Laundry

Sometimes you get into the swing of things taking a little bit longer due to the fact you live on a boat, and don't realize quite how much time is being spent with those chores until you spend a few days in a house with all the amenities.


Friends graciously offered Justin and I to stay at their cabin in the woods of New Hampshire, anytime we want. We have been wanting to get away this winter before the baby arrives, and Justin was able to finagle his schedule at work so that we had a long weekend to do so.


We had a fantastic time, and it's just such a beautiful spot. We went up with no plans whatsoever, but did bring our laundry, a few games, and of course, Willie!





Much of the laundry that we brought up was the new cloth diapers that we have. I was told to prewash them - some of them need it so that the cotton absorbs better, and some of them needed it for the fabric (PUL) to seal. Really, this was my first lesson in living aboard that laundry takes a hell of a long time to do when you live on a boat!

There are three ways of doing laundry if you live aboard. 1) You hand wash. 2) You use the marina's laundry facilities. 3) You go to a laundromat/friend's house/family's house. Over the years, we have used a combination of the three.

When I hand wash, I have to go into the lazarette, pull out life jackets, extra dock lines, and fenders, and pull the 5 gallon bucket out. I then have to empty the bucket, which usually has more lines in it, then I generally put everything back where it came from. I fill the bucket full of water, add soap, swish it around, and then add the clothes. I have a plunger that is used solely for laundering purposes, and I generally bring the bucket inside and set it under the table, where I plunge our clothes for a couple of minutes. Throughout the day, I will continue to plunge them as I walk by the bucket. Once I've decided that I've squished them enough, I dump the water, rinse the clothes, and hang them on the lifelines to dry. (Note: This must be done on a sunny day, otherwise the bucket gets thrown in the head and the rinsing/drying happens the next day).


When I wash clothes at the marina, I have to load up an Ikea bag or two (those things are enormous) and, depending on how much laundry I have, I may or may not have to scope out a dock cart. In the winter, this is an easy task because we are docked right next to the drop off point. In the summer, it's a whole other story. At Constitution Marina, dock carts can be hard to come by in the summer, and sometimes you have to walk the entirety of the marina just to beg one off of someone. Once you get the cart, you check your pockets twenty times to ensure that you have enough quarters and lug up all of your laundry to the washers and dryers, hoping like mad that someone else isn't using them. After the 15 minute walk to get to the washers, you almost always find that at least two of the three of them are full. As long as there's one, you're ok, but you have to be diligent to promptly switch your laundry over so that it doesn't get stolen by someone else....otherwise you'll only get one load of laundry in that day. Then there's always the issue - do I walk the 15 minutes back to the boat, only to turn around again to switch my laundry over? I usually bring everything I need to also take a shower, so that I can wait for it. Anyway, you get my point. Laundry takes forever when you have to do it at the marina, and you had better not expect to get much else done that morning/afternoon/evening.

The laundromat isn't too terrible, actually. You just have to fill those ikea bags, find that dock cart, and bring the laundry up to the car, then reverse the process when you get home.

So, when we got to our friend's place and the washer and dryer were in the very same living space, it was absolutely amazing and it suddenly dawned on me that we (boat people) are a little bit crazy for doing any laundry at all!

This has also made me realize that cloth diapering on a boat is going to be a little bit insane, so after much researching, we will be going with diaper covers and flat fold diapers for the majority of our cloth diapering. The flats are a square piece of fabric that you fold in various ways to cover the baby's bum. The great thing about them is they're way easy to hand wash, and they dry really, really quickly. I really think it's the only way that I will sanely cloth diaper the baby on this boat. We also have about a dozen of what are called pocket diapers and those have microfiber inserts, but both the cover and inserts must be washed each time, and they don't hand wash as easily, nor do they dry nearly as fast.

Hanging the flats to dry after their first, second and third prewash.

Newborn size diaper covers, thanks to Serena and Tig!

Pocket diapers and microfiber inserts. Notice that the snaps make them a one-size-fits-all diaper.

I realize that this is an insanely long post to discuss the ''simple'' topic of laundry, but I think fellow liveaboards will totally understand it, and dirt dwellers might get a small understanding of just how simple their lives really are! (And for the record - I am totally NOT complaining...I just found it interesting enough to write about).

Preparing the Boat for a Baby

I am nearing the 30 week mark of my pregnancy, and that means one thing. We have to get this boat ready for a baby. I will be considered full-term in 7 weeks, so at the very latest we should have the boat entirely prepared for her arrival by then!

Slowly, we have been cleaning up the boat in preparation (and I mean really slowly...we really have to do a major overhaul sooner than later!) The quarterberth went from being our storage bin to being a storage bin in the back and a sort of ''nursery'' in the front. I use the term nursery very lightly. Basically, we bought a couple of plastic drawers and filled them with her clothes and cloth diapers, blocking off the rest of the quaterberth from view. (As you can see from the pictures, I am in the process of painting the ugly white plastic, and covering the front of the drawers with pretty fabrics).


The nav desk is right there, so Justin has rigged it so that the top of the desk is completely flat. We covered that up with a pad, and that is the changing table. Above that, I took some netting and hung it up with a few books in it.



One thing that I have heard fantastic things about was the tummy tub, and I really wanted to give it a try with our little one. If you do a search on youtube, you will find some fantastic videos of babies LOVING these. Some people find them a little creepy (you have to hold their head up at all times, at least until they are able to on their own), but they're quite amazing to me in that the babies really seem to absolutely love being in them. A lot of people ask why we didn't just buy a bucket, but we have been assured that the tub is not just any ol' bucket, so we trusted what we heard and purchased one. Thankfully, it was a tiny bit smaller than I had anticipated, but that still didn't mean we had a place to put it! For now, the best place we've come up with is above the nav desk/changing table. I attached a couple of small ropes and a clip to make it easy to hang, so we'll see what we think of it up there! So far it hasn't been in the way, but we may find that it gets in the way of the changing table. Hard to say, but for now it works.

Every baby needs a fire extinguisher hanging in their nursery...

On the starboard side, we moved what had once been our olive oil/balsamic vinegar/spaghetti noodle/wine storage back to the galley, and have replaced that with frequently used baby items (or what we assume will be frequently used). We have the Ergo and slings (thanks Jon and Kelli!), some baby washcloths, a few toys, a bottle, and a couple of soothie pacifiers.

One of my favorite stuffed animals (a puppet, actually) from when I was a little girl.

Also, we will be hanging the Happy Hangup (thanks again, Jon and Kelli!) on the starboard side, over a cushion (just in case *something* would happen, she would only fall a couple of inches, instead of a couple of feet!) We are hoping that she likes it, and expect that it will become a fairly permanent fixture over there, at least for awhile.

The awesome owl picture is from Auntie Angie, and the 'welcome baby' sign (to the left of the owls) is from Grandma Caron. Grandma also made her the cute teddy bear that is in the Happy Hangup!

For the times where we'd like her in bed with us, we purchased a bassinet (super cheap on craigslist!) which will probably go on my side of the bed, or we can move it into the main salon during the day if she seems to prefer sleeping in that instead of the happy hangup. I'm sure she'll want to change things up!

Justin's favorite stuffed animal from when he was a boy.

It's a work in progress, but we are pretty happy with the way the boat is looking. A few things will have to be tied down if we want to go out for a sail, but the great thing is that we should still be able to go out just fine. We expect that we'll get out on the water far less in the next year than we would like, but at least we'll still have the option. We won't be filling our boat with random baby crap that we'll never use, because we just can't afford to, spatially.

I expect that many of my posts in the upcoming months (years?) will be far more baby related, but I will work my hardest at relating those posts to living on a boat. I have been following many boat family blogs that are very entertaining to read, and I hope that some of our ideas will be inspirations to others that living on a boat with a baby isn't a terribly strange or scary thing to do.

I expect many of Justin's posts in the upcoming months will be of the new boat and our adventures with that. We haven't been down to work on it much lately, as we just haven't had the time/money (especially money) to do much to it. It's slightly frustrating, but sometimes, that's just the way it goes.

And since I haven't posted one in awhile - here's a picture of the growing belly!

It's a Girl!

We have known for 2 1/2 months now, but wanted to keep it a secret. Turns out, secret keeping isn't really that fun for me, and it's definitely not fun for Justin.

But, after hiding this secret for so long, we decided that we needed a good time to tell everyone, so Christmas it was! We told our families first, then announced it to our friends.

We've had two ultrasounds now, and they're pretty positive that we are having a little girl!

Also - the 3D ultrasounds are fairly creepy, but they did one for us at the last appointment. It's fun to have a small idea of what our little girl looks like...but it won't be long now before we know for sure. Mind you, there are strange shadows that show up in these pictures, but you can still make out the facial features pretty well!

another photo of the new crew member

Again, not a boat related post, but a very exciting photo to us!

Guppy

We haven't been doing much sailing lately. Blame the morning sickness, blame the full-time job that Justin acquired, blame anything you want...but we just haven't made it out much lately.

Obviously, it's made for a quiet blog as of late and I feel terrible. I am hoping that once winter kicks back up, I will be more inclined to update more often. We'll be transforming our two-person boat into a baby-friendly boat, and while I don't expect that we will be making a lot of changes to Madrigal, I'm sure we'll have things to update about. Also, it's just easier to update the blog when it's blustery outside and we're holed up in our little shrink wrap cave.

In the meantime, I am excited to say that we saw our little guppy via ultrasound, and all is well.

Week 8

We're having a baby!

Today marks week 8 of Jenny's pregnancy. We are both very happy. We discovered our news right around week 4 and we have been frantically adjusting our plans. A couple months ago we had pretty much decided that we were going to cruise Madrigal south this fall... unless Jenny becomes pregnant, which of course she did. Really, the timing is perfect. We can stay in Boston for the winter, and baby is due to arrive sometime in late March. Our seasonal winter slip will end in May. After that... who knows!? That is the big question right now. We certainly plan to raise kiddo aboard the boat. We've tossed around the idea of getting a bigger boat... but maybe not for a couple years. Dunno. We would like to come back to Thayer's Landing next year, but Constitution is closer to my museum job (and lots pricier), but a mooring sounds cheap and fun (maybe not with a baby!). Life is kinda chaotic right now, but in a totally fun way. We are mostly just trying to figure out the where/when/how for all this baby stuff. The good news is we have a good place to spent the pregnant winter, with lots of friends and good medical facilities nearby, we have insurance and good jobs and indexing is going great... So life is good and baby is exciting.

In the meantime we've done a bit of sailing. We took a trip to Gloucester for a couple days then through the Annisquam River to the north side of Cape Ann. There we visited Ipswich Bay Yacht Club for an evening and returned home the next day. Jenny's morning sickness was battling her will to sail, but she prevailed. I can't get pics to upload right now, so hopefully sooner than later.

-Justin