Busy Hands Homestead

There is something that I love about being solidly in the winter months. Past is the anxiety about the coming cold, the lists of unfinished work, all the things we could have done but did not do. It is a new year full of dreams, and potential, and things yet to come. It is dark enough at 6:30 in the morning to see the earth's shadow cover the moon. Ivory glaces upward, takes in the moment, and crawls back into bed. Sylvan looks up and keeps looking. The cold creeps between bathrobes, and coats, and boots on bare feet as we stand looking at the sky. The early morning darkness gradually becomes lighter, the afternoons noticeably longer. Winter is an excuse to hunker down, to bend our heads close, sip warmth and gradually put the pieces together. Puddles form and ice sheets get smashed while waiting for the school bus. The surface of the road slowly appears and disappears on my walk to work. It snows, and it seems that ev...

Sylvan's blue and orange glove keeps slipping out of my knitted mitten. He and I wave to Ivory on the school bus, go down the street, and up and over the bridge. There is a skiff of snow on the ground, a hint of sunlight through the clouds, and the sound of birds chirping. Flocks of black birds morph across the sky, the morning light flashing off of their wing flaps, and for an instant they are foating glitter. Our hands slip and we switch sides. I can't remember what we talk about, but the kid walking next to me is happy and bubbly and is rattling on barely audible over the drone of trucks. It is hard to imagine that just half an hour earlier, he was screaming about breakfast and shoes and going to school in general. The snow and cold surprised me. I wasn't ready. Sylvan is bundled up in snow pants and bright orange sneakers. His sister's hand me down bogs I saved from last winter are still too big, and I haven...

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...

Sunday:  SNAP Challenge Day 5  Sylvan and I made Oatmeal Muffins. It is a recipe from another of my standby cookbooks. It is a cookbook that I grew up with. My mom had a copy of an earlier edition, and my Oma gave me the one I have. It is the More With Less Cookbook. To total cost for 12 muffins (we ate 8) was $1.78 . The cost of the coffee share $1.52 . Total cost of $3.27. Breakfast was late again. Very Late. Adam resumed working on the bus and I finished moving around plants, cleaned the kitchen, and started the weekly task of baking bread. My new favorite bread recipe is the Basic Bread from Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jenifer Reese. It involves scooping a bunch of ingredients in a bowl, giving it a stir and dumping it into a loaf pan for a few hours to rise. To cost per loaf, is $0.60 . I also started the process of making Pork Liver Pat é . I first experimented with pat é, when I purchased a few whole chic...

I haven't ventured outside or changed clothes since I got up Saturday morning. Yesterday I went through the annual ritual of cleaning and rearranging the house to accommodate all of the house plants moving back into our living space. By the time I looked at the clock is was 5:30 and I figure I might as well spend the rest of the day in pajamas. The whole point of these posts and participating in the #SNAPchallenge is to raise money for Double SNAP Dollars, which doubles the purchasing power of SNAP benefits spent on fresh fruits and vegetables.  So please, if you have the resources and value expanding access to fresh fruits and vegetables, take a moment to DONATE HERE!   My family has lots of practice cooking on a limited budget, because SNAP used to be our food budget.  These posts might make it seem too easy, but it wasn't.  I am calculating the Double SNAP Program into my daily expenditures, which helps a lot! I also have the benefit of being raised in a fa...