Busy Hands Homestead

My best guess is that we have covered upwards of 2595 miles.  We drove from Missoula, through Billings, across Wyoming, cut across a corner of Colorado and covered almost all of Kansas before we ended up at our destination:  Middle America.  We have been crisscrossing the cross timbers for the past three weeks. NO - we do not have a DVD player in the car. I remember childhood car trips fondly: stopping at rest areas, state parks, singing, playing the road kill alphabet game (A is for Armadillo Soup,  B is for Broiled Beaver, C is for Crispy Coyote...  etc.), stopping at old graveyards to make rubbings of cool head stones, tents, campfires, fireflies...  I want that for my kids. I want them to know that a road trip is just as much about the journey as the destination.  YES - I packed some books, markers, paper, a giant stack of CDs and a cooler full of food. We purchased a luggage carrier and gave the kids room for their legs.  ...

Sharing Blueberries and reading Richard Scarry's "Cars and Trucks and Things that Go.  Folding a Weeks work of Laundry..  My Sunday Routine.  Pomegranate Pork and Red Wine for Dinner..  Ivory painted that Candle Stick. 

There are thirty minutes on the kitchen timer and a warm cup of coffee sitting on the table next to me.  I am allowing my self that much time, no more, no less to come up with the 10 best things that happened to me in 2012.  (Only ten things?  This might be hard.) 1. House .  We bought a house, (with a lot of help). That is pretty amazing right? 2. The Clay Studio of Missoula .  I finally talked my self into taking a ceramics class and leaving bedtime to Adam. 3. Joined the YMCA .  Why, oh why did I wait until September to finally get all the paper work together to join the Y?  It has been one of the most liberating, fun and affordable things I have done this year.  This morning on my way to yoga class Ivory gave me a hug and a kiss and Sylvan opened the gate into the drop off center by himself, turned to me and waved me good bye with a big smile on his face.  It made my heart melt. I had to take a moment to proudly observe just how big a...

I remember staring at my daughter, when she was still tiny, red and wrinkled, thinking about this marvelous miracle of life.  Holding her, it dawned on me that, I was also cradling my grand children in my arms as her infant body already contains fully formed egg cells. While I have always made an effort to eat healthy and exercise, this realization has sent me on the additional mission to try and avoid products that contain potential endocrine disruptors and mutagens. Our house hold isn't completely devoid of plastic, all organic or full of eco-cleaning products.  The lists of complex ingredients on the back of bottles gave me headaches.  Trying to remember what was good, all right and bad while actually examining a product in the store was beyond me.  Many of the products I felt confident purchasing were beyond or financial ability, so I took a different approach.  There is simply a long list of products I don't buy.  I don't buy commercial s...

My little girl's arms and legs are suddenly long and lanky.  The clothing that fit her so well around Christmas time suddenly is just too small.  So I have decided to sew Ivory sunny summer wardrobe. These are the results of the last three days: A sun dress with knotted straps.   A summer dress with straps that tie over the shoulders.  The bodice has a print of delicate ferns, dragonflies, snails and beetles.   Ivory is so fascinated by all things buggy and wormy right now, so I hope she loves it!  (This dress is made from a small scrap of fabric a friend gave me, an up cycled man's shirt and a cotton shower curtain for the lace!) A twirly circle skirt. A twirly circle skirt that is reversible! And a skirt that contains the fabric Ivory fell in love with at Jo-Ann Fabric's.  Her favorite fabric was the pink with the little speckles, because "It looks like a cup cake."  This skirt is going to get a matching red shirt wit...

Until I moved to Missoula, Montana a few years ago the only other time I lived more than a few hours away from my mom was during my semester abroad in Newfoundland, Canada.  We were next door neighbors in a few different places, and I could always stop in when ever I wanted, drink cups of coffee, sneak bites of ice cream and spend hours talking, sitting on the kitchen counter while sinking my teeth into slices of bread with Nutella. For months now, I have had a borrowed book laying across my cookbooks in my oh-so-far-away kitchen with the intent of sending the ingredients and instruction of one of the recipes to my mother for Mother's Day.  In spite of all the thinking and planning, the actual doing, of course, is a little on the late side.  The book is Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World . Sylvan gleefully helped me measure out the ingredients, grind them and bag them up. On Mother's day, I still had three little bags with bows and hand stitc...

The remainder of our spring break flew by in a flash.  A friend, her two, my two and I spontaneously packed a picnic and drove out to our new favorite "hiking spot" in anticipation of the coming cold front.  The remnants of last years floods, vast scoured stretches of ground and mounds of drift wood, are perfect for easy fort building.  We built a fort a few weeks ago, but when we returned it was flattened.  The children were not deterred.   They simply picked up the pieces and put them back together in a new arrangement.  The clouds loomed on the horizon, but were slow to arrive and we soaked in the sunshine, wishing that we had worn lighter coats.  \ The cold front did arrive and we woke to blowing snow.  Ivory and Sylvan and I piled into the car to meet up with another friend and her son who where staying outside of town a bit.  I managed to get us hopelessly lost, knocking on the wrong yellow house with a red door, and finally af...

It is Tuesday. Both Sylvan and Ivory are snoozing away upstairs.  Sylvan is curled up in his crib and Ivory is stretched out on my side of the bed.  The flicker keeps landing on our roof - ting - his loud call echos down the flue followed in quick succession by his hammering on the chimney cap  The first time I heard him I thought our house was going to explode, but no, nothing is wrong with our furnace.  It is simply spring time in Missoula. I was clueless as to why this was happening until it was explained to me on Pea Green Boat, a wonderful local NPR show for children.  The flicker is using our chimney cap to amplify his sound - thereby laying claim to a larger territory.  Ivory has taken to calling him: "Our friend". I just hope he doesn't wake up the kids. Our spring break, so far, has been an enjoyable one. We visited the kids - three little goats - that were only two days old.  The smallest one, still a little wobbly on his legs whi...

I have been neglecting the beet. More truthfully, I have been neglecting writing about the beet. I have been cooking beet dishes a few times a month, whether it be borscht, or roasted beets with chevre and walnuts or simply an assortment of roasted fall vegetables.  I have even been photographing them, but some where between moving the images from my camera and actually writing about it, it just seems like too much time has passed. I am eating beets right now. Now is the time to write. I am eating the few left overs from my new favorite beet recipe that I found between the covers of a book entitled Plenty; One Man, One Woman and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally .  I admit I was skeptical.  It only calls for five ingredients and three of those are disliked in my family.  Beets are marginally disliked by my husband, blue cheese is marginally disliked by me, and mashed potatoes which often are left uneaten by Ivory.  I tried the recipe anyway. P...