Moral Support from One of My Sailor/Maker/Mama Heroes

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Last updated on September 4th, 2019 at 06:10 pm

I once had a baby on a boat.

No, I didn’t *have* the baby on the boat, we moved aboard when he was about 1 year old.

People thought we were nuts. We probably were, but not for trying to raise a kid on a boat.

Before the move, I did a lot of research on liveaboard families, and it turns out there are a lot of them! Cruisers forums are full of threads about various homeschooling programs, child-sized personal flotation devices (PFDs, known to lubbers as “lifejackets”), and even instructions for securing an infant car seat to the structural elements of the boat to keep baby secure in a seaway.

I also spoke to liveaboard families locally (in Morro Bay, CA, where I was at the time), and asked them for their tips and advice.

In the end, it wasn’t the liveaboard life that got us–it was the boat itself. She was lovely. She was ancient. She was moldy, and she leaked. (Rainwater, not seawater.)

So here we are, ashore again, me and my Little and our resident Bosun, but we still keep an eye on the “baby on a boat” scene. One of my favorite bloggers of that genre is Charlotte of Rebel Heart. She blogged the other day about preschool and the ex-pat life, and I was moved to comment. A brief conversation ensued, which eventually led to this remark:

I can’t tell you how much those simple, brief words buoyed me up when I read them. As much as I love working from home, it is HARD work. Some days I feel like giving up. Sometimes I think no one will ever want what we sell, or that everyone who wanted one has already bought one. Some days the shop feels really stagnant and product evolution is slow.

And then I get comments like this.

I’m reminded how far our shop has come, how hard I’ve worked to become a better photographer, how many little tweaks we’ve made in product design and packaging in response to customer input…We’ve grown so much in these past couple of years, and more good stuff is yet to come.

Can you think of  a time when someone said just the right thing and pulled you back into reality? Tell me about it in the comments!