I am Dotchi Latham, the author of The Baker’s Acres. It’s pronounced DOT CHEE. Like Dot, the little thing at the end of each sentence. And Chi, like Tai Chi. It’s not Doh-she, or Dotsy or Doh-chee. It's not my real name, it's a pseudonym I write under because I think my real name is blah and boring. Dotchi is my nickname from when I was a baby and Latham is my maiden name.
Starting The Baker's Acres
I started The Baker’s Acres in March 2003 while sitting at home dying of boredom after my hysterectomy. I had nothing else to do and ran across BlogSpot (which is now Blogger) and created my own blog. At first it was some lame name like “Blog Dotchi”. I wanted a cool sounding name and at the time we lived in Tennessee on 8 acres of land in the middle of nowhere. I do not remember how I came up with the name but Baker’s Acres is what the blog name became and stayed that way until we moved to San Diego.
New Name, Same Blog
In San Diego, “The Baker’s Acres” did not really fit when we lived on a 30-foot yacht at a marina. I eventually changed it to “The Baker’s Anchor” but I was not in love with the name then either. When my sons and I moved to NW Montana, I changed the name back to The Baker’s Acres and no matter where I live, it will keep that name. It is just the name I love.
A Little about me
As for me, I was born a Navy brat and grew up on Navy bases for most of my childhood. I got pregnant when I was 15 years old and delivered a little boy 12 weeks early. Brandon died in my arms when he was five days old and I swirled into a depression. I thought I would never get out of it until my mom found The Compassionate Friends group in Tidewater. They would become my godsend and I eventually learned to live with his death by writing poetry and short stories.
My Writing Start
I have been writing since I was 16 years old. My first published anything was in Parade magazine. It was a 100 word answer to a question they had asked. That gave me the ego I needed to start looking into writing. Of course, back then the Internet wasn’t a huge thing. E-mail took 10 minutes to delivery, the Internet was nothing fancy at all and there weren’t really any writing helps that I could find. When I couldn’t find out how to write for magazines, I resigned myself to a life of child care.
Other Jobs besides Writing
Then I worked in a daycare center and promptly changed my mind and went to retail and house cleaning. I dabbled in waitressing and found I am just not as serious a person as I need to be for customer care. I ended up buying a make-up kit, my mom made me an outfit, and I became Bubbles the Clown! I was still clowning, working retail, waitressing and house cleaning when I got married to the man I feel in love with in 1994.
Married Life
Six days after getting married and having a honeymoon to meet my in-laws, I kissed my new Navy husband goodbye and he left on a six-month cruise. Five months into it, he came back on emergency leave because his dad was in the hospital. I am sure we conceived THE DAY he got back. We had a beautiful little boy named Miles who was in the NICU for 6 days. He now looks like a linebacker and is taller than I am!
My husband got out of the Navy because he did not want to watch our baby grow up in pictures. We lived in Georgia for six months then moved to Tennessee in 1996. We had another baby boy is 1998. He was born a month early but was definitely NOT a preemie! He weighed 7 lbs 12 ounces and came out crying. He is now a healthy kid who is almost as tall as I am!
Moving to the Baker's Acres
We bought 8 acres of land in Eastern Tennessee and lived there for the rest of our time in TN. While there, I mostly stayed to myself. That is a long story I will share later. I homeschooled our children and got a job here and there. Mostly, my husband worked and I stayed home. In 2001, after 9/11, the unemployment rate went through the roof and we became pretty broke. I went to school to become a Certified Nurse Aide and started working in a nursing home 65 miles from home. We struggled for a while with my working full time and my husband trying to start a business with a business partner. Since was still in the reserves, the Navy recalled him for Active Duty for Special Work. He left for San Diego and I stayed in Tennessee with the kids.
Moving to the Baker's Anchor
What was supposed to be two weeks turned into a month, then two months. He was trying to decide whether or not he should go back into the Navy or if he should continue pursuing his business back in Tennessee when his business partner made the decision for him by closing the bank account, taking all the files and trying to shut of our phones. With no business still going in Tennessee, he decided to stay and let the Navy extend his orders again and again.
When we first arrived, we did not have a live aboard slip yet so our weeks went something like this. Monday morning: get up, drive the RV to an RV park and set up. Stay at the park all week. Friday morning: Get up, pack the RV, drive back to the marina and stay on the boat all weekend. Occasionally there was a week or two where we paid for a guest slip at the marina we wanted to live at and stayed on the boat for a couple weeks.
Living Aboard: Not the Paradise I thought it would be
I hear people say how cool it would be to live on a boat and if it were just us as a couple with no kids, I could see it being okay. But frankly, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I had never been on a sailboat before much less lived on one full time. With four people and no privacy, my marriage fell apart and my family was miserable. The smog air in Southern California had my kids going into asthma attacks constantly and we were all on two different inhalers every day. We spent too many hours sitting in the ER on nebulizer treatments because we could not breathe.
To top it all off, I am allergic to the heat and sensitive to sunshine. Too much heat and I go into an Angio Edema attack, start swelling and feel downright sick. Too much sunshine and I start itching like I have rolled in poison ivy and start breaking out in hives. Either I lived on Benadryl and various other anti-histamines or we spent the days at restaurants and Wal-Marts or just sitting in the van with the air conditioning running. We went for rides a lot just to get out of the heat. I was miserable and swollen all the time and my kids could not breathe. What was supposed to be paradise was turning into a living hell.
I hear the comment a lot, “but you lived in Tennessee and it’s hot.” Yes it is. However, I had air conditioning and lived near a spring fed; ice-cold creek that I could jump in to cool down fast and we had shade!
So living on a boat turned out to be like an extended camping trip from hell. The bathroom was a ¼ miles away, the toilet on the boat had to be carried out every day and emptied a little further than that and cooking on a boat became a chore. Everything took three to four times longer to do than it would in a house and I soon began to realize the whole live aboard lifestyle just was not for me. I had no space on the boat for our things and I was basically living out of the van and sleeping on the boat. My marriage was falling apart and I felt like I was losing another best friend.
Moving North
Through tears, my husband and I decided we just were not working well living in such small confined spaces, the kids needed a place they could live where they could breathe without inhalers, I needed a support network… but he could not leave the Navy again because we were so far in debt from our years without health insurance. We agreed that the boys and I would move to Montana to live near my family and we would travel back and forth for visits.
In November 2008, we had one more family fling at Knott’s Berry Farm and then the boys and I boarded a train for our home. We have lived in Montana ever since. I started working as a CNA in the local nursing home and the boys went to public school for a year. We started homeschooling again after that and started making more trips to visit their dad. Our relationship has healed and we are friends again. He has helped us through the rough times and we try to make sure the holidays are split between here and there.
Blogging as a Hobby
During all this, I dabbled in writing and worked on getting a career going for myself. It has turned into more of a hobby because while I like writing, I do not make much money doing it. I do enjoy it a lot and I have continued with it, although not as much as I would like. My health issues became a huge problem until the doctors finally figured out what was wrong and started treatment. Both my kids have a series of health issues also that need monitoring. So most of the time between working full time, homeschooling my kids, traveling and dealing with medical emergencies and health problems, my writing wasn't getting much attention.
Blog On!
In June 2011, I hurt my back at work and I have been on work comp ever since. I figured, while I heal, I will work on my writing, blog and maybe start on that book I have always wanted to write. My goal is to keep this blog more active, even after I am finally able to go back to work.
