Wednesday, December 28, 2022

Christmas with the 5 of us!

Any faithful readers out there, brace yourselves! I've got some catching up to do!! I'll try to make these posts picture-heavy and word-light. 

Here I am about to do the final scrapbook updates for 2022 (which will be backdated to get into our 2022 printed blog book - so it's gonna look like I wrote it in December not today, January 4 of 2023!). 

The dust has finally settled from our holiday celebrations and I find myself alone here in the house while Jason gets the first seeds started for the year (onions and shallots). Our kiddos are having a grand time extending the holidays with Aunt Christie and Uncle Mark in Pittsburgh, giving Jason and I the longest time we have had without kids since, well, we didn't have kids!

Here's a snapshot into some of the things that we filled our Christmas time together with. Since we were in "deep quarantine" for a week, we got to savor time just the 5 of us here at home. Who knows how often we'll get such a treat as the years go by, so we did our best to soak it up!!

I'm gonna go day by day again this time, as that helps me organize my thoughts - though my kids aren't here to help me remember if we watched Elf on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day (thanks, Xfinity, for a free movie on you!!). The kids would know but neither Jason nor I can remember!! 

December 24 - We kicked off Christmas Eve by making fresh bagels. YUM! We did three kinds: sesame, caramelized onion, and cinnamon and raisin. My goodness our family can plow through a pack of cream cheese when bagels are involved! 

Much of the rest of the day is a blur for me, though pictures tell me it involved some popcorn and Boggle playing. Kali was working to finish her popcorn seed testing from 2021 before the time for testing the 2022 batch came around. As promised, that was also the night of our sleepover in the living room near the tree!
December 25 - Christmas morning with the light coming in the front windows got off to an early start for our crew. I think everyone was awake well before 8, which is saying something for us. Christmas morning was a lovely morning of lounging, opening presents, eating and sharing around some of them, hot drinks and then all heading out for chores together. After all the Christmas snacks, we were quite ready for Christmas brunch. In terms of presents, you win some and you lose some. Our gracious kiddos would say there were no losses, but I would say the nature kaleidoscopes were more like collide-oscopes! I REALLY hate false advertising!!!! The images on the website show a product and possibilities that are absolutely impossible to replicate with the product that we received. I got to a dead end with customer service so we'll be modifying them on our own and hoping for the best. 
Terah got to actually light the fire on Christmas morning! She's been wanting that honor!!
Phew, the mint o's were not forgotten!!
Terah not only got to light a match that morning, but also use an ax in cleaning up a large branch that had fallen on the driveway in the recent ice storm.
Once all the animals had been taken care of and given Christmas morning treats, we venture in to treat ourselves to waffles with chicken gravy.
Smiley's Peppermint Bark ice cream was in fact delicious on waffles!
In the afternoon we met up with Christie and Mark for a very memorable hike to Hensley's Pond. The one side was not frozen enough to play on safely, but a trip around the pond netted us very solid and thick ice! I will admit that it took several check ins with Jason as our precious trio ventured onto the ice before my heart settled and I joined them.
In the evening we savored a Christmas pork roast with green beans, roasted potatoes and achara (a dish that Tala taught us to make and which I'm not as good at as she is!!)
December 26 - While a good day, no pictures were taken! Jason did all the grape pruning. I did all the house cleaning (which I'm enjoying a lot these days since it gives me a few hours to binge listen to the Good Inside podcast). And the girls had a "school afternoon" together. In the evening, Kali finished her popcorn testing and the girls got all their 2022 corn sorted in preparation for shelling and winnowing. 

December 27 - This was our final family winter cut back day. I LOVE these days where we are outside together (in all honesty, we are all out there together for the afternoon not the whole day!). We tackled a whole variety of pruning and trimming tasks. Kali managed the little bit of chainsaw cutting needed. Alida mostly managed the fire where we were burning raspberry canes and discovered her love of elderberry pruning. And Terah helped to prune and weave her turtle shell which is now strong enough for her to climb. And sometimes our help looked like this:
The pizza dinner headed up by Alida tasted really good that evening!!

December 28 - Jason continued on the winter cut back solo while Terah and Alida helped me make several rounds of mozzarella and a large batch of green noodles. But the hours were ticking by way too slow for our youngest who wanted to know about every other minute how soon Christie and Mark were coming!
We made it! Quarantine complete, Covid tests negative, HUGS RECEIVED!!!!! 
See next post for our Christmas time with 7 of us!

Saturday, December 24, 2022

10 days of (condensed) news...

Here it is, in a nutshell!!!

December 14 - This marked day 1 of our light quarantine week and our first planned (of several) family winter cut back day. Due to a pending ice storm, we helped Kali pick up and haul all the firewood she had been cutting. We also started cutting grasses to mulch the seed turnips. Jason worked on the new outdoor firewood storage but even with some extra hands we were not able to finish it up by nightfall. These days where we spend most of the day outside together are still among my favorite kinds of days! The evening (until late night) was focused on the final hog butchering task (slicing and freezing bacon - all 83 lbs of it!). 
December 15 - The ice storm came right on schedule. It was gorgeous and a good day for Jason to get caught up on some office/indoor things. We kept power all day until about 5 minutes before our small group zoom call. It also happened to be Alida's cooking night and she had french bread rising, cookies chilling, and a pasta meal underway. Thankfully it came back on in time for a late dinner and the bread only fell slightly from its unusual treatment. 
December 16 - Jason and Kali finished up the outdoor firewood storage and named it "Wilson" (as in Woodrow). Now we just need weather that is conducive for making an outdoor fire!! 
December 17 - The piglets were officially named Snuffle, Upa and Gus. And Alida is making fast strides at taming them! Glad they have their house and lots of pine needles and hay to make their little nest to burrow into during this cold snap.
The long evenings are providing more time for show watching and game playing. Kali's new game, Ransom Notes, is a hit! I haven't laughed so hard for awhile. My favorite the other night was Alida's in response to the prompt to write a birthday song for your mom. This one was touching, most are just hilarious! 
December 18 - The yearly chicken banding commenced (for Jason and Alida). We are also into corn processing and finished sorting and shelling the Shenandoah Scarlet flour corn, making a ginormous mess of the front room! The weekly cleaning was delightful - I could easily tell where I had been!
December 19 - In preparation for the next day's biochar burn, Jason and I distributed duff from biochar pit onto various fruits (raspberries, blackberries, blueberries...). Then Jason worked on one cleaning out project (the red coop) while I worked on another (the human coop) before we all headed out to select and cut our Christmas tree. I don't think we have ever had such a shapely tree from our place! The evening felt like our first day of Christmas festivities with the lit tree and celebrating early with Mom and Dad who are spending the holidays in Florida. We packed a lot into the evening - a delicious meal upstairs followed by a puppet show the girls wrote (which they "owed" to my parents for years from receiving the puppets as gifts), decorating the tree and opening a few presents, putting together a wooden puzzle I bought for all of us to enjoy together, and finally introducing my parents to Ransom Notes. So fun!
December 20 - After a holiday brunch of ponhoss, eggs, chicken sausage, fruit salad and coffee cake, we headed out for our yearly biochar burn. As is now our tradition, we kicked it off with a reading together of Jason's meditation he wrote a number of years ago. Once we finally got the fire rolling in the damp pit, the burn went so well and fast (the ticket to that is dried brush!!). It was done early enough that we got to work together on some final garden harvests of arugula, radicchio, spinach, turnips, and carrots before the bitter cold that was on its way, along with more ice/sleet first. 
We enjoyed many of those fresh garden veggies in a salad at dinner, along with Alida's delicious pepperoni and cheese pizza. I'm really getting into her being on the cooking schedule, and the fact that she has alluded to doing it even more than once a week going forward!
December 21 - My parents left for Florida and we said goodbye until 2023. This also marked the start of our week of deep quarantine and our 2nd family winter cutback day. I neglected to take many pictures this day at all. We did a whole host of things, including some more preparations for the single digits headed our way. It was even warm enough for a picnic lunch. With all hands on deck, we helped Jason finish up the black raspberry pruning right as dark fell...
December 22 - Today included more chicken banding in the rain/sleet/ice. This time, a week since the last power outage, we lost it 10 minutes before finishing the final episode of Schitt's Creek. Thankfully the outage was just long enough for Alida to get lots of candles going.
December 23 - Day 3 and the final one, wrapping up the chicken banding for the year. In the afternoon, Kali and Alida did the weekly town errands. I'm so glad that Kali had no problem donning my fancy face mask and glasses to run into Kroger for a few prescriptions. All the other errands were able to be done outside to keep within quarantine AND the curbside pickup at Smiley's ice cream netted us an extra 1.5 gallons of Peppermint Bark ice cream. The girls were surprised when they brought out two tubs of ice cream but weren't sure what was up and thought maybe I was just going all out of the holidays. When I called, they said we should just eat and enjoy it. We will!!! The afternoon was a gift as Terah and I had some hours just the two of us and had fun reading and practicing reading as the world glittered outside and we stayed cozy inside! After the frigid temps last night, we are very happy for our cozy wood stove. Now back to enjoying Christmas Eve with the fam!