HALLELUJAH!

At our most recent family meeting where "goats" were once again on the agenda, Jason and I committed to making a good faith effort at finding an alternate home for Cookie Dough and Oreo where they would not end up being used for meat and where the girls could go visit.   Neither one of us was feeling very hopeful, but both of us were feeling rather desperate for a change.  Even so, it took us a few weeks to get around to writing up an advertisement of sorts to circulate.  We blasted the following out to as many friends, colleagues, and neighbors as we could think of that might have beneficial connections:

"Two goats, name of Oreo and Cookie Dough, which currently live at our home are in need of a new home. We have learned that our setup and family pattern is not really optimal for their and our needs over the long term, and we are unprepared at this time to make the necessary changes/adjustments to our homestead that would be required. They were originally purchased to raise for meat, but due to the children becoming attached to them we have kept them around longer than we had planned; now it is time to move on in one way or another. Our family’s decision was that we are not selling the goats as meat goats, but hope to find owners who need them for pets, companions for a dairy animal or horse, or for land clearing. The goats are very friendly, personable, and small (an adult can easily carry one), and they thrive on human attention. They are twin males that were dehorned and castrated early on. They are generally gentle with children, though they will non-aggressively rear up and lean their forelegs on people (dog-like) when they want attention or are curious about what the people are holding. They love to be taken on walks to find tasty leaves. They are out of a Tennessee Fainter (Myotonic) dam, by a Nigerian Dwarf sire. Oreo does occasionally “faint” when he gets stubborn about going where we want him to on a walk, but that’s about the only manifestation of the myotonic gene we see anymore, except that they do seem to have athletic limitations as far as jumping (a plus for ease of fencing!).These goats have never required grain-based feeds, but have always done fine on a regimen of good hay and leaves from cut branches, with a mineral supplement and salt available free choice and an occasional (bi-weekly) herbal de-worming preparation. We ideally want the goats to go to a situation somewhat nearby (close enough for the girls to visit a time or two) where they will have some room for exercise and where the owners enjoy giving them social attention, as these seem to be the missing ingredients for these guys’ full happiness here at our place. We can deliver the goats if that is an obstacle. They will be available until roughly the middle of September. They would come with what we have left of the hay, mineral supplement, and herbal wormer at the time of the exchange. The price is negotiable depending on situation and need, with our preference being in the 50 dollar range for each goat."

Thanks to people forwarding the above on to others (and to my moment of inspiration yesterday) we had not 1, not 2, but 3 decent options by the end of today!  Kali is very excited about the plan, and her excitement wore off on Alida (making her no longer resistant to the idea of them leaving our place but excited for the adventure ahead).  As of Tuesday evening, Cookie Dough and Oreo will be residents of the Luray Zoo.  I had been thinking lately that really these goats would be great for a petting zoo or some place where their main purpose is to be around people (even better if those people spend quarters on handfuls of feed for them).  On our visit to the Luray Zoo (which is a rescue zoo), we had noted that they had goats and a petting/feeding area.  Perfect!  But what are the chances that they would take our goats?  It never hurts to ask, right?  So I called and after the owner asked me three small questions he said, "yes!"  They have a handful of goats but not enough to keep up with their pasture so he has to mow it sometimes.

After sending out the advertisement, we realized that we were really more or less okay with cutting our losses and giving them away (to be frank I was about ready to pay someone to take them for us!).  So it will be our donation to the Luray Zoo (maybe we can arrange for some kind of free visiting rights?).

So our "goat experiment" may be about to end.  Jason still talks of dairy goats some day.  I'm going to need some significant recuperation time...It hasn't been a good feeling to assume care for these animals and then realize our set up really isn't meeting their needs (wants?).  So lots of relief in the household this evening thinking that they may be about to enjoy their lives a lot more and Jason and I about to enjoy our homestead a lot more!

Even with their noises in the background off and on, I had a grand day.  I'm exhausted but quite pleased to have 28 quarts of salsa cooling on the front porch.  The last 7 need a few more minutes cooling down in the canner before I take them out, which is the only reason I'm writing this post!  I will fall asleep if I lay down.  So far I'm at 100% seal rate and don't want to mess that up, even if it means staying up a little later.

While I tackled this project without Jason (he was occupied all day on outside chores), I can't say I did it alone.  The girls really were amazing (and helpful!).  They peeled some of the tomatoes, Alida peeled some onions, Kali read Alida to sleep for her nap and helped her in countless other ways, Alida was her normal entertaining self and they were both helpful taste testers.

The girls are at really fun and enjoyable stages.  They both have their moments (don't we all?), but overall seem to be thrilled with their lives and are therefore mostly pleasant to be around.  Alida has been rather mischievous of late and more rambunctious.  She likes to tease and be silly and recently seems to like to run up behind us and ram into our legs.  Then the next moment she wants to just cuddle with us.  Yesterday while I was at work she and Jason were being silly together.  Alida was on the floor and piped up, "Hold me."  So Jason reached out and held her arm for a moment and then let go. She said, "Why did you do that?"  He explained that she told him to hold her so he did.  She said, "No, not like that...hold to whole thing of me."  So Jason grabbed one arm and one leg and picked her up and then put her down.  She knew what was going on now and said, "Nooooo, not like that...hold the whole packet of me!"  Jason picked her up and cradled her and that was what she wanted!

She has just sacked out on Kali's beanbag beside me here on the kitchen floor. I'm ready to join her.  The timer has rung, the canner is turned off and bed is calling.  It won't be at all surprising if I have a dream about chopping vegetables!

A tribute to my mother!

My busiest work week of the year is behind me.  I'm tired, but not nearly as tired as I would be had my mom not cleared her own full schedule to spend over a week with us, lending her arms, hands, heart and ears to our family!  THANK YOU!  Today is my first day "on my own" in over a week and I am feeling more and more grateful by the hour.  The piles of dishes by the sink are only one very tangible reminder of her absence.  Every time we are together it is confirmed for me again what a good team we make in the kitchen. There is really no one else (Jason and I make a good team but it's different) who can foresee exactly what to do to be the most helpful without us really even needing to communicate about it.  It feels pretty seamless to be working side by side - almost like there are two of me, but much more enjoyable than if there were!!  We didn't see much of each other all week as I headed off to work before 5 a.m. most days and arrived home after putting in 12-15 hours. But yesterday we got to savor a full day together - with a walk together in the morning and a game together in the evening and lots of canning and conversing in the middle.

There were a lot of things that just wouldn't have gotten done this week had Mom not been with us or I would have been up even later than I was and been more sleep deprived than I am.  Here are just a sampling of the things Mom helped us with over the course of the week (it's worth noting in part because it involves one new experiment): making salsa, canning tomato paste, canning beans, drying tomatoes, drying squash, freezing kale, and making our own home dried minced onion. I'm pretty excited about that last one!  Besides all those things, and many more, she spent lots of quality time with the girls - reading stories, playing games, going for walks, going for a little excursion to town, offering hugs and cuddles, braiding hair, feeding them and, of course, offering listening ears to Alida's constant chatter!  That has not let up at all...

It meant so much to me to leave home knowing that the day would go well for Jason and the girls.  It's not that they would not have been "ok" without me.  We would have survived the week but it is doubtful we would have thrived!

I've found myself thinking about those folks out there in the world who work 60+ hours/week on a regular basis.  There are probably many of them and they must be made of different stuff than me.  When I was at the office this week, I was fine.  I was actually energized by much of my work this past week.  After corresponding with 30 plus new students for a few months, I got to meet them!  And I spent the good part of 3 days with an incredible group of people from all over the world; from Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, South Korea, Peru. China, Congo, United States...  New student orientation is the culmination of a lot of the work I do over the summer so there is a lot of satisfaction in seeing it come together.  I would go as far as to say that I was having fun a lot of my time at the office this week.

Then I would get home, and I would more or less crash!  I would go outside to pick raspberries or tea or take out the compost and feel like I was in a fog.  It was a rather disorienting feeling and one I'd rather not experience on a regular basis.  I just felt disconnected from the place and the people that I love the very most. It helped to know that the week would come to an end and I would go back to working 3 semi-long days/week rather than 5 incredibly long days/week.  But I felt sad thinking that there may be a lot of people working crazy long hours just to get by or because they feel compelled to do so as a way of "succeeding."  Maybe some people actually choose it.  Maybe it works for some people.  For me, the relief I felt coming home Friday evening was palpable.  I would not get in a vehicle again until Monday morning!  I have felt very much like myself this weekend and it has been lovely.  I feel like I've been soaking up my family's presence too - I find myself just looking at our girls and marveling at who they are and who they are becoming.  I feel grateful for all Jason did this week as well to keep things going smoothly on the home front and have felt lots of surges of love and affection of late when I think about our 15+ year partnership.

And now it's Sunday afternoon and the work week is fast approaching.  I'll include a few more pictures here of the last number of days and the fruits of our labors.  While I learned in Maine last year that the call of the loon is right up there among my favorite sounds, it has not topped the sound of a canning jar sealing as it cools on the counter!

Beans, pickles, tomato juice and salsa ready to be washed off, labeled and stored in the root cellar.

I don't know how many more afternoon naps we'll enjoy, or how many more times Alida will nurse to sleep.  So I'll savor them while they last and assume there will be fewer blog pots when they end.

This is what I likely won't get to until another day - thankfully the tomatoes would like a few more days to ripen.  I love chopping, but do come to a point of wanting a night of sleep before I pick up a knife again!

Yes, just a little proud of this one - a home dried squash chip with fresh salsa on it...

Just noting how much I am enjoying canning outside - not that this August has been very hot, but keeping the humidity outside has been a big plus.

Home grown cantaloupe with ice cream in the middle. It is very handy to not have many dishes at the end of a nighttime snack. :)

The pantry is filling with jars of dried things - here's squash, onions, tomatoes and corn.

Those beans are still waiting for me. In the background Alida is grinding corn that I blended until it was much finer and then used as the thickener in my salsa sauce.  The taste is great; we'll see what we think after it is canned.  If we can get away without buying cornstarch, our salsa will be super cheap for us to produce with pretty much just spices that we didn't grow ourselves.

And, finally, deviled eggs with Jason's home grown/ground paprika. Very fun and tasty too!

Corn, applesauce, the fair and family!

We've hit a few milestones around here - on the day our eldest turned 11 we also consumed the very last jar of salsa and pickles from 2013.  I'm glad to report that we have already remedied the pickle situation with dozens of new jars on the shelf becoming more dill-infused by the day and that I made the very first batch of salsa on Kali's birthday to start working on replenishing our stores of that essential component to our yearly diet!  I'm also happy to report that as of this year we are no longer using any bought tomato products to make a home canned tomato product.  Our favorite salsa recipe calls for 1 c. ketsup and 1 c. tomato sauce.  So we are blending and cooking down our tomatoes to make something similar to tomato sauce/paste. I just slightly up the vinegar and salt in the recipe and am 100% pleased with the result.  Now if only the deer would stop tromping around in and eating the roma tomatoes, we might be able to make a lot more!

The days between my last post and this one have a whole lot in common - harvesting and eating and processing.  Repeat!  But there have been a few new fun experiments.  It can be easy for me to get into a food rut at this time of year. In the interest of efficiency in a very hectic season, I go with what I'm used to doing and find it difficult to take the extra time to be creative and try new things.  So I'm feeling pleased with three mini-experiments.  I tried drying sweet corn in our electric dryer for the first time.  I'm happy with the result - in terms of how it dried out uniformly and that it looks pretty in the jar on the shelf with the other dried things - but don't yet know if we will actually like to eat it.  That's pretty important!  Eating it plain feels almost like eating caramel, as it is bound to get stuck in the grooves of your teeth. So we'll see if we like it re-hydrated in soups this winter.  I dried a large tray of cherry and drying tomatoes in our solar dryer, using the back up light bulbs over night to finish them off.  It worked amazingly well, staying consistently at 120 degrees overnight.  Several hundred little tomatoes were reduced to less than a pint jar.  And, finally, the most delicious experiment was making grape spread (and one I regret not having tried years ago).  Rachelle and I made juice together the other week and I ran the remaining pulp/seeds through the victoria strainer.  I added a bit of honey, stirred, and served. It disappeared rapidly!

One of the things I've enjoyed recently is the times when we have been doing food processing tasks together.  Both Jason and I have been solo on some canning projects this year and while we both can do it I enjoy so much when we get to work as a team.  Our applesauce and corn freezing day was one such day where we worked at it together, along with having Jonathan and Rachelle join us for part of the day.  I also love having Alida as my side kick, who currently fills every pocket of silence with her chatter.  In addition to chattering constantly, she is actually getting quite good at a number of tasks.  Besides "knowing about tomatoes" as she framed it, she is also decent at husking corn, cranking the victorian strainer, putting noodles on the drying rack, and finding squash on the vines that I've missed.

We've plowed through a lot of produce this past week, as we've enjoyed various celebrations for Kali's birthday and a fun Benner family weekend in Keezletown (minus just a few members who were missed!).  Kali's birthday party requests have become much less complicated (she no longer is interested in blending two holidays for a themed party), but one thing remains consistent: a yearly trip to the Rockingham County Fair!  It was a gorgeous day Wednesday and we spent a good 7 or so hours milling about looking at animals, riding rides, and enjoying a picnic.  I get majorly overstimulated there and noted to Jason that I never notice people's faces because I'm so focused on getting to a particular destination without running into people.  He noted that he is always watching people's faces so is usually running into people.  So we concluded that once again we make a pretty good team and he should just walk behind me so that I can get us where we need to go without collisions and he can spot people we know that we might like to greet or talk with.

Kali rode a few new rides this year but still didn't do the one that drops you from up high, leaving your stomach at the top. Jason and I did it together and we both vocalized our sheer terror during those 2 seconds of free falling.  I wasn't sure if Alida was going to get her "money's worth" out of her armband after her first ride. We all joined her on a little caterpillar roller coaster.  As it went down the one and only small hill she said, "this doesn't feel good" and I was hoping that she would not lose the contents of her stomach as they took us on two more rounds.  She didn't but as we got off, she said, "that was not fun."  The ferris wheel and carousel got better reviews, but her all time favorite was a large slide.  On one of our many trips to the top, the guy working at the top putting our feed sacks on the slide and sending us on our way noted, "I wish I liked this ride as much as she does."

We left Kali behind with Emily, Jonas and Rachelle to ride a few more rides while we took off for a home with a tired, but surprisingly good spirited, 3 year old.  We had just pulled out of the lane for the fair when I looked back and saw that she was already completely sacked out - arm sprawled to the side of her seat and her head hung over with her mouth open.  Clearly she was tuckered out!!

Friday was Kali's actual birthday and the Tangly Woods crew joined us, along with two of Kali's closest friends, for pizza pockets and s'mores over the fire.  Another picturesque evening with scrumptious food - which tastes so good eaten outside.  Kali spent most of her birthday reading some new books she was gifted and not talking much, since she almost lost her voice due to her cold.  But it didn't seem to slow her down much or keep her from enjoying crossing into a new year of life.

The celebrating continued, welcoming most of the Benner clan to Keezletown for the remainder of the weekend.  There was plenty of fun to be had, but clearly the highlight of the time was taking in all the new skills and cuteness of the youngest family member (who as of today is older than Nora was when she died).  She's growing so fast and doing so well and is clearly thriving under the wonderful care and adoration of her parents.

So the weekend was my last hurrah before new student orientation week.  I better sign off now and use the rest of Alida's nap and the quiet in the house to turn my attention to the week ahead.  It may be awhile before I'm back in this space...

July excursions behind us & August is here!

The "craziest month" in my year has arrived!  April and August are my busiest work times and they seem to coincide with two of the busiest months here at our homestead, especially August.  This year our beans will be later than usual and tomatoes are ripening slowly due to the cooler temperatures, so things will all "nicely" come to a head right around the final push of preparations for new student orientation at the end of August.  August is also a time for much celebrating, with the birthday of our eldest who turns 11 in 10 days - so a trip to the fair with the Tangly Woods crew and a birthday party/sleepover are in the plans for the month as well!  My saving grace as I look towards the next few weeks is anticipating my mom spending a week of it with us.  Things always go so much smoother with an extra set, particularly her extra set, of hands around!  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I've been hesitant to put any kind of "lice update" here since my last very premature and hopeful blog post. I think I was naively hoping, beyond hope, that we were through with those little buggers!  We were, almost!  But with lice "almost" is not good enough. Over the next 3-4 days we found one tiny louse on each of our heads.  It was enough to cause us to stay up to the wee hours of the morning multiple days in a row combing each other's hair and pulling out nits.  Jason and I have had multiple "date nights" after the kids are in bed, sitting in our closet examining each other's head with a fine tooth comb (literally).  Not our idea of a romantic date!  The good news is that we have been "bug free" for well over a week.  We are back to hanging our laundry outside in the fresh air and sunshine, and doing laundry at a more reasonable pace.  Our floors are still squeaky from the oils that have dripped on them, but washing floors is one of those things that keeps getting bumped off the to do list, in the interest of more pressing (and fun) tasks.  We are still checking for nits and are still finding what appear to be really wimpy, dark colored, flat egg casings here and there. Of course the fear is that one of those egg casings is not dead and will hatch, so hence the continued vigilance.  Re-infestation of head lice would radically alter the month of August, which is not what we are hoping for!

One of the reasons we are up late checking in the evenings is we can't bear to use all our good daylight time on it.  There is too much to engage in the outside world - produce to harvest and freeze, dry, can, or eat and lots of weeds to be pulled (way more than normal due to the abundance of rain).  By the time we get to August, I don't feel like I have the luxury of taking much time to experiment with food preservation, which is what I really want to be doing. Canning is what comes naturally (and freezing, but freezer space is already at a premium), but I'd like to get better at drying and fermenting.  I managed to take 5-6 huge squash last week and dry them in rounds and I'm a big fan.  First of all they take up so much less space and second of all they are tasty. When I next have a surplus of squash, I'll give it a try brushing them with a little olive oil and salting them and I think we'll have a great snack option!  In the midst of putting up food for later, we are also consuming vast quantities of delicious, colorful food.  Here is a sampling of one such meal - beets, cucumber dill salad, string beans and a squash, onion, garlic, saute with chicken pieces.  We recently pulled all our onions and shallots and had a hard time fitting them all in the garage.  I didn't get any pictures of that afternoon's fun since we were pretty much jogging to and from the patch and garage to get them pulled before the rain started.  As soon as Alida's wakes I hope to head outside and fill a few baskets with tomatoes, cucumbers, beans and whatever else there is to find. It's likely, with Alida along especially, that none of the raspberries will make it back into the house!

We've been gone from home 3 out of the last 4 weekends, which might be a bit part of why our week days feel so crammed full. In addition to our trip to the Benners, we made two trips to WV - one for an annual Music on the Mountain event and to drop of Kali and her cousin for the week and the second for a camping weekend with college friends and picking up Kali.  Both were well worth the trip, but leave us wishing that more gatherings happened after frost and before spring planting!  In between our travels we enjoyed a week with cousins around.  It's really special to see our girls forming relationships with their cousins now that carry them between visits.  There was lots of game playing, laughter, and running around outside.  The house feels quieter with just the four of us now.

This past weekend was our camping trip to Spruce Knob Lake.  We hadn't been camping since I was a day or two pregnant with Alida - so it had been awhile!  It was as it usually is for me - enough work getting ready that I wonder if it is worth it and then loving it once there and feeling like it goes way too fast.  Before we know it we are back home airing things out, laundering wet and dirty clothes and jumping back into the swing of things.  But the memories of cooking over the fire, talking with good friends, hiking around the lake, napping in the tent to the sound of rain pouring down, watching our kids enjoy each other, and taking in the beautiful views from the highest point in WV linger.

Lice...what a nightmare!

When we were on our recent trip in PA, I noticed a little bug crawling in Alida's hair.  I pulled it out, looked closely at it, showed it to a few others and then assured myself (after a minuscule amount of online research) that it must be a book louse acquired through her reading lots of books that do not receive much attention anymore at the house.  That was the last I thought about it, until two nights ago.  Kali and I landed in the bathroom at the same time and on a whim I grabbed her brush and was redoing her braids. I just snag the opportunity when it comes, as it sometimes doesn't come around more than once every few days.  The light must have been just right because almost immediately I recognized the little nits right near her scalp.  Talk about a sinking feeling in my gut!  On closer examination, I saw the little bugs that looked just like what I had found in Alida's hair the weekend before.

I don't know if it was that I was still feeling too sick to think deeply about what I was seeing in PA or if there was some internal and unconscious denial that it could be lice.  Normally I second guess myself like crazy and can't let that kind of thing rest until I'm assured I've been thorough in figuring it out.  It truly was the farthest thing from my mind all week. I had combed both girls hair multiple times and hadn't noticed anything.  Boy did I miss a growing population!!  But we'll get to that.

Once I was pretty sure I had a solid diagnosis of what we were up against I went outside to break the news to Jason.  It had been yet another day where our to do list did not even come close to matching the hours available in the day. He was working hard on some weeding and was trying to get to a certain point before he quit for the evening so we could enjoy our last evening together with my niece and nephew who were staying with us from PA.  We had plans to make an outdoor fire and cook pizza pockets over it and relax!

I needed a good 10-15 minutes for a little "flip out" session where I vented about the bad timing of this, the unfairness of it, how I didn't want to have to deal with this, etc... This included a call to my mom for any tips she might remember from when I had it (multiple times), and no doubt a little desire for some sympathy.  It felt like a whole different thing to face this as a mother.  When I had it as a middle schooler it was horrible.  Being sent home from school is no fun.  But once home I just shampooed with what I was given, sat while my hair was combed and then went back to whatever I was doing.  Sadly, I have no memory of helping to clean, vacuum, do laundry, etc...  And I didn't have the quandary of what product to put on my child's scalp, what approach of all those out there to take to eradicate the little buggers!

And, I'll admit, that I've never thought that I should do some research into what we would do if/when one of our children brings lice home.  Never rose to the top of the priority list - actually never even entered my mind to get on the list.  So here I was feeling flustered, uncertain of what to do first, wanting to help the four kiddos in our care to have a good evening, thinking of the many people I needed to communicate with who had been with us over the past few weeks, and already feeling tired without even having started!

But after my mini-meltdown of "I can't do this," I (better said "we") did it!  And Jason and I make a pretty good team.  We got into action and spent much of the next 24 hours in high gear, and in the highest gear from about 7 p.m. that evening until 2:30 a.m. when we crashed for a bit of replenishing rest before continuing.  I have never done so much laundry in such a short amount of time and we used the dryer in one night more than we normally do in one year.  There were little side perks of the whole ordeal - for example, our car was vacuumed out for the first time in a long time.  Jason even commented on how impressed he was that I hadn't mentioned its grossness sooner.

We did take the time to make a fire and sit around it with the kids which was definitely the highlight of the evening.  That and my new food experiment that was a HIT!  I came up with the idea to try sliced polenta as the "bread" for pizza pockets in my desire to find a gluten-free option that is just as delicious.  Success!! I'm already eager to do it again.  We used our home grown brown flint corn which I ground and boiled and then solidify in a loaf pan.  Simple, able to grow it ourselves and delicious.  We'll be doing that again...

As the sun set, we decided it was time to start slathering all our heads with the oily goop I had found at Kroger (the one "pesticide free" option on the shelf that looked promising).  I got out the detailed instructions and found it sobering to read around 9 p.m. that one might expect to spend up to an hour combing hair that was longer than shoulder length.  Kali's now touches the chair when she sits AND it is thick AND she had it the worst.  Below that section of the instructions were some tips, including the use of movies to pass the time.  I felt very pleased with my stop by the library the day before our niece and nephew arrived to grab a few movies "just in case."  Thanks to Shaun the Sheep and Max & Ruby we survived the next few hours together in the bathroom and even all seemed to see the humor in finding ourselves with oil-filled heads having a movie party in our bathroom (I guess our huge bathroom is good for something - often feels like a lot of wasted floor space)..

By the end of the evening we had determined that Kali had a massive infestation (we are talking dozens and dozens of bugs), Alida had clearly gotten her fair share of them, and Jason and I had a few each.  Thankfully no sign of any on our niece or nephew and we aimed to keep it that way - load after load of towels, sheets, blankets, clothing, hats, baby carriers, etc...made their way into the washer.  Two black trash bags are in the garage with quarantined stuffed animals and other non-washable items.

I may actually be getting ahead of myself to even post this as it is not 100% certain we are out of the woods but it feels like we are on our way.  We did a comb through last evening and found no bugs, dead or alive, and only very dead/deflated looking nits on Kali and a few on Alida.  So fingers crossed we have licked them.

One of the hardest things was sending that "my child has lice" email to friends and family.  I like to give people I love nice things.  Lice is not on that list!  I've gotten only gracious and understanding responses, even from the one friend whose son can probably thank Kali for the nits they have found.  

I've thought a lot the last few days about maintaining perspective and accepting what comes our way and making the most of it.  It is not hard to get a quick and huge dose of perspective with the news flooding in from Gaza and the personal calls for help from alumni of the graduate program I work with.  It is heartbreaking and brings me up short when I find myself inclined to complain about the huge inconvenience this has been.  It was an inconvenience, but that and only that.  We are all safe, well fed, and comfortable (other than slightly itchy scalps).  So the title of this blog should probably be changed.  It felt in some ways like a nightmare but it is more accurately a bad dream, and a very short-lived one.  

The morning after being up until 2:30 a.m. I opened my email to find that the Peace on the Inside quote for the day was "Always fall in with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way."  The recommended practice noted that "There is much in our lives that we can't determine, influence, or control.  Today I recognize that my task is not only to accept this, but to find ways to adapt, reframe, reshape, reimagine... to become an artist who uses disaster, discomfort, disappointment as a canvas upon which to express and create."

It's a recommended practice because they are not expecting we are all experts at it yet.  I'm certainly not, but I do feel that all of us have weathered this as well as could be expected.  The kids especially have been great sports about it.  I think a side benefit will be that Kali is unlikely to complain about "normal" hair brushings ever again!!

It felt good today to head outside and do some garden harvesting, to play in the kitchen making pasta with the girls, and to not put a single load of laundry in the washer!  

Alida is now up from her nap and it is time to start working on sauteing my third round of squash, garlic and onions of the day (this time for a potluck so those in our family that might be getting tired of squash can pick something else to enjoy!).  To end on a happy note, here is Kali with her fast growing "ducky!"

Pickles and more...

If there weren't pickles in the canner, I would be very inclined towards bed rather than blogging.  But, as it is, the canner is just about to boil so I've got a few minutes to do what will probably be a rather shoddy job of getting this blog up to date. Frankly, I'm not even sure where to start.  Since I last posted, it has been a whirlwind of social gatherings, visits from out of town friends and family, the never ending cycle of harvesting and processing food that defines this time of year, a few canning projects, my first experience of acupuncture, the worst bug I've been slammed with in years, a date night with Jason where we went to two movies at Court Square Theater (we started with the compelling and angering documentary Fed Up and ended with a feel good romantic comedy Words and Pictures), and finally a trip to PA and back.  Life has not been dull!  Is it ever?

On the garden front, we are enjoying our first pole beans, cucumbers and tomatoes.  We are enjoying the last of our sugar snap and snow peas and the wineberries and black raspberries are also winding down.  We continue to be surprised by the lovely kale we are enjoying (we've never been successful at spring kale).  I pull an occasional beet for Alida (who downs as many as I cook up for her).  There are herbs in abundance, mustard greens, lots of squash, onions and garlic.  We dug all our garlic recently and are happy to report that there will be no ping pong playing for some time now because the table is full and overflowing with garlic!  I'm using it by the bulb not by the clove and we are loving it!  We had a major garden scare when we got back from our weekend in PA.  Our fence charger had stopped working and we had purchased a new one but in the rush to get ready for our trip we had not gotten it charged and installed.  A deer got in our garden for the first time ever and possibly also a groundhog.  YIKES!!!  Jason was vigilant with liquid fence for the few days that it took to get the charger up and running and as of last evening the fence was once again giving a good shock to any creature (including Jason) that dared touch it.  And, yes, we did bait it with peanut butter to attract the critters to the garden fence for a little lesson about how they would be happier elsewhere.  So for now it seems the beans are safe, if we can keep up with the bean beetles!

I did get around to picking and making red & white currant jam.  Pretty stuff!!  More recently we enjoyed two evenings of wineberry picking (thanks to the generosity of the parents of some close friends) and made a large batch of wineberry jam, as well as freezing several gallons.  It is a good and bad sign that our stand up freezer is jammed full and the chest freezer is not all that far behind.  Good thing I don't need to freeze cucumbers!  I did freeze some grated trombone squash the other day and hope to give a little more space to more of that before the season ends.  The other thing we harvested the first of the other day was potatoes.  They were delicious and so beautiful.  When I was showing them off to my friend, she asked if I was going to take a picture for the blog.  She noted that it just looked like something that would show up on the blog.  Here it is!

It is often good for us to get away here and there during this time of year, because otherwise we have a really hard time slowing down.  The only other things that seem to do the trick for me are getting really sick or having a baby around.  Well, I got really sick and slowed to a grinding halt and then went to PA where there was a sweet baby that I couldn't hold for fear of passing my illness to her.  What a bummer that was!  But I enjoyed our niece from a distance and it was very special to initiate a quilt top made by Grammy Benner with cousins (thanks to Mom Myers and her sewing circle friends for knotting it)!

The highlight of the weekend for our kiddos was definitely pool time.  I'll end with a short video of the activity that Alida was not interested in discontinuing, even when her lips were purple!