Since we got home...

I loved blogging collectively as a family, but not sure that trend will be possible over the long haul. Maybe here and there. But for now, while Terah is upstairs puzzling, Kali and Alida are doing some "homeschool afternoon" activity together, and Jason is working on the bike shed wall, I'm gonna attempt to provide a window into the 2.5 weeks that have flown by since our landing home. 

From one angle, it could be summed up with just a few descriptors: DRY...HOT...CRUNCHY UNDER FOOT...SUNNY. We went from the land of abundant water with lakes seemingly everywhere, to a parched landscape. 

Here are some other themes!

New things! Kali is taking her first official school class of her life - a writing class at Blue Ridge Community College. So far she has always come home in good spirits. Getting up before 8 twice a week has maybe been the biggest stretch!

Little people! I missed them during our time away. The smaller they are, the more they change in such a short time. Bear is getting so big and waking up to the world around him. And he's such a good snuggler!

Luca is communicating more and more and we are loving his expanding vocabulary. It's so fun!!! He is also a fabulous snuggler, but I admit that I'm enjoying the new phase of being able to lay him down for his naps and regain the feeling in my arms!

The girls' purple bedroom curtain gives the room a pink morning sheen!

We are enjoying keeping Violet a few times this fall also. Terah and Alida are mostly the babysitters in this case and I'm backup. It's their first paid babysitting gig!

Fun outing: We joined Emily, Jonas and Ivy for a fun tubing outing last Sunday. The river was so slow that it was a VERY calm river float (such that the breeze could blow you backwards against the current). The water was incredibly warm compared to Michigan. It was good the run ended when it did because the low water had Emily's tub making contact with a rock in such a way that she didn't have much air in her tube by the end!

Flowers: While I'm feeling inspired to grow even more flowers next year after soaking in the beauty of Janie's flower farm in Flint, we don't have to go very far to soak in a whole array of colors and the bees and wasps and other pollinators are always busy at them.

Even the Mahon Yam are flowering!

Gardens updates: Big changes happen in two weeks' time! The most unpleasant change was learning upon arriving home that a groundhog had taken up residence INSIDE the garden fence. Long story short, the groundhog is now in our compost pile and Jason is our hero. A second one got in and Jason was hoping to repeat his tactic of digging them out of their burrow but we haven't seen evidence of it in the last day or two so we think they climbed out and then we fixed one place in the fence so we hope it will not return!

Here's what we are deep into at this juncture:

Jason is very busy eating as many tomato, mayo and bread sandwiches as he can. And generally eating juicy slices of tomatoes at any meal that makes sense to do so. 

It's salsa, sauce, and diced tomato season. I've had a little help but I've done a lot of it solo this year - but, mind you, I am not ALONE in the kitchen because there are always many podcasters that are happy to keep me company!

The dry weather (with controlled irrigation) has actually "netted" us a lovely cantaloupe year. None of them are splitting! So we are also eating those daily - it's a short but sweet (ha ha) season! It's fun to see Alida and Terah processing cantaloupe seeds (I didn't know how to do that until I was about 40!).

We'll be getting into the larger late summer/fall harvests here soon. Jason just cut, threshed and winnowed the buckwheat this week.

We introduced spraying neem oil regularly on some crops this year and it seems to be making a difference. The snap bean season is going on and on and on! It's slowing but we still are enjoying a lovely mess of delicious beans every couple days. A new taste bud sensation is the fermented garlic paste that was ready when we arrived home. Beans, butter and garlic paste: it's a winner!

I actually harvested several messes of elderberries this year! Thanks to Jonathan and Christen giving me a big tip on how to freeze them and then get the berries off the stem, elderberries are not feeling quite so daunting. I've passed them all to Christen who is gonna juice them with hers this year (YAY!), but I'm feeling glad that elderberries don't feel quite as daunting to me as they did previously!

Our blackberries are more or less over, so here's Terah trying to eat the Michigan blackberries off the screen during our road trip blogging sessions!

Special times: this first one is just cuteness overload!

Thanks to Kali (and Alida) ushering at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Jason and I got to see Much Ado About Nothing this past weekend! Kali provided us with two free comp tickets as an early birthday present. Amazing acting, horrible story, a number of belly laughs...it was a good time!

And the following evening we celebrated these two beautiful people loving each other for more than 58 years and being married for that many! So grateful to be sharing life side by side with them.

NEWSFLASH: Progress resumes on bike shed wall!!!

It's a very good sign to be able to report that Jason has spent a few chunks of time on the bike shed wall this week. We are not feeling such urgency on the day to day things and so he has been able to shift his focus to trying to complete that task so a cascade of others can fall into line. It's looking good!

And, finally, we saw some really beautiful skies while we were gone! But I'm not sure any rival the sun rising over the Massanutten Mountain!

August Road Trip - Part 6 (Ohio and HOME!)

We left Decorah Sunday morning, as soon as we could get ourselves up and packed back into the car with bellies full of pastries acquired for all of us from a local bakery. We only got in on a tiny bit of clean up before we knew we needed to start the trek east (our pitstop was in Ohio - over a 10 hour drive AND this time we lost an hour). Various ones of us attempted to snooze along the way.

Around my (Janelle mainly wrote this post with family input) departure from CJP, I had reconnected with an alum who was so affirming of my work at CJP and also supportive in my process of healing from burnout. It was delightful to realize that Jackie and her family lived very close to our path home. They provided comfy accommodations for our crew of weary travelers, being flexible with our late arrival. It was a short but sweet visit, and meaningful to make an in-person connection after our smattering of long emails back and forth in the months prior. It was another experience of getting to see a friend in their home context, making the virtual connection feel even more meaningful going forward.

While it was hard to leave so soon, with many conversations I wished we had a luxurious amount of time for, we were all starting to hanker for home. We just had about 7 hours to go before we landed home tired, dirty and eager for our own beds!

There was definitely the need for some pillow screaming on the last stint, but I think we were all pleasantly surprised about how well we traveled together over many hours in cramped conditions. The long days didn't feel quite as long as we expected, and we didn't even make it through two of the handful of audio books we had checked out for helping the passage of time. That said, it's not hard to see how eager this gal was for freedom from a seatbelt! We were all excited coming up the driveway, with the parents probably feeling the most daunted by what awaited us. 

Part of what awaited us (not the daunting part) was dinner prepared by my mom for us! How lovely to land home to something other than packaged snacks. It was disorienting enough landing home in August after two weeks away, but these touches softened the landing considerably!

Home, sweet home!! It's been so good to go back through the trip together through photos and sharing memories. We've been home just over 2 weeks now. There were times in the lead up to the trip and even during it that I questioned whether it felt worth all the work. But there's no doubt in my mind at this juncture. And if it confirmed anything for me, it was that these are my favorite humans on the planet and spending time with them just makes me crave more of it! Again we are so grateful to my parents and Tibby who made this time away possible, and we do promise to consider carefully any future trips in August as long as we are still farming!!

P.S. There was some discussion at the time of this writing as to whether the humans really were dirty upon arrival home...

...but no one doubted that the car was! That's genuine Iowa dirt road dust on that car and it's unclear whether it was not getting around to it or nostalgia that kept it on there for over two weeks!

August Road Trip - Part 5 (Iowa)

Done were the "short stints" of our road trip. We were in for a doozy of a day beelining it from Frankort, MI to Decorah, IA so that Jason could participate in the first event of Adam and Licia's wedding weekend, which was a men's circle (thankfully we gained one hour in the process of our travels that day). We were unable to work out the timing of our trip to hitch a ride on the ferry across Lake Michigan, so we took the longer route around it. Once we landed in Decorah, our home for the next few days was the 4H campground where the majority of the wedding festivities took place. We bunked in one of the cabins, which we shared with just one other person (who, thankfully, was not bothered by the sniffles that were moving their way through our family; a small souvenir from along the way). Our time in Decorah was full and sweet, cool in some moments and real hot in others, and we left feeling so grateful that the stars had aligned for us to be present for these days of celebration, connection, ritual and lots of laughter. Here's what we collectively chose to share with you from our Thursday night to Sunday morning time in Iowa:

While sitting in traffic on our sprint to get to the first wedding festivities in Iowa, Terah added some levity to the moment by genuinely asking if these were giant toilet paper rolls. 

While Jason attended the men's circle, some of the rest of us baked cookies. Prior to the trip, Adam wondered if his favorite Tangly Woods cookie could make its way to Iowa - I brought ingredients instead so they would be fresh!

Look at that grin - is it because he's with Jason or enjoying a cookie?!

Grateful for our accommodations but not the mouse poo OR their nighttime parties. We snuggled in long sleeves in our sleeping bags the first night and the last night we couldn't get cool enough.

Our family has always enjoyed being on the back end of wedding preparations and Friday was such a day for all of us. We weren't sure how we were going to hang these ginormous decorations in the trusses of the pavilion but Licia's son and his mad climbing skills came to our rescue.

Here we are working on paper bag lanterns that would light the way to the wedding pyre on Saturday evening.

We didn't just work that day! 

Many of us enjoyed a relaxing river float.

Swinging bridge above the river...

...and the view of the swimmers below!

PIZZA...PIZZA...PIZZA!

After all that hard work (and play), Adam and Licia treated all their wedding helpers to wood fired pizzas made twice weekly at a local farm.

It was great to have some quality time with our dear friends from Virginia. We declared we wouldn't wait until another out of state gathering to get together again.

The wedding morning dawned clear and hot! Thankfully, the ceremony was being held under a HUGE oak tree in the middle of the Decorah Community Prairie. We arrived in time to help gather flowers.

They were used to decorate the outdoor space and snazzify the tree!

We also got snazzy!

The exquisitely crafted yet purposefully partially unplanned ceremony was inclusive and community oriented, rich with ritual and ample opportunity for participation. 

Between the wedding and the evening festivities, we squeezed in a fly by visit to Seed Savers' Exchange. We walked out 15 minutes later with a catalogue and a few business cards.

We also dashed over to the home of some friends of theirs that Adam insisted we really needed to meet while in town. He was right! We thought we were arriving late until we realized our car hadn't had its clock adjusted for the time zone so we had an extra hour and got to savor a longer visit. The husband of the couple is a highly skilled stone mason and pictured here is the spiral staircase in their home,

After visiting over some bean shelling and pear cutting, we ventured into the heat for a quick tour of their garden and chicken flock. By this time, Terah had made friends with their dog, Sam.  

One of the things we had in common was breeding chickens for local adaptation. We tried to resist but in the end came home with a dozen fresh fertile eggs which are currently halfway through incubating under one of our broody hens. We also came home with seeds from some of their favorite garden varieties. 

We got back just in time for the dance...

...a whole bunch of sweaty fun!

One of Janelle's favorite parts of the weekend was the abundant supply of adorable babies on the premises! She was missing her doula babies and at times regretting Jason's vasectomy. 

The dance was followed by a potluck and highly entertaining and meaningful open mic session. 

The wedding pyre - a 10ft stack of packing pallets and branches. Terah and Janelle crashed for the night back in the cabin, while the others went to watch.

Aren't we stylish? Iowa will do funny things to a person!

We thoroughly enjoyed the time with Adam, Licia, and their community. We soaked it up as well as we could and it was hard to leave our friends, both old and new. It was special for Alida to get to know someone who is just 5 days older than her. But, alas, home beckoned.

P.S. NEWS FLASH: While in Decorah, Kali was defeated for the first time in ping pong by Alida, 14 to 21! (Kali still won best of 3)