Welcomed our dash back and we have a teenager in the house again!!

One thing I did not include in my last update was what Terah, Jason and I were working on during her solo time with us on Sunday, March 17th. After being inspired during our North Carolina trip, we were working on frames for paper making for Alida's birthday! In case Alida happened to look at the blog, we didn't want to give away the surprise early. It was a joint effort with my mom cutting up sheets and finding a used blender, the younger girls shredding lots of old financial documents and then most importantly Terah and Jason taking the lead on the frame making. Here Terah is holding the package. What remains is now trying it all out and making some paper! That will have to wait until this next flurry of travel is behind us and the soccer season is underway. But we are ready whenever a nice block of time shows up for such an activity! 

The other thing I didn't mention in the last update was the excitement building for Tala's arrival that Monday. After a short stint in DC, she joined us for a visit and got to be part of Alida's birthday celebrations!! How special! Tala arrived with all of us out in the gardens, but it wasn't long before the four of them were back inside, deep into their Dutch Blitz tournament!! No one was complaining about getting out of the large weeding job of the day! Jason stuck at the spinach thinning much of the day, which would have been more fun if there were more spinach plants to weed around. We'll enjoy what's there... Those first spinach salads of the year are always out of this world - especially when topped with fresh violets!

I continue to love Mondays and spending the majority of that day each week outside. Right now the brilliant spring colors are a pretty big boost to my spirits. The first broody mama hen with her chicks doesn't hurt anything either!! 

We were all around the table again for our Monday evening Tangly Woods' meal - Mom treating us to one of her feasts! Smiles all around!!

A complication of the week was some roaming sniffles and not feeling great for various ones of us. Not something we wanted to contend with. It didn't interrupt Luca's time with us and I was eager for some catch up time as we had missed some of our times together recently. He's such a big boy now - communicating in full sentences and overflowing with ideas!

The week included lots of hugs and snuggles, Rook and Dutch Blitz games, walk/talks, and just savoring being together. As I type this, Tala is starting her first long flight back home (it's hard to believe the visit came and went already). 

It just so happened that Alida's birthday week also coincided with her turn to have Mommy and Daddy all to herself for a few hours. She did share the time with the pigs and the chicks. 

Sunday was a gorgeous day for an outdoor fire complete with pizzas pockets, s'mores and good friends. The breeze moving the smoke all around was the only unwelcome part of the afternoon!

On the eve of Alida's birth, we enjoyed a family work day with lots of spring activities - cleaning out chicken coops, mulching and weeding (oh, so much weeding available!). Feeding pigs weeds makes weeding more fun and doing it together also makes it more fun. Alida was occupied a good part of the day making and decorating her bday cake with Grandma. She's got a knack for it!! We enjoyed the cake that evening with a birthday celebration upstairs.

The report from Alida was that this March 26th anniversary of the day of her birth was a fun and good day! Yay!! That means the day was a success. There were games...

There were yummy meals all together... (she picked delicious menus of homemade quiches and homemade pasta and bread)

There was an excited little sister who fashioned her own party hat...

There were friends, including Luca who reminded us often that it was, "Alida birthday!" 

There was dancing...

AND there were fun presents! She had no idea her big sister would take her request for an axolotl seriously!

Meet Lottie!

We'll have some additional birthday celebrations next week to mark adding a teenager back into our mix. It felt like we shifted gears pretty quickly after her birthday to saying our goodbyes (for now) to Tala. The girls enjoyed some last games while Jason and I went to town (for him to meet with our architect friend and an engineer about the pavilion and I took care of Bear so the adults in the meeting could concentrate). It was high time we got reacquainted. Thankfully it didn't take long!!

And I got to take in someone's new mobility - you would think my mouth would be the one hanging open but he seems pretty pleased with himself too! Currently his mouth is closed and he is sacked out on my front!!

The girls had to say their goodbyes first and then Tala and I took a few hours to stroll through and sit at the JMU arboretum before I took her to the bus stop. These are not easy goodbyes!!

We did manage to add some amusement to our photo taking...

And we savored the many kinds of daffodils AND seeing some baby great horned owls way up in a tree. I'm feeling grateful for the memory of that time together as Tala heads back over the ocean!

On the home front, we are itching to get to the spring planting. Looking at the calendar from last year makes me feel horribly behind, but Jason reminds me that we aren't. That said, he was eager to get started on the potato trenches. He's picking up seed potato today and we'll see if a fresh start on seed potatoes nets us more taters in our digging later this summer. We'll hopefully get those in, along with onions, shallots, beets, lettuce, parsley and cilantro within the next week or two. It's also time to get the tomatoes and flowers started inside. All of a sudden the growing season is upon us, ready or not! It was a timely time for Jason to hear this song on the radio and share it with me! I'm a tad obsessed with it currently, so I'll share it here for anyone that wants to listen to a very sweet love song! Enjoy Dylan LeBlanc's Let it Rain! Until next time...

A Glorious Week!

A new week is starting here on the home front and I'm kicking it off by luxuriating in the memories of the week that just concluded while Jason takes care of the animals and the girls pull themselves out from under their covers to join us for a family work day - it's spinach thinning and weeding day!

A week ago today Jason and I packed up and left the home front for a few days alone together - an early celebration of our 25th anniversary coming up in May. I believe we have now fulfilled one of the new year's predictions for 2024 we made with Benners, which was that we would leave the farm to the girls' care sometime this year. I don't know that I ever expected to get four whole nights! 

They did amazing! Jason and I are already dreaming of the next time! While Terah and Alida would probably say that we can never do it again, every update seemed proof that they were not only surviving in our absence but thriving. They got to hang out with Luca, enjoy an outing to the American Shakespeare Center with Christen, had a picnic on the roof, enjoyed an evening with Grandma and Grandpa and another with Jonathan, Christen and Luca and they even kept Bear on Thursday and tantalized me with adorable pictures of their time together. In all fairness, Terah was eager to turn the dish and egg washing duties back over to us and Kali didn't seem to mind that her chores would now take a fraction of the time they had taken that week. But they didn't seem to suffer in the least! I don't have a single picture of Kali from the week, since she was the one taking the photos (other than the many flower pictures that came to us thanks to Terah!). 

So while our kids kept busy feeding themselves, cleaning up after themselves, tending to the animals outside and inside and to other little people, Jason and I savored every minute of our time away together! It was as close to perfect as anything can be - such a sweet time of connecting, music creating and playing, reading, hiking (soaking in so much beauty!), light and deep conversations, future planning alongside reflecting back, so much playfulness, and mostly feeling so grateful for each other and all the growth and healing that we are experiencing individually and together. It was just beautiful! It can already feel like a distant memory in some moments, but I know that time together will keep feeding us for some time to come. We knew that this getaway was like taking a deep breath before starting somewhat of a marathon. It's gonna be a full year here, but we feel more ready for it after taking some time apart together. And we also made some concrete plans for making sure we check in regularly about how we are doing amidst the many balls we will be trying to keep in the air together. We make a good team!

We came home to some excited children and to some chicks who had nearly doubled in size and definitely in strength and to a layer of dust over nearly everything - thanks chicks! Our younger two had clearly spent a lot of time with them as they were super comfy using both of them as roosts and lovely perching spots! So we savored a few days with birds escaping regularly from the confines of their swimming pool and served them their eviction notice yesterday! They moved out as the next round of chicks hatched and were delivered to our first broody hen of the year! We are firmly in chick-hatching season!!

We all spent the afternoon tying up various loose ends, cleaning the house as much as one can do with chicks flying about, and prepping for our third and final Ted Lasso weekend with Andrew and Alena (i.e. making caramel corn, chex mix and cookies for the snack table!). We only had a handful of episodes left, which we enjoyed thoroughly, which left us plenty of time for chick adoring, a glorious hike, many rounds of Higgy Piggy, and lots of ping pong. While we have come to the end of our show rewatch together, we are already dreaming and scheming for our next weekend together!

We parted ways Sunday late morning after a St. Patrick's Day brunch together (no green foods but plenty of green confetti, thanks to my mom, decorating the table - and Alena sporting a lovely headband!). 

The afternoon was full of more fun times. It was Terah's day for time with me and Jason solo and we soaked it up (don't ask questions around Alida's birthday on what we did for much of the time!!!). Then I departed on another glorious hike while the chicks were moved to their outdoor lodging! And there are no pictures of the evening scurry to at least make the house a little less obviously a chicken coop (i.e. CLEANING!). The afternoon hike was a particularly special one - I had the privilege of doing a repeat hike with one of my doula-clients-turned-friend! We had walked to Hensley's Pong when she was eagerly anticipating this sweet baby's arrival (ok, trying to be patient and wishing to encourage her to come out!!). We did a repeat hike so I could take some photos of the pair 9 months later. Pretty sweet and special!! I love birth work and I love staying connected with the families that invite me into such an important season of their lives!

And now here we are! Jason just came in from chores and the girls are officially stirring (I hear voices and footsteps in the back). The morning quiet has come to an end...