Where was she when I was in eighth grade?

Kali wrote a poem today:

The sun is first, shining and bright
Then there is mercury, hot with its light
Venus is hotter, but next on the chain
Earth is the only one with Africa or Maine.
Mars comes next, with caverns below
There is an asteroid belt, escapes seem to glow
Then there is Jupiter with its big, red spot
And Saturn, which doesn't seem to have a dot.
Far out Uranus, how little we know!
Then there is Neptune with winds; how fast they blow!
Poor little Pluto, he just seems to moan
We'd call him a planet, if only we'd known.

I believe she is going to take after her father in the poetry realm!!! I am still scarred by my "C" received for my 8th grade poem written about my cat Pepper.

September news

Most days the thought "I want to put this on the blog" goes through my mind at least once. And then by the next day I can't remember what that inspiration that flashed through me was. That feels like how life is in our household right now. I'm soaking in a lot of it, but it also seems to be going so so fast! (and half the time I sit down to write and then get interrupted, as in this case, and don't get back to it for hours or days...)

So I'm now at the end of the day rather than the beginning and bed is calling louder than most other things. Just to mention a few of the things that haven't left my mind since earlier today:

Kali is now not sure what she likes more - art or math. This would be a big switch in our household. While Jason was feeding Alida the other day, he suggested she might write an essay while he was busy. She did. About art. It reads:

"Art: Probubly the eseist school subjact for most tiaps
Panit Draw Colur Stamp Cut n Tape Skalpt
Can be Framd
Can be done with pen marcr craon paper pensul leaf sesors stik grass
Looks like this (sorry I can't easily show the pictures)."

Her spelling is still not fabulous, I can actually understand it now (a big change in the last few weeks) and it is cute to see her enjoying communicating through written words - sometimes.

Alida's big news is that she has been working hard on something and it has paid off. A TOOTH!! As of this morning the first one has cut through on the bottom. I'm hoping very much that her desire to bite and chew on me lessens now that the bugger has cut through. We'll see!

The big news for Kali and Alida is that Daddy has completed the swing set and they are both very pleased. Kali and Jason just went out for a little night swing ride. I think Kali would swing a dozen times a day if there weren't other things that took her away from the swing set - like playdates, home school co-op days, books that beg to be read, stuffed animals that need their harnesses changed, cookies that want to be baked, games that are fun to play, etc...

And Jason and I are just trying to keep up with and soak up our growing girls and our growing farmette. The most recent canning project was my all time favorite one - grape juice (liquid gold is often how I refer to it). I feel so rich as I watch the deep purple liquid flow out of the steamer. FUN! The next canning project will be tomorrow night - following up on Jason's chicken butchering evening a few days back. I keep thinking we are almost done and then I bring in enough basil for pesto, enough green beans for several days of fresh eating, enough tomatoes and peppers for another batch of sauce... There are butternut waiting to be harvested and a few final watermelon in the patch. And we have been eating lots of sweet potatoes in various forms (partially due to the fact that Jason half cooked some of them in an attempt to cure them in a room with a space heater).

While Jason was washing sweet potatoes down by the garden, I took in and enjoyed some of the lingering color in Nora's garden. I can't always sort out all my emotions about the many things that have transpired in our 6 years on Fruit Farm Lane, but the enduring and overarching emotion at many moments right now is gratitude. And a big bundle of the gratitude I feel goes to Nora. So we enter a new week and one in which both Jason and I will celebrate another year of life - what a year it has been!!

It just keeps giving...

I'm sure it comes as no surprise to any of our faithful, or even not so faithful, readers that I'm typing this to the sound of two canners busy at work! Just when I thought the garden was slowing up, Jason came in with three baskets of green beans. There are 7 pints of dilly beans in one canner and 7 quarts of green beans in the other (and three bags of snipped green beans in the fridge). But that isn't the food processing project I'm feeling most pleased about today. When we were out putting the chickens in last evening, I noted that our rhubarb plants looked fabulous, and in need of a trim! And we had peaches that were also needing to be used. I wondered (after having recently been given some tasty strawberry rhubarb jam) if I could find a recipe for peach rhubarb jam. I did. I made it. It's yummy and pretty!

I'm still feeling a little bit in awe that we have peach trees growing right outside our house, that grew from seed, and that are showering upon us delicious peaches. We have eaten lots, canned some, frozen some, made peach jam with some, and shared some. How fun!!

In other news, Alida is getting around these days. She likes to flop from her front to her back to her front and pivot around and is starting to make significant progress towards mobility this way! She is also discovering the joy of grasping something and then letting go, just for fun. Pick up, drop, pick up, drop, and on goes the game. She also enjoys banging her heel on the floor when she is laying down (nice percussion instrument that she has discovered) and shaking her toys to make them rattle. I couldn't contain my laughter today when we were laying together in bed and she discovered my fingers. I was holding my hand above her head and she got very interested. She grabbed a finger and shook my hand. No sound. She let go. She stared at my hand, grabbed again and shook. This "toy" was not working as she expected. She probably went through the routine a half dozen times or so. It's so, so fun watching her discover and figure out her world.

ps. Update on a previous blog post - Jason not only won a blue ribbon at the fair, he got a check in the mail today from the Rockingham County Fair Association...for $1.50. :)

A day of "puttering"

As I nursed Alida to sleep tonight I was feeling that my day had been rather unproductive (it was a day in which I felt like I had all kinds of "catching up" to do after putting in a 5 day/50 hour work week - and that included catching up with my family, particularly a rapidly developing now 5-month old). It was merely a fleeting feeling that came over me, and then I started thinking about the day and chuckled inside. Alida sacked out quickly and I came out to rejoin Kali and Jason and the canning projects underway. Jason was getting started on dishes and we started chatting. He laughed as he shared with me how he was just thinking about how nice it was to have a low key day at home, in other words a day where we were not pushing/ultra-focused on getting a lot done. We shared a fun moment recounting our day together. Here's a snapshot:

I woke to Alida wiggling beside me bright-eyed and smiley around 6:40am. She is officially done being swaddled at night and it is cute to see her going from being a tightly wrapped little mummy to a sprawled out big baby laying on our bed. After enjoying some morning smiles and a few of her raspberries blown in my face (a newly acquired skill), she was ready for her first nap of the day and, while Jason did chicken chores and then picked stinging nettles for our breakfast, we went for a nice long walk.

Jason and I enjoyed nettle egg sandwiches, watermelon and applesauce and then started on our day, doing inside tasks and slipping out anytime there was a break from the rain and wind. Jason harvested the following things from the garden: slicer tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, swiss chard and lambs quarter, basil, and watermelon (the cucumbers had been harvested and canned the night before, the beans picked and ends snipped for eating over the next few days, and the sauce tomatoes were also picked last night ready for us to process today).

The rest of the day included Jason and I working side by side making just shy of 40 pints of salsa and while Jason took the lead on much of the tomato chopping, I made several batches of pesto, a huge batch of green rolls, and made up a recipe for a potato crusted fresh tomato pie because I needed to think of a way to utilize the oven heat for more than just the bread I was making. We also made the butter from our milk share, Kali made chocolate peanut butter no bake cookies with a little help and I ended the day getting a large batch of pasta sauce started.

Fitting in all the cracks of the day were many diaper changes (as well as many diaper changes avoided by Alida still going potty much of the time in the sink) and lots of time nursing. And watching Alida could be a full-time activity and great entertainment right now. She is so cute laying on her belly - her favorite thing to do is to lift her legs and arms up so it looks like she is swimming. She thinks it is very funny when we imitate her. She also loves having her belly eaten and she will grab about anything within reach - watermelon is still a much loved snack, so it is a good thing we grew a lot of them!

Alida isn't the only one adding to the fun and laughter in our home. Kali got an idea from a book, "50 Simple Things Kids Can Do To Save The Earth", to write a letter to your senator about protecting the rainforest. And so she did, but she tacked on two additional items. "Ps. Rule about no tailgating...Pss. Help protect monkeys." Off it went and she is eagerly awaiting a response.

She has brought it up a bunch of times since then and is wanting her correspondence with the senator to have the greatest impact possible. Well when she learned about petitions she got to work again. Her petition now has four signatures. Jason and I were both happy to sign the request for our representative to protect both monkeys and the rainforests. But what I loved most of all was Kali signing on Alida's behalf. In case you can't read it, it says, "Alida (Too little now...Probably will care later)." So if you are in the Keezletown area and would like to add your signature to her petition she is ready to collect as many signatures as possibly before sending it off!!

Well, Jason is working on the mountain of dishes from today and I need to attend to the pasta sauce simmering on the stove and the last canner load of salsa. We didn't exactly put our feet up today but we reaffirmed for ourselves that 1. we make a good team and 2. we love food processing the best when we do it together!!

It's a pretty good thing that the rain nixed Jason's many plans for the day!!

Growing up...too fast!

So this week is up there as one of my busiest work weeks of the year. New student orientation started Tuesday morning and as is normal in the mad rush of last minute details I put a long 12 hour day in on Monday. How it is possible for a little person to change so dramatically in that period of time, I do not know, but when I got home Monday evening I once again felt overwhelmed by how fast she is changing. She was doing all these new things, including what Jason has coined her "tough baby act" where she throws herself back, juts out her chin and makes these very cute but low rumbly baby grunting noises. Very, very silly!!!

I'm trying to figure out how to balance all the evening home tasks with my desire to both crash from exhaustion when I get home and soak in all the changes we are seeing as Alida continues to grow and develop. Last evening we literally walked away from the to do list and took a much needed family walk. Alida had the new experience of riding in the jogger and did not even make it halfway before falling fast asleep. We had a hard time finishing our walk since a little kitten at the neighbors' seemed much more interested in coming home with us than playing with the other cats around. Finally, after Kali got to hold and play with it for awhile, Jason dumped it in a bush and we all ran down the road before it could figure out what happened to it.

Then last night we hit another milestone of sorts. Alida has been getting out of her "swaddle sack" with greater ease by the night and we wondered when it might be the end of swaddling. On our walk we decided to wait until after we get through this particularly busy phase to shake things up any more than necessary. Well, she had different ideas. She was not going to have her arms tucked in last evening and promptly wiggled them out every time I wrapped her back up. So she slept for the first time in a little sleeper and no swaddle and it went just fine. Growing up!!

Well, the baby has just joined me and I want to soak in the morning smiles before heading off to work. Some day I may get to posting some St. Palentine's day pictures of Kali's recent birthday party...

Debut at the fair

Ah. I see what the problem was. I had wondered why, even though my rooster was clearly blue ribbon material at the Rockingham County Fair this week (It's hard not to win when you're the only contestant in your category), the little yellow "For Sale...Make Offer" sign garnered zero responses. Now seeing these photos downloaded, I can see that the problem was that my lovely golden rooster was perfectly camouflaged against his wood shaving bedding. Folks must have walked right by all week wondering where the chicken in this cage had gone. If a Chantecler chicken ever wanted to hide in a bed of straw it would have no trouble!

Though I've kept chickens for as much of my life as circumstances have reasonably allowed (or perhaps a bit more), this is the first time I've ever shown a chicken. Normally I am not one for formalities or orthodoxy, even with chickens, so the Standard of Perfection promulgated by the American Poultry Association (this lists all the recognized breeds and their corresponding Platonic ideal form) can tend to elicit a bit of sarcasm on my part. So what brought about this foray into conformity? As my friends might guess, I did it as an outsider with an angle. You see, the Chantecler chicken is recognized by the Standard, and has been since the early twentieth century. But only the White and Partridge color patterns have so far been accepted. Perhaps that is why they failed to appeal to me. I, of course, keep the unrecognized Buffs. What a renegade!

There is a small but passionate community of fanciers who have taken it upon themselves to promote the cause of inclusion of the Buff among the accepted forms of Chantecler because, as near as I can gather, they are convinced of its inherent goodness. This amuses me. Perhaps they are taken with their birds but are irked that they cannot win the coveted Best Of Show really big blue ribbon with them. I do not count myself among them. However, I am convinced that this strain of Gallus Gallus (the domestic chicken) has some unique and useful genetic expressions that offer much to the poultry keeper (especially the amateur...which is most of us). These traits include: frost-proof comb and wattles (nearly absent congenitally), general hardiness and vigor, good hatchability, calmish disposition, an ability present in some of the females to hatch and rear their own young, non-aggression towards humans, decent rate of egg laying, easier than average plucking (for a heritage breed), eminent roastability (nice shape and very tender), and feathers that are light colored enough to allow a clean appearance to the plucked bird but with enough color to not litter the plucking site with visible blotches of white for months after butchering day (a pet peeve).

As such I am loathe to see it slide towards extinction, which is the direction it has been headed in recent decades. One strategy for its preservation is to promote demand for it. One strategy for promoting its demand is for people to believe it is a legitimate breed...a breed that can win blue ribbons, nonetheless! One strategy for more people for believe in the breed's legitimacy is for it to be accepted to the Standard. One condition for its application for acceptance in the Standard is that it have appeared in a given number of poultry shows. I think you can close that logical loop.

Also, it seemed like fun. And it was. I got to see the back side of the Fair, and that was my favorite part of the whole evening. Even if I had to face down the stares of the poultry keepers who seemed able to smell a greenhorn a mile away, I and my pony tail marched right in there and asked all our dumb questions until we found the designated cage. Next year will be easier, and if I can talk our neighbors (the only other people I know who own Buff Chantecler...got their eggs from me, of course!) into entering a bird or two, maybe there will even be some competition!

P.S. We named him Ferris.

10:22 a.m.

Did I mention different sleep patterns?