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.  ...

Ivory threaded the needle up and down through the button holes.  Tacking down the tulle, sandwiched between the button and a layer of sparkling felt.   I stitched the whole thing to hair clips.  There they are:  We are ready to go to celebrate a birthday!

"Mama, come on." He is tugging on my hand, pulling me persistently from my bed.  He had just climbed from the middle of our bed, over my back and onto the ground. "Where are we going?"  I ask, reluctantly slipping out of bed and following him through the door, back across the squeaky floor to his bed.  He climbs in, lays down, and asks for his blanket. He had woken up crying, and like every night, I had retrieved his little body and placed it next to mine, but this night it didn't calm him. Sylvan, barely visible in the dark, breathing slowly and deeply.  I can't help but wonder: "can I go to sleep without him beside me?" Our world is shifting. My toes and heals touch together, and suddenly I am stable, balanced, light and elated.  My knees perched on the table of my arms.  I breath and when my toes touch the mat again, I wonder: "How exactly is this pose related to the crow Sylvan pointed out to me in the parking lot?" My world...

I was hoping to post these Sunday night... Whole Wheat Oat Bread and Cherry Poppy Seed Danishes in the making. Christmas Stockings for Adam and I Story Time A few snap shots of our day.

Some days are just hard: full of worry and stress. Sometimes, those days full of worry and stress happen to coincide with important days - Sylvan's birthday - to be precise.   We opened Sylvan's first birthday present before breakfast.   Slam dunk!  Adam fixed us all french toast and then we mulled over what to do.  I had not planned our usual birthday pot luck because, well, it was Thursday and Adam was supposed to be working until five and I had class at six.  My plan had been that we would have cake between Adam's work and my ceramic class, but our was wide open, too open, but we were going to make the best of the day.  We picked up and headed downtown to take dizzying ride after ride on the carousel.  When we ran out of tokens we strolled on.   We ducked into Taco Del Sol (you know it is a celebration when the Wests actually eat out), where both Sylvan and Ivory love the bean and cheese burritos. ...

Sylvan had been running around grinning, in a wonderful mood, dishing out hugs and kisses and just before I stepped out of the door, Ivory came down and I gave her a hug and a kiss as well. I touched up the little cups I had worked on the night before and then spent the next seven hours working on ten mugs.  Putting on layers of Shellack, wiping away the surface, creating texture and adding a slip trailed grid. I stared at the finished mugs in front of me. I had been handling them so long - looking at them for so long - that I could no longer tell if I liked them.  All I knew is that I wanted to go home. When I walked through the front door, Sylvan was napping. Ivory and Adam and I sat around the dining room table while she mixed color after color, testing each result until her splotch filled papers covered the table. Much too soon, I got back into the car and drove to the Missoula Community Food Co-op .  Hours later I finally walked through the front door and I ...

Sylvan is sitting at the dinner table.  His fork in his fist, the prongs sticking strait up.  "I thankful," he is not quite shouting. "I thankful. I thankful. I thankful." "Well, I am thankful... ", Ivory begins. "NO NO NO NO NO NO. I thankful", Sylvan shouts across the table at her. "I thankful." "Hold on Ivory.  I think Sylvan is trying to tell us what he is thankful for." Usually Ivory decides what Sylvan is thankful for.  It is most often the food we are eating or something exciting we did that day while Sylvan stands on his chair at the dinner table turning in circles singing: "Thankful, thankful, thankful."  I usually am poised at the edge of my seat, waiting for the moment that his thankful dance takes him over the edge of his chair.  (Thankfully, that has not happened yet.)  But today it seems he wants to speak for himself. I thankful is followed by a string of sounds, very serious sounds, and I take his...

A friend and I went on a walk today. A friend and I and our children, four in total. The snow glowed white overlaid with dark shadows.  We stepped from light to dark through the high contrast of a sunny winter day. Ivory is reading books on the sofa, Sylvan paging through his own stack of books on the dining room floor.  Just a few minutes ago both were red faced, with bands of tears streaking their cheeks.  Today we have journeyed through smiles and tears, happy and sad, light and dark as many times as we stepped through the shadows underneath the undulating trees. Dinner is baking in the oven. Colored pencils are being spread across the floor as coloring pages are filled in with rainbows.  I take a deep breath and enjoy the sunshine. I am trying to push the thoughts of just how many more shadows I will have to walk through before bed time out of my mind. Sunny winter days are starkly beautiful because, and not in spite of, the shadows. "Look M...

Sylvan asleep, the dishes washed, dinner started and I sit down to sew a few buttons onto a cute cardigan Ivory was handed down from a friend.  She impatient, waiting for a friend to arrive and share dinner with us, utters those three words that parents dread: " I am bored." I pour a rainbow of buttons into a cake pan: "Can you find five buttons that are the same and match your red and grey and black sweater?".  Much too soon she gathers a little cluster of grey buttons and stacks of large, medium and small buttons are marching across the table.  Mom: "I am bored."  I stare at the table for a moment, set down the needle and thread, put aside my hopes of quickly fixing this silly cardigan and instead dig through my craft supplies to find that roll of floral wire I know is hiding somewhere in one of my drawers. Success. For an hour she is concentrating, silently stringing her stacks of buttons onto the wires - small, medium and large.  She hands the thr...

When I think about the day in 2003 on which I met my husband, I think guacamole. There are many moments in our lives that I remember by the meals we shared. The last meal he cooked for me before I drove to New York for my summer internship in 2006 was Veal Marsala.  The meal that was waiting, sitting on the table, when I returned was a Spaghetti Squash picked up at the Farmer's market that morning. Even rockiest days of our marriage (so far), I will always fondly remember with side by side concocted candied orange peals and chocolate fudge.  The morning after Ivory was born, we pulled apart monkey bread while we stared across the tiny hospital room at that sleeping bundle.  The day after we came home from the hospital with we walked all over Stillwater, Oklahoma in 90 degree weather.  When we walked out of the door that morning we were full of new parent adrenaline and the fact that I had had virtually no sleep the night before seemed to matter litt...

This morning I rolled over in my bed and stared at the clock. Guiltily I calculated that Adam had left almost two hours ago, and that I wouldn't be seeing him again until Sunday evening. This weekend went by too fast.  I attended a lecture by Julia Galloway Friday night and her workshop most of Saturday.  Sunday was spent cooking for Adam's week away, and if I had not curled up next to his warm body for two nights, I might not have realized he had been home at all.  I continued staring at the clock, willing my self to get out of bed.   Since I haven't been able to spend late nights at the Clay Studio my dining room has become, not only the play room, but also a make shift studio.  During nap time and after Ivory and Sylvan finally fall asleep I attempt to wrap up the list of things I am trying to finish for the upcoming MADE fair .   Today, during nap time, I attached the handles to bier-steins and trimmed a few plates.  I p...

The Beginning: Canvas 1: Canvas 2: Canvas 3:  Back to Canvas 2 with a broom for a paintbrush: The End!