Busy Hands Homestead

I haven't been sleeping well. I fall into bed feeling exhausted and tired but the moment when I finally relax and am just about drift off to sleep my head just starts running a never ending anxious monologue. I try to refocus, breath.. I've been doing yoga for years, I should have this mastered this by now...  get up to and go the bathroom and then try again. But the underlying anxiety that drives the monologue and keeps me on the edge of tears and starts all over again. Here is why. A month or so ago I signed a letter.  A letter supporting the opening of an office for an organization that helps resettle refugees in the United States and would resettle a few individuals here in Montana. I didn't think much of it initially – because if we have the ability to help people out of terrible, desperate situations it simply is right thing to do. Then this happened. I received this image as a text message I don't know who took the picture .And since then - I ...

Last year, we woke to a winter wonderland on Thanksgiving morning, bundled up and followed converging sled tracks to the site of what will hopefully become a longstanding neighborhood tradition: pie breakfast.  Slices of sweet and savory pies, mimosas and fresh espressos disappeared as quickly as the time and we all had to rush home to cook for dinner. This year, we woke with equal excitement and trotted across the still bare ground to the second pie breakfast and our second thanksgiving far from home. Cradled in my arms was a pie baked on the inspiration of a faint child hood memory. Shortly after we moved to the United States, my grandmother took me to the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I sat across from her scanning the menu for a compilation of words that I recognized, trying desperately not to let her know that most of what was written was almost illegible to me. There, I spotted something I knew:  Brie. And that was the dish...

(written almost entirely while on hold with Team Heath) I have hung the diapers, stepping on the sweet smelling pineapple weed ( Matricaria discoidea ) at my feet.  Ivory is napping on my bed and I just gently deposited Sylvan on his sisters bed. I sighed and picked up the phone. I am sitting here, tethered to my phone, being transferred from one person to another. Somewhere along the way I have gotten dropped and am back to the first step in the process, I was just transferred back to the Team Health billing center. I have been on hold so long that the battery on my phone is noticeably warm. This has become a weekly ritual. It all started on March 23 rd , 2011 when Sylvan was 7 weeks old. We were visiting family in Oklahoma and he developed this horrible mucus in the back of his throat. He would choke after nursing and instead of spitting up milk, he would spit of masses of sticky slime. I had him sleeping propped up, terrified to fall asleep myself... It...