Saturday, June 27, 2020

Staycation

We chose not to travel away from home this summer. Instead we attempted our first ever "staycation" from Saturday, June 20 - Friday, June 26 (all committed to not checking work or personal email or going on Facebook for the week). On our way home from town last evening, we had fun rating and reviewing our vacation spot before we landed back at our "real home" (it was a running joke much of the week pretending we didn't always live at Tangly Woods). So as a vacation spot on a 0 (worst) to 10 (best) scale, Tangly Woods got a 10 from Terah, a 9 from both Alida and Kali, and 8.5 from Jason and an 8 from me. Some of the comments given for this vacation spot included:

  • Beautiful view (mountain!), well stocked game cabinet, well equipped kitchen for cooking experiments and good sleeping accommodations
  • Bathroom sink and toilet were not washed in preparation for our arrival
  • Thankful that we were permitted to snack on things (raspberries, peas, fennel, parsley, tea, etc...) during our stay
  • Disappointed to see how many weeds were left in the flower beds
  • Well thought out house design - our family flowed pretty seamlessly there throughout the week. 
  • All the sunlight in the rooms gave a cheery feel
  • Having animals to care for took time away from our days but was also fun
  • There's a great restaurant nearby (Gray Jay Provisions) that has awesome takeout pizza on Friday evenings
  • So lovely to have a blueberry patch right next door, and to have timed our vacation right with the start of the season
  • We took advantage of the mountain pass a few times for hiking on the Western Slope of the Massanutten Mountain
  • The neighbor's peacocks were a little loud sometimes
Here's how we spent our week including a few thoughts about staycations vs. vacations:

Saturday, June 20th

Jason and I slipped out of the house before anyone else roused to hike up to Hensley's Pond with decaf coffee to sit by the water's edge. We pretended that walking back up Fruit Farm Lane was arriving at our vacation spot. It was a foggy morning such that we would not have known there was a mountain in front of us. We talked about finances and racial equity and what reparations might ask of us and how to seek to balance things in relationships that we are in and as opportunities arise. We dipped into the blueberry patch for the first taste of the year. We arrived home to Terah and Alida up and the first phone call needing an urgent response about hatching eggs and incubation. The first of several tests to a staycation being a vacation (and part of the dawning realization as to why the word vacation is related to the word vacate!). We needed to hit a little reset on things following responding to that chicken call... Jason headed out to move the piglets and Rosie and the girls had their chicken chores to attend to (we were gifted with my parents being around and my dad taking morning chicken chores/pig feeding for us on several mornings!).
Dad had also put up a sign on our door to welcome us upon our return, which we left up for the week as a reminder to ourselves as much as anything!
 It was almost noon by the time we sat down to our brunch of nutty sweet potato waffles and bacon. This was definitely a theme of the week - it was a good thing that we planned just 2 meals/day as our brunches were normally finally ready and us ready to sit down and eat closer to noon.
A game of Upwords ended well (I won so no need for me to rein in my grouchiness), following by the younger generation playing games with Grandma and Grandpa while the parents read and napped!
Alida was our master tortilla roller for our taco dinner, that was accompanied by the first steamed hull peas of the season.
Probably one of the most precious things about the week was there was a lot more time to devote to this kind of thing! There were more hugs, more tackling and pouncing sessions and more times where Alida would request to be "subdued" (that was truly her invention!!!). Lots of giggles and warm fuzzies accompanied those things.
We did head out together in the cool of the evening to snack on red raspberries and weed the row to stock the pigs up on weeds in preparation for the next day. We were trying to work ahead so that Jason and I had as little as possible that we had to do on Sunday. It was to be "Parents' Day Off" at Tangly Woods and we were hoping to soak it up. We attempted to name our stints of work throughout the week as our contributions to this lovely place where we were allowed to stay for the week. That mental game worked...sometimes!

 Sunday, June 21st

Saturday morning was so nice that we repeated it on Sunday, just adding reading materials to our backpack so we could linger by the pond this time. And it was a clear morning with a full view of the mountain in front of us. I had pulled a novel out of the Free Little Library to read and after a chapter decided I didn't feel like using any of my vacation week on it. It felt kind of empowering to say, "Nope, I don't have to read this book if I don't feel like it." Instead I just enjoyed listening to the bird and frog sounds before heading back.
I was able to catch up on Sun magazines in between my snoozes and meals prepared for us by the girls. Jason finished a novel.
It felt like more of the work of the day landed on Kali (all the dishes anyway), but all 3 girls helped with meals (even Terah made fancy decorations for our plates).
She also made multiple trays of other food that you can see tempting me here while we play Yahtzee together.
For breakfast they made eggs and toast to order, along with a greens saute. For dinner Kali made Middle Eastern meatloaf and Alida made nettle garlic biscuits, with that day's sugar snap pea picking for some fresh crunch!
Jason and I were about as successful as we could have hoped for at not doing much - Jason collected eggs and took the toilet out. I started laundry, fed my cheese whey and fed the pigs their evening meal. We did head over to the blueberry patch as a family to see what was ripening, finding a few black raspberries on the way.

I also cashed in a coupon for a "hair playing session" from Alida, and Terah gave me a mini-foot massage simultaneously. It was mostly relaxing.


Monday, June 22nd

Mom and I were up and headed to the blueberry patch before 6:30 a.m. I will say that "sleeping in" was not a component of this vacation. Our roosters and the neighbor's peacocks help with the early morning rise, along with my genetics. And, in the heat of summer, I like to get the outdoor things done as early as possible. We each returned with a gallon bucket of berries that we enjoyed over the following days.

It was getting hot by the time Jason stocked the pigs with weeds and I had mixed up the next batch of chicken feed. The girls (who are able to sleep in quite successfully) were finally up and at it and did chores while I worked on brunch: french toast and chicken sausage.

Our second "chicken emergency" came that day when friends who had gotten 4 pullets from us for a little town backyard flock called to report that one had started crowing! We knew we were sexing them a little early so I guess we should just be glad we were 75% correct. So that chicken has returned to Tangly Woods and a more certain female has made her way to join the town flock.

We took advantage of my parents' presence with us for Alida and Terah to hang with them while Kali, Jason and I watch the first of two films on our list. Just Mercy was an amazing and heart wrenching film. It was probably what got the tear ducts in good operation for other points in the week. It would be painful to watch no matter what, but maybe even a bit less so if it was a history our society had reckoned with, taken responsibility for, learned from and worked to heal the wounds from. It's so very painful to watch as we repeat the patterns and harms over and over again.

I'm deeply impacted by movies and so was glad we chose a midday viewing (during daylight hours) and had some time to absorb the material before bedtime. We taught my parents the enhanced version of what I grew up calling "Take One." We have the party version of Banagrams which is what has my mom wearing the banana bag on her head - there are a bunch of tiles that make the players do a variety of silly or difficult things (like playing without using your thumbs!). When we weren't playing games downstairs, there were often games happening upstairs.  
Monday night the girls had a sleepover in "the cave" upstairs, which meant the parents enjoyed a kid-less night downstairs. While the kids had supper with Grandma and Grandpa and played Wingspan, we decided to make the trek to Hensley's Pond for a third day in a row to enjoy it in an evening. We were glad we didn't linger any longer, as we arrived home right as a storm rolled in. The storm had Alida a little worked up, but the report was that it didn't take them long to fall asleep and not a peep was heard all night. That's the way we like for it to go!

Tuesday, June 23rd

This was the day where the daily load of what had to be done during our staycation hit a bit harder, especially for Jason. I was still enjoying having farm tasks to do WITHOUT the pressure of office/email work breathing down my neck. But I was also fully aware that we were not "just relaxing." It happened that it was a morning where we needed to do the animal chores, get pig weeds and it was harvest day which included picking/shelling peas, picking sugar snaps and raspberries, picking and washing lettuce. Then, of course, there was food preparation and the accompanying dishes, the daily toilet emptying, the afternoon pig feeding/egg collecting/animal shutting in and other odds and ends that seem to keep cropping up here and there.

By afternoon we were able to get in some relaxing and game playing in - there was Boggle and Mastermind and Sequence. It was also our day of dessert experiments. And they were all raving successes. The first was our first time ever making homemade caramel popcorn. It didn't last long! We also made peach leaf ice cream for the first time and spice bush berry biscotti to the side. All delicious and worth repeating - though possibly not all on the same day!
Since Terah couldn't write in our "vacation journal" she took to drawing pictures and for some reason kept drawing whales and boats with nets for catching the whales. We thought it was a sign that maybe we should play Save the Whales. Jason wasn't too into that game so decided to keep working on his second novel, which happened to be Moby Dick. That was worth a good laugh! We did all play Hearts together in the evening and Alida shot the moon successfully, much to our surprise and her delight. I cashed in another "you choose 10 minutes" coupon from Alida for a foot massage while I read the ADHD book I'm chipping away at. And then for bedtime we all cuddled up to watch the final of the Great British Baking Show season we were on (no, not the same one as the last time it was mentioned - some of us must admit we are a little bit hooked...).

Wednesday, June 24th

A repeat of Tuesday morning with a string of chores and weeding - weeding sometimes creates additional projects like this morning when we weeded the strawberry beds and took out the old bed and planted dry beans. The brunch plan for today was also the most complicated one - 4 quiches with different fillings. I had my pastry chef (Alida) to help with the crusts, thankfully. But by the time the sausage, greens, sausage & greens and herb quiches were in the oven, it was midday.
Jason spent the afternoon up on the hill for some much needed alone time while the gals in the household played Nectar Collector. I wasn't really in the mood for another long board game but mustered the energy for not one round but two, before crashing to read for a little bit (which, inevitably, led to a short snooze).
We had dinner upstairs on my parents' deck, which was a treat on all fronts (no food prep, no clean up, and a lovely meal with my favorite people and a beautiful view). We headed to the blueberry patch after dinner but we were rained out almost before we got started. We came home with a few cups but were rewarded with a brief but full rainbow over the mountain. You have to look close as it was fading by the time I attempted this photo!

We ended Wednesday, trying out a Marie Kondo episode on Netflix, being told by at least one friend how relaxing the show was. I do not envision getting hooked on this one. I've had a taste and that was enough. It was much more stressful than I expected to hear a couple reflecting on the stage of life with young children where you feel your life has kind of gotten out of control and where you feel like your partner and kids are no longer getting to enjoy your best self. Maybe it was just a little too close to home!

Thursday, June 25th

This was the day where Alida exclaimed how wonderful this staycation has been, as the parents were hitting an emotional dip. Thankfully, we didn't bottom out for too long and we had the time to feel a lot of emotions and to talk through things together, which we often don't feel we are able to do. I cried 3x that day - I'm sure the piglets were wondering what had come over me when I brought their basket of weeds with tears streaming down my face. It was the day where it became clear that a vacation would not likely have gotten us in touch with some of the emotions that had been welling up in both of us for weeks/months. A vacation would have been more relaxing and would have provided an escape of sorts - there's a place for those I think! A staycation felt very rooted in place and kept us in touch with our "normal life" enough to contend with many of the emotions we feel on a daily basis BUT provide the time/space/opportunity to let them bubble up and out, rather than needing to tamp them down to get on to the next thing that must be done.

This day included more reading, naps for some of us, and game playing (including teaching Grandma Eleusis, which Kali had taught us all the day before - very fun!!).

We spent the evening around an outdoor fire, after a short rainstorm had cleared the air. And with Jason and I having cleared the air between us and somewhat within ourselves, I think I can say that we both felt more lighthearted than we had all week. My parents joined us for pizza pockets and Kali created a new hit, which was roasting carrots in a pizza pocket maker over the fire. Kali almost put her foot on a toad that was nestled in a crevice of the fire ring. It stayed there the entire evening! I hope it was comfortable and not scared!
Friday, June 26th

And that brings me to yesterday, our final staycation day. One lovely dynamic of a staycation was there was no packing to leave or time on the road and no having to pack up to return home and then unpack. Those parts were not missed! Our last day did include our only time on the road, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I won't bore you with the repeat of us going out for morning chores/weeding for pigs while the girls slept. The one tidbit from today was I checked on the girls before going out and was surprised to find Alida in Terah's bed snuggled up with her. I was eager for the story, as this has never happened before. Alida was not able to tell me anything, though, as she didn't remember how she got there!

The other tidbit worth mentioning is that both Jason and I continued to feel more lighthearted and connected and so I think we both enjoyed that early morning chore/weeding time together a lot. The girls were all awake when we got in so it was time to start the bagels - the most anticipated brunch yet! In a continued theme, Alida was our dough gal and did most of the kneading. While it rose, I whipped up a sausage spinach egg bake and some sauteed greens for sides. We had splurged on real organic cream cheese for the occasion. We all got full before we wanted to be done savoring all the deliciousness in front of us!
After cleaning up, Jason and I got one final staycation nap to gear up for an evening on the town. Fridays are errands day when we do egg/dairy deliveries and pick up pig scraps. We haven't done that all together and haven't really gone anywhere as a family for a long time. Our kids were pretending to not understand how cars and seat belts work! There were many stops before the much anticipated final resting place (though the girls got to play with friends and I got to go on a walk while Jason did the bulk of them). We landed around 6:30 at a friend's pool with 4 kinds of pizza to fill hungry bellies as needed in between swimming and splashing. The evening did not disappoint!
So there you have it. As the sun set, home we went! I think we all hope it won't be our last staycation. I enjoyed our home much more than I have in a long time. I feel more in touch with our plants and animals after the week, not to mention my husband and daughters. I feel more inspired, challenged and committed to create some better work/home/family boundaries. I feel grateful for time to rest, for time to read, for time to hike, for time to cry, for time to process, for time to play games... All those things felt like both luxuries and necessities if I was going to keep engaging the world in meaningful and productive and life-giving ways!