sailing with kids – Cannons to Cruising

Officially Boat-less

This is a long-overdue update. SV Story Time is under new ownership! And as much as we miss the boat, a mental to-do list a mile long was instantly wiped away after we signed the paperwork. I am happy and grateful that something we loved so much will get the time and attention she needs to really shine. However, that mental space is quickly filling up and I’m trying not to get overwhelmed.

We have now turned our focus to the upcoming move to Washington. A mortgage is secured, job applications are sent out, and we are slowing putting the pieces together. BUT—holy hell, this house hunt. Prices in the Puget Sound have skyrocketed over the past few years and it’s giving me a panic attack. This is completely new territory for us, and I am afraid of making the wrong choice. Factoring in schools, possible commutes, location, construction, cost…it makes me crave the simplicity of before. Don’t like where we are at? Pick up and move. I know this is part of the process of putting down roots, but knowing it needs to happen vs. actually doing it has my mind in turmoil, and I’m not really sure how to fix it.

This past year has been a humbling experience. I say this as I check my inbox to receive yet another query rejection for my latest book (I think the count is in the 30s or 40s now). Some days, it feels like we have it all figured out. Others, it’s “Dear Author (ouch), I just don’t feel that this project is the right fit for me. Thank you for considering me for your manuscript and I wish you great success with your writing career.”

Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Love,

Taylor, Conor, W, and R

Officially the end of this chapter. Thank you to everyone who has followed along this transformative journey. It’s been a great 5 years.

A Re-Introduction

Hello and welcome to all our recent blog followers! Since arriving in Virginia, we have met some wonderful new people (while staying 6ft apart) who have inquired about life on Story Time. Considering I started this blog four years ago, I thought we were due for a re-introduction. Here are a few questions I’ve gotten over the past few weeks:

How long have you been living aboard and how many kids do you have?
- We have been living aboard Story Time for 3.5 years. She is a 2002 Catalina 380 and used to be called At Last. We bought the boat in New Bern, NC and moved it down to Camp Lejeune. During the past three years, we had our two kids, a girl ‘W’, and a new baby boy, ‘R’, while living aboard full-time.

Why is your boat called ‘Story Time’?
- I am an author. I have two books out right now that were published by The Wild Rose Press in 2018 and 2019. You can read more about Cloaked and Sonder Village here! It was also a fitting name because we have kids onboard. We plan on making and telling a lot of adventurous stories on this boat.

What do you write?
- I write mostly women’s fiction, sometimes with a hint of fantasy. I am halfway through a draft right now, but it has been on hiatus since summer due to the whole ‘giving birth’ thing, then moving states + getting out of the Marine Corps. It has been a busy few months! I’m about to pick it back up any day now, as soon as I get the motivation…any day now…

What’s your endgame with the boat?
- We will head down to the USVI in the near future. COVID changed a lot of plans, but we will still end up in the Caribbean.

Where do you put everything? Where does everybody sleep?
- We have embraced the minimalist lifestyle, so most of what we own is on the boat. We do have a small storage unit for Conor’s military gear and our seasonal wardrobes. Our boat has two separate ‘bedrooms’. Our daughter is in the v-berth, while baby, me, Conor, and Scout are in the aft cabin. We all have doors that close, thank god. Eventually the kids will share the v-berth.

How often do you sail?
- Not as much as we would like. In North Carolina, we tried to leave our slip at least once or twice per month. Our 10-day trip up to Virginia was our longest trek to date. We are very excited to rack up some nautical miles this summer on the Chesapeake though!

Do you plan to do this forever?
- Nope! We LOVE living aboard, our boat, and the opportunities it has brought us, but Conor put a firm 10-year deadline on this plan. Our dream is to keep the boat, but also have a house with a large kitchen one day. This lifestyle gives our kids an incredible childhood—wild and free—while also giving us the financial flexibility to travel. When the time comes, I want W and R to use the boat to go have their own adventures as they enter adulthood.

Anything else you’re wondering about? Please put it in the comments or shoot me an email on our contact page! I am happy to help, especially if you are thinking about a major lifestyle shift along these lines. Tiny homes, RV’s, minimalism with kids—I wanna hear about it! I’m also planning to revamp the layout of the blog in the coming weeks. I never thought it would have so many entries!

Love,

Taylor, Conor, W, and R

He’s Here!

Baby R1

And baby makes 4. Baby brother arrived this week just one day after his due date, and we are over the moon that he is finally here!

Labor was much quicker and easier this time around. After a 17-hour labor with W, less than 8 hours with baby boy felt like a dream. We got to the hospital in the middle of the night, I was already 8cm, was whisked up to the delivery room, and a little later I pushed for 15 minutes and he was out! Not to say it didn’t hurt, but I had so much more energy this time around and knew what to expect.

Giving birth during a pandemic was a little different. Options for pain meds were limited. I was able to use just nitrous oxide for pain management the first time around, but for this birth the hospital said it was epidural or nothing due to Covid risk. I opted for nothing, especially when the anesthesiologist introduced herself as the “student anesthesiologist”. Hell no. We were hoping to bring our doula in (zachthedoula.com) but because of the 1 support person rule, he couldn’t come to the hospital with us but helped me labor at home.

Baby boy came out alert and healthy. My recovery has been easy, and I feel almost back to my old self after just a few days. He was back to his birth weight by day 3, so high-fives all around!

W has completely embraced her role as big sister. She calls R “my baby!” and holds him every second she gets. It hasn’t been all smooth sailing, though, because she still has those big toddler emotions to process and has been taking it out on Mom and Dad. We are trying to find our routine and new normal, but we are tired. Up all day with a toddler, up all night with a newborn.

This whole 2 kids thing is no joke. At least everything we need is always within arms reach on the boat! I do feel like we are just doing tiny living and not liveaboard life because we haven’t used the boat for her intended purpose since July. This season of life is so fleeting, though, and soon our tiny newborn days will be over forever. Trying to find moments to embrace the here and now of this stage and freeze the memories.

Wishing our families and friends could be here with us to celebrate the new arrival. Thank you, everyone, for your love and support.

Love,

Taylor, Conor, W, and R

Well, We Did Stay at Home!

Technically 🙂

We spent the weekend away from the docks and anchored out overnight with Minoh. 12 mph winds, clear skies, and 75 degrees—it felt like a dream! We anchored across from a private beach and made good use of our dinghy.

anchorminoh

anchoroutdinghy

In the past, Conor has usually been so busy with work in the spring that we don’t start getting into our sailing groove until Memorial Day weekend. Thanks to the quarantine and his recent work-from-home schedule, we were able to get Story Time into shape much faster this year and get out onto the water by April. It has been an absolute joy to take advantage of the warmer weather before the humidity hits. Good thing too because our sailing window is also going to end much earlier this summer. We are adding another crew member! Baby #2 is arriving in August.

babybump — Baby’s current interests include dock yoga and kicking the crap out of me.

Love,

Taylor, Conor, W, and Baby

End of Quarantine

We reached the end of our quarantine period on Saturday! No COVID-19 for us. We celebrated by finally taking the boat out for the first time this spring. Our last sail was in November, so Story Time had four loooonnngggg months stuck at the dock.

A great aspect about boating is that it is social distancing at its finest! I think boat owners naturally seek isolation, solitude, and quiet out on the water. It is the perfect activity especially when everything around us is closed. Our engine fired right up, all systems still worked, and we dropped anchor for a few hours across the river.

As this pandemic drags on, we feel lucky that we can still do what we love as a family. We are thankful to all be together, happy and healthy. Wishing everyone we know the same fortune.

Love,

Taylor, Conor, and W

2019 Recap Video

This is our third recap video! Check out 2017 and 2018 if you need a blast from the past before watching 2019!

So much has happened this year—Conor took a trip to Norway and also graduated from WTI. I published my second book and wrote a third. W is speaking in complete sentences and scooter-ing down the docks like a madwoman. I can’t believe we have a 2-year-old!

This year was also filled with visits from family and friends, epic sails and sunsets, and (probably) too many cocktails.

Here’s the wrap up! The accompanying song is “Wars” by the Strumbellas (thanks for a great time, Nashville!)

Through A Child’s Eyes

We had a fantastic boating experience with another family this weekend. We invited one of my writer friends, her husband, and their two kids to come sailing with us on Sunday morning. This was their first time on a sailboat, and they were eager to learn!

Aspects of boat life that have slowly become mundane to us over the last two years were put into a new and refreshing light when explaining them to a six and eight-year-old. Getting off the dock became more than throwing lines and getting out to sail as quickly as possible. It turned into a fascinating explanation of WHY for everything. Why are there so many ropes? Why do you tie them that way? Why do we throw that over there? Why does the engine make that noise? Why do you have to look for water coming out the back of the boat? A five-minute process turned into twenty, but it enriched the experience for everyone.

rope1 — This pic is my favorite (posted with permission from his mama!)

Out on the water, the kids steered the boat, learned how to trim the sails, and found out how the navigation equipment worked. We even hung out with some dolphin friends!

dolphin2

dolphin1 — So close you could touch them

Though he has had a great career in the Marine Corps, I really think teaching will be somewhere in my sweet husband’s future. Watching him interact with W fills my heart, but also seeing his ‘teacher mode’ with older kids makes me excited for the years to come. I can’t wait until W is old enough to go from “keep her from falling off the boat” to “active crew participant”.

It just amazes me how kids soak up knowledge and dive into new activities without hesitation. They aren’t afraid to do it wrong or ask questions. This makes sailing even more enjoyable because it snaps adults out of autopilot. Kids make you live in the moment; to stop and think about what you are doing, and most importantly, WHY you are doing it. And the answer is usually, “Because it’s fun!”

Love,

Taylor, Conor, and W

How to Sail with a Baby

memorial day 3

After 8 long months at the dock, we finally went sailing again! Memorial Day weekend was just too gorgeous to ignore, and the water was calling to us. It was the first time with our little family of 3 (plus Scout, of course) and we had a blast. We weren’t as rusty as I feared we would be. Story Time sailed like a dream, and seeing her sails up filled me with such joy and contentment.

memorial day

While we were prepping the boat after a stagnant winter, I was jittery with nerves. How in the world could we safely sail with an infant? Were we negligent parents to even consider doing so? Let me tell you, seeing my baby girl gaze in wonder out at the water while safely strapped to her dad made all doubts fly out the window. Here’s how we sailed with a baby, and cardinal rules we have decided to follow:

1. Wait until baby has good head control. For us, that was 5 months. W can roll over and is close to sitting up unassisted. She is huge for her age and has strong body control. I definitely wouldn’t take a baby out who is younger than 3 months, but that is personal preference.

2. Pick a day with perfect weather. We had a max of 10 mph winds, and it made for such a calm experience. If there was any chance of high winds or storms, we would not have gone out.

3. Go over your casting off and docking steps. Who is doing what, when, and with which line. Review it over and over until you’re confident with your plan of action. Worrying about the baby took up massive space in my brain, so it was necessary to be able to move without second-guessing myself as we left the marina and came back.

4. Stay local. Don’t push your luck and risk a fussy and unhappy baby who is hot and tired. We only sailed around New River and were gone a total of 4 hours. As W gets older, we will go for longer stretches, but this was a good start.

5. Babywear. Seriously. We have a Lillebaby carrier that can be adjusted to both me and Conor, and W loves it. Conor wore W during the sail because he was at the helm the whole time. I like to run the sails, so I needed to be free to maneuver. This brings me to rule #6:

6. Baby does not leave the cockpit, ever, except to go down below into the cabin with Mom to eat/stretch out/etc. If she is not in her Lillebaby, then she is in her Stohlquist infant lifejacket.

7. For casting off and docking, baby goes in her crib down below. She protested a little when we were casting off, wondering why she couldn’t be in on the action, but it was better for her to fuss in a safe place for 5 minutes while we got underway. While we were docking, she was quite content to wait for us and babbled in her crib. Her crib is strapped down in the v-berth, and won’t move.

8. Leave and return while your marina is open and there are staff members to help you. It is quicker and smoother than trying to do it with just two people. I’m a fan of whatever makes life easier with a baby.

memorial day 2

All in all, it was easier than I expected it to be. I had thought that we might need to rig up some sort of car seat contraption in the cockpit to put W in while underway, but once we came up with these rules, it was pretty much unnecessary. We are looking forward to more adventures this summer, especially anchoring out. If you have any additional tips for sailing with babies, please post them in the comment section!

Love,

Taylor, Conor, and W