Busy Hands Homestead

Time has been getting away from me.  The days jam packed with little happenings that it seems like I have hardly had a moment to collect my thoughts, much less, to put them into writing. So I will back track a few weeks. HUNTING - a success.  Adam brought home a deer. and then THE SICKNESS - we ALL got sick. Almost two weeks ago, Sylvan climbed into bed next to me, whimpered tucked his hands into my shirt, fell asleep and then proceeded to puke all over me... changed sheets..  and again..  changed sheets...  and -  then he and I got up.  We only have three sets of sheets for our bed.  So, at four in the morning, he and I started a load of laundry and curled up on the sofa to wait for the rest of the family to get up.  I wrapped my body around his, frustrated by my inability to make him feel better.  The one thing that I can always count on to make him feel better, nursing, made him violently ill and my refusal to do so made h...

All of the sudden time has slowed down. The month has been a whirlwind: meetings, birthdays, kiln firings and school outings. Ideas for blog posts scratched on scraps of papers, just to be piled up while we go on to the next thing. These are the matching journals I stamped for Ivory and Adam as his 30th birthday gift.  Last fall I started having Ivory draw a picture of her day for Adam on those days that he doesn't come home from work.  This way they can share their days with each other even when they don't see one another. This is the double layer meat cake I made for Adam's birthday party.  Two layers of meat loaf, a layer of bacon in between and the entire thing is iced with mashed potato "frosting" all topped off with sauteed onions and mushrooms.   This is the bright white glow of the Anagama Kiln firing. In a few more days, we get to unbrick the door and unload shelf after shelf of transformed clay.  This is the...

It is the first day of spring. Out side of the window the chickens are still rooting around in the grass. Sylvan is asleep in my arms. He has been curled up there for the last five minutes, and those are the first continuous minutes of sleep he has had all day. He fell asleep on my hip while I was cooking dinner but refuses to be put down at all. A mysterious fever has been plaguing him, into which even the Dr. had no insight. Ivory is puttering around in the dining room, setting up a picnic in front of the furnace for her droves of imaginary children and class mates. The toys are steadily spreading out from their shelf on the living room through the dining room and stop at the kitchen door. I am sitting in the corner of the living room curled up in our blue arm chair – waiting. We are all waiting for Adam to come home from work. The longer days, often mean longer and often unpredictable hours. He came home late from work yesterday too, dinner and bed time...

(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...

We were supposed to be drifting in a canoe on a lake, but instead Ivory is drifting in and out of sleep on the sofa. I cancel all of our play dates, and resign myself to a quite day at home. I pick up the yard (where does all this clutter come from?) drifting in and out of the bedroom the living room and the yard to check on the sleeping children. It is a drifting kind of day. The flat pod peas Ivory planted weeks ago are ready to be harvested. But picking them can wait for her, and I leave them hanging, translucent in the morning sun. “Stir-fried with thin slices of beef”, I think to myself. Between naps, we read chapters of Lucy and the Green Man by Linda Newbery. We read about the passing of seasons, summer waning, winter arriving. That seems so far away. Summer and sunshine seem to have just now entered our lives. We read about Lucy's grandpa passing away and my voice cracks a littl...