Odds and ends...sweet and fun ones mostly!

I ran out of time yesterday to do the full catch up so I'm here in the downstairs alone now as Jason and Terah slice and freeze bacon in the garage and Kali and Alida usher at the American Shakespeare Center. 

The girls and I spent much of today out and about shopping. Our kids are no longer being clothed entirely on hand-me-downs or hand-me-arounds! There were a few notable gaps in their wardrobes which, thanks to Gift and Thrift, Once Upon a Child, and Super Shoes, are now filled. If I'm going to go shopping, I could not ask for better company than our three girls. That said, while I enjoyed parts of our day together for sure, I also felt really distracted in some moments. My mind and heart were traveling all over the place from the major life challenges and losses being faced by people near and dear to me to the large scale suffering being experienced in various places. I've found myself thinking recently of the season of our lives when Jason and I were planning our wedding (happening simultaneously to me taking my first peace and justice classes at EMU). I was unlearning and re-learning history and especially being exposed to a lot of new knowledge about my country's involvement in many armed conflicts around the globe. I really struggled with thinking about hosting a celebration of any kind alongside the current events I was learning about. Now 25 years later, I still am grappling with how to hold grief and gratitude, suffering and celebration, my daily reality alongside that of so many others. My strong desire to be and do enough kick into high gear and yet any contributions I make just feel like they are drops that disappear in the vast ocean of need... 

So with that swirling around inside, here are some things that have filled parts of our days in recent weeks!

I have dried SO...MANY...APPLES! We pick up pig scraps in town on Fridays and sometimes what we pick up ends up being more food than the pigs need and/or high quality seconds (like the 3 boxes of apples I came home with a while back). They are melt in your mouth delicious...

Yep, gotta throw in a sky picture! I love that I'm outside often enough to take in the ever changing sky. I don't seem to tire of it!

Jason had a much smaller role in filling the woodshed this year. He worked with Kali some, but it ended up being done mostly by our three girls. 

I slipped away from the home front one day to enjoy a long anticipated hike with a dear friend! We made it to the summit of Furnace Mountain where we were rewarded by a gorgeous view and where Wendy introduced me to the delicious wintergreen flavor of birch bark. 

The little people in our lives are still such an incredible source of joy and laughter and amusement. Luca's vocabulary is exploding. It's such a fun stage. We love our Thursday times together with just him and our weekly meals together as a family. Luca doesn't have a lot of patience for the many conversations we would enjoy having at length together. But he absolutely loves when we are all doing something together that involves him. Last night it was writing names on his little board and me saying, " Give me an M" and everyone replies, "M" until we have spelled a name. He started to pick up on it and before long when I would get to the end of the name and say, "What's that spell?" he would shout before any of us, "Mama!!" He was so pleased, as were we!

Bear's vocabulary isn't changing quite as fast but the number of things he enjoys gnawing on is! He's "helped" me bake cookies recently, he's had his first piano lesson, and he has graduated to sitting in the high chair at the table with us. So fun!

And, while on the subject of little growing things: why do I love bringing the little piggies their slop bucket and finding them all buried in the hay in their house and then watching as their little snouts come up as they sniff the air and then they slowly emerge to check out what I've brought with hay strands all over them?

Less exciting news, but it is probably worth documenting that Jason is still working on the shop shed ceiling insulation project. It's been another one of those projects that is completely impossible to predict, one in which he is trying to mostly use materials he had accumulated for this very project, and which has taken much longer than we had hoped it would. It felt important to get those materials off the floor of the shop shed and into the ceiling cavities so that the shop shed could be more useable once again. So it needed to be done AND I know he is eager to move on to other things!

We haven't quite worked ourselves out of a job, but the Adopt-A-Highway trash pick ups we've committed to doing along our road twice a year feel less and less "worth our time!" We feel like we aren't doing much when we walk nearly a half mile in some places without picking up anything and then must remind ourselves that that is a wonderful thing and way better than when we were filling multiple large garbage bags every time we did it!

With all that there is to cry and scream and rant about, it does feel so very good to laugh! And that is what we did a lot of on our second Ted Lasso weekend. In addition to getting about halfway through the third and final season, we also fit in some Dutch Blitz, soccer playing and delicious meals together! Terah was especially glad we didn't make it to the end of the show, since she knew that meant we'd have to plan another weekend together with Alena and Andrew soon! Time with good friends that you can laugh with, while also being real with each other, feels like such an immense gift. We are already anticipating the next time!

And here I am still alone downstairs, with my book calling my name! I might get a fire going in the wood stove and cuddle up for a bit! The headache I've been nursing for the last few days is easing up a bit, but I'm ready to not work it too hard for the rest of the evening. I am through two of the three new romance novels I just got out of the library. I'm really enjoying my introduction to another new author and my kids are ready for me to get through these so I'm not so eager to jump under my covers and read at night. I actually get through more than a page or two of these before falling asleep!