Snowy weekend

Kali is proving to be more and more like her Grandma Myers in her love of snow!!! She has been quite thrilled with the additional 4-8 inches of snow that fell yesterday. We bundled up yesterday and today and enjoyed "penny walks" outside. This was a suggestion in one of Kali's magazines - in short, each person chooses a destination. One of you is "tails" and the other "heads." You shake the penny and then whichever side is up that tells you your first destination. Once there, you choose two new destinations, shake again and so on... Very fun and I told Jason, as silly as it is, it somehow fills my desire to be accomplishing something. :) And Kali is happy to do things like deliver egg cartons to our neighbors, check the mail, empty the compost, fill the bird feeder (as well as lots of silly things like jumping jacks in the snow, pulling her around in the snow to form huge letters, etc...) as long as it all falls under the "penny walk" heading.

Yesterday and today Kali and I have restocked our bread, granola and granola bar supply, as well as cooking dinner last night exclusively on our wood stove. Today we have maple barbecue chicken marinating in the fridge and are about to roll out our lamb's quarter homemade pasta. We have had fun doing projects, keeping Jason fed but otherwise staying out of his way!

Jason and I took time Friday morning to do a quick "2010 Strategic Plan for the Myers-Benners." It was helpful for me to get our goals for this year on paper and, while very daunting, somehow alleviated a portion of my anxiety about the coming months and gave me more energy and an ability to see how I can be helpful. So much of the big projects coming up fall largely on Jason's shoulders (building chicken coops, building a wood shed, disassembling the tower, etc...).

Speaking of the tower, Jason removed the first of the paneling today! So it is really coming down! While we are nowhere close to ready to take it down, he needed some wood for the "rooster condo" he is building and figured he would go ahead and start using the tower wood. I had to laugh to see Kali covering her ears while Jason was banging away. We have a picture of Kali in her highchair soon after we moved here with her hands over her ears and Jason putting up trim in the background. Here we go again!!

...We have now enjoyed a very late lunch and one well worth waiting for. I was laughing as we rolled out sheet after sheet of pasta. I thought it was a bit ridiculous that the recipe online I was using for spinach pasta noted that it served 4 people. I thought we would have pasta for days. Let's just say that I did not put away any leftovers (though I do have enough noodles drying for at least one lasagna). We consumed a lot of pasta. Kali was thrilled to have fewer comments offered about possibly adding some variety to her plate other than just plain noodles and I was happy to see her consuming large amounts of eggs from our chickens, lamb's quarter from our garden patch and non-GMO ww flour. We'll be doing that more often, though the amount of cranking involved won't likely make it as regular an activity.

Time to see if the laundry on the line thawed and dried for me.

One other thing to note: for those familiar with the game cribbage, it seems worth mentioning that Kali now beats me about half the time. I recognize that there is some element of luck in the game, but still... It has also been interesting to note that she now really tries and doesn't just keep all the letter cards because she likes them best! We'll see if the competitive Myers gene is coming into full bloom or not?