Time away and then a flurry of activity!

Last week Jason and I cashed in a lovely birthday present from my parents - two nights away ALONE! As much as we love our whole Tangly Woods' pod, it wasn't too hard of a decision when offered a getaway just the two of us or all going away together. Both are fun, but very different! We were definitely needing the first option. We headed back to one of our favorite spots where lots of memories have been made - we've enjoyed the cabins at Lost River State Park just the two of us and with the whole Tangly Woods' crew. 

The only hiccup upon arrival is that their pest management service just happened to be doing something to the outside and inside of all the cabins on the one and only day we were there and they weren't offering any time frame for the disturbance (let alone explaining what they would be doing inside the cabin). A quick inquiry at the office netted us a helpful response from the front desk person saying that they would tell the pest management company that we had refused entry. Works for us! And this time, unlike the last cabin we stayed in, the fireplace worked well and didn't smoke us out. It was a delightfully lovely relaxing and connecting time.

And I completely neglected to take any more than a few photos, even forgetting my phone for our hike where I savored the mosses and ferns and we sampled wintergreen berries. We started a new book together, which provided lots of fodder for our conversations and which we plowed through nearly a third of. The time for reading drastically tapered off upon our return home. But we were also feeling eager to return since our littlest was feeling particularly eager for her mommy. 

As we were leaving, I thought Terah's voice sounded funny but each time I asked if she was feeling ok, she assured me she was; nothing to note when I went through a list of possible symptoms. But by evening, she was ready for bed super early and was appearing to have landed her first cold in a LONG time! Sigh!! We felt pretty conflicted being away but were told that all was going ok and we should stay and enjoy ourselves. We followed those instructions pretty well, though I did find myself a tad distracted at times and needing to check in more often than I would have otherwise. When we arrived home, I had a little leech on me for quite some time. None of us ever got super sick, but the virus did pass through most here at Tangly Woods in some form or another (sadly hitting my Mom the worst - I'm glad for my good stash of mullein tea, which seemed to help promote a quicker recovery than sometimes). 

So we landed home and dove into a VERY full week on the home front: spinach thinning, bike shed progress, hog butchering, and soaking up lots of Luca time! I'm gonna split things into a few posts so this one isn't book length all on it's own. But here's a few smaller updates on the aforementioned items and a few other miscellaneous things that seem noteworthy enough!

Spinach thinning - how glorious to have a hearty enough stand of spinach to need thinning in December! Jason, Kali and I worked on it together one day, but it was tedious enough that we lost our daylight before we could finish so Kali and I finished it off the following day. We netted enough spinach to share a big bag with my parents, to make a batch of fresh hot spinach dip, and are still enjoying it for salads and haystacks. What a treat!! We even harvested one of our few radicchio heads to go with. It was good, but unless we know how to grow them better/larger I would say it doesn't deserve prime garden real estate at this juncture. It is great to have a variety of fresh crunchy things at this time of year, other than turnips which we could be eating at every meal of every day and still likely not making much of a dent in the crop.

Terah and I took a load of ornamental grasses to the seed cage today that Jason will use for mulching the seed turnips. He's started planting the best ones to make seed next year. They are ridiculously large! We are doing a new thing this year for the first time: adding taste testing turnips to our list of things we taste and then vote on. We cut off a chunk and taste it and if it is a good sweet crispy flavorful one, we'll plant the remainder of it to make seed. It's time consuming and we keep forgetting to do it, but also fun and again remarkable the variation in flavors between the different individuals. So we are hoping to make some more notable progress on the flavor of the turnips we are growing in this next generation of seed! Stay tuned!! I am very happy to report that my tastebuds are enjoying turnips more and more over time, which is a very good thing based on the number we have!

Random sighting - we had an opossum in our persimmon tree!

New toy, I mean tool! Yay for the help of a hand crank corn sheller - Alida and Terah are the experts in using it thus far in our household.

Both before and after our little Lost River getaway, Jason was getting the footer for the bike shed done and starting on the wall. He's got a few eager helpers, especially Alida who worked with him on much of the footer and is eager to get in on some of the wall building. Right now we are in a stretch of nights below freezing which won't work for having the mortar set, so the project is stalled until there is warmer nighttime temps. I can see how much Jason is enjoying having kids enjoy learning new skills alongside him, especially ones that he would have learned from his own dad. 

And now today! We kicked the day off with a nutty sweet potato waffle brunch before heading outside for the day. It was day one of our quarantine (as we eagerly anticipate spending some holiday time with Jason's sister and husband in a few weeks), which kinda marks us entering our own holiday season of spending a lot of time together as a family. We are spreading out the few Christmas presents we have for the kids and gave Kali and Terah their new pruners at brunch (since they were going to need them today!) and Alida her box of fancy food coloring for some hoped for holiday baking!

Then off to enjoy the first of several planned family winter cut back work days. This one panned out differently than initially expected as a predicted ice storm tomorrow had us switching up some tasks around for the week. We all helped Kali haul the piles of firewood she had been cutting up over the last few weeks to the staging place for filling the wood shed. If only we needed to burn more firewood to heat our house! My goodness we have a lot of wood!!! Then Kali and I worked on thwarting honeysuckle in a few places while Jason made some more progress on our new outdoor firewood storage in Kali's garden. I'm pretty excited about not needing to cart down wood every time we want to make a fire in the fire ring! 

Isn't this piece of wood beautiful!

He has a lot of fun with these kinds of projects!

The days just aren't long enough right now! We keep getting caught trying to get stuff done as daylight wanes. So the roof is half done, but will need another work session to wrap it up. And we did attempt to accomplish too much today, knowing we had a massive amount of bacon to work up tonight. Alas, here we all are itching to watch The Voice finals and there's still bacon to slice after 9 p.m. 

We did try a new thing today, switching our upstairs fridge to a freezer. I had the "fun" job of skinning the bacons and then we partially froze them for slicing. Alida and Terah are sticking with Jason through the many many pounds of it! And I'm getting caught up here on our scrapbook, when I probably should be crafting more of a supper plan. Good this family includes at least a few night owls!