March 28 and 29: Spring = Mud

Some of our dear friends moved to Virginia eight years ago on the 29th, and they said that when they got to Albemarle County, the land was gorgeous: the forsythia was in bloom, the redbuds were out, the dogwoods, the spring green.

It's not like that this year. It has been grey and rainy, which means, at least here, muddy. Since I don't have to go outside a whole lot, it doesn't bother me too much, but for Phil, out sloshing around feeding cows and trying to set up his office, it's a bummer.

Despite the mud, we moved the IKEA bookcase up to Phil's office. He could certainly use the extra book storage space, and my bedroom has returned to a state of rest.

Speaking of rest, Phil has been weary lately. He skipped using the neti pot for some weeks, and we wonder if maybe that contributed. (To neti pot: run warm salt water through the nasal passages. It hurts. I understand why he doesn't want to do it. But living out here, with molds and pollens and dust, our doctor friend recommended that should be part of the daily routine. Only Phil actually does it, though.)

When we moved to Virginia, I had suggested that we could name the farm "Rest and Be Thankful," the name of an estate in one of the world's most delightful books, The Sherwood Ring. At the time, he thought it sounded too much like a retirement community ... or maybe even a cemetery. But I asked him again this week, and he laughed and said that that name doesn't sound so bad anymore.

Phil continues to move things out of the office space. He's getting close to being done with the bathroom vanity, but we never bought a faucet and we are also still lacking some pipes and fittings. The mirror/medicine cabinet we bought for over the sink is much too heavy for the single stud, besides being dimensionally much too large for the space. Maybe we'll hang it over the end of the bathtub, just to make sure we have some "medicine cabinet" like space for the various essential oils and salves and homeopathic remedies. Maybe not.

Jadon has been teaching Abraham chess. Abraham is a good sport, and, for a rank beginner, a worthy opponent. And a friend gave us a game called Suspend, a "hanging, balancing game" and all four brothers and Phil vie for the chance to play. Abraham is good at that one, too.

Isaiah has tried a few alternative building methods from Steven Caney's Ultimate Building Book. The author suggests numerous low-cost creative construction methods. Isaiah tried making jello jigglers (using plain gelatin and cherry juice—) to make an igloo. I don't think it worked very well, but he was occupied for quite some time. He also tried dipping the ends of Q-tips in rubber cement. We have the purchased and expensive Geomags that fulfill almost the same purpose, but I didn't mention that and, again, he had fun.

Joe has begun his stick-figure art phase of development. ("Mommy, I like art now!")

And Caleb had a single tooth break through on Friday. He might have a second now, but he is good at keeping his mouth shut, so I'm not sure. Thankfully, I don't remember any increase in fussiness. With Jadon, I remember slathering his gums with tubes and tubes of teething gel (I'm sure artificially colored and flavored—what was I thinking?!). Some children are in extreme pain when teething, but he hasn't needed a dose of homeopathic Chamomilla for teething pain yet.

I've been experimenting with different sleep patterns. This week I have tried going to bed between 1 and 2am, sleeping four or five hours, and getting up for an hour or two of additional quiet work time. I might nap an hour before breakfast, and then take a good nap in the afternoon.

I like that I have some solid hours to work without any noise or distraction. The biggest downside I've noticed, at least after a week, is that I have multiple waking up times, and those can be disorienting. If I feel particularly dazed in the afternoon, I play the piano (more poorly than usual) and that helps my brain transition.

I loved watching most of the March Madness game between UVA and Michigan State. That was a little treat to myself, to sit up and enjoy it. And I sort of helped host a baby party for a friend from church yesterday. It was another little treat to hear how God is at work in our lives.

And, finally, we were given a gift from our cows, too. Phil put the calf back in his pen on Friday morning. He milked Friday night and he milked Saturday and we don't think there was any reduction in production. And, better, it appears that the calf somehow took care of Bianca's mastitis. We have great rejoicing!

March 26 and 27: Always Closer to Completion

Bianca started showing signs of mastitis about a week ago. That was my issue with her a few years back: she would get a low level mastitis and it just would not leave. Since we're dumping her milk anyway, Phil figured he could introduce the calf back.

Problem: she refused to let her calf nurse. But Charity, who is milking about a gallon a day, was happy to let the baby eat.

Hmm. Maybe we will not be flush with milk anymore.

Farming is always complex to figure out.

We got another IKEA order yesterday. God bless those delivery guys who tracked through our mud. The boys were ecstatic to have some beautiful new tempera paints: Joe, Abraham, and Isaiah all enjoyed those.

The older boys tried to put together the rocking chair.

That was a bit rough, but with Phil's help, they managed in the end.

I had thought it could go in the playroom, but I think it makes it too crowded. I had thought it could also possibly go in the reading nook, but the aesthetics were all wrong. But by the boy's window: perfect! Now I can read to them in the evenings in comfort.

Isaiah put together a bench for the table. No one will need to sit on a bucket for a chair anymore!

I had realized about a month ago that, though I ordered a bookcase for the bedroom, I probably didn't need it. With the built-ins, I have adequate storage space. But we had the bookcase, and it was heavy and inside, and I didn't speak up well enough. I guess I figured it would be okay.

But it is a cheap piece of functional furniture, now sitting unused in my bedroom. And my bedroom had a week there of such loveliness. I have a ridiculous amount of angst every time I walk in. I catch my breath in horror. I don't think it will grow on me. We'll move it out when the ground isn't quite so muddy. If I need it someday, we have it here, but until we need it, it doesn't need to live in my bedroom.

Phil put together a tall cabinet for the bathroom, with a full-length mirror! I can see my whole self! (It was a bit rough trying to support it, since the wall it's on has a pocket door and, thus, no studs, but Phil, problem solver extraordinaire, figured it out.)

Phil has been working on the bathroom vanity and medicine cabinet today. Again, nothing is ever easy. He had to get creative in how to support the vanity. I'm not sure what he'll do about the medicine cabinet.

But we were blessed! I had a fun visitor come in the morning and Phil had a fun visitor come in the afternoon. And then we had fun fellowship at Bible study in the night, and one of the new attendees just got saved on Sunday. She was glowing! Feel the joy of the angels rejoicing! Thanks be to God.

March 24 and 25: Home Days

Monday morning Phil worked on cleaning out the storage trailer. He built himself a desk, and moved boxes of books. He has many more boxes of books yet to move.

We had a much-loved visitor come Monday afternoon. He made good use of our miracle glider and recliner chair. Although it was chilly out, the boys played outside for a few hours, and then they watched a movie, letting us visit with minimal interruption. It was a good day. They are good boys.

We woke to snow. For us, from Colorado, that doesn't seem terribly odd. Even though it is early spring, snow isn't unexpected. But I think most of our Charlottesville neighbors are so over the snow. They are tired of snow days, tired of snarled traffic, tired of shoveling, and cold and grey skies, and mountains of dirty snow in parking lots obscuring the view.

Our refrigerator maxed out at about ten gallons of milk. Even if we purchased more jars, we don't have more space. What to do with the extra? Without an ice cream maker, the excess has been stacking up more quickly than ever.

Phil has poured milk on the trees in the nursery, but this morning he simply fed the calf the milk. I think it's hard to know what is the best use of that precious fluid: if there was a garden plot ready, that would be the priority. A castrated calf that will be turned to food hardly seems like the best dumping ground for excess milk. And yet, it is the quickest and easiest option, and it's good for the calf. On a snow day, it's probably a good choice.

The snow fell steadily until dinner time, gorgeous, large flakes outside the picture window. Delightful. As Phil cleaned the office, he came across some CDs we hadn't seen in five years. All our operas! Isaiah put one on right away, and we basked in a bit of culture. (History of Opera was one of the most pleasurable classes I took at university, and I managed to convert Phil, too, not that it was a hard sell.)

Today Isaiah realized that there were a few other albums besides opera. My old Best of Queen CD! We listened to "Another One Bites the Dust" on auto-repeat for an hour, and the boys jumped around and I danced while folding laundry. PE for the day? Check.

And I figured out an easy way to get through a half gallon of milk: make it into hot chocolate. Martha Stewart has a delicious recipe (3.5 cups sugar, 2.25 cups powdered chocolate, 1 T. pink salt). A cup of that mix in a half gallon of milk, and we all had happy tongues and warm bellies.

Tomorrow we have a delivery scheduled: bathroom vanity, among others. It will be amazing to have another sink and mirror! With the snow, I'm not completely certain it will happen, but it might!

March 20-22: March Madness

Phil had a second long day in town on Thursday. He comes home and talks to me for hours whenever he's been away: who he saw, what they said, how the errands went, and so on. He has had an odd week of headaches; does he need a new pillow? A trip to a homeopath with certification? Regular doctors have never been able to figure out his headaches. We were the ones who figured out the MSG (and all the "Secret Names of MSG" connection); we know about chemical poisoning (like fumes from PVC joining). But this current iteration has me flummoxed.

Happily, he only lost Thursday afternoon to the headache. He managed to get the milking done once home from errands, and then he sat in the tub for hours.

I'm so thankful we have a tub.

Friday was a kitchen day for me. I had bought up organic apples before they sold out (small organic apple crop this year), and they were starting to turn, so I made three final apple pies. Then, because I had extra pie crust, I made two pumpkin pies, too. I've always envied Harold in the book Harold and the Purple Crayon, how he just draws the nine kinds of pie he likes best. The only other time I've been close was at our wedding, when we had twenty or thirty pies, strawberry and apple and some others. I think I was too busy celebrating to eat much of them, but they looked nice on the table!

I tried to make ice cream, but the ice cream maker no longer works. I'll return it, as one week of functionality isn't enough, but it was such a bummer to look forward to apple and pumpkin pie with vanilla ice cream, and have just really sweet and creamy vanilla milk.

I thought it was a bit over the top rich, but I called it a milkshake and the boys drank it. Good for them.

That was on top of pounds of bacon in the oven, rice, and curry. How did I survive without my big sink?

The daffodils popped on Friday. There are more to come, but it felt like we went from no color to patches of yellow in just a few hours. We headed out to admire them, and Joe said, "They smell delicious!"

They smell like spring.

Phil and Jadon headed out for a men's overnight with the church in the midafternoon. I don't think Jadon has ever had an overnight before. He was the youngest by a good seven or eight years, but he spoke up apparently, and attempted small talk. Good for him!

I took advantage of a relatively empty house to indulge in a little March Madness. I remember one spring break, my family of origin rented a cottage in the mountains and watched hours and hours of March Madness for a week. We didn't have a tv, we didn't have any prior experience of college basketball, but that hooked us.

So, hooray for the local team, UVA, ranked #1. It was fun to watch them down by 10 for a bit, come back and dominate the second half.

Phil had planned to come home to do Saturday morning's milking. I'm assuming he's had enough camping to last a lifetime, because he was sleeping next to me when I woke up. Apparently the beds were not very comfortable, so he drove home in the middle of the night, slept, and did the milking before heading back for breakfast and more good guy time.

They came home close to 6pm, absolutely wiped out. Abraham had picked some daffodils and arranged them. They brighten up a room so nicely!

And while the boys had quiet movie night with Phil, I went to the annual Spring Fling party with friends.

It felt like a rich, fulfilling few days, even though, with the ice cream maker out of commission, we are drowning in milk.

March 17-19: Prep for a Fun Weekend

This was the view from my kitchen window Monday morning. Is it not beautiful.

Monday mornings I'm always a bit surprised by how long it takes me to get everything in order after the weekend. If I get the house clean Saturday night, and we are away much of Sunday, how can the house need hours of cleaning? It is a mystery.

But that is something I'm realizing, as I try to use my 168 hours a week well: if I don't include any time for general organization, life rapidly devolves. I'm trying to find the happy medium.

We've been doing a lot of school work lately. The sunny days are few and far between, as we continue to have days of snow and cold and grey. We are trying a new math program with the middle three boys, and they are having a good time with it.

On Monday, Phil spent time cleaning his office and doing paperwork. He has plenty to do.

Tuesday was a town day for Phil. He gets to lead the men's retreat with our church this weekend, so there is much to think about and plan.

I had made muffins for breakfast. Caleb grabbed for one, and Phil gave him a little piece.

I wasn't very nice about that, I'm afraid. Some allergists suggest that babies cannot easily digest gluten until they are about two, and so recommend holding off on gluten foods until then. I wouldn't have expected blueberry muffin to be Caleb's first food, but I will hope that a tiny crumb will not mess him up for life.

I then made him some eggs, thinking that he is clearly showing signs of food readiness. Nourishing Traditions recommends boiling an egg for three minutes, tossing the half-cooked whites, and feeding the baby the runny but heated yolks, sprinkled with sea salt, as a first food.

I was ready to cook six eggs (this baby does seem hungry, after all), but in the end, even the two I made was two too many. Caleb isn't ready to swallow, so all that bright yellow yolk came right back out again.

One benefit of muffin as the first food is that it probably won't stain clothes like egg yolks, provided the muffin is what's offered, and not the blueberry.

Caleb is scootching well. It is amazing that anything with that much friction from contact with the ground can move along, but he gets where he wants to go now.




On Wednesday, we spent the whole afternoon trying to get our family financial books in order. I have hesitated to use QuickBooks because I can enter an entire credit card bill into Excel in a few minutes, and I always have Excel open for other purposes, so I stay quite current. But to open QuickBooks and enter the various information: that has been a longer project than I have wanted to undertake.

But, as part of our hoped for orderliness, we are going to try actually keeping careful books starting this year. It was a tiring project for the two of us, and took something like seven man hours to enter four months of one credit card's expenses. Phil has hopes it won't always take that long. I think it would have to get faster, because I don't think that many hours is sustainable, realistically.

On a completely different note, we think that, should Jadon go to college, he might need to take Caleb with him. What will the baby do without his beloved oldest brother?

March 16: Turkish Delight

Back when I was milking, I had my share of frustrations. Cow hoof in bucket, cow kicked over bucket, cow kicked me, cow didn't want to come, cow didn't give much milk.

Although Charity still doesn't come readily, she stands well. Bianca, though, has been giving Phil fits. We ran out of alfalfa cubes (forgot to get them in town on Thursday), and Bianca has been letting Phil know her displeasure at the lack of pampering. Whenever he gets kicked in the head, he lets her go. She missed the Saturday night milking and the Sunday morning milking because she was being too much of a pill.

She's not even a two gallon a day milker, so she's not going to be in dire straits by missing those two sessions. But it frustrated Phil.

We bought alfalfa in town, though, and by Sunday night, with treat in hand, Bianca was so ready to be milked that she started squirting milk as soon as Phil touched her udder. He said, "I was glad then that my curse of the morning didn't stick: 'May you get mastitis and die, you rotten animal!'"

Though I am not usually happy over the misfortunes of others, this was an affirming moment for me, actually. (And a bit humorous: not a common curse, certainly!) I had assumed that my frustrations over the milking were some deep-seated character flaw in me, and that unless I could learn to release the anger and frustration, I could not be a good farmer.

And though that might be true, I think it's also true to say that if even-tempered Phil can get furious with an ill-tempered animal intent on harm, I wasn't doing as bad a job as I assumed, either in my animal husbandry or in my emotional melt-downs.

I still have no desire to return to milking, but to have Phil say, even once, "I just don't want to milk right now"—it wasn't just me that struggled with irritation and annoyance.

This was a day of rejoicing for me in others ways. Caleb started to scootch for the first time, advancing on his belly by half-inches until he was a few feet from his starting point. He was in pursuit of his brothers' books.

A few weeks ago, after reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I had ordered some Turkish Delight (the food Edmund requests from the White Witch, when given the choice of anything). About a decade ago I found out that Turkish Delight was not, as I expected, some lovely caramel-chocolate creamy dream, but an over-sweet gelatinous mass, flavored with lemon or rose. If you can imagine eating sweet soap with the texture of thick tapioca pearls, you have no need to try it. (Really, it was bad enough I suspected that C.S. Lewis included that as a wink-wink joke: who could possibly want to eat a pound of this disgusting stuff?!)

Anyway. To allow the boys the full experience of the book, I ordered Turkish Delight. Sadly, when it arrived, even though it was made in Turkey, it had American style artificial colors and flavors (including the infamous Red Dye #40), and so we regretfully did not allow the boys to taste.

I shared it with some friends, though. One of those friends was shopping in Marshall's and found a box near the checkout, and when she checked the ingredients, it was colored with beet juice. And so the boys got to have a taste, and many people at church got to have a taste, and so we can all appreciate the story a bit more now. It was such a thoughtful gesture!

In the late afternoon, it started snowing. I meant to back the car up the driveway right away, but somehow it was not until well after dark that I headed out. Embarrassingly enough, I ended up well off the driveway, but I pulled forward and backed up more carefully.

When I checked my tire marks, to see where I had backed up, I was horrified to see that I almost hit our electrical box. In fact, I don't know how I missed it. My tire marks ended 18" from the box, but when I looked at the angle of the tires, and how far the rear of the car extended beyond the tires ... it made no sense. Another time to shake my head in thanksgiving. And ask Phil to move the car next time if it's really needed.

March 15: Pictures All Up

Phil figured out how to hang several pictures that didn't come with hooks (he hammered in little nails or grommets on either side and strung wire between). Then he drilled into the concrete exterior wall where I told him to, and in the end, I had a wall above my bed with a sweet picture my sister did of me as a girl on roller skates (my Dad and I used to roller skate together around town), and a cartoon by my brother-in-law of Phil climbing and me with a wheelbarrow of Bibles 4 Babies, along with a cross-stitch my maid-of-honor made as a wedding gift.

And on the other wall above my bed is a collection of things I love: three weddings gifts, a postcard of my favorite Georgia O'Keefe painting from her museum in Santa Fe, an illuminated manuscript with the blessing my Dad prayed over us nightly. It's a very "me" wall.

And when I walk by, I can look in and see a very "me" room!

Phil also got out level and measuring tape and hung the art I had for over the loveseat. The largest painting we call "Singing and Dancing in That Land," a song we sang in Boulder about heaven. I love that wall.

And the room as a whole, too.

I continued on the ice cream kick. The boys finally gave out after about the fourth batch. I suspect, though, that as much ice cream as I can make, they will eat.

Phil spent much of the gorgeous day outside. He continued the general site cleanup. The boys helped him remove broken concrete blocks. Those that still have a section intact he'll bury on the ramp up to the barn to stabilize the slope. All broken bits went into the tractor bucket and into the dumpster.

Then Phil regraded around the down slope, trying to help the land contour so that it doesn't drain toward the house.

He cut down the southern tip, and then went to work on the final hills of dirt from original excavation.

We had a mound of topsoil set aside, although all mounds seemed to grow weeds with similar ability. But we were surprised to see how much more rich, dark, and vibrant the topsoil was, once he started to spread it out.

Will a garden come up from this ground?

I have three little seeds-in-a-cans that Isaiah and I planted last week. And all three sprouted! I was so grateful! I had watered and forgotten about them, and then figured they had dried out and died. But, no, there there are!

I had a miracle today. Late in the afternoon, I grabbed Caleb for some photos. I first put him down near the boys' window. The three younger boys were all with me, helping Caleb laugh, laughing themselves. We were having a good time.

I moved Caleb away from the window to get different light. And I got a gorgeous photo!

As I glanced at this photo, the older two boys, in exuberance, climbed onto Isaiah's bench. And the bench tipped over, and the boys on top fell down. Right where Caleb had been, but wasn't any more.

We could have been on our way to the hospital. And instead, I had a baby who cried a bit because I scared him when I screamed, and a beautiful photo that doesn't serve as a reminder of tragedy, but a reminder of God's grace.