A lovely sabbath day!

Today was glorious!  The sun was shining and the temperatures soared above freezing, making it just right for working together outside.  With Jason's focus going primarily to the bathroom project, we have not had a lot of time working in the same area together.  So what a treat to have him stationed at the picnic table doing some much needed chicken coop rehabs, while the girls and I loosened stacks of frozen leaves to put on new garden beds.  I think they were about as happy as I was to be working out in the cool air and warm sunshine.  It was fun to hear Alida's giggles as we pushed her over into the big leaf pile and to see Kali now able to give Alida wheelbarrow rides.  I also let the chickens out early to range so they could be traipsing around us.  We all had plenty of energy after a delicious brunch of fresh kale (see photo below for our picking conditions) and pork sausage, both thanks to generous neighbors, and some coconut flour waffles (still trying to make something that isn't dry with coconut flour - that stuff is incredible!).

It's been nice to have a bit of a breather from the bathroom project while the concrete cures.  I took the opportunity to "reclaim" our floors yesterday, thereby enjoying a full day of walking around without grit under my feet.  I know it will be a mess again soon enough, but I've relished this short stint of cleanliness.  Below you will find a smattering of photos from recent days.  The second round of chicks is due to hatch early this week.  I'm quite impressed by the first mama hen that has kept all 9 chicks warm under her feathers, even with our 2 degree night this week.  They are getting their little feathers and Jason has seen them undertaking flying practice!

I'm wrapping this post up so we can turn our attention to a family meeting.  Three out of the four of us want to have one, but the littlest in the house is not into sitting still to do much of anything right now so we'll see how it goes!  Kali is still finishing up her dinner, and I'm still wrapping my head around the fact that she just consumed an entire spaghetti squash with lots of red sauce over it for dinner (the quantity of food is impressive, but even more so is her much more adventurous palate).  It's coming at a great time as I'm getting more adventurous as our standard and easy go to's are gone and we are digging deeper into our reserves (which is exactly what we should be doing in January).  Seeing our little onions sprouting, reminds me that spring is not so far off!

The only jack hammering casualty: what I came upon when coming back from upstairs where I had stationed the girls with a library movie to get them away from the noise and whole house vibrations.

Jack-hammering progress!

So grateful for Jason's brother, Ethan's, help on the plumbing (both the thinking and doing parts)!

And the Myers-Benner gals were all happy to have Kathy's company while the men worked - this puzzle has been put together at least 10 times in the last few weeks.

Alida and I went next door to glean the last of the kale before our 2 degree night.  Let's just say it was crunchy as I picked it, but Alida was munching on it - snow and all!

Filling the cavity, as much of it as possible, that was under the tub.  Unfortunately, we discovered that the cavity goes partway across our bathroom and kitchen floors.

Future shower location!

From today: Alida's favorite game was trying to steal the leaves we were trying to load into the wheelbarrow until we would push her back into the leaves.

Chicks showing off their new little wing feathers!

Happy birthday dear 2015...

It is my (Jason's) fond wish for you that you had as much fun ringing in the new year as we did.  We got together with some good friends for a "pie" themed supper (two kinds of shepherd's pie and a potato crusted quiche...wow), then while the young kids busied themselves in the play kitchen the adults played a few jocular rounds of Bananagrams all together before the men headed to the garage for a marathon ping-pong session and the women played more games with the kids and talked.  At quarter of midnight we were summoned for a grape juice toast.

I hope 2015 looks a lot like 2014 did except that we're all a little older, a little wiser maybe, a little better at what we do.  But as the calendar turns over, we've had some things to accomplish, some things to reflect on, some things to relish, some things to celebrate, and some things to initiate on this New Year's day:

To accomplish:

We've dived into the bathroom renovation.  As it turns out, our inference that the musty odor that develops in our house while we're away is coming from the bathroom could not have been more accurate, or so it would seem at this stage.  As I dug into the demolition aspect of the project, I found nothing too remarkable with a view to mold issues until I got to taking apart the old water heater closet.  The closer I got to the business end of the bathtub, the grungier things felt, looked, and smelled.  I had known from earlier remodeling projects that there was an opening in the concrete under the tub drain, but I'd never been able to access it before and get a good look at it.

I'll cut to the chase:  Sometime between 1981 (the year the house was built) and now the tub drain had become disconnected from the P-trap assembly that joins it to the main drain line.  In English this means that some large percentage of every bath and every shower that we and the former residents of this home ever took ended up not in the septic tank and drainfield (its intended destination) but into the ground under the concrete slab.  Structurally this is mostly not a big deal.  In terms of air quality it is, to be frank, a big deal, since the inevitably mold-saturated air in that soggy pit would have been contiguous with the general room air of the bathroom, and from there the whole house.  Also, the excessive moisture that would have entered our home that way might go a long way to explaining our difficulty in controlling humidity, even in winter.  Ever since making that discovery, I have been basking in the feeling of deep gratitude that we might now be able to rectify this.  I am so glad we decided to tackle this project in 2015.

And tackle was certainly the word for it today as I used a neighbor's fabulously effective electric jackhammer (Is there something unseemly about using a room's ordinary wall outlet to fuel the obliteration of its own floor?  There might be a warning in Deuteronomy about that.) to rattle a hole in the floor under where our bathroom sink used to be so that my brother (thanks, dude) and I can re-configure the drain pipes this weekend to suit the needs of the shower stall I will build in that location.  Also if I can re-pour that section of floor I can make the shower floor recessed in comparison to the rest of the room, obviating the need for a threshold, which renders it more usable by a person in a wheelchair.  Am I smart, or what?  Well, I guarantee I doubted my smarts pretty seriously as I donned safety glasses, dust mask, and earmuffs, stood the remarkably heavy apparatus on its point, took a deep breath and pulled the trigger...in my bathroom, no less...and turned an otherwise perfectly good, cold January day into a hot mess.  It will be worth it!

To reflect on:

Most specifically, our financial situation.  It's been over a decade since we have felt the need to keep close track of our expenditures for informational or planning purposes.  We've thought of ourselves as mostly pretty naturally thrifty people who don't spend a lot on frivolity, so it has never seemed like analyzing our spending would generate much information that we could actually act on in any significant way.  But this fall and winter we've begun to realize that Janelle's lingering intuition that we are not quite living within our means is, in a word, true.  Over that past half year or so we've recognized a significant shortfall, complicated by several expected and unexpected large expenditures.  It will need correcting.  So we're taking advantage of a free online budgeting program this year to help us gain a more precise awareness of the flow of money in our home economy such that we can make adjustments to whichever end of the balance sheet we may in order to bring our financial situation up to the same standards of sustainability that we expect from our gardens.

At first blush, the solution could be pretty simple:  Janelle could potentially increase her work to full time or I could try to pick up part time work of some kind.  Neither of us likes either of these options too well...trying to fit our homestead activities around work time away from home is going the wrong direction as far as our philosophy of work and home is concerned.  But philosophy that is not doable is not good philosophy (so I say, anyway), and we're willing to consider making this kind of change if we find that the need for it is unavoidable.  We're not willing to go into debt for ordinary consumer expenses.  But before we concede the point, we're going to take a hard look at where our money is actually going and how we can make a difference on the needs and wants end of the equation.  We're also going to be looking for ways we can gain more economic benefit (financial or non-financial) from the projects we already have going.  For example, we're putting serious time into plant and animal breeding, the benefits of which work might extend far beyond our home and family...might there be a way those efforts could be rewarded by the community?  The same could go for the skills maintenance and process innovation for home food and energy systems we think we have come to embody to some extent...might there be a way for folks who would like to pick up some of the skills to help make it possible for us to continue concentrating on these things?  We don't yet know how to go about answering these questions, but we aim to work on them a bit.

To relish:

Fresh lettuce and spinach, from the garden, on January 1.  Talk about a "first!"  Never was there a sweeter spinach than that which grows in slow motion (even slower than usual, I mean) through the dim light of a mild December.  And I mean "sweeter" literally.  Maybe it's our low-sugar food choices having their effects on perception, but I've never eaten spinach that tastes this sugary, especially the leaf stems (petioles).  I'll bet you never have, either.

The spinach is Winter Bloomsdale that I've selected for hardiness, vigor, productivity, and winter survival for several years.  Last winter (remember the polar vortex?) it made it through pretty well without mulch.  This year I can't yet notice any winter damage at all.  The lettuce is growing--yes, growing!--under spun polyester row cover.  It's an aesthetic compromise in the garden, and it's a petroleum product, but the rewards in the kitchen and the belly are pretty hard to ignore.  I'd like to breed a lettuce that could shirk the cold like the spinach does...stay tuned!

To celebrate:

In the final days of December, the chickens gave us nine self-opening Christmas presents: Chicks!  Actually it was ten but one was a dud.  It's the wrong time of year to hatch laying hens (it supposedly matters what light regime predominates at which stage of maturity), but when one of my hens started going broody at the beginning of the month, I decided the timing was good for raising a few extra birds for a spring butchering.  I had wanted, anyway, to see if I could get a broody hen to raise chicks amongst the older flock in the composting coop.  If it works, I'll be pretty pleased with that system, I think.  I was so tickled with the idea that when a second broody turned up I put ten more eggs under her.  Then we left for PA for Christmas and while we were gone a third started setting.  I'm afraid I'm a sucker for not wasting a good round of broodiness...I put eggs under her this evening, too.  And I think a fourth hen has started in.  Why, pray tell, are my hens going broody in winter?  I surely can't answer for it, but, hey, we're going to roll with it.

To initiate:

I suppose setting eggs under a hen fits this category, but also we're getting a jump on the gardening: Our onion plants are never big enough at onion planting time.  Last year I started them at the beginning of February.  Better than the beginning of March, but still not good enough.  This year we decided to try January 1, so as soon as I'm done typing this I intend to sneak that sowing in (I'll sow ten or so seeds per cell in mini-cell packs in a simple covered flat (tabletop greenhouse) and set them on a rack hung in a south-facing window) before calling it a night.

Better get to it!  Happy New Year.

Final days of 2014...

...and we are going out with a bang (literally)!

Jason is making a ruckus in the bathroom as demolition is officially underway.  There's no turning back now!  Alida is already complaining about how noisy daddy is being and wondered if he would finish the whole project today. Wishful thinking!  We'll try to keep the blog balanced with a variety of life's happenings over the next few months but likely the stages of this project will take somewhat of a front seat, as it will clearly be the major focal point of our time and attention.  I'm sure we'll all have our moments, but right now it's exciting to embark on something we have dreamed of doing for years now.  And it has been quite some time since we have done an inside construction project, so I think we are up for the challenge!  The original completion date was around Alida's birthday but with the delayed start, we are probably looking more at end of April or sometime in May (colliding unfortunately with spring planting and one of my two crazy months at work!).

It was nice to have a few days away, enjoying time with family at the Benner homestead before plowing ahead (it seemed that Grandma wasn't at all disappointed at being surrounded by grandchildren!).  Gratefully, we now have a week here at home together with a few fun social gatherings interspersed throughout the work days.  I imagine my most helpful contribution will be keeping the rest of us out of Jason's hair, keeping everyone fed and as happy as possible.  If I can also get my hands dirty here and there and make a tangible contribution to the remodel project that'll be a bonus!  I just took Jason a shot of wheat grass juice to give him a boost for the work ahead, noting how weird we are as we both slugged it down making horrible faces in the process.

While we work inside, there are exciting things happening outside too (in the composting chicken coop, that is).  It seems that all of a sudden we've got hens wanting to go broody left and right. It's not exactly the ideal time of year for this to happen but, as we often try to do, we are taking advantage of the opportunity to try something new and hopefully learn a lot in the process.  Right now there are two mama hens sitting on eggs and the first brood are set to hatch anytime now - we are calling them our "new year's chicks."  Jason has heard peeping but the mama is sitting tight so we haven't seen proof of fuzz balls yet.  There's another one or two hens contemplating broodiness so we may get a few more rounds started.  We are all pretty excited to see how raising chicks in the composting coop goes, and having them free range with their mama (who will hopefully be able to teach them the ropes of safe free ranging early on).  Stay tuned!

Time to head out in the mist to get some exercise and hopefully encourage an afternoon nap for Alida.  I've done more sitting around, eating and napping the last few days than I'm accustomed to so I'm eager for some movement.  In closing, here's Kali and Alida with their gingerbread house creations that they made while with the Benners:

Merry Christmas and we are about to dive in!

It's Christmas morning: Alida is tearing around the house playing with a group of imaginary friends and trying to patiently wait for the rest of the family to be ready to finish opening stockings.  Kali and Jason are out moving the ducks and giving them a little Christmas morning treat of wheat grass.  I'm bustling around getting nutty sweet potato waffles and sauteed kale underway, getting a little laundry done, and packing for a holiday trip to the Benner homestead in PA!  It will be our last family trip for awhile so we are going to try to savor it!

Ready or not, the next thing on the major projects list is to remodel our bathroom!!  We've been moving things around, emptying out the bathroom and rearranging the one wall in the kitchen to prepare for the demolition phase, which will begin just as soon as we return from our trip.  We are getting used to our toilet being in the back kitchen and we have taken our last showers in our old bathroom - something I don't think any of us feel particularly sentimental about!  It's another one of many times in which we feel pleased about using a compost toilet - it would be much harder to move a water toilet into our back kitchen!

I've been very grateful for the additional storage afforded to us by the finished bed project!  Some bathroom supplies have already taken up temporary residence in the drawers of the bed.  It was lovely to see completion of a project we have dreamed about for a number of years now. As always, Jason has done a fabulous job of designing something that is beautiful, functional, comfortable and will last for a long, long time!  We hope to set it up for a queen mattress when we can swing that purchase, but for now (again, designed fancily to accommodate either) it is holding our old double box spring and mattress (making it just a little too high for Alida to climb into herself, but a lot of fun for her to try).

Lastly, it feels worth noting that for our Christmas Eve dinner last evening (at Kali's request) we had navajo fry bread tacos with fresh spinach and lettuce picked from our garden.  The fry bread was also made with fresh ground cornmeal and rye flour (remember, we are out of any wheat flour so I'm getting more and more creative by the day).   They were a hit!  But even more than the tacos, Alida enjoyed diving into her finished pink sauerkraut.  It tasted a whole lot like the batch made with green cabbage that she consistently said "yuck" to when we offered to serve her some.

We ended our evening snuggled up together watching a very sweet feel-good movie that we got for Kali for Christmas (Because of Winn-Dixie).  Now off to down a shot of wheat grass juice, finish Christmas brunch and then to get the car packed so we can head north!!

Backgammon and "local cookies"

Since we'll be together with some extended family soon, it seems worth offering some words of caution to anyone that might enjoy accepting an invitation to play a game with our littlest.  She likes to win.  A lot!  She doesn't like to lose. At all!  Depending on the time of day and her need for sleep, it can be a minor disturbance or the end of the world.  It works out well when she and Rover play together, as you can probably guess who wins.



Kali got this segment of a recent game recorded while they were spending several hours together Monday while Jason was busily getting the walnut for our bed oiled!  That leads me to another topic of much excitement - if we stay on schedule (a very modified schedule, since we were already about a month off schedule when he started on the bed), we will likely sleep on our new bed Saturday night!  New bed, old mattresses (for now anyway).  I'm taking some time off work around the holidays to boost our progress on both the bed and bathroom projects.  And so far we have been able to free Jason up to make good progress during the day and then enjoy family time and game playing in the evenings.  Last night while we played turkey feet, Jason and the girls plowed through 4 popcorn sampling rounds!  Tonight it's our newest culinary experiment: gingerbread rye cookies.

Ginger pre-harvest

Ginger post-harvest

I don't think I've ever made a batch of cookies where the bulk of the cookie was made with local ingredients.  For this family, that's pretty special.  It's 100% rye that we grew, eggs from our chickens, grated ginger uprooted today from the pot on our piano, and sorghum molasses from our neighbor next door.  There is nothing remotely local about the icing or sprinkles - but I was quite happy to use up 4 mini-containers of icing that have been in the freezer for months...

Well, our Turkey Feet rounds for tonight are over, so I just need to grind the wheat grass for our "shots" before bed.  Kali has even acquired a taste for it.  And we are all feeling pleasant after the game playing since Alida won the last round. I don't think anyone intentionally let her win, but it would be tempting when the last round falls after 9 p.m. because otherwise there are often some tears during the bedtime routine.  Last night they were calmed by telling a story - that of her Grandpa Myers and his days of not necessarily being the best sport (thanks Parcheesi Boy for the good diversion!)

In closing, here is this family getting silly this evening!  On a recent date night with Aunt Emily, the girls wrote with her a new version of a library book regarding underwear do's and don't's.  They did one about socks.  The girls had a lot of fun pretending to put their socks in the woodstove, in the silverware drawer, in the compost, on my ear, and on their elbows today.  Here we are all acting out "Do use a clean sock if you unexpectedly come across a banana you'd like to carry home!"

Thanks to Alida's inspiration...

So a few weeks back, friends joined us for an overnight visit and we lumped together food contributions from both households for our Monday evening meal.  C had brought some fancy little raviolis that made quite the impression on our littlest (even today Alida mused, "I wonder how she made them."  She hasn't quite gotten the concept that you can buy pre-prepared meals).  The next day, if not within hours of eating them, she was wondering when we could have them again.  I try to live by the premise that if you can buy it in the store, you can surely make it, and hopefully an even tastier version!  I also like to follow up on menu requests made by our girls because they tend to eat really well when they have been part of deciding what to eat, and better yet if they help in the creation of the food itself.

I hadn't even tasted the treasured morsels, so was going only on the fact that they were spinach and cheese ravioli with a red sauce over top.  We make pasta often and have a ravioli attachment (used only once with moderate success) for our pasta maker.  So that hurdle was supposedly non-existent.  The greater hurdle, or so it seemed, was that I had completely run out of flour (wheat) a few days back and Jason and I had decided for a number of reasons (financial, practical, nutritional) that we were going to not replenish our supply but instead discipline ourselves to stay out of grocery stores and use the food we worked hard storing up from April through October (it is after all almost officially winter and this is the time to eat it)!

So as I often do, I used a few google searches to land a pasta recipe that was deemed a success with 100% buckwheat flour.  The recipe called for the soaking method, which neutralizes anti-nutrients in grain, so I mixed up the dough (2 c buckwheat flour, 1/2 c water and 1/2 T raw apple cider vinegar) last evening and let it set until Alida arose today from her afternoon nap.

It was nice to have a pasta maker to assure me we know how to make pasta, but there was no getting the buckwheat dough through it without turning it into little shards of pasta.  So on to the trusty rolling pins and wax paper method - decidedly harder on the wrists but with my little helpers we got the job done!  And the dough was very nice to work with and soon we were making our very own spinach and cheese raviolis!  I knew the buckwheat would have a stronger flavor than wheat so was uncertain what kind of reception they would have.  There are no leftovers!

Tis the season...

The sun is streaming into our front picture windows so I've positioned my chair right in the path of the warm rays!  Jason and I were too eager to head out for a morning jog together (taking advantage of a "childless" morning), and didn't get around to starting a fire.  The sun will take over from here!

The girls are enjoying a sleepover with Aunt Emily and Uncle Jonas.  It was nice for Jason and I to have some concentrated time together again, as we were likely to go through complete withdraw after our luxurious Thanksgiving time away.  It was everything (and much more than) we could have hoped for.  We had planned to head to West Virginia on Wednesday but ended up going over Tuesday to beat the snow storm; an excellent decision!  We planned to spend the time with my parents but Mom had also reserved the family cabin down the road for Jason and I to slip away to as much as it made sense to do so and as much as the girls were comfortable with that plan.

Well, as it turns out, they were 100% comfortable with us being gone!  Kali was gracious and welcomed us back warmly each afternoon. Alida...not so much!  Anytime we would reappear, she would ask why we were there and made it quite clear that she liked it better with just Grandma, Grandpa and Kali.  It was nice to know she didn't "need" us, but I wouldn't have minded had she "wanted" us just a tad more!  In all honesty, though, it was a glorious feeling to know that we were having a wonderful time and so were the girls, and I think the grandparents enjoyed it too!  The snow added additional fun and beauty to our time in the mountains!

This was not staged - I actually picked these 7 letters during one of our many Upwords games!

Kali spent hours out in the snow and it seemed that Alida's favorite was sledding after dark!

On the last day I wondered out loud to Jason how long it would take for us to get tired of our WV schedule: wake up without an alarm, enjoy a hot drink and breakfast over a game of Upwords, do some yoga together or read out loud or to ourselves, beat Jason in another game of Upwords over lunch, hike back to Mom and Dad's together, spend the afternoon relaxing/playing games, eat supper with them and then do some more relaxing and games, and then head back to the cabin for the night.  Let's just put it this way - we weren't tired of it by Sunday when it was time to head back over the 4 mountains...

One of the surprising parts of our four full days there was that Alida nursed to sleep for her nap each afternoon. On the last day there, I had Jason come up and take some pictures once she had fallen asleep. Over the course of those days, I had the strong sense that we were coming to the end of an era.  Kali nursed until her 3rd birthday.  Alida is going on 3 3/4 years old and at our last family meeting noted that she might stop when she is 5.  I'm not sure the stars are going to align for that to be true.  In reality, she hardly ever asks to nurse anymore (she went about 4 days this week without even thinking about it until I mentioned it).  There isn't much there anymore to extract even if she was still good at it. And, on that last point, it seems that she is actually kind of losing the knowledge of how to nurse.  On one hand it is kind of humorous, on the other it's kind of uncomfortable.  At our family meeting, we talked about doing something special to mark the end of nursing, but she didn't seem very interested in that.  From what I can tell, it seems like it is just going to phase out peacefully without much attention given to the transition. Jason asked me the other day if I'm ready for the end.  I'm really not sure, but ready or not it seems to be fast approaching.

The girls helped Mom decorate for Christmas while we were there and so they were all practiced up for our return home!  Our first day back, Jason and the girls scouted out a tree on our property for our front room and we got our the Christmas tunes and danced and decorated!  While I find the lessening of daylight hours at this time of year difficult, I do enjoy the ritual of plugging in the Christmas lights, getting a fire going in the wood stove and playing Christmas music. We are also enjoying more games of Backgammon and Turkey Feet and have just started in on 2014 popcorn taste testing!  I also love the time of year where soup is about the right thing for every meal.  I'm thoroughly enjoying getting reacquainted with beans and squash and potatoes.

So, like every season of the year, there are things that I enjoy and look forward to and things that will make me welcome the next season when the time arrives.  For now, I'm about to get reacquainted with our kiddos, who are headed back our way...