It always feels like thriving through the end of April is a team effort around here and this year was no different. I was eternally grateful for Mom and Dad's presence upstairs during this particular week. Having some extra pairs of hands for pulling weeds, reading stories, making food, hugging girls, going dishes, being the soccer chauffeurs, mowing, playing games, etc... made a huge difference in our family's experience of the week. While I know Terah missed me at points in the week, she is such good buddies with both of my parents and did really well in my absence. I know I commented to Jason more than once that I felt like I wasn't falling apart like I sometimes do in April. They get some credit, and Terah gets some credit for continuing to sleep better at night. I'm ready to give a pretty big shout out for the power of sleep!
In the midst of the crazy week, all the Tangly Woods' gals went out on a trash walk. Our littlest was even initiated into the crazy vests routine and was quite proud of her little work gloves! It was looking to be a rather uneventful trash pick up walk; we know of at least one neighbor helping to pick up trash but we are also hoping that habits are changing since we didn't even get one full bag of trash/recycling along our road. But Kali added some excitement to the walk when she swung her bag against her leg and the broken glass within gave her a nasty cut on her leg. She really wanted to continue with us and so she was quite a sight by the time we returned home. Oh the sacrifices made by this Adopt-A-Highway volunteer. :)
In other exciting news, on a very different front, our first batch of cheddar cheese is waxed and in the root cellar doing its thing. We'll break into it in a few more weeks. If I get really inspired today (unlikely by the way I'm feeling currently - catching up on laundry and doing some cooking might be all this gal is inspired to accomplish today), I might get another batch going. We used a natural bees wax for this first round. I think it's kinda pretty if I must say so myself and smells slightly sweet like honey. I'm slowly getting back into the routine of getting extra raw milk and making things from it so we can give the pigs whey or skim milk and not lots of whole milk. Stocking up right now on mozzarella and have made ricotta and butter as well. It's the time of year to do it - the butter is such a rich yellow color with the cows enjoying such lush green pastures!
One of our greatest challenges at this time of year is not having our evenings all of us sudden go from delightful to everyone falling apart. With the daylight hanging around longer we tend to push hard on outside stuff until dark and then all of a sudden find ourselves at 9 p.m. not having eaten dinner or folded laundry or frozen the heaps of spinach picked while it was still light. Then there are overly tired (and hungry) kiddos, Kali often takes what feels like an eternity to shut her ducks in and things kind of go downhill rather fast. The first step towards positive change is increased awareness right? I'm clearly noting the pattern with a desire to change it. It's a good night when we can get our two youngest in bed cuddling with daddy for some stories by a reasonable hour or without any tear stained faces. And a cute sight it is! Terah now believes clearly that this is part of the nighttime routine and will not stand to be removed from the scene until she is feeling tired enough to rub her little eyes and then the desire for mommy's arms and some milk wins out!
The lushness in the outdoor world is almost incomprehensible right now. It's really stunning! No we didn't even nearly get through the to do list pre-graduation party, but we got through a lot of the wish list and the gardens are honestly looking as good as they ever have. I know that Jason and I both had our moments in the week of marveling at the way beds are shaping up, soils are improving, perennials are filling in and lowering the weed load. It feels like, as much as we have worked hard at it for the past decade plus, the plants are really doing the lions share of the work. And they do it so beautifully!!
I just finished up another full round of picking on our spinach beds yesterday. They have yielded bushels and bushels of spinach for us! This round of picking was the time to pull all the early bolters that we don't want to save seed from. So it was the largest picking and clearly the amount will plummet from here on out. But not before I've been able to put up many containers of frozen chopped spinach. It feels really good to finally feel like I have a system for picking, washing and blanching spinach that works super well. I can almost do it one handed with a baby on my hip, though I'm faster with two and enjoy it more when I can scurry around alone with the girls playing in the background. My only complaint, that I haven't even verbalized to anyone until now, is that our kitchen scissors is very suboptimal for chopping it or my hands are very weak. So a good spinach snipping scissors is on my wish list for a future season.
My sense is that this will not be a bumper crop year on peas. Our germination was not great. On the hull peas I won't be overly disappointed in that it may be grace if we don't have tons of peas to shell. But I'll be sad if we can't eat to our heart's content on sugarsnap and snow peas. Time will tell on those! Jason made new pea cages for the hull peas which are installed and the peas happily surrounded with grass clipping mulch. The main garden has become an area that feels easy to keep weeded and well maintained. It is one of those areas that is bearing much fruit, in multiple senses of the word, after years of tending and improving soils. It's honestly such a joy to watch it flourish! We even have kale plants that are looking really good currently - I am so used to us not having much success with any cole crops that I keep forgetting that I could pick kale for us to eat sometime. That and I haven't really found myself sitting around wondering what there is we could cook up to eat or having extra time to harvest more things. The spinach has really been plenty to keep up with, though I did get oregano pesto in the freezer this week too!
So after a lot of weeding, cleaning, and prepping we had a grand time opening our home and the lovely outdoors to my Center for Justice & Peacebuilding work community. We hosted the graduating class, their family and friends and all that wanted to join to celebrate with them. While plenty warm it did not rain and we were able to enjoy being outside the whole evening. It was the normal level of chaos where Jason and I were mostly scurrying to and fro, but I think both of us also got to enjoy snippets of conversations with folks or stop for a minute to marvel at the world gathered in the space we call home. It really was a beautiful circle of humans gathered! Our girls once again did a fabulous job sharing our home and their parents for the evening. I think it's sweet to see Alida holding Kali's hand - as I know she both enjoys the hubbub and also wants the reassurance of being near someone familiar. I can understand the feeling!
We had two gorgeous days when I was scheduled to be home following my long stint of being away most days at the office. My wish list was long and I was excited to do some catching up on the home front. That was when the nasty bug hit fast and furious and I completely lost one of those two days. I meandered at the end of the first day as far as the onion patch where Jason was working his weeding magic. But as I approached he looked up and said, "you aren't feeling better yet." I guess I wasn't hiding my misery very well! Amazingly, Kali was the only other one in our family to get it - about 24 hours after me (sadly my mom got hit with it too!). It was nice of Kali to hold off for 24 hours as she helped me make it through day 1 and kept Terah safe while I checked in and out of awareness all day long. Then she got to have her zombie day when I was on day 2 and functioning at about 65% or so! So I got to moderately enjoy the second beautiful weather day and then the clouds and rain moved in again. My did we have rain!
I'm not sure who enjoyed the rain that collected in the fire ring more, Terah or the ducks. Both seemed very pleased with the arrangement. Terah kind of looked at it wide eyed and said, "wa wa." It was as if she was wondering why we had never done this before. She played until she was more or less sopping and I think a tad chilly. The ducks played and splashed and swam and dabbled for a long long time! They are so fun to watch in their element. Kali stood out with them for a long time getting good and wet (but thankfully she was on day 3 of the bug and starting to feel much better).
The rain definitely altered our pre-house concert plans. Out the window went the idea of mowing, as well as a good number of weeding projects. So Jason got to do some garden planning and other random indoor tasks - including making an egg collecting basket out of a gourd we grew. Yes, if we you cannot read his facial expression well enough in this photo to tell, he is pleased with himself! It's working quite well to date, assuming he can keep it from being swiped by one of his daughters. The littlest especially is pleased with his creation as well!
Speaking of the littlest gal (who is cooperating very nicely and sleeping in so I can finish this post!), she continues to be a very spunky, determined, and sometimes rather feisty gal! She knows what she wants and is not in any way reserved in putting it out there. Whether that be for a particular hairstyle or a food or a toy or a person to hold her or for mama milk, she will let us know! Her vocabulary is exploding but you do have to know her well and be able to pick up on the slight nuances between words as a good number of them sound VERY similar still. So sometimes we have what feel like little games of charades where it is a combination of sounds and hand gestures or taking us somewhere to show us something that finally gets the message across clearly. She is pretty interested in being part of whatever the big people are up to and this week we have finally more or less ditched the high chair - WAY earlier than we did with the other girls! She just seemed to want to be at the table in a big person chair.
Ok, better wrap this up and work on breakfast preparations and get laundry underway before the whole crew is up and at it. But not before mentioning that our first strawberry was split into thirds yesterday for the girls' enjoyment. It's going to be a tough year as there are some very eager hands and mouths around here for berries and at least one of those sets of hands is not wanting to wait until the berries are red! I'm not counting on having any for the freezer! Terah's favorite word is "me" right now and sharing is not really in her list of strengths currently. Alida is also pretty eager to get to the berries before the slugs. It's Kali who asked me several times whether I was sure I didn't want a portion of the one very small berry that was already hard to get into three pieces!
In closing, as the baby wakes, here are two short videos of our wonderful evening last night! Due to the clouds continuing to spritz on us up until just before show time we made the hard call to move the music indoors. It ended up being a gorgeous evening, thankfully, and so folks spilled out onto the yard, deck, swingset and kids were tearing around the property while music poured out the open windows. I was running around too much to take a count but I know it was over 60 and less than 100 - and a diverse gathering of neighbors, friends, community people, band followers, family, etc... Here's just a tiny taste! I love the second one: after Terah got used to our home (again) being overloaded with new faces, she settled into it and seemed to really enjoy the music. She was clapping spontaneously and I loved her little swinging legs. She was even playing peek-a-boo with one of the concert goers. The evening was a success from our vantage point and Jason just came in to report that the hoards of children tearing around through all the gardens did not yield more damage than a few broken off garlic leaves, some flopped over shallots and the drainfield being smashed down in places to make the hay cutting slightly more challenging. "Worth it!" was Jason's take, and mine too!!!
