A hodgepodge of things including the recent deep cleans...

About 3 weeks of living to catch up on here. I'll just dive right in to this random assortment of happenings. The one thing I'm noticing as I look at the photos is that things are going to start getting more colorful again.

But first, let me give a brief update on our winter 2020 deep clean projects. We recovered from the garden shed project and are benefiting from the reorganization of that space - though my dad wondered if he was in the right shed when he went out to do chores this morning. It is always nice when one's work makes a noticeable difference!

So what remained yet was under the shop shed, the junk piles around the shop shed and then, last but not least, inside the shop shed. We are working up to the latter one, but in the last few weeks we have completed the under and around projects - with Jason taking the last things to the dump as I write this. As always the projects were a combination of sorting things, cleaning things, getting rid of things to various places, fixing things, re-purposing things and reorganizing what remained. It was also a chance to sure up the foundation under the shed, tighten the tie downs and level the rain barrels.  

We were able to work together for most of the under the shop shed project. For a variety of reasons, Jason ended up being more on his own for the junk piles deep clean. And that project was unique in that our goal was not to reorganize anything but to dismantle and make something go away entirely! Jason really deserves a medal for his commitment to these projects and "stick-to-it-ness." It's not easy work - either physically or emotionally. We call them "junk piles" for a reason - they include things that many would consider "junk" but that there is also a potential use for. So do we ship off to the landfill things that no one else is likely to want but that we might be able to use? I am trying to not use the phrase "throw it away" when I talk about getting rid of things from our home. I think it is more accurate to say something like "move it to..." We are not really getting rid of anything entirely, just relocating stuff out of our sight. Would it be more responsible for us to have to find a way to deal with our trash without shipping it away for others to deal with? These projects raise lots of value questions and judgment calls and are just messy in every way! But we did meet our goal. As of this morning we moved the last pile of pressure treated wood, mostly from our old greenhouse, into the crawl space where it will store longer out of the weather.

Also this week, Jason finished a once over on chicken coop repairs AND was able to accomplish another winter project wish list item - replacing the old roofing on our carbonaceous materials shed that had sprung some leaks (making it not nearly as useful for keeping the leaves, stray, hay, corn stalks dry). I had assumed he would need some help, but I was also feeling a lot of stress with what was on my office job list. I told him to let me know when he needed me to join him outside. When he came in to wash up for lunch he had done the whole thing by himself. So no before or after pictures of the roof but here's the shed with it's new metal roof installed.

So what's next? Well we have a little time to gear up for the shop shed deep clean, which will take place spring break week when I hope to take off work to have more hands on deck to help. We have done some prep for it - getting electrical supplies for the wiring we hope to do while it is cleaned out and amassing pallets for the insulation project we also hope to do. This will be no ordinary deep clean. We are definitely saving the most involved and complicated project for last - AND the one that will likely have the most lasting and beneficial impact. We can do it!!

I should at least mention here that Kali also did a little deep clean this week. She deep cleaned her Free Little Library at the end of our lane! Jason went down and helped her with a few minor repairs and then her sisters also joined her for some of the cleaning out and organizing. So if you find your way to Fruit Farm Lane anytime soon, check it out! Kali is thinking about putting a little survey in there to see if she can get a sense for who is using it and what they might like to see in there. It's clearly not just us, but we have no idea how many others are checking it out!

Now for the fun and colorful updates - on food, flowers and kids!

NEWSFLASH: We ate our home grown pineapple! It was delicious. It was gone way too fast. We look forward to the next one in four and a half years or so! It was definitely bigger than the first one we grew and savored in September 2015, which was great since this time we had to divide it 5 ways instead of 4 (I was 8 months pregnant with Terah last time so she only enjoyed that one vicariously)! We had been cleaning up some pineapple from a work catering event that I had brought home and so maybe that made our pineapple shine even more. The flavor was spectacular and no doubt it was extra special because we knew this particular fruit very well; walking past it each day for months as we waited for it to ripen. The top is now planted and we'll see if we keep expanding our pineapple operation... Kali thought it would be nice to have enough going that maybe we would net closer to 1 a year rather than ever 4-5 years!

Yesterday we tried a new fun food experiment. We've been taste testing a lot of winter squash for seed so I've been roasting many squash! Sometimes the pans almost fill with "squash water" as they are roasting and it's often a very sweet liquid. When I pull the squash out and let them sit, they reabsorb the liquid. But what would happen if you drained the liquid right away into a pot and simmered it down? Squash syrup!! It's actually super syrupy and sweet (and, well, squashy). Not sure if it is will become a staple but it was fun to give it a try and have it work so easily!

While we are still yearning for more winter, the first flowers of the year are blooming! Jason heard a new word coined recently that has resonated with us: blissonance. It is a word used to describe the feeling that I, and it seems many others, experience on these gorgeous warm winter days where the sun is shining and buds are popping out. It's beautiful. The warmth is welcome. And something just doesn't feel right. It would be great in April or May, but January and February? So here's a celebration of the beauty and the color and an acknowledgement too that it feels like we have yet to have a "real" winter. We wonder what that means for the growing season ahead, the bug population and more broadly what this is communicating about our weather patterns to come.

The purple crocuses are always first and I sent Kali out with the camera to get a few photos the other day. I should have known that she would seek new and interesting ways of photographing these delicate beauties. There were delightful surprises when I downloaded photos this morning. Here are two of my favorites:

The Lenten roses are also blooming and then the baby daffodils in Nora's garden have put out there first sweet little flower.

And, finally, we welcomed the first two walking iris flowers inside - which we can enjoy with no blissonance since this is about the time they normally start gracing us with their one day shows! 

I'll end here with a short kiddo update. This past week held two new exciting things cousin/niece-related! Ivy had her first sleepover at Tangly Woods and it went off without a hitch! Other than me needing to intervene in the bedtime routine when Ivy was pitter-pattering out to Kali asking for additional stuffed animals every few minutes to sleep with, it was completely smooth! And even that was all cuteness in retrospect, though at the time I was rather eager for some shut eye myself! Then this week, Ivy spent Tuesday at Tangly Woods. We are going to start having her with us for a day a week. It went great and she clearly has no trouble sleeping here as she took a 3.5+ hour nap. As smoothly as it went, I must say that I was exhausted by evening. That may have had more to do with the work meetings and cheesemaking I was also fitting in the cracks, in addition to having an extra mouth to feed and an extra little person to tend to. Whatever it was, the combination had me very ready for bed!

And, last but not least, our girls eagerly prepared for my parents' arrival last night by making 75 hearts to hide around their quarters in honor of my mom's 75th birthday 10 days ago. Well, they mostly enjoyed it. Terah had a massive meltdown when her hearts were not turning out as she so deeply desired them to and there was no consoling or helping to fix it. It seems every few weeks she is due a large emotional exhale and this is where it came out this go round. But she had recovered in time to help with the hiding and also the sweet sign she and Alida made to put on the door. So we are happily a household of 7 again and Terah has once again moved upstairs. We'll see much less of her in the next 2.5 weeks. We pale in comparison to the excitement of Grandma and Grandpa. It's about time for me to extract her from upstairs for lunch, but she'll likely pipe up "you can't take me downstairs" as soon as she hears my footsteps! Here I go...

FUN trip to WV and NOT FUN garden shed deep clean!

If I get to choose between a 2 day conference in DC without our kids and 2 days in wild, wonderful WV at my parents' Mountain House of Hope with our kiddos and dear friends, the decision will not take long to make! This January we didn't have to choose, as my parents graciously watched the farm two weekends in a row! 

So Thursday a little over a week ago we headed to WV following Kali and Terah's yearly check ups. There was nothing really noteworthy about those other than Terah growing 5 inches since her last one, almost pushing the shot out of her leg having not fully internalized yet how much relaxing helps shots go better, and how very cute she was reading letters for her first ever eye test. Mostly, we were just happy that hurdle between us and a weekend (without my computer) in WV was behind us!

Good friends from college and their three fun and spunky kids joined us Fri-Sun. While the snow we hoped for came to us in the form of drizzling rain, sleet and the occasional snowflake, there was still more than enough fun to be had! It really was a tried and true break!! We played games and more games and more games - Dutch Blitz, Spoons, Codenames, Five Crowns, Bananagrams, Boggle, Monopoly, Golf, Go Fish, 7 Up 7 Down, Pit and probably more that I'm forgetting. We ate lots of amazing food, popped many rounds of Tangly Woods' popcorn, and enjoyed lingering conversations around the table. Two puzzles were put together, there was one stint of outdoor play and W and I got to go for one hike just the two of us! We also enjoyed a violin concert and were glad mom and dad's house didn't come down with a very energetic game of "soup soup" (a homemade variation of tag/hide and seek).  

It was a very special weekend with kindred spirits! Life surely has changed considerably since our times hanging out just the four of us in the older generation nearly 20 years ago. Some of the dreams we talked about then have now come to fruition. And there are 6 beautiful new people that have added richness and complexity to our lives. I know our family of 5 hopes we do it again!!

It was not the smoothest landing home. It's hard to go from a fun and relaxing weekend away from all the demands of "normal" life, and then dive back into the week. My office days were particularly taxing and I was yearning for a few days on the homestead to try to feel a bit more grounded again. We had slated Thursday and Friday of this week for our next deep clean project. The night before we checked weather and all looked good so we decided to tackle the garden shed.

Thursday morning, Jason and I started the day reading and having coffee together, then split chore responsibilities and were ready to dive into emptying the shed (with some little helpers coming to join us early on in the process). Here's a taste of what we were unloading but the pictures really don't do justice to the task ahead of us!

The unloading part is always the easiest and fastest part of the project. Everyone was in moderately good spirits as the day got underway. But some of the stress the adults in the home had been carrying all week didn't magically dissipate as we got into the project and it was clear there was going to be some hard work involved. We wanted to do it together because the hope is that I will be using the garden shed more and more and so knowing what is where and assisting in organizing seemed important. But to date it has largely been "Jason's space" to maintain and use and so it was not only him opening up the project to others but also having us all inspect all the stuff that had accumulated and ask him to make decisions about lots of things, while also keeping us busy with jobs. Oh, this is not his ideal set of circumstances/responsibilities!!

I think we would have probably done ok if the weather predictions from the night before had held. We got everything out, cleaned it (the girls helped scrape chunks off the floor) and were ready to start moving things back in before lunch.

BUT right as we were taking out the last few things, snowflakes started falling. I assumed it was just a passing cloud with a few flakes to drop on us and would soon stop. To the contrary, it started coming down more and more and even laying on things. This was not in the plans. That, coupled with kids starting to get cold and pesky, about did me in. Now there were kids asking for things and interrupting our concentration on deciding where to put things. And then there was needing to decide what order to do things in partly based on what would be most messed up by getting snowed on. Ugh! Honestly, I was out there already thinking about this blog post. The deep cleans of the rooms of our house had hard moments too but they were also a lot of fun, such amazing fast progress, and very notable differences in our day to day home environment. This round of deep cleans feel much more challenging in a number of ways: they are spaces we don't all use equally, they are spaces that haven't been cleaned much and have slowly accumulated a lot of stuff in the fullness of our farm life, and they include lots of hard decisions. It is not so easy to just ask,"does this piece of wire bring me joy" and then base your decision on that answer. Many of the things don't bring us immense amounts of joy but are very practical OR if we keep a certain thing around we might save ourselves a trip to town later on (which would in fact bring us joy!).

We finally had to break for lunch (or else it would have soon been supper time) and so that involved Jason putting anything back in the shed that chickens might come by and peck at (them eating small shreds of metal would not have been a good thing). So once again (like the garage), we weren't able to do the pure "put things back one at a time" method with an outdoor/indoor project like this. Daylight and weather are just factors outside of our control!

We left the snow covered and wet piles, and came up to the house. I had to laugh (or I would have cried) as I saw the snow covered laundry. It was one of those days that I had contemplated using the dryer. But I decided to take the time to hang it out. By that point there was no point taking it back in...

By dark on day #1, everything was back in. There were still some things to sort and hang up. That was most of day #2 (yesterday) and Jason gets the credit for that hard work. Due to me giving most of Thursday to this project, I needed to devote more or less all of Friday to my office work. I did feed the pigs for two outside breaks and slipped to the shed to take a look at the progress. SO MUCH IMPROVED! Our front porch is full of things to give away and Jason and Alida are in the shop shed right now working on putting new handles on tools that Jason has wanted to fix for a long time! That has been the beauty of these deep cleans - not allowing ourselves to put broken things back but either choosing to part with them or fix them and make them usable. We may say that the best thing out of this whole project was Jason getting another kids' hoe ready to go for the season with a usable handle so that Alida and Terah won't have to fight over one. Yay!

So for my sister-in-law, Emily, I'll end with the best I could do on before/after shots! I did tell Jason that I think we might need stiff drinks of some kind to make it through the shop shed deep clean!

BEFORE:

 

AFTER: 

 BEFORE:

AFTER:

Ahhhh....

CASA & date with Alida

Saturday afternoon and I find myself sitting in front of the warm wood stove. Kali is making cheddar cheese (and playing willingly with her younger sisters some and sometimes being roped into doing so even when she isn't as interested). Terah is playing some variation of Tenzi. Alida is up in the common room playing Monopoly (by herself, poor gal!).

"Catch up on the blog" has been on my project list for some time and to be completely honest I just haven't had it in me. The world feels a bit brighter today than it has for awhile, and so here I am to catch up on this virtual scrapbook, and fill my mother's "blogposts tank!" (Yes, catching up will involve more than one post) Starting today doing chores for the first time in weeks and then a walk with a close friend and neighbor are two contributing factors to this feeling like a good day!

But let me back up! We had two weekend trips in a row in January. The first one was just Jason and I heading to DC and leaving the kiddos with my parents at Tangly Woods. As always, they did a superb job of caring for kids and animals in our absence - it seems very probable that they have more fun than us! We decided to attend CASA's (Chesapeake Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture) annual conference this year - to keep furthering our own education and, this year anyway, hoping to make some promising connections for Jason's Shenandoah chicken breeding project. I'm beginning to think that one conference (especially in a city) a year is probably more than our duo can handle. As we drove into DC  on the ever widening highways and were in stop and go traffic just for a bit, I once again was hit by the fact that most of the people around us are doing what they do every day! It was not a weekend and this was just the "normal traffic" of people going to and fro in their daily lives. I told Jason I was pretty sure I would not survive it for long!

But we made it safely to Jason's aunt and uncle's home in Falls Church, where we stayed for the night and enjoyed reconnecting with them while in their neck of the woods. Upon arrival, I was glad for a short walk through their neighborhood to a lake at sunset. What I hadn't realized is that while we got closer to the conference, we had also positioned ourselves in such a way as to have to go right through DC to get to Hyattesville, MD where the conference was held. I'm proud to say that us country folk made it without any wrong turns - but that was not without a good 1/2 of coaching from Jason's aunt and uncle and detailed written instructions on what lane to get into and when all along the way!!

We spent two days going to many sessions on grazing, soil health, racial justice and the food system, starting a farm business, etc... We got to connect with many great people doing a lot of really exciting things. And, still, I felt a bit like a fish out of water. The son of friends of ours happened to be at a different event and saw us and snapped this picture. When I look at it, it is not hard to remember how uncomfortable I felt going to check into the hotel. It's just not a space I feel very at home in. Not to mention that most of the folks there are farming at a scale that we aren't really even dreaming of or aspiring to do. Maybe that was the most clarifying part of the whole conference for us - to realize once again that we are not necessarily even wanting to make a business out of our homestead. While a helpful realization, it did not necessary come with a second wave of insight that included exactly what we do want to be doing.

Last Monday one of my colleagues shared the following poem as an opening to a long and arduous meeting I was part of. I wished we could have just read the poem and then called it a day. To say it resonated is a bit of an understatement. The part of this that I feel most in need of figuring out is how to "create a clearing" and how to "wait there patiently."

Clearing by Martha Postlewaite:

Do not try to save

the whole world

or do anything grandiose.

Instead, create

a clearing

in the dense forest

of your life

and wait there

patiently,

until the song

that is your life

falls into your own cupped hands

and you recognize and greet it.

Only then will you know

how to give yourself

to this world

so worthy of rescue.

As always it was good to return home from time away and be reunited with the girls, even if the youngest especially was resistant to moving back downstairs. And even if I was called Grandma a lot in the days following our return.

Jason and I were eager for our last daughter date night. Alida had quite an exciting day for hers as she kind of got 2 dates in one day! Due to needing 2 new tires. the girls and I did one of our errands circuits around town and landed at the Little Grill for lunch (which happens to be conveniently located right next to Whitmer's Tires). We played Golf while we waited for our lunch, and we were just wrapping up when they called us to let us know the car was ready. It's a bit repetitive to mention it again, but every time I'm out and about with the girls I feel so thankful for how fun they are to be with and how they make errands more bearable, and actually fun! We had a good time!

And that wasn't the end of the fun. That evening (this time with Jason and without Kali and Terah), we headed back in for a night on the town! We left at our favorite time of day, when the light on the mountain in front of our home is so striking and beautiful!

Two out of the three components of the date night mirrored Terah's but that was in no way a disappointment for us! We were a bit nervous when we got to Bella Luna and learned that they could not take a personal check - only cash or card. Our only credit card had just been hacked and we were waiting for our new one. So we had to get our wallets out and combine cash and (phew) we were happy to have had enough to carry on with our plans without adjustments! So, as you might guess, we played games while we waited for our pizza to come. We then took a very cold walk to the Forbes Center at JMU where we were treated to a production of Wilde Creatures - a fun rollicking play with lots of music and dance and a powerful message too. It ended with enough time to head back into town for ice cream cones at Bella Gelato before heading home.

I am not sure if can wait until next Christmas for another round of dates with these spectacular gals. It was definitely the best trio of Christmas presents ever!