Summer Hiatus

The fast is over, and I loved it so much that I'm extending portions of it for the entire summer. The kids won't be watching any TV, and I won't be blogging or spending much time at all on the Internet. We found that this week became a mini-vacation for us, with evenings spent playing Monopoly with Caiden or rocking on the porch with iced drinks and tired dogs at our feet. Instead of writing posts and reading comments, I read real books with pages! It was like life before 2006 all over again. :-)

We read stories, painted, played games and put together puzzles, visited with friends, went fishing, and spent a lot of time just being together. Caiden told me, mid-week, "I love us not watching TV! Let's keep doing all this fun stuff instead!" I'm not ready for this to end, and since we've added a whole new list of responsibilities by moving onto land, it'll be easier to have some margins in our lives if we drop a few things here and there. For me, that means blogging. For the kids, that means TV. Maybe when fall picks up, I'll start again. I keep vacillating back and forth, not able to decide whether to quit entirely or keep blogging, so I'm taking that to mean I'm not ready to make a decision either way.

Thank you for all the kind and encouraging comments you've sent me during the fast. I read them today before posting, and I'm reminded that blogging is a wonderful way to enlarge my world. For now, I'm sliding things off my plate and widening my margins, hoping to enjoy every last bit of this summer with my family. So consider me on an extended summer vacation, and I'll see you when I return. In the meantime, I hope your summer is filled with good things! See you in the fall!!

Well.

Well. (Hear me laughing now.) That's what I'm thinking, if you could see inside my stream of consciousness. I'm surveying the family room, strewn with all the contents of the Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Operation game, and Candyland. And a few random toys I can't identify. The three kids have been playing games, which makes for a quiet hour, squabble-free, except now it's time for dinner and my family room has vomited 982 pieces. Oh, well.

Friday night Chris and our boys had some friends over for a pasture campout. We had 15 people for dinner, 9 of them under the age of 8, and it was wild and loud and fun. The next morning, as I was waking up in my silent house I saw my boys traipse across the field, where Chris calmly stated that somebody needed the emergency room. If you know us personally or have read this blog for long, that won't shock you, will it? He'd hooked his leg with a big fishhook, so off he went to CareNow to get it removed. Good thing there's one close by our new place, since it seems to be oft-visited by our family. We were just there in April for Caiden's head puncture, and that's where Bridget drove me when I relocated my toe back in October.

So again, it won't shock you to know we were there again today. (Have I mentioned that I was there last week, also?) Grayson somehow filleted his wrist at church today, and thank heaven one of our children's pastors is a former EMT, because he wrapped Gray's wrist up so well that I didn't even see the wound until I was sitting down. I'm still feeling a little pale. I'm constantly in awe of nurses and doctors and their ability to look at body parts missing pieces, and not flinch. A bunch of stitches and a strawberry shake later, and he's fine. I'm still a little nauseous, but he's fine.

Tomorrow we turn a new corner on our church's month-long observance of One Prayer. Last week was a food fast, and this week is a lifestyle fast. Chris and I agreed that TV and Internet would be good choices for us, so this is my last post for a while. I'm full of hope that the next time I post it'll be from a place of cleanliness, home-baked bread and cookies, folded laundry, and NO visits to the ER. One can only hope. :)

This is the stuff of my life: toys and kids everywhere, campouts in the backyard, enjoying friends and hospitality, and unexpected emergencies. Well. It's good, and I'm glad to have it. All these things stretch me, smooth me, and give me much to feel grateful for. After all, it could've been a rusty fishhook, or Grayson's wrist could've been cut in the wrong place and spurted. I've already mentioned that I'm not great with spurting. And with each additional emergency, we get a little bit calmer. It's good for us, although Grayson wouldn't agree today.

I hope you have a good week, and that if you're part of the One Prayer group of churches, that this lifestyle fast is a blessing to you and those around you. I also hope your week is filled with folded laundry, 982 toys in their right places, and no visits to CareNow. Again, one can only hope. Happy week, friends!

Little Week

Recently my mother and I were discussing the task of getting a house ready for sale, and all the overwhelming feelings just the thought of that brings on. We concluded that if there's time, the only reasonable way to do it is to mix in a "Big Week" among several "Little Weeks." Meaning: Spend one week repainting the master bedroom and bathroom, baseboards and trim, and decluttering the master closet. For me, that would be a Big Week. Then for the next two weeks, I'd take 30 minutes each day to accomplish one item from the list, such as taking down family photos in the den, or quickly cleaning out the linen closet, or buying a new rug for the powder bath. For the rest of those two weeks, I'd concentrate just on normal "life"--paying bills, cleaning the house, meals, laundry, playing with the kids, dental appointments. After two weeks of little things, I'd attempt another Big Week.

My mom has less than a year to list her house, which is a lot like planning a wedding during a long engagement: you have too much time to plan, so you drive yourself crazy with every detail. I had a five month engagement and planned our wedding 600 miles away from my family. The wedding was to be held in a town that was hometown neither to me nor my groom, which added complication in. But with just a handful of months, there wasn't time to stress over every detail, and it was relatively easy. My sister had a year-and-a-half to plan, which gave plenty of time for too many details, and my poor mother almost went bonkers. But I digress.

She and I are both on our own Big Week-Little Week rotation. She, to get her house ready. Me, to get mine put together. I'm on the other side of moving, and having three little ones home 24 hours a day makes it a messy, often interrupted duty. To top it off, my old home was just as I liked it, in every room, and this one needs something (paint, bedding, decor, curtains) in all but one. I flit from one project to another, and it's making me tired and restless. There is a lot to be done here.

This week I concentrated on painting our little guest house. The garage was converted into a one bedroom guest house many years ago, and although it was a nice color, it wasn't my color. So I spent every afternoon in there painting, Caiden at my side while the younger two slept. Today it has one coat of paint and needs another, but my hands are stiff and swollen, and I'm tired of paint. So I think instead of pushing through and getting it done this next week, I'm declaring it "Little Week." I'm going to concentrate just on doing laundry (and actually putting it away the same day!), planning meals, spending time with my family and friends. Nothing extra: no painting, decorating, planting, planning. I'll water the newly-planted flowers, but that's it. I'm tired!

What are you in the middle of, that you could use a "Little Week" as a refresher?

It's a Garden Party!

Lisa at The Preacher's Wife is hosting a Spring Garden Tour, so come on in and check out my weeds! Just kidding, sort of. When we first saw this place, in early March, Chris was taken aback by the amount of work we were facing: pastures to mow, weeds by the million to remove, and flower beds that needed to be planted, mulched and hand-watered. I, on the other hand, was delighted. I've been yearning for a place with space for a compost pile, a vegetable garden, and herb beds. I got my dream, and a month after moving in I'm realizing it really is a lot of work, but the gratification of taking something overgrown or dead and turning it into a spot of beauty really does make all the work worth it. I'm also learning a lot about our Texas perennials, as well as old-fashioned cottage garden plants, since our home and land are older and have been planted with perennials for years and years.

Here's our place:Oh, how I jest.

Seriously, here are little snapshots of our country home:
You can't tell since I just planted these containers yesterday, but there are shade-loving hostas, ivy, and green-leaf begonias in here. Give it a month, and they'll be huge and overflowing. If my lab puppy doesn't eat them first.
This is one of the beds we reclaimed from the weeds. I experimented with transplanting oxalis (purple shamrocks) and wild violets, and I kept the mums and ajuga that were already there. I added penta and impatiens for color.
Part of my herb garden, including one of three enormous rosemary bushes. I added chocolate mint, oregano, and lavender to the right of the rosemary, as well as oleander, yarrow, clematis, daylilies, and speedwell. The entire bed is about 30 feet long and includes five beautiful red rose bushes, spaced underneath our children's bedroom windows.

This chair was the first purchase I made when we bought our old house. I sawed the legs down, painted it red, and kept it in the guest bathroom til I got the idea to plant it, instead. We moved it to this house with plants intact, and now it sits near the driveway in a quiet little spot. I can't explain why I love it so dearly, but I do. It's surrounded by some sort of daisy-type perennial that I can't identify. (Help?)
In case you think I'm exaggerating about weeds, check out these. (And do you see that enormous rosemary bush in the far left corner? I could make rosemary potatoes every night for the rest of my life and not run out!) There are nice perennials hiding in these weeds, and it's my job to find them.
See, I really wasn't exaggering about the weeds. Trailing along the fence are several large trumpet honeysuckle vines, many years old. If I don't weed this section soon, I won't be able to see them! The entire bed is about 100 feet long, winding along the entire drive, and it's so overwhelming if I look at the whole thing. So I work on one section a week and close my eyes to the rest. Eventually, it'll be done. In the meantime, the Turk's Cap, lantana, allium, canna, irises, and huge rose bushes will just have to blend in.
The beloved mulch pile. It gets smaller each day, and then Chris will get me another several yards of mulch. The boys have decided it's great with the Duplos digger.

Here's a project for next year. It's an empty storage shed, just right for a playhouse. I'm thinking shutters and window boxes, and a little flagstone entry, with peonies or hydrangeas flanking each side.
And a far shot of the barn. You can see the truck and trailer in the background; Chris and Caiden spent the entire evening dragging fallen limbs from our last storm. Tomorrow night is a campout with several families; I think we'll have enough wood for a serious bonfire! My garden will be going in the fenced-in section of the barn, to join our pumpkin patch we've already planted. Next fall we hope to have it painted the typical barn red with white accents, and we're already making plans to fill it with some livestock!

There are so many sweet little hidden nooks and areas here I didn't photograph, that were once loved and are in need of some TLC now. We're busy planting Texas lilacs, daylilies, salvia, and other perennials so that next year we won't have quite so much work to do. But overall it's wonderful to be able to dig in the dirt a little everyday, have the boys sweat and work next to me, and create something beautiful.

If you've joined Lisa in showing off your gardening projects, let me know! I'd love to come visit. Just don't ask me to weed.

Clarified Confusion

We have bugs. Lots of them. Tonight I googled "locust," "cicada," and "katydid," because I thought they're all interchangeable. What I found was so life-altering I called my mother to let her know we lived a lie my entire childhood. She was fascinated. :-) If you have school-aged children who like bugs, this post is for you. Because don't we all want to be The Mom Who Knows About Bugs??

Here's the skinny on flying insects (because I know you're waiting with bated breath):

1. Those flying, scary insects I always called grasshoppers? They're actually short-horned grasshoppers, aka locusts. That's right! Locusts aren't those winged bugs up in trees that leave their creepy/fascinating shells on tree trunks. But they do sing, similar to a cricket. When you picture plagues of locusts, or John the Baptist's main dish, this is what you should see:

2. What I was calling a locust is actually a cicada. Cicadas are the ones that hide up in trees, shed their shells, and sing all night long. Think, "Song of the Cicada," if that'll help you keep this straight. Here's a picture of the shell shed off one (I couldn't find a live one to photograph, but their shells are usually iridescent green/blue/purple):

3. And the insect we found today, a bright green, long-winged leaf-looking thing, is a katydid. And a katydid is a long-horned grasshopper. (See "Miss Spider's ABC Book" for a good drawing, if you're in the preschool set like I am.) Katydids also sing, but their song is chirpier and louder than cicadas. Chris and I have been standing under trees scratching our heads for a week, trying to figure out what was making that noise! I listened to them online, and we must have 94 million on our land, because they're loud! For a bug, they're awfully attractive:

So, in summation:

Short-horned Grasshoppers=Locusts (brown/red/black ones)

Long-horned Grasshoppers=Katydids (Kermit green ones)

Tree-singing, shell-sloughing Insects=Cicadas

Now that's all cleared up, I can sleep tonight. Well, I could sleep tonight, if they'd all quit singing. At least I know who's singing what, though.

Afternoon

I told Chris yesterday that I'm having a hard time settling down lately.  At night when the kids are in bed, I usually jump at the opportunity to knit or sew or read.  But since we've moved here, I can't sit still, there's always so much to be done.  We're not entirely out of boxes yet, the kids' toys seem to be everywhere, and just when I sit down to focus on something, I jump up to do something else.  It's driving me crazy.

So this afternoon during naptime, I was in a funk.  I have two great books to read, and the newest issues of Old Schoolhouse and Homeschooling Today magazines, lesson plans to write, laundry to put away, an outfit for Addie on my sewing table, a sweater I've been knitting.  I didn't want to do anything.  So I stretched out on my bare mattress and fell asleep.  I woke up midway through to find Caiden next to me, snoring.  I rolled over and fell back asleep.  Two hours later I woke up to Grayson whispering to me at the bedside.  After sending him to the family room to play with pirates while the rest of the house slept, I snuck outside and sat on the deck.  

It was about to storm, and the trees were creaking.  Raindrops fell above me, but I was hidden under the canopy of the trees.  And then I noticed the horses and donkeys in the pasture behind ours, running pell-mell, kicking up legs and whinnying.  They were rejoicing, and it would've been impossible for me not to be, too.  It was awesome, in the true sense of the word, to watch them run through the rain.  

Our church is joining many others for One Prayer over the next month.  Today kicked it off with a fast, to be followed by a mini-Daniel Fast this week, and then over the next weeks we'll do something new.  I'm hungry, and my non-caffeinated head is about to explode, and I'm still feeling restless, but it was a balm to my spirit to sit out there, alone, surveying trees and fields and horses, all of us worshiping together.

"Praise the Lord from the earth, you great sea creatures and all ocean depths, lightning and hail, snow and clouds, stormy winds that do His bidding, you mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars, wild animals and all cattle, small creatures and flying birds, kings of the earth and all nations, you princes and all rulers on earth, young men and maidens, old men and children.  Let them praise the name of the Lord, for His name alone is exalted; His splendor is above the earth and the heavens.  Let everything that has breath praise the Lord."  Psalm 148 and Psalm 150

Cultivating Home

We've been cultivating civility* at home lately: the inside by shooing out bugs and ridding attics of mice; and the outside, reclaiming our land from the wilds.  This weekend we've concentrated on pruning back wildly overgrown nandina and crape myrtles from the deck, and doing lots and lots of weeding and mulching.  

Chris spent most of yesterday on his shiny new John Deere (What is it with men and those green machines?  It's like love at first sight!), and I spent it with a wheelbarrow and a yard of mulch.  By night's end, we'd planted Indian hawthorne, hostas, penta, impatiens, ajuga, and salvia in the front bed to join the caladiums, ferns, and nandina.  I had to tear out some beautiful old hollyhocks and was loathe to do it, but the poor things were planted in the wrong place years ago, and they just didn't go.  So they went.  I'd planned on cutting the stems and putting them on my nightstand, but Charlotte (a la "Charlotte's Web") crawled out of the mess, and I was done.  I don't really mind spiders, but when they're large enough to wear my shoes, I'm out.

Today Chris finished power washing the deck and stairs to the laundry room, and I planted sage and mint by the monstrous rosemary bush, and Caiden and I mulched some more.  My hands are blistered, my feet will never be clean again, and I'm wiped out, but the house is looking better everyday.  I topped it off with working on decorating the master bathroom (When Chris said, "Hey, that looks great!" I confessed to scavenging items from the entire house.  It's free.) and putting away the mountain of laundry from yesterday.  

Now I'm sitting in the chair, too tired to get up, listening to the dogs pant and the tree frogs chirp.  I'm happy as a clam.  We still have some boxes lying around, four weeks after moving in, and not a single room in the house is right yet, but we love this place more every day.   There's so much left to do to bring this place back to a state of civility, and I think the flowers we planted today might be as old as the hollyhocks were, before it's all done.  Each day we chip away at it a little more, and every night I gaze around at our work and feel satisfied at another day well spent.  It's always time well spent, cultivating a home.

*At a recent conference I attended, Sally Clarkson spoke of cultivating civility in our children's lives.  I'm stretching that definition to include our home, too. 

Fixing a Day

What to do when you wake up and realize your house is a mess:

(And your car is a mess.  Your laundry is an unwashed or unfolded mountain.  You don't know what's for dinner, and you can't cook anyway because your fridge?  It's a mess, too.  If you have any money, you certainly don't know because your checkbook is a mess.  The weeds?  They're growing.  And so is your to-do list, except you don't know where to start because a woman only has so many hours in one day, and her three kids aren't helping much except to hide grapes in the couch cushions and spill o.j. on the rug and fight over whose light saber is whose.  Hitting close to home here.)

1.  Light a candle or two and put on some soothing music without words.  Bach's Cello Suite is my favorite for a get-it-done kind of day.

2.  Pour a cup of coffee/tea/water and drink it fast.  You'll need all the help you can get today.

3.  Clear a way to the kitchen sink and put everything that'll fit in the dishwasher.  Run it.

4.  Close the doors to every room that's a mess, focusing only on the kitchen.

5.  Take out the trash.

6.  Drink some more coffee/tea/water, and wipe down the counters.

6b.  After your kitchen is relatively together, make every bed in the house.  And put all errant laundry in a basket by the washing machine.  Then throw every out-of-place toy, shoe, or dog toy in another laundry basket, and put it somewhere you won't forget but can't see from the kitchen.

7.  Now sit down and make a list of what's reasonable.  Don't plan on planting flowers or painting a room or sewing a baby gift.  Just write down what absolutely has to get done to make your house a home by dinner.    Plan on no more than 15 minutes per task.  The bathrooms don't have to be spotless, just livable.

8.  Start on #1, and don't do ANYTHING else until #1 is finished, unless somebody is bleeding or throwing up.  When #1 is finished, congratulate yourself and move on to #2.  Continue until your list is done, disregarding the phone/email/answering machine/doorbell until you're in a state where you can breathe again.  If emptying that basket of loose toys/shoes/dog stuff wasn't on your list, take 10 minutes to put everything away.  

9.  Before you go to bed, survey what you've accomplished.  Now that your house is better, you can work on things like bills/weeds/returning emails, etc. tomorrow.  Make tomorrow's coffee and tomorrow's list.  Wash your face.  Breathe deeply.  Climb under your sheets and get a good night's rest.  You made it.

It's Coming, I Promise.

I have been asked more about knitting than any other subject since I started this blog two years ago.  I taught myself to knit early last spring, and since then many of you have wanted to try and wondered where to begin.  I promised, several months ago, to write about what I used to learn, and I haven't forgotten, but I want to sit down with the resources and write a really thorough post.   But then we moved, and it's been a little crazy, you know?

Yesterday we were going on a little day trip out to a ranch with a waterpark, horses, and great food.  We've been so excited to go, and all I needed to do was put the carseats in Chris' car, and we were ready to hop in and make the trip.  But somebody spilled water all over the floor in the dining room, and when I mopped it up, I noticed that it wasn't a spill, it was a spring.  A spring that kept on coming, even when we turned off the water main.  Except not only did the spring keep on springing, but the faucets kept on pouring.  Even I know that's bad.  That's kind of the point of a water main--you turn it off in an emergency, and the water stops.  When the water doesn't stop, it's a littl scary, especially in an old house I know nothing about.  We don't have much history yet, the house and I.

We called our home warranty, who called a plumber, who said he couldn't come today.  We called our home warranty again, explaining that a spring in the house is bad, bad, bad, and could they try a plumber who understands that an emergency requires immediate attention?  Finally Sam the plumber showed up, as the kids were holding back tears realizing that the trip was down the tubes.  So to speak.

Sam scratched his head, shook it slowly, and said, "Well.  You're certainly in a pickle."  Thank you, Sam, for that encouragement.  For the record, when the seasoned plumber is puzzled and worried, it strikes fear deep inside me.  After he left, Todd the water company guy showed up to replace the valve in the water main.  Many, many hours later, after several bottles of Gatorade and two trips to Lowe's, it was fixed.  Except, and here's the funny thing:  once the water was totally off, the spring kept on springing.  Rats.  (Not literally.  Those who've read me lately know that's a possibility, but not this time.)

After I panicked a little more, envisioning ripping up our foundation and destroying my new kitchen, and pulling out our retirement and going to the poorhouse (nothing like a good panic attack now and then), we scratched our heads and thought, "Hey!  Maybe it's one of the air conditioning units!"  Sure enough, once it was off, so was the spring.

So now we have water once again, all my towels will be freshly laundered after mopping up untold amounts of water, and the dining room floor is squeaky clean.  And hey!  We discovered a sprinkler system in the front yard.  Oddly enough, there's no sprinkler system panel, only a red-painted faucet behind the hose.  Turn it on:  sprinklers.  Isn't that crazy?  

And if the air conditioner guy can't come today, we'll try the trip again.  

So that's my long explanation of why I haven't written about knitting.  Because my life is crazy.  Not crazy-busy, but crazy-weird.  Weird things happen to us, like petrified frogs and impaled dogs and possessed smoke alarms and dining room springs.  And it's a little hard to remember things like knitting when I'm planning on going to the poorhouse.

But today?  If the A/C guy is here fixing our problem, I'll post about knitting.  Unless something else happens.  Around here, you never know.

A Big Day

This week Caiden read an entire book to Grayson, for the first time.  

Oh, You're Jealous. Admit It.

There are many charming things about my bathroom.

Beadboard walls.
Separate sinks and vanities for him and her.

A claw foot bathtub. (Chris told me, when we first looked at the house, "Oh, I'm so sorry this bathroom doesn't have a big garden tub, Sarah." To which I laughed and laughed and laughed.)


And this.



In case my supreme photography skills aren't highlighting this well enough, it's a petrified frog. That's a petrified frog, ladies. (Actually, it's a petrified frog sans eyes and one leg, says Caiden.  I didn't get that close.)  You're jealous, aren't you?  Not just anybody can have a petrified frog in her bathroom.  It's not like you can just pick one up from Pier 1.  I'm blessed like that.

But I've come a long way in the last three weeks of living here.  In April, if I'd found a dead, rock-hard frog behind my toilet, I'd have screamed, then freaked out, and then screamed some more.  And I might've never used the bathroom again.  But I'm working on my country-girl skills.  After stepping past more spiders and lizards than I can count, shooing a skunk out of the garden, and even picking up a grasshopper by the leg and throwing it out the door, a petrified frog doesn't scare me one bit.  

A live one, now, that's a different story.  I have a small phobia of live frogs.  I hyperventilate if they jump anywhere near my skin.  Who knows, though.  Maybe three weeks from now I'll even be able to handle that.