as well, but after that we will hopefully have time to relax.