Jason's home from the first day at a new tiling job in Keezletown and is out doing the "tuck and tie" on squash vines, collecting bean seed from the seed sanctuary and troubleshooting the next step on extracting a paper wasp nest from our lilac bush. Kali is working on her pokeberry dyeing project out on the porch (we'll be sporting some new colors soon - but some of the items she is dyeing are ones that will not be shown in public!). Alida and Terah are chattering and singing songs from The Sound of Music while they roll out tortillas for our taco dinner. I've just taken my second rinse down of the day after stirring the composting chicken coops' litter and giving each a fresh layer of leaves, as well as doing the same for the ducklings. So now to share some visual and word snippets from the last two weeks.
But first an "advertisement": Today I officially finished up the online course I bought for myself as my "leaving CJP present" and to support my continued healing! I give Christy Harrison's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals course 5 stars! The last year of reading, listening, unlearning, new learning and a good share of tears has brought more transformation and a peace in my relationship to my body and food that I honestly had given up on ever experiencing... If you struggle with your relationship with your body or with food or with "exercise," I'd be happy to share more with you about the class. She also offers a shorter (cheaper) class than the one that I took.
As a teaser, here's the titles of the 13 modules we worked through. The lessons are applicable to nearly all areas of life!
They are not always fancy or fully clothed! This cloud burst the other day was rather enticing!
One not so fun time:
Luca:
- Self compassion
- Reject the diet mentality
- Honor your hunger
- Make peace with food
- Challenge the food police
- Feel your fullness
- Pleasure and satisfaction
- How to navigate emotional eating
- Respect your body
- Joyful movement
- Gentle nutrition
- Review and troubleshooting
- Life as an intuition eater
And now to the happenings of the last few weeks, or at least a sampling of them!
Gardens, Harvests, Processing:
The dry beans are all harvested and threshed. The brown beans came first and more recently the black-eyed peas. Next up is white potato digging later this week.
The delicata squash have now cured and been sorted into ones for the pigs, ones that we don't want for seed and are hoping to share around with anyone who wants them, and then a large bin tucked in the root cellar now to taste test for seed selection for next year's planting. It seems that the lush summer with adequate rains encouraged prolific growth of plants and some abundant harvests but also seems to possibly be one of the reasons we are having more early breakdown of some things and increased bug damage. I'm really glad we have pigs!!
Jason even found termites in a cantaloupe. Who ever heard of such a thing!
The garlic, shallots and onions all got sorted and processed this week. I just used our last onions for the refried beans tonight and am using large handfuls of first use garlic. Those are three of the crops that are not holding up well at all this year. This is a sad thing!
As many things wrap up for the season (the tomatoes are tanking and I'm ready!), the sweet peppers are coming ripe in greater quantities. This is a happy thing!
Here's one of the clear signs that I'm less overwhelmed this harvest season than the many previous ones when CJP was added to the mix: I made elderberry syrup! Even after sharing elderberries with multiple households, we still had such delightful bunches that I couldn't pass up the opportunity! 3 quarts of stripped off berries made 3 cups of syrup. We'll savor it!!
Another sign of less overwhelm was experimenting with our loaded apple tree out front. Jason nervously (as historically I got overwhelmed with any suggestion for something that takes more time or might not work out) suggested we try adding the apples to pasta sauce. From one previous experiment cooking them to see if they would make good sauce (answer: NO!), it seemed they were high in sugar and pectin. Maybe they could sweeten AND thicken our sauce. They did both marvelously! I'm hooked!! I didn't have to add any of my dried tomato powder for thickening and didn't have to cook it down nearly as long.
The magical food processing thing is happening over and over again this year. Anyone have an explanation? I throw all the things we have into a pot - here is all the tomatoes, peppers, squash, etc... I needed to catch up on - and cook it down into sauce and it comes out to EXACTLY 7 quarts (one canner load). What is this phenomenon? It happens ALL...THE...TIME!
We had the opportunity to glean grapes for making juice this week up the hill. Due to Jason's back injury (see below), the girls went up with him to help (one helped the whole time, the other two in fits and starts - you can guess who was who!). It took several hours but they came home with nearly 2 bushels of yummy small grape clusters. They were not quite as ripe as sometimes so the juice is on the tart side but we will still savor it thoroughly this winter!
This might be the giveaway on who tuckered out partway through the process. :)
The seed sanctuary is working as intended! Jason enjoys very much when he sees a squirrel on the wire OUTSIDE the cage (looking in longingly?!). He's bringing in lots of beautiful seed for future plantings. He just came in with what he deemed his contribution to supper (a large stalk of sorghum for chewing on).
Corn...corn...corn! We are going to have SO MUCH popcorn and flour corn, and probably more than enough bronze flint corn for ponhoss. We successfully outsmarted the chipmunks this year and the patches are looking great! Jason and I just bought our birthday presents for ourselves yesterday - two things to help ease the processing grains, particularly corn! We bought some stainless steel sifters for corn and other flours and then a hand crank corn sheller. We'll wear all the skin off our fingers if we try to hand shell all of this year's corn!
We are big fans of the slicer tomato we have affectionally named "Shenandoah Valentine!" Jason found the perfectly heart shaped one Sunday in honor of my parent's 57th wedding anniversary!
Fun times:
Most Tangly Woods' evening meals are able to happen on Mom and Dad's deck (we are treated to Mom's delicious cooking on Monday evenings when they are around). And it is lovely when there is nothing on the schedule for either household right after dinner and we can linger visiting or enjoying the girls hula-hoop shows or watching for what birds are coming through in the evening. My dad is birding here, not snoozing!
We are so grateful for the playdates our girls get to enjoy with Ivy twice weekly. On one this week they were pretending to go to the Queen Zouse's ball (this included my wedding dress and lots of fanciness).
Having Kali back with us continues to be a delight! And we are getting back into the groove of getting some time for Jason and I to be with just Kali weekly. The last few times it's been her driving us to one of Jason's jobs where he has had tiny things he needed to wrap up while Kali and I took a walk down to sit and chat along the river. I love those times!!
Our conversations meander but some of what we've talked about is what ways Kali wants to take part in the functioning of our household. Here she is working on reducing the poke berry population at Tangly Woods. In addition, she is now officially our laundry person! And we are also back to regularly enjoying thoroughly her cooking!
A Sunday lunch and afternoon at Jonathan, Christen and Luca's house was the perfect sabbath activity. Luca was a delight even if it seems likely that he's working on getting some teeth through his gums.
Last Monday Jason tweaked his back at a job. Ugh! He was pretty uncomfortable for a few days and needed to be a lot stiller than he would normally be in late summer. And I got to test my muscles and stamina for a few days. I definitely went into autopilot for a stint just trying to get the next thing done. The girls all helped in additional ways, including bringing some company for Jason while he sat with the heating pad my parents kindly loaned him!
Ok, let's get back to the FUN TIMES! This...Baby...Is...Too...Much! He's so so so so much fun and we savor our times with him immensely. This past Thursday when I got back from my walk with Christen around 8:30 a.m., Alida was already up AND had done her chores. This is pretty much unheard of, but knowing I was returning with Luca was a huge motivator. He seemed happy she was waiting for him.
He gets passed from one loving set of arms to another!
Ducklings:
He's good at taking me back to former times where life centered around NAPS (or lack there of). This kiddo works hard for his naps right now, as does the person helping him. We snuggled, he drank a bottle, I sang, we laid together and he pawed at my nose (my nose should be healed up by our next Luca-day!), and finally he sacked out while I held him and fed him his bottle and bounced and patted him while singing a little jingle we made up with Terah's name. :)
We love making him smile and laugh - which is not normally too hard. If we land on something that works (here's it's Alida who had the touch), we have no interest in stopping until he tires of it!
In the vein of cute things that are growing and changing, here are our "independent" ducklings. They aren't as interested in their independence as their mama hen was in granting it to them. She easily moved herself back to the compost coop when let out to range. The ducklings peeped for her A LOT the first day or two (pulled at my heart strings hard), but they seem to be adjusting now. She normally visits them some when she is let out each day to range.
I'll sample me practicing a new approach to thinking about our space. Here pictured is Terah's "already started" clothes. These are clothes that are not yet dirty enough for the wash but too dirty to return to the drawers of clean clothes. She has three shelves to work with in the bathroom. And this scene is a common one that unfolds partway through each day. Here's a moral judgmental take on the picture: what a messy kid we have who should know better than to leave her clothes all over the floor. With that approach, I could choose to reprimand her for not keeping things tidy. Instead, as I sat pondering the scene from the toilet, this came to me: What I'm looking at is proof that I live in a house with children. And this particular child is involved in various kinds of activities each day that necessitate multiple changes of clothing. And that same child is often moving so fast to get to the next thing that she can't bear to take the time to fold or put the clothes back on the shelf. What a full and fun life she lives!! Kali, who was with me in the bathroom at the time, made some kind of comment suggesting that maybe I was working to convince myself of my new outlook. :) Yep, it may take some time to fully take root, but I'm enjoying many opportunities to practice it and how I feel when I do!
Well the tortillas are nearly done and before long it will be time to shut birds in and have dinner.
I'll close with one more "advertisement!" If you missed my recent post where I mentioned How to Keep House while Drowning I'll put in a second plug here now that our whole family has listened to it together! It was just as good the second time around and inspired great family conversations!
I'll sample me practicing a new approach to thinking about our space. Here pictured is Terah's "already started" clothes. These are clothes that are not yet dirty enough for the wash but too dirty to return to the drawers of clean clothes. She has three shelves to work with in the bathroom. And this scene is a common one that unfolds partway through each day. Here's a moral judgmental take on the picture: what a messy kid we have who should know better than to leave her clothes all over the floor. With that approach, I could choose to reprimand her for not keeping things tidy. Instead, as I sat pondering the scene from the toilet, this came to me: What I'm looking at is proof that I live in a house with children. And this particular child is involved in various kinds of activities each day that necessitate multiple changes of clothing. And that same child is often moving so fast to get to the next thing that she can't bear to take the time to fold or put the clothes back on the shelf. What a full and fun life she lives!! Kali, who was with me in the bathroom at the time, made some kind of comment suggesting that maybe I was working to convince myself of my new outlook. :) Yep, it may take some time to fully take root, but I'm enjoying many opportunities to practice it and how I feel when I do! 
No comments:
Post a Comment