Busy Hands Homestead

There are moments when anxiety squeezes my lungs, I blink to push away tears, and I focus on what is around me right now.  Life at this moment is scary with so many things unknown, but at the same time I deeply grateful to be where I am, at this moment, with my family, and hyper-aware of just how much privilege this moment holds. At the beginning of March 2019 we turned on the heat in our house that we had been working on for almost a year. After living in the bus for seven months, followed by house sitting and couch surfing for the coldest of the winter, we made the decision to move out of our 30 foot school bus and into our house.  We had no kitchen and unfinished bathrooms. It was rustic at best, but warm. We camped out in a construction mess and for months as we finished bathrooms, built cabinets, added doors. In March of 2020, I am hyper-aware that warm water and hand-washing is a luxury, that having space (or money) to store essentials and minimize grocery runs isn't u...

The two of us are face down in a giant pile of leaves. I'm laughing, and it hurt. I raked the maple leaves in our yard into a giant pile thinking that the kids would be excited, or at the least, would want to jump into them just once. Instead they watched me for a few minutes, shrugged their shoulders, and asked to walk down the street to a friends house. I let them go, think that this is just what 6 and 9 feels like, and continue to rake the leaves waist high. I am slowly, grudgingly coming to terms with the delay of our house remodel (again). The many moving parts that need to come together to start the process of tearing down and rebuilding our house, didn't come together in time to move out and start before the cold set in. For weeks, probably months, I've been avoiding a house, that no longer feels welcoming to me. I avoid my garden, my kitchen, my living room (there is no where to sit anyway), barely see my family. I've move through sadness, ange...

A gift arrived in this giant box....  and the box is just as awesome as the new sleds.  While Adam took the kids on a cold and windy sled ride. I finally finished our present for Sylvan...  and yes, it is late, very late!   Here is his very own fort kit.  At dinner every night Sylvan takes one look at his food and screams: "I don't like that!  I don't like that food!  I don't like that!"  The rest of the family is almost done before he takes his first bite of his pinto bean, onion, spaghetti squash and cheese quesadilla...  and....  a big grin spreads across his face.  He does like the food.  As a reward for trying his first bite Sylvan snapped this picture of his sister.  (She ate all her food, and half of his.)

An Empty Gym.  Gallon jugs of tempera paint. Rolls of colored paper.   Scissors. Glue.  A closet of voting booths lined with canvas. Satin Banners.  A few busy kiddo's after school and busy mama's that stayed on for late nights and  Ready. Set. Go.  The backdrop for the Lowell Elementary Christmas show:   All the windows line up for one continuous scene.  Notice the snow flakes?   Snow flake crystals are formed on multiples of three... thee pointed stars, six pointed, nine, twelve etc...  I think it has something to do with the angle of the water molecules.  So,  I folded them on 30 or 60 degree angle resulting in stars that have either 6 or 12 points.  A super late school night for Ivory and Sylvan who patiently looked at Christmas books while Adam picked up our new stacked washer...  My coordinating skills are lacking sometimes - but then I thought that this back drop ...