Busy Hands Homestead

I have my hands on the steering wheel, flying up highway 44, driving in and out of the past and present. I am feeling the wind on my face, seeing sunflowers and laughing out loud at hearing Afro Man for the first (and possibly the last) time. In reality, the windows are rolled up, the fields are green and the news is on. On this road I battled my fear of traffic, shed tears in pouring rain, snailed through blowing snow and endured the vertigo of newly paved asphalt and an equally black sky. I drove up and down this stretch of highway hundreds of time because, well, I was in love. My first love. My first for almost everything – my first time getting drunk, my first time to lie about where exactly I was spending the night, my first cross country road trip complete with food poisoning from gas station food... but, as with most great first loves, this one was followed by equally great first heart break. The only cure for which, I admit with embarrassment, was sit...

“Do you want to sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, I ask Ivory. “No. I only sing songs about animals.” And a new song alights. This one is about lions. For some reason my little girl will not sing nursery rhymes. She will ask for specific ones (at times), fill in missing words (at times), but will not sing a nursery rhyme.  Just last night she was sitting on the edge of the bed in my grandmother's basement singing to herself. “Happy Changes, Happy Changes, Happy Changes”. I have no idea where this song came from, but this is a classic Ivory song. She sings the moment. Happy changes indeed.  We just spent the day visiting with my Oma. Eating her wonderful home cooked food.. walking around her neighborhood and just enjoying her company. We are on a road trip. We left behind the mountains, drove across the plains, saw a few raindrops, a lasting rainbow, a sunrise and a sunset. We drove past bent over workers lumping potatoes into bags. We drove past bags of onio...

(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...

The day after Adam defended his master's thesis, we loaded up a rental truck and he drove from Stillwater, Oklahoma to Missoula, Montana. A month later I crammed our tiny car full of all the things we managed to forget to pack into the truck, put my daughter into her car seat and made the trip north to join him. I took the Orange street exit, and I will admit it, promptly got lost. So rather than being absolutely ecstatic, I was more than a little grumpy when I finally managed to fine the MUD site where we would be living for the next year. I was even more grumpy when I walked into our new home, only to see how literal my husband had taken my request to not move in completely with out me.... everything, and I really mean almost everything was still in boxes or laying on top of boxes. So, I unpacked, sorted, moved furniture and slowly put my life back in order and started to explore this new place we lived in. In August Ivory and I will have lived in Missoula for...

For Ivory's first birthday I made her carrot cake and lemon zucchini cake cup cakes with cream cheese icing. She tried one bite, and decided she would not have any. Instead she shoved handfuls of watermelon into her mouth, dripping and sticky, but immensely happy. On her second birthday, we had carrot cake with cream cheese icing. It was much better received this time.    By her third birthday I had discovered a wonderfully rich and moist chocolate beet cake. She proudly told everyone who would bend down to listen: “I had a vegetable cake for my birthday!”, which was followed by confused looks in my direction... and my subsequent interpretation of Ivory's statement. I came across the recipe while perusing the pages of a tiny little cook book that was given to my husband as he commenced his year as a VISTA at Missoula Urban Demonstration Project (MUD) . The cook book is the 2006 edition of Eat Local, Feel Noble! compiled by Lauren Caldwell as a ...