Quiet Night, Homey Night

Spending a quiet night cruising around on the internets a bit....kids all exhausted from baseball, marathon Lego creating and endless summer light...its just Elizabeth Mitchell and I in the house tonight. There are lullabies in the other room that I can't quite hear and a steady computer buzz in here....and giant stack of paper teetering on the desk next to me. Tomorrow is the day I sort every piece of paper we own and cull it all down into neatly arranged file boxes (or maybe even one!) and turn the office into a haven of neatness and order.

Today was the day that I painted more trim, washed more laundry and managed to actually re-hang the mirror by the front door....every little bit helps. So much to do around here. I am thinking maybe I'll throw one more load of laundry in before I head to sleep. I love the amazing modern magic of having in-house appliances that do chores for you while you are away. Brilliant. I've just started experimenting with the delayed cook settings on my oven. Its really kind of fabulous to stick a roast in there, add seasonings and set it to turn on an appropriate amount of time before you roll into the driveway from kid events with a bunch of whiney littles who are all starving. God bless the dude who invented that idea.

The garden has had a lot of rain and I am woefully behind on trimming, weeding, edging and mowing. I have to get the mower up and running tomorrow and get the lawn in decent shape. I think the pansies in the front planters have finally run the race too. Time to swap them out for some lobelia and marigolds or some other heat lover. They did their best...and now its on to the sweltering set.

The rabbits in the backyard have raised one baby and appear to have hatched the next one. The previous "baby" likes to munch clover in the backyard by the kids sandbox while we are out and then bolt in a panic when we all pull in the driveway. The newer, tinier fluffball of a kit is spending its time hiding out under the giant, lush hostas at the front of the house and runs in a manic dash whenever I do scary things like walk past on my way to turn on the hose. Love seeing them grow up in our yard and also love that the tax they take from our garden is tiny. They sometimes eat the leaves off of our bean plants but mostly they seem to prefer the clover in the lawn. (Yay for lawns that are more than just grass!!!!) I love this about city gardening. No deer. No woodchucks. No chipmunks. No moles. Just a couple of rabbits with a refined palette.

We have come into the weather where a quick run down to the beach after dinner sounds super good. Last night was our last night with A before he flew out this morning and we took a picnic of fridge leftovers, two towels to share and one boogie board and just ran out to the beach in time to take  short dip, eat dinner on the rocks of the point and watch the fishermen haul in sea robins. Then we poked around in the shore debris and collected shells to carry back to the car with us as we hiked up the beach path in the glow of fireflies. It was a great last night together. I hope the sunsets in California make him think of us, we're thinking of him over here. In my empty house tonight I'm thinking of little notes that we can send, ways to stay in touch and things to remember to tell him about tomorrow when we're chirping texts back and forth and having our Good Morning Talk over coffee and sausages. Lots of love, lots of connection, lots of dedicated energy. May you have the same!

Missed Sap Seasons

 Its Sugaring Season here in Southern Connecticut. Yet again, I have considered but then skipped tapping the maple trees here on our city lot. Only one of our trees is a sugar maple but we have several other maples, red and Norway on our city lot and any maple, as a learned a couple of years ago, can be tapped for sap! Maybe next year. I have to buy a few spiles and buckets and stop making plans to run away to the tropics screaming during the exact week that the sap runs hardest where I live. Heh. We leave for Florida soon.

 We are taking a class at one of the local nature centers (the kids and I, although I have to admit that I am a tag-along and the class is supposed to be for my sons) and today it involved a hike through the snow and sparkling sunshine to inspect the woods, chew birch twigs together (Mmmm!!!! Wintergreen!) and take peeks into the first few filling sap buckets. Next week we are promised tastes of maple syrup since they will be hopefully getting enough sap to start boiling it down. Even without any action, it was super fun to visit the sugar house and pat the stove and sit together on hay bales around it. Maybe next year is the year that I will put on my giant canning stock pot and keep the stove at a simmer while I lug buckets of pale golden water indoors triumphantly. I'm quite keen on the idea....I just keep forgetting every year. Maybe I should put a reminder in my electronic calendar that will go off mid-January and tell me that I want to tap trees. "Order Spiles and Scrub Out Canning Pot" it could say. Laura Ingalls, move on over.

 The boys and I got out our first big teeny piece jig-saw puzzle after dinner tonight. I was giving them lessons on sorting out the edge pieces and examining the cover illustration for small clues on the gray shag rug in front of the fireplace. So much fun. Dee took to it like a duck to water, I had to pry his little engineer hands off the project when it was time to take a break for the night. A's family are great puzzle lovers and my ended family love puzzles quite a lot although my own natal family group didn't do them much at all. I think my Mama found them tedious or boring or maybe the baby was always losing pieces and the dog was always eating a few and somehow that rattled her..... Anyhow, its kind of a new pasttime for me and I feel really happy about bringing some piece of A's childhood into our family activity.

 Joke books are huge this year, especially with our newly confident reader who is suddenly devouring everything written within reach. He's incessantly reading his new joke book that he got for Christmas and loving his new handwriting book which has him doing jokes for copywork. Such a hilarious, brilliant otter idea for a kid like mine.

Well, its time to go to bed. The quilts and down comforter are calling and my good man is waiting. I hope you all have a snug night and wake to a day full of challenges and excitement, little gifts and new lessons. I am thinking of you out there as we pass the middle of the week, as my tiny nephew recovers from his surgery this morning, as my garden sleeps under the snow, as I plot lesson plan in my mind, as the mending sits waiting in the downstairs closet and as we all recover, rest and rejuvenate under the half moon. xoxo!

Cold, Robots and Holiday Romoval

The winter cold has finally really found us. After a frozen pipe inventory (all bathroom sinks and toilets...) I pulled on extra layers to take the chickens their food scraps and also a new wad of straw for the next boxes and coop floor. Its amazing to me that the hens seem so fine in the cold but from what I've read they actually are in more danger during hot weather in the summer when we get into the 90 and 100 degree weather than they are from today's 9 degree chill. They might be fine running barefoot in the snow, but the girls still got warm water in their waterer and an extra handful of meal worms for a snack. The weather men tell us that there are days of super cold ahead of us so I'll be keeping a close eye on the hens, reading up on Pinterest recipes for breakfast porridge and turning our science walks into indoor reading time. Its still refreshing to go outside in weather that cold but it leaves you gasping and your hands burning after much less than a city block. Its reading weather.

Sometimes its nice to be the indoor pet.

I am slowly taking down Christmas. Today I am taking down the mini-tree on top of the bookcase and burning the branches that were on the mantle. I have put some of the special decorations from my grandparents collection on the mini tree. I like having them up out of the reach of little fingers but I love having them out and in sight of the whole family, being used and loved each year.

It has been grand to have them out but I'm really excited about putting Christmas away too. Tomorrow will be the day I attack the tree and haul it out to the curb! I'm intimidated and invigorated all at once at the prospect! All those pine needles! EEP!

The boys and I are painting a series of watercolor robots to hand on their bedroom walls. So much fun to be doing pen and ink outlines, non-realism, playful subjects and more cartoony lines. The boys are inspired and keep making new varieties of Lego robots. They are little figures, easy to slip into a coat pocket when running errands (even if Mommy does say to leave toys home) and just simple enough to teach to your little brother. Love finding them all over the house.

Seashore Cure

Well, we have....as I tell the boys....only two more sleeps until our family is all back in one location again. We're all good and ready for A to come home.

Today the weather was still insanely gorgeous. The day started off with a misty, fog that was stunning against the beautiful fall colors we still have and the fog burned off into a beautiful, if sometimes cloudy day. It almost felt like spring...the air was moist and warm and smelled of leaves and green things.

We worked in the yard a little. I raked leaves into the hen's new pen which made them tremendously happy. We finished the stone garden borders in the front of the house which I have been working on for about two years. SO AMAZING to have it all done! I keep looking out the window again to enjoy the accomplishment. I also laid a little more of the brickwork (mortarless) that I am using to edge our front walk. Should have taken a picture...didn't think of that. I am using salvage brick that is all red and the standard size but otherwise varies in style and design and mossy character. I love how its turning out. I have maybe one third of the walk left to finish although at the moment I am out of brick and need to keep my eyes peeled for more being thrown out somewhere.

Poor little Nib was sick again today. This is his second illness in the course of A's travel. I let him sleep in a long time and then we did some gentle things around the house and read a bunch of story books and then it was time for something cheering. The boys and I took a cloth bag for beach combing and headed to the ocean.

It was gorgeous. We saw a school of big silver fish, swimming and sometimes leaping out of the water. We found horseshoe crabs and ark clams and beautiful driftwood and more oyster shells than we could count. There are oyster beds right off the coast here so loads of their shells wash up. Some of them get to be enormous. I also thought to myself that maybe next time the chickens are getting low on their store purchased oyster shell, I could just take a hammer to some of the extra shells we bring home from the beach. Wonder if that would work?

By the time we got home Nib was feeling 200% better (there is no place better to recover than the seashore) and little Pom was taking his place with a clingy attitude and permanent bad mood. I have him draped across my lap right now while I type...his feverish little self snoring away on my knee.
Have to remember the seashore for the next time I get deathly ill...it seems like such a wonderful place to be sick. The air feels cheering, the sound of water is theraputic, there are shells for combing, there are birds wheeling over you and the endless water sweeping out in front.

Man, do kids get sick a lot. Good thing I have an immune system that can handle it! I can usually avoid getting sick and if I do fall prey I usually get a lighter version. I'm all for that.

Do lets learn invincibility!

Golden Days On The Mend

Spending lots of time at home today. Nib has a ridiculous predilection to carsickness and this morning I briskly bundled him into the car to rush off to a bible study and ended up paying the price for my rumbledy driving holding his head over a toilet in the nearest rest area. So much for that outfit. I am really hoping that it turns out to just be a one-off, motion-sickness incident although I do hear that there are tummy bugs about. Boo. 

 On the upside, the weather is absolutely perfection and he felt totally normal again after a morning of work in the garden in which I weeded the strawberries within an inch of their life and the boys completely dismantled the brick wall in another part of the garden. Vitamin D is worth a certain price. I'm awfully glad that dry stacked walls can be re-stacked.

 We've been picking pears off a roadside pear tree that I discovered not far from the house, the flavor is wonderful and they are great treats for tossing in the car as we head off to baseball practices. They're also nice in the juicer, which means we can even find uses for the cracked ones that split when they fall from the highest branches of the tree.

I realize that sounds amzingly Ma Ingalls of me but it truly isn't. It takes no time at all to stop for five minutes and pick pears up off the grass and I haven't canned a single, darned thing this year even though I meant to with deepest intention. This is year two of my great hiatus from tomato sauce and canned peaches. We didn't even pick one peach this year.

 All the things in the vegetable garden were looking a bit past so I trimmed them all down a bit, thinking that I was beginning the autumn clean-up. There was a lot of material for the compost pile and some of the plants (the tomatoes for instance) were trimmed down to mere shadows of themselves. I was totally shocked to go out today and discover that they have all rebounded and flushed new growth such that they look like big full plants again. We are having a second round of produce! There's new leaves on the kale, the tomatoes are blossoming again and even the dahlias have begun  blooming all over. Never give up.

 We laid low today, skipped most of our lessons, read library books, took extra naps, played in the sunshine and watched Cheaper By The Dozen for the first time. I hate feeling anxious about the spread of germs and worrying about being behind but I do like the comfort of knowing that we are masters of our own schedule and if we so deem, we can take a day. I keep reminding myself that this is one of the biggest reasons why we homeschool. I cherish that lucky gift.

 I was just texting A and telling him to hurry soon (he's working late tonight) because any little family emergency is so much better with two. Isn't that the truth? Its so much better to go through crazy with someone who loves you. We have had real troubles in our marriage but I can honestly say, that we both feel that way about each other these days. Sometimes you need to stick it out, put in your time, read, grow, change and get help with wildly tenacious energy. I feel incredibly lucky to be going through life with someone that is a problem solver and a grower.

 I am off to kids club now, running all the non-sick ones off to enjoy their little pals and hoping that we have a quiet evening here at home. May the germs abate, may the hope rise and may you feel that you are over the hump! Happy Wednesday!

The Bethlehem Fair, birthplace of holy memories

We just did our annual trip to the county fair, one of my very favorite, ever end-of-summer rituals. Little things can make wonderful traditions.

 We live in a size-able city that is a bedroom community of The Big Apple...that means that living around these parts is quite urban and rather devoid of fairs. In urban New England, people in our neck of the woods have mostly grown up attending carnivals which are like fairs, minus the agricultural bits. I love agricultural bits.

 I love the part about how you park in a tromped down hay field and walk forever to get to the gate. I love the quilts and the baking contests and the view from the top of the ferris wheel that is all trees and rolling hills and the occasional church steeple.

I love that you have to wear your old boots because the midway is just a dirt path that gets messy from so many feet tromping through it all week. I love that nobody thinks twice when our four year old has grass stains on both knees and our toddler is hanging off the fences by the livestock pens.

The fair was one of my childhood rituals. I grew up entering things I made, dreaming of owning a horse of my own after visiting velvet noses in the horse barn and spending my savings on the Tilt-a-Whirl and The Scrambler. I feel so right at the fair, lots of great memories there. Wonderful, precious to me, part-of-who-I-am, things-that-make-the-world-feel-right-memories. Its simple stuff and silly stuff, (the ridiculous carny patter on the midway still makes me laugh out loud and The Scrambler makes me giddy) but its so happy and so gritty and inspiring to me.

 I always come home and want to go to visit the area farms more and grow bigger carrots and teach the boys to knit and work more carefully on my pie edging. I love that fairs make me think of things that I can do myself and want to do them. I love that they make me proud of capability and relaxed warmth and my own state. I love how much the fair has become a celebration for my sons. Its super fun to share the things you love with the next generation.

And I have to say, my husband, who isn't an agricultural devotee has been very gracious about learning to appreciate this ritual that I love so deeply. Affectionate shout out to him for making me feel understood and helping the kids value things he knows matter so much to me.