Spring in all its fullness! Finding moments of flow!!

Spring has fully settled in here at Tangly Woods and it's the time of year when I blink and I feel like I've missed something. Warmer temps have things growing fast, blooming vibrantly and all at a rapid pace. I am not at all ready for red bud season to leave us, but the trees are now focused on leafing out. I'm trying to keep up!!!

On one of my treasured walks with a dear friend this week we were talking about fun. I had been listening to a two part series on the importance of fun on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast and it was articulating many things that I've felt over the years. As my burnout got pretty intense, one of the most disconcerting things that I noticed in my life was that things that had been fun for me no longer felt fun - same activities but totally different feelings in my body. Everything started to just feel like another obligation, another thing that I had to do, and the pressure was crushing. 

That's one of the reasons it felt so striking when I recently made my own rolled oats and I was giddy about it. I didn't do it because I think everyone should be making their own rolled oats and so I was modeling something I thought others should emulate. Nothing could be farther from the truth! I happened to have oats that we had bought years ago. We have a pasta maker already. I have and use a dehydrator regularly. And I was familiar with the process enough that it didn't feel overwhelming and I had the time and space to do it. I get a kick out of making things with my hands. And there really is nothing like watching the pasta maker gobble up those soaked oats and spit out rolled ones. So satisfying. So FUN! But the fun was not the activity, it was the mindset I had while doing the activity. For just a few minutes I found myself in what they were calling a "flow state" and I was fully present to what I was doing right there, right then. 

That is NOT common for me! I am nearly always contending with a tape playing in the background of my mind - what I could or should be doing that I'm not, the people I'm not tending to while I'm tending to others, the many things on our to do and project lists that we'll probably never get to, wondering if it is ok to thrive here at Tangly Woods while so many others are struggling to survive, pondering whether any of what I'm doing matters in the grand scheme of things and wondering what that grand scheme is, analyzing the past and ruminating about the future, and on and on and on! So those moments of "flow" and feeling full present are so welcome when I get glimpses of them! 

That's a long intro to come around to say that one of the benefits for me in pausing and reflecting back over a period of time and looking at the pictures that Jason and I have taken is that it helps me stop and reflect and see all the beautiful moments that make up our lives. And while it puts a very incomplete picture out there for others to look in on, in some ways what I put out in this space is actually helping to balance what is often happening inside me. I see the photo that I took when Luca and I were walking home to Tangly Woods and he is munching on red buds like corn on the cob and I am reminded again that he is my teacher!! He is an expert at being present and staying in flow state. He's so so good for me! 

On another note, I'm still not sure how I feel about his rapidly expanding and improving vocabulary and pronunciation when that means that sometimes he seems to be pondering making the full switch from "Nel Nel" to "Janelle!" I'd be Nel Nel to him his whole life if I had my way!

I've got some pretty expert teachers at flow and presence right in my own home too. Alida and Terah have enjoyed many hours fully absorbed sitting outside with their little chick friends (especially Olivia, Caramel and Buddy). They go out for chores and I won't see them for hours. There are days that I get all wrapped up in the messages around productivity and responsibility and being ready for the "real" world and privilege and hard work and on and on. But then I remember that in my mid-40's I'm working pretty hard to unlearn a lot of those same messages. I breath a little easier and savor walking outside and finding them fully focused on watching these little rapidly growing creatures dust bathing or pecking grass and marveling at them. I think, "I want to be like them!!"

In all honesty, that last few weeks have not had a lot of moments of flow for me. There's a lot of "fun activities" in the mix, but I've only had glimpses of being fully present. I've been in a preoccupied state much of the time and so being present hasn't come easy for me. That's why this pause is feeling pretty important to me today.

In no particular order, here's some things that stand out from recent days! 

Soccer is in full swing!!! Alida had her first game yesterday and played a combo of midfield and defense in the first half goalie the second. It was such a fun game to watch - I love how much she loves playing! We were joined on the sidelines by my parents and sister, Karen (sadly Sue wasn't there to join our mini-celebration of their wedding anniversary with mint tea and fresh cookies!). Soccer photo credits here to my dad!

After the game we went to Sweet Frog to use some coupons we had (let's just say our $20 of coupons didn't even cover 1/2 the cost for the 5 of us to each get a cup of frozen yogurt). This is NOT an advertisement for them. If you want ice cream, go to Smiley's!!! But it was something different and in that sense a fun little outing.

A much more enjoyable outing recently was Jason and I's adopt a highway walk with our eldest. The red buds were delicious. The conversation was full and rich and interesting and stretching and fun. Picking up the trash was, well, picking up trash...

On the home front the gardens are bursting! I find myself in total adoration of the little pea plants. And the carpet of dill (YAY!!) where it went to seed last year. And the tiny beets coming up (even after we were not going to plant any to simplify things and I caved!). Jason, on the other hand, could just look at the grain crops all day long and can't stop gushing about the lush barley! 

I'm feeling hopeful about the onions this year, though it's pretty early for that sentiment. They've stayed green, they aren't dying off and there's new growth. You can do it onions!! And my gratitude to neem oil for it's help with the critters.

Mondays continue to be one of the highlights of my week when the five of us spend a good part of the day working in the gardens together. Each week is different, but the commonality is having a day clear of other competing priorities and just focusing on home tasks together. This past week included the rather dirty but successful task of emptying out the composting chicken coop. Kali and I did most of that together, while Jason and the younger girls did some slightly less smelly tasks like planting out Alida's birthday flower bulbs - a task that will hopefully add splashes of color to our summer! That said, I don't mean to complain about our task - my wrists and elbows complained but I actually enjoyed it AND especially love seeing the habitants of the compost coop come and go. Mamas and chicks...I just never tire of that combo. We just gave the most recent mama upwards of 30 chicks to tend!

After having a week focused on the home front, Jason did 3 Sassafras work days away from home this week. He needed an extra set of hands for one of those days, so Kali joined him. He tried to play it cool, but I know how much he enjoyed being accompanied for the day by one of his daughters!

He also got to teach another daughter how to use her new mini (and very cute) chain saw. Sadly the thunder scared our younger two inside before she got to do much with it. Next time...

It's definitely picnic season at Tangly Woods. It's the time of beautiful puffy clouds and changing mountain landscapes. It's often hard to come inside, so we bring the food out with us. And the food! I do love spring meals. I realized recently that without a baby on my hip most days, I have stopped doing many of the things I could do easily with a baby. With older kids, I can do heavier work and be out in the gardens and so I often don't do the things that I could do with tiny people in tow - picking violets and red buds and tea...Bear and I did that together this week!

Dilly egg salad with pickles, fresh oregano pesto, homemade farmer's cheese, stinging nettle garlic biscuits, spinach salad with Tangly Woods' eggs, violets and red buds!

Yesterday afternoon our box arrived from the Land Institute. So we pivoted quickly (making my cheddar cheese process rather inconvenient) and spent the late afternoon/evening getting our plots for the Perennial Atlas Project up and running. It made for a LATE night - we were eating dinner at 9:45 p.m. and I was too tired to chew my salad so it went in the fridge and I ate some chocolate mousse with raspberries instead. 

Here are your Tangly Woods' civic scientists at work. Here's a little bit about the project we are engaging in over the next 3 years:

The Land Institute’s civic science communities bring people together to learn as they grow and study perennial grain crops. This project focuses on three perennial grains and their annual counter parts, sainfoin (a legume), silflower (an oilseed), and Lewis flax (an oilseed). This study is designed to help support perennial grain research and lay the ground work for the creation of a perennial atlas, a set of maps displaying perennial grain performance, diseases, and more. The goals of this project are to engage a diverse community of civic scientists in a multi-year social, agroecological and geographic research project to produce a perennial atlas and further improve civic science research. Civic scientists will plant and maintain research plots containing perennial and annual grains. Civic scientists will interact with their plots to make observations, collect data, and share their thoughts and data with researchers.

A few delights in recent days included a day visit from 3 people who were part of Jason's workshop at Oak Spring Garden Foundation. We were compensated generously to host them from 10-4 to talk chickens and we had such a good time that no one was ready to part at 4 p.m. They ended up lingering into the evening for dinner and Ransom Notes and finally pulled themselves away around 9:30 p.m.! The pigs also enjoyed their visit and the extra back and belly scratches. (Side note for the record: the day before Jason also hosted a JMU class for a short farm tour while I was in town)

Speaking of special visits, we are finally all healthy again and got to savor our Bear day again this week. I keep thinking he can't get any more precious and then somehow he manages too. We figured you can never start too young learning to play Rook!

While the younger girls were occupied with their paper making project in the kitchen he joined to observe but then busied himself swiping one of the rugs they were using. He looks pretty proud of himself, doesn't he?!

Paper making teaching and inspiration credit goes to my cousin Colette and her son Birch! 

Now here we are on a cloudy Sunday morning! We have a day ahead of being together in various combinations of humans here and out and about (meeting up with Emily, Jonas and Ivy at what we call the Blue and Yellow Park this afternoon). It's Terah's turn for some Mommy and Daddy solo time today too and I'm banking on her wanting to spend at least some moments of it snuggled in the hammock Jason put up this week (I have yet to try it out!). It has been calling to me every time I walk out the side door...

Speaking of places that call to me, I'll end with a photo a dear friend took on our walk to Hensley's Pond this week. We got spritzed on for a good portion of it and the raindrops on the pond were mesmerizing. I love that place!

Now for homemade waffles - I do love Sunday brunch made by our kiddos!!

Tidbits from two weeks!

That infamous 2 week mark is approaching where I get overwhelmed by the thought of scrapbook catch up. So here I am while the girls enjoy homeschool afternoon, Jason is in the gardens and I've got one stew in the crockpot heating and a second soup on the stove simmering for our small group gathering tonight around the fire ring. 

The (many) pictures here will show the glorious, colorful, productive, fun, celebratory, sweet, wonderful and photo-worthy moments of these last 2 weeks. Not included are various ones of us taking our turns melting down and falling apart, illness complicating schedules and heightening anxiety, relationship work that feels fruitful or frustrating or both, and so much more. So here's one small slice of life's much more complicated and flavorful pie!

March 28 - FINALLY we got a Bear care day again!! And what fun we had catching up on all the ways he is growing and changing SO fast! Some favorites:

Concentrating on "tap tap"

Knocking down our towers (he's been good at this for awhile)!
He's also been good at melting us into puddles with his smiles!!!

His open mouthed crawl is pretty adorable too! He got to be a big helper on this particular Thursday by joining me to hide Easter eggs for Alida and Terah and some of their friends. He didn't give away any hiding spots AND he was pleased to get to play to his heart's content with the eggs following the conclusion of the hunt! While Kali was in class and the rest of us enjoyed a walk or playdate with friends (including the aforementioned hunt), Jason worked hard finishing up the potato trenching. Yes, he did it all by himself this year and we are so very grateful!

March 29 -31 - We were eager to have the ground prepped for potatoes as we were headed to PA for a long-awaited trip to be with some of Jason's family (for a belated Christmas and right on time Easter celebration - Chreaster for the second time since Kali's birthday party with said theme). We enjoyed a variety of traditions blended together (e.g. hunting for Christmas stockings!). There were indoor and outdoor games enjoyed by the young and old(er). Two highlights for me included a tour of the forsythia fort by one of my nieces and getting to meet and snuggle and savor time with my newest grand nephew.

Another highlight (which I'm realizing right now took place on the eve of April Fool's Day) was our final pitstop on the way home where the girls and I delighted in finding an overripe banana to buy for Jason from the convenience store. We even broke it in half to do our best to simulate his recent dream, except in this instance he had not forgotten his wallet and we were able to pay for the banana! We also bought a pizza (unrelated to his dream and related to our rumbling tummies)!!

April 1 - Well, this is always kinda a big day in our home - I think it might be one of the favorite or at least most celebrated holiday's of the year. There was a lot happening and it was not all related to our family gardening day. It's actually quite shocking that we got the potatoes planted, the biochar pit filled back up with duff from the remnants of the brush pile, the onions AND the parsley planted. While we were busy outside, there were chicks hatching inside and Grandma was busy working on dinner for her stuffed animals! I don't think Grandma finished her to do list that day (as some items may have been added to it) and I found some to do's in the seed potato sack that I also didn't manage to fit into the day.

It was not a joke that 3 snakes (2 males fighting over who was going to get to reproduce with a female) kept showing up right where we were in the gardens and had some of us a little skittish. You'd think they would have been too busy to pay much attention to us but I did get a little too close one time and one of the smaller males came after me trying to be very scary looking (in all fairness, I did back away!).

We had a good hatch that day but our one green egg that showed up in the incubator did not hatch sadly. 

We also have no intentions of hatching the T. Rex. eggs Kali's collected from the breeder pens that evening.

My mom threatened that we would not get dinner if we didn't behave that day while they were out and about. We didn't cause any serious damage but I can't promise we stayed out of their home entirely or that those 120 plastic Easter eggs we have didn't come in handy in making their bed a little bumpier than usual. Thankfully, in the end, she took pity on us and did feed us a very interesting dinner!

We had dessert first - cupcakes, lollipops and pudding!*

And we topped off our evening with meatloaf and fries!*

What a silly bunch!

*food served: meatloaf and mashed potato "cupcakes," jello salad "pudding," and brussels sprout "lollipops" followed by chocolate rice krispie treat "meatloaf" and apple "fries"

April 2 - With most of our tricks and jokes out of our systems, we enjoyed a day with plenty of chick adoring fit into all the cracks!! Jason got our tomatoes, hot peppers, flowers and sea oats (from our summer vacation to Michigan) started and Alida had her skills assessment as a kick off for the soccer season (ready or not, here it comes).

We feel grateful to my dad for his continued (and VERY optional) help with morning chores and when Luca comes over he always wants to find and say hi to Grandpa Herb and Grandma Sarah.

April 3 - Alida's eagerly anticipated bonus birthday did not quite go as planned. One of the goals was making memories and we definitely did that, if not the expected ones! The day started out fun. Alida was VERY sore from her soccer practice the evening before but we thought was fine otherwise. We had a fun wet picnic at the arboretum, enjoying take out from the Little Grill (thanks to a bday present for me from my parents) and then watching the baby Great Horned Owls for a long time (and I could have stayed longer). As we left there, Alida started to fade and faded quickly. We got some necessary soccer shopping done before nixing the rest of our plans for home and snuggles!

We couldn't see the real owls very well, but we had our own cute little owl!

Alida and I snuggled up and before long were both asleep and only got in on the very tail end of what appears to be a very magnificent double rainbow from all of Jason's pictures!

April 4 - The cold traveled quickly from Alida to Terah and was a big bummer and changed plans AGAIN for our times with others. Sigh!! It was a good impetus for finally making a large batch of elderberry syrup from dried berries I had been looking at and doing nothing about for years. And Terah felt good enough for chick adoration!

April 5 - Before I headed to town to do the weekly errands and Jason took off for Oak Spring Garden Foundation to teach a two day chicken workshop, we plowed through some things on the farm in the morning. We really do make one amazing team! We got the pigs moved to their spring/summer/fall pasture pen system and then seeded oats, sugar snaps, beets, cilantro, lettuce, dill, and collards (all in less than 2 hours - thanks to all the soil healing work that has taken place over many years!). Historically, preparing the soil took many many hours and now there is sometimes not more than a few minutes of prep! We were working too fast to take any pictures...

Jason was hosted in a very fancy guest house at OSGF, overlooking Bunny Mellon's main house garden. I believe he was much more comfortable in the chicken coop and had a lovely (if exhausting) time talking chickens with other interested persons for two days!

April 6 - While Jason's talked chickens, the girls and I enjoyed a day at home Saturday and did the annual mustard run pull (my magnolia now has a nice layer of mustard-mulch) followed by enjoying Kali's delicious homemade tomato soup topped with maybe the only winter cress I'll get around to sautéing and toasted cheese sandwiches. 

A few views from Jason's location:

April 7 - I was the only one that stayed put today! The girls took off for NY to take in the eclipse (in its totality!) and Jason traveled back home to me after the conclusion of his workshop. I always feel so grateful when my loved ones are on the road and get where they are intending to go safely!

April 8 - Our Monday family work day was a J+J work day this week and I learned to mow (with the corded mower!). We also did some of the first work in the seed cage for the SARE grant. AND we enjoyed the solar eclipse in the afternoon before I had my first doula meeting with a new family I'm working with. A monumental day all around! The kids got to enjoy the total darkness and were all glad they went, even though there wasn't much of a break in the clouds there!

The pigs were more interested in their slop than donning the eclipse glasses!

I enjoyed my first spinach salad with violets AND red buds while taking peeks up at the moon covering the sun!

April 9 and 10 - the last two days have been a hodge podge of odds and ends for me and Jason - we need those kinds of days regularly, even if they don't pay the bills. The girls returned home VERY tired and we are contending with an additional bug-souvenir from the travels. Another sigh! So let's end this post on a very sweet and cute note. Google photos was feeding Kali a few pictures recently that reminded me very much of ones I'm taking now, but with smaller versions of the same people. I guess we've been enjoying little chickens for a long time now!