Everything other than the new baby!

As Jason and Terah are sizing up onion sets (giving them more room to spread their roots before planting outside), Kali is working on getting popcorn ready for seed testing and Alida sitting beside me absorbed in a book, I'm going to try to share briefly the non-baby updates...

We had the occasion to dress up earlier this month when we attended our first indoor wedding for who knows how long. Alida enjoyed the occasion to wear the dress my mom wore to my wedding that now fits her. How did that happen?!

When not wearing wedding attire, Jason has been doing a lot of digging and soil moving. He occasionally had a little help (I cannot take credit for even one shovelful!). The main digging is now done, but the project is a bit stalled as spring bears down upon us!

One of the things I'm savoring about not being on zoom many mornings first thing onward is that Jason and I are reading more out loud together over hot drinks to start our day. After I did a first read of Jes Baker's memoir (Landwhale), I promptly started reading it again to Jason. We plowed through (or groaned and laughed through) that one and now are making slower progress through Sabrina Strings' Fearing the Black Body. Learning and feeling so much... Here Jason is enjoying some homegrown buckwheat grits with just a few of the MANY eggs we are enjoying these days.

We've been trying to block some full days for farm work together and one recently was a tree felling day. It always feels sad to take trees down, even if they need to come down for various reasons and we'll use them for various projects and to heat our home. And I'm always very grateful when we are able to take all down without incident. 

Then some random things that make me smile. Jason cleared a hill FULL of multiflora rose. I made sure I was busy with other things that day. The chickens are having fun with the exposed soil. The ducks are not impressed that one of their hiding places from Kali is gone. 

Why do I love the look of laundry drying on the line so much? It was a gorgeous day and so I did rugs and towels and used every line and every clothespin!

I'm having fun learning to use the chipper. Again with less screen time, I'm able to devote some time to learning some new things around home. This is a job I could enjoy doing more regularly. I also enjoy cleaning out chicken coops and putting in fresh bedding. 

St. Patrick's Day came around again and I had to make sure I was wearing something green all day (even if is was just a green pipe cleaner made into a ring). Alida beat us all with green on every article of clothing and additional adornments. It was also a good excuse to make homemade green noodles for pesto pasta. And we topped off our green meal with Smiley's mint ice creams!

It is that time of year where we start to photograph our food on a more regular basis. I know they look pretty much the same every year, but after that first spinach and violet pickings, we just have to get a photo of the first spinach salad. Many more of those on the menu in the days to come!

The gardens are beckoning! We spent all day yesterday in the inner garden - weeding/thinning the overwintered spinach patch and then applying compost, path clearing and redistribution of soil, wheel hoeing, clearing weeds, and leaf mulching. Such satisfyingly visible progress! 

Alida and Terah harvested a bunch of turnips for our first round of roasted turnips.

While I don't need to photograph the pigs' food, I do like to photograph feeding time. Maybe I already shared one of these photos, but I get such a kick out of watching the chickens line up to get any little scraps that fly out of the pigs' mouths and close enough to snag through the fence. Lilly is the only chicken brave enough to go in with them. 

It's time to go eat some popcorn, so I'll end with my favorite picture that I took recently of Terah's turtle shell about to burst forth with new green growth. Welcome spring! 

Welcome to the neighborhood, Luca Alder!

A month ago we were eagerly anticipating the arrival of a new little neighbor! And now we have had almost a month of loving him on the outside of the womb. With Terah by my side, I tried to show some discretion in how many photos I include here, but since we are both completely smitten we were not able to narrow it down any further than this. I feel so grateful and honored to have been able to be part of Luca's journey into the outside world and also there to welcome him and his parents home after a brief (but momentous as these stays always are) stint in the NICU. They are now settling in at home, and we couldn't be happier to live just a few doors down!! 

The girls and Jason came to meet him soon after they arrived home, and it was clear that I was going to have some serious competition in the baby holding arena. Everyone is eager for their turns, but Terah seems to be my match. Who knows if she will have the same baby magnetism I did as a little girl in an ongoing way (she was certainly over the moon with enthusiasm about her cousin Ivy when "I I" - as she called her - was a baby. But for now she is so eager for any and every chance to walk down the road for a visit and to snuggle him). She just told me to say, "Terah is loving Luca so much!".

It was special to be part of a naming ritual with them in the same location where I had taken some pregnancy pictures not long before. This transition of a baby from womb to arms will never cease to amaze me!

Jonathan and Christen even ventured up the lane to join us for dinner one night, and Luca was fine with that plan as long as he was sacked out. Terah had gotten many stuffed animals (the black and white ones for contrasting colors) lined up for him to play with, but he wasn't quite ready for a playdate. 

He's doing such a great job at being a baby! And his parents are doing such a fabulous job of tending to him and enjoying how good he is at being a baby. And we are so eager to get to know this little person more and embrace who Luca is. Here's more of the love flowing!

He's often appears oblivious to our presence, but I feel sure the love is still working its magic!

The last time I visited (managing to get in a visit by myself!), he found his thumb for a bit.

And this is how I left him. He seems to be taking some lessons from Lilly on how to live a good life!

A month in photos

So we are about a month behind on this scrapbook at this point! That is in part due to the general busyness of life and also that the scrapbooker of the family (me) has been a little preoccupied with the new (baby) neighbor down the road!! But here's a smattering of pictures of the last several weeks, bookended by snow! It continues to be a theme of this winter - I told my dear mother that it really is time for her to take down her snowflakes and "let it snow" signs. She was very adamant that that doesn't happen until winter is officially over. While it did not snow for her actual birthday, here was her belated birthday present a few days later.

I do love going into the composting chicken coop on a snowy day and being greeted by the warmth and the eager and colorful array of birds waiting for their breakfast.

We had a snowy Valentine's Day this year. I had planned to surprise Jason with a candlelight dinner (the girls were in on the surprise) and assumed I'd have an easy time keeping it from him since he'd been working away from home. But the snow changed those plans and he was around home - but thankfully doesn't normally pay a lot of attention to my puttering in the kitchen. I did have to quarantine him in the bedroom for the final 1/2 hour or so of preparations. The girls, especially Alida, decided to have their own candlelight dinner upstairs. It was a really fun evening! My biggest disappointment of this holiday was the downward turn in quality of the candy conversation hearts. How can the machines that make those things get so much worse over time? A good number of them were completely illegible. They tasted about the same though, paling in comparison to the shepherd's pie, sesame garlic flatbread, deviled eggs, raspberry crisp and the homemade sesame candy. 

As we eagerly anticipated welcoming our new little neighbor in February, we soaked in some final get togethers and walks. We were trying to give the baby opportunities to disrupt our plans. On the one evening we were together, their cat Lilly followed them up to our house so we invited her in to join the fun. She wasn't so sure at first and went in and out a few times before deciding it was actually a pretty nice place to hang out. Terah then decided to entertain her by lining up as many stuffed animal friends as possible. She mostly didn't pay attention but at one point decided that the stuffed cat was a little too much for her. She took it out with one swipe of her paw. I admit that it was very enjoyable for me to have a cat in the house again. I do have such fond memories of my cat, Pepper, and Lilly is a very enjoyable cat with a great personality! We were happy to have her visit.

I continue to enjoy having more cooks under our roof, with ever advancing culinary skills. We are getting into a routine of each of the girls cooking once a week (with varying degrees of help depending on age). Alida is the expert tortilla maker. Kali is fabulous with flavors. Terah is a very cute stirrer!

In between the two snows of the last month, we have seen ever increasing signs of spring (and with that is the ever increasing number of things on our farm to do list - but I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole of "project overwhelm" here...I'll spare you!). 

We even had our first picnic!

We've been chipping and clipping away at the winter cutback and pruning - a good way to generate brush for our biochar burn and bedding for chickens and pigs. 

I was so relieved to see the garlic coming up recently. We got it in a lot later in the fall and it really wasn't up before winter set in. But here they come. Seeds and plants never cease to amaze me!

Other fun things of late - Alida and Terah helped make donuts with Grandma on Fastnacht day (and we all helped to eat them)!

The kids continue to enjoy 1-2 playdates a week with Ivy. We've even ventured back into some indoor play time together, which is very thrilling for Ivy but also makes saying goodbye so much harder! 

Terah found the fridge magnets recently and was having fun with them one day. Here is a sweet message she made for me. She also put up the alphabet and had me come see it. As she was completing it, she asked me to spell "lmnop" for her. I said it slowly so she could hear the individual letters. :) When I came to check her work, I saw that all was in order except there was no "n" between "m" and "o" but instead she had put the "n" towards the end (ynz). When I explained that she had it right but the "n" wasn't in the correct place, she said, "but what about the 'n?' " And then it dawned on me! Without visualizing the alphabet she had hear the "and" at the end as the letter "n." She has now been set straight!

This is a sight we are seeing a bit more of! Kali is chauffeuring us places whenever possible - not that we go very many places these days. In light of that, Grandpa has offered to allow her to chauffeur him sometimes for errands and with his new volunteer gig transporting animals for the Wildlife Center of Virginia.

I recently got permission from Kali to tweak her Christmas coupon from me. I had offered her a late night convo weekly with me and Jason but have discovered that I'm abysmal at staying awake for late night conversations. So whenever possible we are enjoying a Sunday hike instead! They have been so very enjoyable.

Quick chicken update: spring is upon us! Egg numbers are increasing. And the first incubator is loaded with hopes of chicks to help Alida celebrate her 11th birthday!

And, finally, here we are at today! I am doing my best to savor the beauty of the winter wonderland outside and not think about it causing yet another delay in us making progress on the ever growing list of farm things begging for our attention. I got some snow in my ricotta cheese this morning while making it on the porch during our March snow. No one was feeling much like a lot of snow venturing today so we took this as an opportunity to make some serious progress on our most recent obsession (a friend recommended the Netflix show Grace and Frankie and suffice it to say the three older Myers-Benners are hooked - though I admit to being the one to say "just one more episode" the most frequently). The younger two ditched it early on and settled into an 11 hour compilation of Shaun the Sheep episodes. It's probably about time for another episode once the chickens and ducks have been shut in for the night... But before that I'm gonna play Rummikubs with anyone who wishes to join me in memory of my Grandma Myers who would have turned 100 today.