Always creating something at Home

New nautical room

2011-11-22T17:27:00.000-05:00

My daughter has long been obsessed with pirates and all things nautical. Even though she begged me three years ago to let her have a pink room (only a month after I'd painted it yellow), she spent the better part of the last six months begging me for a blue room. Pink and blue are the two colors I don't like on walls or in houses. I'm partial to warm neutrals. Alas, what's a pirate's mother to do in the end. We now have a blue room in our house.


New laminated nautical world map, blue striped duvet, and shark sheets. Arrgh!

Rope hung shelves to display all things nautical and trophies plundered and earned for feats of bravery.

Desk made by Captain's mum for arts and crafts and plotting ship's course.

Ship's wheel clock for steering young pirates to activities on time.

Book cases made by pirate's mum to hold treasure maps and booty and such.

Look! Space for more booty!

Savannah still has her treasure chest at the foot of her bed, filled with the egg money she saves and other personal treasures. We are only awaiting a low-pile chenille rug on back order to complete the project. I can say with great accuracy that this pirate's mum is looking forward to relaxing for the holidays now that the captain's quarters are in tip-top ship-shape.

So long

2011-11-20T00:21:00.000-05:00

My apologies for not posting in so long. My husband is working a new job this year that renders me a single mom about 95% of the time. I've been learning new habits to keep myself sane during this time and to keep the kids involved in their regular activities.

I am tired all the time, as you can probably see from this picture, but keep up with my little rascals as best I can. They've had plenty of new milestones I should've shared. William sings his ABCs in the cutest little voice. Savannah rides her bike without training wheels and is ready to graduate to a larger one.

William rides his tricycle now on the road all by himself and put his first pee in the potty (no pictures of that thank goodness!).

Savannah tested for her brown belt in Taekwondo and was praised for her positive energy, focus, and indomitable spirit. William fell in love with a race car blankie that nearly takes the place of mommy's tummy and Savannah became a full Brownie in her Girl Scout troop.

Because this will be a challenging year for me with little free time, I won't be able to post very often until Kevin's job changes next year. Probably best to subscribe if you want new happenings to appear in your inbox, rather than having to check back to see that I have or have not posted. Wish me luck and have a great Thanksgiving!

Piano for S

2011-09-08T22:13:00.000-04:00

In just less than a year, Savannah has come a long way in her piano lessons. I'm so proud of her that she can already read music better than I can. Sometimes I try to imagine where she'll be in one more year of piano lessons. Anyway, the time had come when her keyboard was holding her back. The keys aren't touch sensitive and there were no pedals. But the dilemma for us is that in our open contemporary house, there are very few interior walls. Add that to the fact that we heat two floors of our house with a woodstove and we have a recipe for disaster for a real piano. Fortunately, we discovered that the electronic pianos have really come leaps and bounds in the past few years and without strings and hammers, they aren't as sensitive, requiring even humidity and temperature year round.

So Savannah finally received a more suitable practice piano and it even comes with a view of the garden and pond, something a regular piano couldn't have. She enjoys the pedals and the three levels of touch-sensitive keys and we enjoy the sound of her playing. I don't know how long she'll continue her piano lessons, but I hope it's for a long, long time to come.

Busy bee me

2011-09-04T21:53:00.001-04:00

I know it seems like I let a time slip by without posting much. Summers are challenging because they are so busy. One of my projects has been renovating the guest/project room. It is a small bedroom and I needed a project room much more than we needed a guest bedroom so even though it took me two years to do it, I finally sold our super-comfy queen size bed that didn't fit in the room no matter how you tried to arrange it. And then I built two more to fit into the space (yes two more!)

This is the XL Full daybed I built with a Full-size trundle beneath it - two beds in a smaller space. I already love how the smaller beds have transformed the space in the room. I also made the drapes and pillows (after all this room is also my project room!)

The dresser is an antique yellow pine one that I fell in love with at an antique show in Boston and have had ever since. I wouldn't dream of painting it antique white to "match". I like the Bohemian look to this room.

Kevin helped by finally replacing the closet doors in this room. They had to be removed during the radiant floor-retrofitting, but that was two years ago... The quilt on my design board is the most recent one I've completed.

On the other side of the room is my somewhat organized, always in use, sewing space. I built this desk as a Christmas present to myself last December but it's been in use from the day the paint dried so I've never taken a photo of it. I custom-built it 2" lower than average so it suits my height perfectly (no more stretching my toes down like a child to reach the sewing machine pedal!)

I've tried to make the most of the space by adding shelving to store fat quarters, peg board to keep my sewing tools within reach and a fabric covered design bulletin board for my lists and ideas.

On the corner wall I painted a pair of thread-holding racks and mounted them to keep my thread with reach as well. The sewing desk is large enough to accommodate both my serger and my regular sewing machine at the same time and for large projects, I can pull the table away from the wall to let the fabric drape over the other side as I'm sewing. Forms follows function is the motto of this room.

Laundry renovation

2011-09-01T21:53:00.000-04:00

When we first moved into this house, the laundry was in the basement, crowded in the mechanical room where we needed to put a whole house water filter and mini-furnace for the radiant floor. So we moved the washer and dryer upstairs, to a hallway in the master suite area. After the move, I really wanted to put cabinets up but there was a window, our only window for that area nearly flush with the wall and cabinets would have blocked half of it. I finally settled on open air shelving.

I'm glad I finally finished this project. I had cabinet-grade plywood ripped to 15.5" strips for wide shelves and painted them to match the trim in the room. The baskets on top (one is missing) hold little used items like candles and light bulbs (with the new energy-efficient bulbs, it seems we never have to change a bulb!) And the basket on bottom holds the things we use for doing laundry like stain removing mineral spirits, etc. Now it's easy to clean off the tops of the washer and dryer and they don't collect trinkets like rocks and acorns and coins from people's pockets.

I am still considering add a small ruffle curtain beneath the bottom shelf to hide the outlets but at the moment I kind of like the cold, utilitarianness of it. (Did I mention laundry is not my favorite chore?)

Utiliarianism, in architecture:

The belief that the value of a feature is determined by its utility.
The aesthetic of exposing necessary materials and features, such as metal or heating pipes, which are normally included in a design for their utility rather than their aesthetic appeal.

Farmer's reward

2011-07-30T18:05:00.000-04:00

Once our garden is in full swing, we feel pretty stinking rich all the time. And why is that you wonder? Because every day is like eating at a fresh gourmet restaurant. A typical trip to the garden will yield all this, and more.

Everything I could hold: a half pound of green beans, two zucchini, four eggplant, two cucumbers and two peppers.

This year I smartened up about my herbs and overwintered some of them so they had a huge head start in the spring. Most of my overwintered herbs are the size of small hedges, so I hope to keep that up this year. I love being able to pluck some oregano, thyme or basil for whatever I'm cooking in the kitchen. The eggplant and cucumbers are ripening at a pace of 3-4 a day and we eat the cukes as fresh snacks they are so sweet.

Our tomatoes are only just beginning to ripen. These are an heirloom variety, Beam's yellow. They look like light bulbs and have a very sweet, mild flavor that makes them a good addition to everything from eggs to salsa. The pumpkin-shaped Brandywines are green on the vine, as are the Roma and cherry tomatoes. The carrot tops are tall and lush and since I didn't have the heart to properly thin them, I have been plucking baby carrots 2 to 4 inches deep from the rows each week to thin them out now (except now I get to eat them instead of just discarding the seedlings). We've come up with some great in season recipes this year that I'll share this week.

Baby fluff balls

2011-07-05T09:39:00.000-04:00

Our fourth of July was special this year because we watched two chicks hatch. Words can't express the awe and cuteness of the experience, so we'll just share some pictures.

Farmer's breakfast

2011-07-04T09:17:00.001-04:00

First it was strawberries and lettuces, now it's sugar snap peas, cucumbers, and the first eggplant and baby broccoli crowns.

"Sugar snap peas for breakfast?" you ask. Sure! And cucumbers too, although we juice them with a few apples and carrots for a refreshing healthy breakfast juice.

And of course, a bunch of eggs we collected yesterday.

With sauteed chives, garlic and baby broccoli. Mmmm. This is the richness of the gardener's breakfast. Of course, it also matters what we didn't eat.

Do you see the two little cracks on each of the eggs? We can't wait to meet our newest feathered family members. To me independence is all about having having secure, safe and sustainable food and energy (here's looking at almost 14 megawatt-hours of solar energy generated). Happy Independence Day!

Little farm miracle

2011-07-03T23:53:00.000-04:00

Today we had a lot going on as usual but after our walk Savannah spotted something new while collecting eggs. Our broody hen was off her nest and two of the eggs were cracked. After a bit of searching we found something sticking out from our broody girl's breast.

Can you see the sweet not yet one-day-old baby chick peeking out from beneath her mama's feathers? Here's another close up just in case.

Welcome baby! We are eager to see the colors of this one as it grows since it is half Buff Orpington and half Rhode Island Red. But this wasn't our only surprise. Then we discovered a second baby that had fallen outside of the coop, it was running around frightened and cold. As soon as we caught her and she felt our warmth, she quieted and fell asleep. We decided to bring her in the house to raise her in the brooder. That way we can be certain she will have food, water, warmth and will not fall out of the coop again. And, she'll imprint on us.

Even Aunt Megan got to hold our new baby fluff ball. But there was another surprise. William had been asking over and over for milk while I was preparing the brooder. When Kevin went to the fridge to get his milk, he heard peeping from inside the fridge! He brought out our bowl of freshly collected eggs and I quickly did the water test on them. Two of the eggs floated right to the top so we scooped them out. Aunt Megan heard the peeping from inside one of the eggs too. I made a little "nest" for the eggs inside the brooder where it was warmest and guess who wanted to snuggle with her sisters?

The first egg on the left already has a small crack in it from baby sister's egg tooth. Tomorrow we expect to have two baby fluff balls in our brooder and possibly a third if the last egg was also fertilized. For us, this is quite the miracle because our rooster Lucky (who is lucky to be alive in the first place) has half a brain and doesn't exactly know what he's doing when he mounts a chicken. We see very few fertilized eggs. Ever. So we thought our poor broody girl was nesting in vain. We left her alone though to do her thing with her clutch of eggs and now she's got one lovely chick to raise as her own and we have two or three to raise our way. Tonight or tomorrow we expect to see the miracle of hatching. And soon enough all the siblings will be together again, grazing the land with their mama and each other.

Bathroom display wall

2011-07-01T13:32:00.000-04:00

You might be wondering why you haven't heard from me in so long. It's not for lack of news. We thought would have to move in July for Kevin's work so I've been working like a mad person to complete all the unfinished home renovation projects on our house. Of course, Kevin was "transferred" to a new position in the same town so we get to stay for another year - yay!

I've been working hard to renovate the master bathroom, which has a large wall space that is not easily accessible. To me that screams display. Using Ana White's simple plans for ten dollar display shelves, I created a pair for the wall and painted them the same color as the vanity, which I've remodeled and the wrap-around built-in bench in the master bathroom. It's such a simple project, but I think they look great without cluttering the space too much. I wanted a subtle beach or shell-themed room since we take an annual vacation to the Gulf Coast of Florida and really love it. The only pictures on the wall are of us at the beach and shells that we've collected or purchased while in Hawaii or Florida. There's still plenty of blank space left to fill as we make new memories, although we've thought of adding a corked bottle with a secret message inside. I can't wait until the entire master bathroom is complete and I can show you the whole thing.

Day on the farm

2011-06-03T13:57:00.000-04:00

There's much going on everyday now in the garden, so I need lots of helpers. While I garden after dinner, I keep everyone else occupied to keep them nearby and out of trouble. My water-obsessed boy loves to water the asparagus bed. (Our mantra: Water plants, not people!)

The sugar snap peas have already grown up to the third level of my trellis, and are begging me to add levels four and five.

My solution to never having to weed the garden - weed cloth used in mounded up rows with straw around the perimeter. I roll up the weed cloth in the fall and re-use it for 3-4 years.

We've already picked some fresh lettuces from the garden for our salads. Nothing beats tender fresh garden lettuces. This is a head of Ithaca.

And an heirloom favorite from France, merveille des saisons.

My big girls helping out in the compost pile to turn the pile for me so it cooks more evenly. Thanks girls!

Blueberries springing up on a bush that Kevin thought was dead. I guess my special compost mix and two years of TLC revived it. We used to get a few dozen blueberries from this bush, now there are hundreds and this is our smallest blueberry bush!

Savannah works her magic touch with the babies. Even the more high-strung Americaunas love her and jump into her lap in the evenings before bedtime when she's in the hammock. She can be found after dinner with two or more babies on her lap, nestling into her warmth and enjoying the snuggle.

Dirt and other miracles of nature

2011-05-22T00:14:00.000-04:00

Every year I spend many back breaking hours adding composted horse manure, compost from our household, and composted chicken and wood manure to our garden. Today as I labored away, discouraged by the amount of clay and rock still in our garden, I wondered to myself, why I was doing this. I tilled in 100 pounds of sphagnum peat moss in one small row, meant to house carrots, while my boots got sucked down in the wet clay and my back ached from repeatedly lifting the dense clumps of dirt that clung to my pitchfork. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to see a great documentary this evening called, Dirt! The Movie, all about our relationship with the soil and its complicated diverse organisms that sustain us and all life on Earth. If you get the chance, I recommend this film, which grounded me and made the knots in my shoulder seem not quite so bad.

This week we had the opportunity to see all kinds of nature's curiosities such as the baby chipmunks running about, with their eyes still closed, completely unaware of our presence but somehow able to locate, open and eat nuts. How they can do this, when human infants are so helpless for so long, beats me. The chipmunk above was the size of a small mouse.

We were able to rescue this year-old red winged blackbird that had gotten tangled in a net. It had injured its wing trying to rip free of the netting so we housed it for the night so it could rest and watched it fly away the next morning, good as new. I learned first hand how formidable their beaks are and hope to never do battle with one.

Our lilacs, whose blossoms had remained pinched tightly shut until this week, seduced us with their intoxicating fragrance and we finally had to bring some clusters indoors to enjoy. The bees are drunk in love with the lilac bushes this week too, and I can't blame them. They're also busy pollinating our strawberries, which have begun to bear small green berries, teasing us with the promise of a bountiful crop sometime in June.

William turns two

2011-05-01T23:13:00.000-04:00

It's hard to believe that it's been two years since my little guy entered this world with a bang. Most of the time, he is a gentle and kind little boy, who likes to give hugs, say new words, play outside, snuggle with his baby chicks, and arrange and rearrange flowers. But he can also turn into the naughtiest little boy in a flash, running with wild abandon in any direction he pleases, even if that might be out of a store's automatic doors into the street or through a busy airport terminal or out the front door towards the woods in a diaper and bare feet, hardly noticing the prickles in his feet until he is caught.

These extremes define my William's character - eager to make enormous messes,

Yogurt schmogurt.

but equally willing to do hard work that is not asked of him like unloading the clean dish washer or pushing the wheelbarrow full of manure even though the wheel keeps sinking through the mucky meadow.

For his birthday I made his favorite cake, that we call Fairy Tale cake, with layers of white chocolate pudding and white chocolate frosting and added his favorite thing to the top - an airplane.

I guess you could say he liked it.

I guess you could say, he really liked it.

I try to keep the kids' birthdays simple for as long as possible, so we just celebrated with our immediate family and did all of William's favorite things, like eating pasta with homemade marinara sauce and edamame, catching tadpoles from the pond, a bike ride and walk down the road, a ride in the paddleboat, and playing with our new toys.

We catch dozens of tadpoles, newts, and fish in the pond.

William is obsessed with water. He points it out whenever he sees it, and on our walks he must stop at each place there is a stream to admire the flowing water and perhaps toss in a pebble or two. With his boots on, there isn't a puddle he won't stomp in or drain with dozens of trips with his bucket. Before we child proofed the bathroom doors, it was not uncommon to find him standing on a stool at the sink, water running profusely, with his hands in the water.

William's new airplane can go on land or water.

Airplanes and trains are his latest obsession. There's hardly a plane that goes by that he doesn't spot, no matter how tiny. It's a treat to take him to the airport viewing center to watch the planes take off. He feels disappointed by landings though and always wants to know when the airplanes are going to go up, up, up again.

William's favorite toy, was not his basketball hoop as I'd hoped (big sister seems to have taken over that). It is his bubble maker. He and "sis-sis" made bubbles for an hour with great delight after dinner.

Uh, oh! A hole in this bucket means no more carrying tadpoles around in it.

William wears his new "2" shirt from Mommy, with an airplane embroidered on one side and the number two on the other. The fabric is leftover Katie Jump Rope by Denyse Schmidt.

It's hard to believe that my baby's baby days have already passed us by but he's such a fun little person to have around, we love his big boy character and sense of humor. Next time you see him, challenge him to a funny face contest, I dare you!

Images of Easter

2011-04-24T22:38:00.000-04:00

Wild chives from the yard

plus fresh eggs from the girls

make fabulous scrambled eggs with chives and cheese

plus a fresh loaf of Sara's vitamin E bread equals yum!

William plays with his new knitted chick

while Savannah models her new "owl" attire.

William finds some "eggies" for his basket

Savannah fills her basket

We plant a new tree with five types of grafts

and some roses in a hedge.

And we goofed around a bit

and a bit more...

okay, maybe there was a lot of goofing around!

Simple stair bookshelf

2011-04-17T11:10:00.000-04:00

We have particularly wide stairs with nice wide landings. I think they are perfect for more bookshelves, since it seems no matter how many books I donate to the library, we always need room for more.

Using a 1 x 12 pine board, I constructed this small bookshelf. It is very solid, even though I didn't use wood glue in addition to screws this time. I intended to back it, but like it so much plain, I'm going to live with it for a while before I decide whether or not to tack on a back. It's only 18" tall but it keeps with the openness of this contemporary house. I primed it and painted it with two coats of a muted sage green sample paint I had in my paint closet - one of the rejects for the upstairs bathroom. My intention for this book case was for it to hold reference books that everyone in the family uses, to get them out of the office and to place them closer to where we use them. The basket holds my Mother Earth News magazines, which I read once cover to cover, then consult over and over again.

I used the top to display some of Kevin's Air Force honors and USATF awards, which had been collecting dust in a corner, and our wedding ducks. In some Asian cultures, wedding ducks are given as a symbol of life long commitment, as ducks mate for life. They believe the spirit of the carver enters the ducks, which impart the carver's good fortunes on the married couple. The ducks symbolize peace, inseparableness, and many children. I sometimes forget they are supposed to be placed bill to bill, not tail to tail, which is a sign of a tiff.

This is the first time I primed my wood before painting it and I can't believe the difference - the paint went on so quickly and smoothly there's not a brush stroke on this piece. It looks much more professional than some of my other pieces. I guess I finally learned something.

Spring chores

2011-04-12T14:00:00.000-04:00

It seems that as soon as the ground thaws, there's a long list of chores needing attention around here. Fortunately, with good weather over the weekend, I could get some odd jobs done outside while the kids played ball, chased the chickens, and climbed trees. I was able to build two of the three raised cedar beds I wanted for the garden this year. We are trying out some new gardening techniques with the crops we've had difficulty with in the past years - mainly because of critters eating them. Mine are constructed from 1 x 4 cedar lumber in 8 foot lengths because it's cheapest to build them with these materials and because 8 ft is the maximum length I can fit in the car. These beds are 2 x 6 feet and 11" high so they are easily portable. I used a cedar 2 x 4 for the corner supports.

Of course, right after building these, I discovered another design that I fell in love with. The main difference is simply that this raised bed plan anticipates critter problems so it includes covering the bottom with hardware cloth to prevent moles from digging through the bottom and uses PVC tubing to create hoops to drape bird cloth over the top keeping out birds and many insects as well. You could alternate using bird cloth with frost cloth to extend the growing season as well. In the above photo, you can see I've installed the PVC piping in one of the raised beds already. Unfortunately, I had to learn the hard way that you can't bend 1/2" PVC tubing across a 2-foot span - it's simply not flexible enough. So, I will be using traditional metal hoops for the cedar beds that fit inside the PVC instead.

I decided to adapt this hoop method to the strawberry fountain, which our chickens and the crows like to get into once the strawberries appear. I can't wait to fill the new raised beds with soil and compost and get started but we're not yet past our last frost date. At the moment I have the greenhouse filled with baby seedlings waiting to be transplanted. With the hoops over the tops of the new raised beds, I'm considering trying to keep them covered with frost cloth to protect them from frost and transplanting early, we'll see how brave I get. (The greenhouse is also filled with fluffy baby Buff Orpington chicks!)

After all the rain from last week, the ground was perfectly soft and soggy for digging holes for planting new blueberry bushes and raspberries this weekend. I set one new blueberry plant in digging a much larger hole and layering soil, straw, and chicken manure compost in the bottom of it. I always separate the root bundle and splay it out to help encourage the roots to grow deeper. I also planted three Heritage raspberry plants to expand our patch and replace some of the canes that didn't make it from last year. One of my favorite things about summer is taking the children to the garden to have their snack. They love picking the fresh raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, and blueberries for themselves. They pop cherry tomatoes in their mouths like candies and wonder why tomatoes from the store don't taste like these. They eat all the sugar snap peas so that they never make it to the house. This year, I'm expanding our sugar snap pea patch by four fold so some will surely make it to the house, I hope.

Long enough

2011-03-29T11:34:00.000-04:00

We returned from our trip to Florida. We stayed just long enough to

start a few fires,

make friends with real pirates,

bury a few treasures in the sand,

pat the stingrays and feed them lunch,

dance in the ocean until its waves knocked us down,

see the dolphins in rehabilitation and captivity,

and in the wild,

nap,

and play around with some technology,

meet some other moms,

sail on board a real pirate ship,

learn how to fire pistols,

and listen to pirate stories at sunset,

become honorary pirates,

dance our buccaneer hearts out,

climb to the top of the world,

bungee jump,

and flip,

and flip some more,

hang out upside down to appease our monkey hearts,

make new friends and dance a little,

unmake new friends!

learn how swimming pools work,

and rearrange the fountains,

collect sea shells,

swim under the water,

and pose for a late night family photo with the camera timer.

Until next year, bye Florida!

Farmer genius

2011-03-11T12:08:00.000-05:00

There's a certain kind of genius that only experienced farmers possess. That genius has come from years of making mistakes, back-breaking work, and age; age that makes you work smarter because your body can no longer work harder.

After doing much research on chicken waterers, I discovered a chicken farmer who makes his own waterers and feeders for about 10 bucks each. They keep the water clean and full for about two weeks for a flock our size. So, I couldn't resist, I had to make my own because anything that makes my life easier, is a blessing.

First I tipped my 5-gallon bucket upside down in the pan to mark the height of the side of the pan on the bucket. Then I turned it back over to drill 3/8" holes below this line (when turned over). I filled it up, tapped on the lid, and turned it over set outdoors for a few hours to be certain there was no leaking before introducing it to the coop. The girls are thrilled with their new watering system! Placed on a cinder block, they can't kick up their bedding into the water.

The feed bucket has 1 1/4" holes drilled around the base of the bucket (again below the side of the pan). I also drilled three 1/4" holes in the bucket and using screws, washers and nuts, bolted them together so it wouldn't tip or get pushed to the side. As the girls eat, their feed refills itself. I only wish I had done this sooner!

Intoxication

2011-02-25T23:03:00.000-05:00

There are few things that are intoxicating to me in the middle of winter; but the smell of rich, dark soil, the texture of this moist earth crumbling through my fingers made fertile for seeds by earth worms, the promise of hands that have been well worn by a day's honest work in the garden, nails clipped short and needing a good scrub in the sink, these things get me every time.

Sure, you could say that the above is just a romantic way of saying that I like the smell of dirt, the feel of worm poop and trading my dry, cracked winter hands for rough, calloused gardener's hands. But, if it weren't for the promise of spring, we'd all be going crazy this time of year, holed up in our warm homes while the ground stays frozen beyond our front doors and ice sprawls like a river down our walkways. The seed companies know this. They are happy to fill our mailboxes with bright, colorful catalogs, dotted with vibrant flowers and red tomatoes pregnant with juices, flavor and seeds. They aim to make us drool, to make us spend more money on what could be in our gardens (and tummies) in a few short months.

My new plans for the garden include introducing ollahs (oy-yahs) to some of my beds to see how well they work for me in my climate and to conserve water (and time). I plan to make my own ollahs following the techniques from closer to the dirt. I plan to build another strawberry fountain with everbearing strawberries to complement the three varieties we already have established (sparkle, early glow and sure crop) and to build at least two more raised beds for herbs, lettuces and an asparagus patch.

I'll be planting a hedge of balsam firs for privacy and a windbreak and expanding the raspberry and blackberry patches. We'll extend the highbush blueberries too. I've collected a few 5 gallon buckets to make various manure teas for my gardens indoors and out. I may even experiment with urine manure tea, which is supposed to be the best all-purpose manure tea for plants, according to research conducted by Woods End Laboratories in Mt. Vernon, Maine. So much to plan for!

Play dough dreams of spring

2011-02-05T22:22:00.000-05:00

Even though I expect more snow and ice, it feels like we've made it through the worst of winter and that the promise of spring is close at hand. During the winter, we don't clean the chicken coop like we do throughout the rest of the year. Instead, I add a weekly layer of sweet clean hay, golden straw or pine shavings to build up the organic mass in the coop. Besides keeping the chickens warmer, it creates excellent compost come spring time and to my nose smells sweet, pungent, and earthy, not unpleasant. I actually look forward to this gardening smell on my daily visits to the chicken coop to check on the girls. Our matriarch, Scarlet, has the first few white feathers peeking through on top of her auburn head, a testament to all the hawks and dogs she's dodged. All the chickens are more grateful of receiving pats and food scraps in winter to keep their days more interesting.

In the house our worms are hard at work creating their own compost. In the spring as they start to multiply, I plan to scoop handfuls of red wigglers into the raised beds to help ensure the success of those crops. The soil they live in smells rich and loamy and Savannah can't help but open the lids and dig around inside.

We're growing our fourth batch of bulbs indoors; this time crocuses, spring's smallest but bravest and earliest bloomers. Seeing the delicate green buds everyday does wonders when there are snowbanks outside taller than I am. And to stave off the winter blues, we've been making play dough, something made pliable by the warmth of our hands and wanting to be stretched and molded into whatever we can imagine it to be.

Busy at play with a batch of homemade play dough. I use the oilcloth to spare my table from the rough housing.

Alligators and little girls.

Elephant-bat.

The play dough recipe that really works:

In a large bowl combine 1 1/2 cups water, and 3 Tb vegetable oil, (food coloring, if desired), (vanilla or other scented oil, if desired).

Add to it 1 1/2 cups flour, 3/4 cups salt, 3 Tb cream of tartar and stir until the lumps are gone.

Bake in a 9x9 or 9x13 glass pan at 350 degrees for 7 to 10 minutes.

Remove from dish, when cool enough and knead. Store in a plastic lidded container or bag to keep it fresh for many weeks.

Treadmill desk

2011-02-01T18:56:00.000-05:00

There's a slow trend in offices across America, both corporate and home offices, towards increasing exercise during the work day. As a mother with a very stubborn eight pounds of baby fat to lose, naturally, I had to jump on this bandwagon. So, I built myself a treadmill desk.

It's very simple and fits around my treadmill, but didn't cost me the $500-$6,000 that some companies are charging for these. It is made from 2x3s for the legs, a pair of 2x2 cross supports, and some leftover 3/4" MDF for the desk top. I used my Kreg Jig to attached the legs and painted it black to help it blend in as much as possible with the existing treadmill.

Check out my new office view!

The idea is that you walk 1-2 miles per hour while working on your computer. It's exercise that you wouldn't get otherwise and adds up over time. I'm really looking forward to using my new work station. The other freelancers I know who use one say it has increased their productivity while decreasing their butt size.

Search for "treadmill desk" and you'll find a wealth of information on the topic and the studies that have been conducted so far. To build your own, just keep in mind that it should clear your treadmill on all sides, rather than rest on the treadmill to avoid any vibration from the machine. Hope you build one this year too!

Popcorn for breakfast

2011-01-31T14:33:00.000-05:00

William likes loud things. Our air popper is loud, ergo William likes it. It helps that he's crazy about popcorn and gets to throw nutritional yeast on by the fistful. But I was still surprised when he insisted on having it for breakfast. I offered him banana bread, which he loves and would more aptly be called banana cake. I offered him toast, with butter, and jam. I offered him cereal like big sister. With blueberries on top. Blueberries plain. No, it had to be popcorn. For breakfast.

So, we popped a big bowl together and he was so happy that he ate it by the fistful.

You didn't believe me about eating it by the fistful until you saw it for yourself, right? At least he also ate a big bowl of grapes with his big bowl of popcorn and washed it down with milk.

"Hey, what can I say? I'm quite the guy!"

Worm houses

2011-01-30T22:44:00.001-05:00

Last night I read about a farming family and one of the many things they do to promote soil health is vermicomposting. I've considered getting worms many times before but kept putting it off until my littlest rascal is older. Today though, something clicked and I ordered my worms and we constructed our worm houses. As is often the case, it turned out to be a family affair.

Savannah learned how to use an electric drill with the impressive 1/2" drill bit. We drilled holes on the bottoms of two 12 gallon containers for aeration and drainage of any excess water. Excess water will be caught in a second container below, that is intact.

Ever wonder what happens to all those manuscripts I write and work on? If they are lucky enough to get printed, they end up shredded and in the spring get added to my compost pile. Kind of neat that my work feeds my garden too.

The paper will act as bedding for the red wigglers, a tiny but voracious worm, that will occupy their new digs when they arrive on Tuesday. The paper is kept moist for them and a bit of organic soil and food scraps are added daily.

My help gets a little exuberant with the worm bedding! At least there's an indoor gardening project we can do in the dead of winter that's fun.

I think William is pretty proud of his indoor farming project!

Here's one of the double set of bins (we made two sets of worm houses); the whole bin sits on the bottom, the bin with the 1/2" holes drilled into the bottom sits on top of it. There are also holes at the top for air circulation right beneath the lid. Eventually, we will place a third bin with holes drilled in it over this one for two weeks when it's time to use the worm castings. The worms crawl up through the holes in the bottom of the floor to the new food available in the top bin. Our worm houses were constructed with information from this website and our 2,000 red wiggler worms were ordered on sale here, a Pennsylvania company.

We made two sets of wiggler homes, and plan to house about a thousand in each. The first vericomposter is affectionately named the "Vermestate" and the second is the "Wormcome Inn". We're not the only ones who named their worm houses, right? Bring on the castings! I can't wait to use them in the garden.

Blue elephant's debut

2011-01-29T16:42:00.002-05:00

Savannah entered the Powder Puff Derby this year, an activity I had intended to be a daddy-daughter event, but since Daddy is in Chile and couldn't be in two places at once, it was more of a mother-daughter event. And then when I needed help with some wood working tools to countersink her weight on the bottom of the car, and Savannah used craft supplies to decorate it given to her by another neighbor, and William inspired the design, and another neighbor helped me entertain William during the race, it turned out to be more of a neighborhood-family event.

Last year's photo with her pink race car and third place trophy.

Anyway, Savannah's goal was to apply what she learned last year to try to beat her finish of bronze or third place in her age class. Because she's been sick, she designed her car just two days ago and finished it last night. She calls her car Blue Elephant. Honestly, I don't know where she comes up with these things.

Savannah still looks pallid and puffy since she's recovering from a viral illness.

Hopefully you can see the actual blue elephant on her car. It's from, I think, an old Alexander Henry fabric in my stash that she mod podged on over the watercolor markers that her art teacher gave her.

At the race, Savannah sets her car in the starting block in the assigned lane. They are good about rotating lanes and averaging the times so it's more fair.

Here's Savannah's car in the first lane. On the side the lettering says "Blue Elephant".

Guess who won first place in her class this year and got to progress to the overall finals? That's right, Miss Savannah and her Blue Elephant. In the finals round she came in seventh and had an axle problem that we hope to improve on for next year's derby. I wonder what design she'll come up with next year.

Our happy little Daisy with Blue Elephant and her first place trophy in front of the race track. Racing day is so much fun!

Discoveries

2011-01-05T14:05:00.000-05:00

One of the best things to me about homeschooling is that when my child has a new interest, we can explore it fully. Savannah's latest obsession is building and learning about circuitry, so we've been doing it for three days.

As you can probably tell from the photo, it makes her very happy. Deliriously happy! Perhaps because it ties into her goal of learning how to build robots that wash the dishes and clean up after people so she can build them and make loads of money (her dream, not my dream for her).

So far she's built alarms, fans, lights and learned how light switches work. She's learned that metals that conduct electricity such as paperclips can be used to complete a circuit and that electricity can only pass in one direction through an LED. She's also learned the difference between building in parallel versus in a series. (By the way, I should mention here that I have also learned much of this as we go along.)

And that water also conducts electricity and can be used to complete a circuit. (Don't worry it was a safe setup.)

"Mom, just tell me, what happens when I put the wires in the water."

"If I told you, you wouldn't remember, but if you do the experiment yourself, you will never forget."

Perhaps we have a budding scientist on our hands!

With her eager assistant, William. William "helps" by clapping when her circuits work out as planned and to show her appreciation, Savannah often replaces the slide switch for the button switch so William can turn it off and on.

Savannah has fun building a flying saucer (a fan blade that launches into the air).

William made a few discoveries of his own. He found out that it may be easier to try on someone else's boots, if they have bigger feet, but that wearing one boot forward and one backward, doesn't make for easy walking.

He also discovered that while it may seem like a good idea to climb into the newspaper and kindling box, it may not be as easy to get out as it was to get in.

I guess some people just have to learn things the hard way.

Bathroom library

2010-12-22T16:13:00.008-05:00

I saw a cartoon that reminds me very much of my house. In the comic, a woman is giving her friend a tour of the house and as she stops in front of the bathroom she gestures towards it politely and says, "And this is my husband's library."

A pile of magazines starts to grow faster than the house plant in the first floor bathroom.

That's how my DH treats our bathrooms and I have to admit, I can understand it. When you have young children, there's pretty much only one room in the entire house where you can truly get some peace and that's the library, aka, bathroom. But, of the three bathrooms in this house, two of them are small and there's no room for a regular magazine rack. This means that I have to pick up piles of Solar Today and Popular Mechanics to clean the bathrooms or shuffle them aside to get to the things that really belong in a bathroom. So I came up with a solution I can live with.

The solution.

I know, you're probably thinking, what's that. It's my solution so the bathroom reader and the bathroom cleaner can coexist peacefully together in the same space. I'll let it speak for itself.

Ta-da! The most elegant solutions are usually the most simple. I transformed some scrap wood into a magazine wall rack. By painting it the same color as the wall (called Sugar cookie by Behr), I hoped to make it blend in as much as possible. I didn't want to clutter an already small bathroom.

What do you think? The rack holds up to five magazines close to the wall so no one will bump into it. Me likey. In case you want to build your own for the bathroom librarian in your life, I'll include the dimensions below. I built this one as a Christmas gift to my husband but couldn't wait a few more days to install it.

Slim magazine rack cut list:

(2) 1x3 8 1/2"
(3) 1x3 9"
(1) 1x2 9"

Note: You could also increase its depth by using 1x4s instead of 1x3s or change the style in front by swapping out the 1x3 for another 9" 1x2. If you look at the second picture, you'll see that between the horizontal strips of wood on the front, there's a 9" piece on the back to screw the rack onto the wall.

Another farmhouse bed

2010-12-17T23:24:00.000-05:00

While they were doing this,

I was building this.

Of course, William thought it was for him...

But, it wasn't quite his size.

I painted it white during his nap time and, under the direction of my daughter's aesthetic, sewed some pillows and a quilt for its future occupant. Can you believe this beautiful doll bed was made with 100% scraps and I didn't have to buy a single thing to make it? I love Ana's plans.

Want to see more? You can here.

Recitals

2010-12-15T21:57:00.001-05:00

This month Savannah had her first piano recital with her new teacher. She played Beethoven's Ode to Joy, the simplified version to which her piano teacher accompanied her, and Candy Shop. She is such a patient girl, never afraid of performing in front of an audience and waiting quietly when it's someone else's turn.

Savannah waits her turn to play her recital pieces.

For her recital I made her a new dress, an early Christmas present from Mommy. It's a long jumper-style dress in purple corduroy, very rich and warm with tights.


Yay! Savannah plays the first three lines of Ode to Joy solo without a hitch.

After the performance there was just enough time for a few poses in front of the poinsettias.

And of course, even William got to have his own little recital at home. It may not have been musical in nature, but he was the center of attention after stealing his Dearest's glasses, which is better than stealing her beer...

Happy William before his ear infection. The next day he grumped around for a day before we realized he had another ear infection. Now that he's been treated, he's his rascally happy self again. Whew!

Cooking with William

2010-12-04T14:22:00.001-05:00

Ever wonder what life is really like at our house? Have you ever tried to do something with your hands tied behind your back? Then you have some idea of what it's like to cook with William.

William opens my container drawer and makes room for himself. Perfect for Mommy to trip over on the way to get utensils.

It's a priority for us to have home cooked meals that don't start in a box or package. So, I spend a lot of time in the kitchen. It's one of my domains.


William likes to open my oven warming drawer, usually with great force on my toes, presumably so he can get warm.

The kids like to be where I am, so naturally, they also spend time in the kitchen. But in different ways.

William likes to open everything he can get his hands on. Everything. In the time it takes me to saute an onion, he has had the time to go through every drawer in my kitchen. He picks up my heavy cast iron cookware and transports it to new locations. Wouldn't you know it, All-Clad likes to travel in this manner too. With all the frequent toddler miles they've earned, they'll be on vacation in Hawaii by the end of December, first class.

He opens drawers, slides them out, rearranges items and then leaves them out so that when I'm carrying a large pot of pasta in boiling water to the sink, I get the added challenge of maneuvering though an obstacle course while trying not to parboil myself. It's great fun, really. I'm sure all the medieval cooks used to spice up life in the castle kitchen to see which ones deserved culinary knighthood.

What weapons can I reach in here?

Then there's the baking tool drawer and the cooking utensil drawer. They contain lead-free baby safe items like vegetable peelers, Henckels knife sets, microplanes (Did you know these were actually woodworking and metalworking tools before some brave woman stole one from her hubby to use as a zester in the kitchen?), pizza cutters, you get the picture.

None of them work as well as when Mommy does it...

Here's my kitchen floor, after William is done digging in my drawers. See that rolling pin? You would think it's pretty dangerous, like a rolling log or slippery banana peel but the item of top concern is actually the dough docker. Definitely one of the most lethal tools I own, similar to a spiked medieval morning star, awaiting its next victim when it's on the floor. The next time you come visit and stay for a meal at my house, you are welcome to challenge yourself in my kitchen. Not feeling that brave? That's okay because now when you sit down at our dining room table for a meal, you will really enjoy it knowing how many obstacles I had to overcome, how many battles I had to win, how many sharp objects I had to face, just to prepare a seemingly simple dish for you.

Gratitude

2010-11-30T22:55:00.012-05:00

November is a month of gratitude for me for a number of reasons, so I am always sad to see it go. For four years now I have participated in Nanowrimo, National Novel Writing Month, and each year that I pull a novel out of thin air (working on it only after my work is done and the children are in bed), I'm surprised and thankful. Thankful because I'm doing something I love and have a carrot and stick to make me do it.

November is also the month that we spend more time indoors together. There's less to do outdoors. The garden doesn't need tending anymore and has been tilled back into itself to feed itself for another year. The fruits have been mulched and fed with a rich layer of compost and the chickens are quieter now and appreciate our company more and food scraps with fewer grubs and bugs to eat.

Lucky, our handsome one-eyed rooster.

November is the month that comfort foods start appearing on the dinner table; warm and creamy squash dishes, vegetable casseroles, roasted chickens, hearty potatoes and root vegetables, soups, and sweet apple crisps and warm puddings. We begin to open the jars of jams we set aside in summer, blueberry jam from our neighbors' blueberries, strawberry from the orchard down the road, cranberry grape jam for turkey and chicken dinners. A homemade pie crust can be filled with anything in November; a savory quiche, a pumpkin pie, a chicken vegetable stew, sweet potatoes, cinnamon apples with crumble topping, or vegetables and cheese.

The wood stove cranks out enough heat to keep two stories of our house very warm and suddenly we're wearing T-shirts again. With the shorter days, we spend more time at home inside the house as a family, tickling, giggling, talking, snuggling, reading books, and rascaling (that's an actual word in our vocabulary).

Savannah reads William his favorite book, Each Peach Pear Plum, on the sofa in pajammies (another Sara word) before bedtime.

We also prepare for the Christmas holiday by beginning our annual decluttering. We pick up our stuff and ask it when we last used it, whether it makes our lives easier or more beautiful, whether it or the space it occupies is more important to us. Space that can be used for practicing Taekwondo, for dancing to the Backyardigans theme song for the 10,000th time, for entertaining guests, now that we're indoors so much, or for chasing, or tickling, or driving toy cars around.

William making art at the easel.

November is a great time to begin star gazing again. My favorite constellations are prominent in the early night sky and Venus always shines brightly. There are meteor showers and they start early enough that the kids can see them before bedtime, just in time to wish on a star. Yes, November is among my favorite months, so I am always sad to see it go, but grateful that we experienced all it had to offer.

Paper whites

2010-11-12T09:22:00.002-05:00

Late fall and early winter days can feel drab after the bright colors of early autumn and the end of harvest abundance. One way I like to counteract is with a burst of spring in the house by forcing bulbs. This year we are using paper whites in two rounds. One for early November, one for Thanksgiving.


Bulbs planted in river pebbles and water the last week of October.

They are fragrant like lilies, almost too sweet if you are sensitive to smells like I am, but they are easy to keep and grow quickly.

Each flower grows in a cluster of 10-12 white flowers and each bulb has 2 to 4 flower clusters of its own.

Overall, very satisfying effect for such a quick indoor gardening project in the middle of the drab days between fall and winter, brown and white.

Blood suckers

2010-10-31T22:26:00.002-04:00

Both of my children were blood suckers for Halloween this year, one very scary vampira

and one itty bitty spider (with a binky!)

Savannah filled her bag halfway this year. With Daddy out of the country, and Mommy on her own, we did an abbreviated form of trick-or-treating this year. William was quite the wild spider, running all over our neighbor's houses (playing with their calculators, climbing their chairs, harassing their dogs, opening their kitchen drawers, the usual boy stuff just in other people's houses) after he ate some M&Ms. Fortunately, he doesn't know how to open candy so he just tries to bite into the shiny wrappers, which doesn't yield any sugar. Mommy can't wait for Daddy to take over the trick-or-treating again next year.

Happy Halloween!

Play time

2010-10-28T16:34:00.000-04:00

For my birthday I wanted to get something special for the kids. I opted for this:

I really like it! It's strong enough to hold 1,200 pounds, so Kev and I can climb on the geometric dome too and with a 10 foot diameter, there's more than enough room for all of us.

Little William has to be especially creative while playing since he can't climb it yet himself. He has fun trying though. He runs under and through the dome and swings by his arms from the lower bars like a monkey.

It's a challenge for Savannah who is learning more agility and balance. The first day she fell from the top right on her back but we had piled 8-10 inches of mulch beneath it, so it was like falling on a soft bed. Fortunately, she hasn't fallen since and everyday that it hasn't rained, we've run outside to climb.

Office bookshelf

2010-10-17T17:59:00.000-04:00

I'm embarrassed to say that since we've moved into this house, our office area has been a mess. This is partly because we moved from a house with a 16' x 12' office with a 12' built-in floor to ceiling bookcase, full closet, and his and hers desks and filing cabinets. Now we share a small desk in a tiny space that is shaped like a triangle and not an equilateral or isosceles triangle, but an irregular scalene one. For an extra challenge with two "real walls" and the third open to the stair banister. But enough of the excuses, here's a before and after photo of the mess.

We painted the office walls a while back when my mother was visiting. Paint is always the first requirement for renovating a room here. The desk is against the top landing, with the printer adjacent to it, the window wall has one small bookcase holding a jumble of supplies and there are boxes of files, paper and other electronics stacked against the long wall - in short a disorganized mess! I had the idea a while back that a single long bookcase could solve the problem. My husband was a disbeliever. Over a two-week period I had the chance to sneak out to the garage during nap times to start building this thing. Because of my lumber diet (our beater of a farm truck didn't pass inspection and I don't have another way of transporting lumber at the moment), I had to use what was available to me. I had a piece of 3/4" thick plywood in the barn that I'd only cut the corner off of to make my potting bench. So I got to work with my early Mother's Day gift and built this.

Here's the new bookcase built from plywood and framed in pine 1"x 2"s.

I generally followed the plans from Ana White's website, Knockoff Wood for Grace's bookshelf. My shelf is sized for the space though and the materials I had on hand so the dimensions are about 60" wide by 32" tall. The cubes on the bottom are 15" x 15" x 13" deep.

Here it is all filled up with office supplies and ah- organized.

Because of the small space of the office, even with my widest angle lens, I couldn't fit the whole shelf and wall organizers in the photo. Above the wall is a file organizer on the left, a cork board in the center and a white board on the right. And yes, that is an outlet in the middle of the wall six feet high. The whole office has oddly placed outlets like that one.

Here's the window wall with the new curtains I sewed to match those on the stairwells. Perhaps you'll notice two more oddly placed outlets to the right of the window. At least the view from the window is great.

I'm very excited about having an organized space again with all of my files at my finger tips. Really I have to thank Ana White for showing me how easy it is to build solutions to all my problems. Thanks Ana!

Garlic planting

2010-10-11T16:08:00.000-04:00

It's time to plant garlic. This year for my zone, October 12th was announced as the perfect day for planting cloves. Alas, I am not a perfectionist so I had to plant mine on the 10th when my husband was home to help keep the kids at the raspberry patch while I dug in the compost pile. Why the exact timing? So there is enough time to let the roots settle and grow but not for the shoots to break the soil surface before the first frost.

Filled with compost with room for a mulch layer. My raised beds are about 2' deep by 6' long. Plans for raised bed can be found here on Ana White's site.

I am planting garlic in the first raised bed I built. (When I can acquire more lumber, I plan to build at least four more raised beds, most to be filled with food, but my daughter will have her own for whatever strikes her fancy. My beds are 2' by 6', using 4 2x6s. This way, all the lumber you purchase is used.) I used a rake and hoe to loosen the soil beneath this bed, then dragged it into place. I placed 3 inches of composted hay in the bottom of this planter, then 6 inches of compost, which compacted the hay. Within a week I plan to stake two corners of the raised bed, but I haven't had the time to cut the stakes yet.

My garlic cloves should remain toasty enough this winter under their blanket of pine needles.

I planted 17 garlic cloves evenly spaced in the raised bed about 7" apart. I'm trying a California softneck variety this year. I pushed each clove 1 inch below the soil surface then sprinkled an additional generous inch of compost on top. Because garlic is a spring crop that overwinters, it likes a good coat of mulch. Leaf mulches are the most popular for garlic but we don't have a system for mulching leaves. One popular method of making a leaf mulch is to fill a rubber trash can with raked leaves and then insert your weed whacker (like an immersion blender) and give them a good chopping. One day I plan to do that, but for now I simply raked some of the needles from our big white pine and mulched with a generous 4 inches. I know that pine needles are acidic but my organic gardening books tout it as an excellent mulch for most things because it breaks down so slowly. The waxy coating on the needles helps the soil beneath it retain moisture while the needles themselves do not absorb much moisture. They do a great job of keeping down weeds and I happen to like the look of them. Pine needles make a good blanket for winter crops like garlic so I'm testing this all out and keeping my fingers crossed for some delicious spring garlic.

Uh, oh! Didn't count on the appeal for local wildlife to climb in! Better add a layer of chicken wire across the top.

As long as I can keep critters out of my raised beds I hope for some delicious home grown spring garlic. I hope to count 17 sets of scapes curling out of their winter dormancy come May or June. I use garlic scapes in soups, potatoes and omelets. I place them in a vase to enjoy their wild green beauty and pluck them out at will. My children prefer the quick access because they like to nibble on them. My favorite website for garlic planting information in cooler zones is Boundary Garlic Farm.

Garlic scapes in a Ball jar awaiting their fate.

Stacked

2010-10-01T22:54:00.000-04:00

For two weekends we've been stacking wood in the barn. Kevin splits the wood from trees that have fallen in bad weather or from age and then stacks them behind the barn to dry for a year. This year he's helped two other people remove large trees from their yards for next year's wood. I know that I do a lot of things many women wouldn't do but one thing I don't touch is the chainsaw. That is completely my husband's forte. I get to do the lion's share of wood stacking though.

Here it is stacked inside the barn, three rows deep stacked six feet high. The long rows are about 20 feet long and the short row is about 16 feet long.

When stacking wood I always discover the critters whose lives are intertwined with it. There are snake skins, from those who enjoy the protective coolness of the wood pile and perhaps enjoy rubbing against the rough bark. There are wasps who build their paper nests like Japanese lanterns, colorful fungi, and sometimes, near the bottom of the pile, there are bright orange newts crawling in the damp grass and soil. Today I discovered a nest of mice, one mother and her five babies, all nursing with their eyes closed.

Mother mouse peeks out at me.

My instinct is not to disturb any creature, especially one nursing its babies. But, they are mice and there's little room for sympathy on a farm. Mice get into the barn and burrow their way into the tractor's motor, dragging insulation and other nesting materials with them. They eat through the wiring. They chew through the boxes we store in our garage leaving holes in our things and their droppings behind, and they carry Lyme disease. Kevin scolded me for not killing them and I see his perspective, but I find myself asking whether a pink wriggly baby that hasn't yet opened its eyes to the world is a worthy opponent. It only craves the warmth and milk of its mother.

Two of the babies with eyes shut.

Once upon a time I worked in a laboratory where it was my job to breed a mutant strain of mouse, and to sometimes cull the babies the day they were born for tissue cultures, which I also performed. I used dry ice so the death was painless, and the purpose of my work was to learn more about muscular dystrophy treatments, but still, it's never escaped me that all those lives were in my hands.

Today though, I couldn't do it. I'll let Kevin make his own decision about the nest but my mothering instincts are too strong to destroy this home.

New bench

2010-09-28T00:20:00.000-04:00

For a while I've wanted an outdoor bench or a pair of outdoor benches that we could use near the pond to throw our towels on and just sit and watch the sun set over the water's edge or drag over to the bonfire area so we can sit comfortably while watching the tendrils of orange and yellow dance. And don't forget the marshmallows!

Kevin put me on a lumber diet, that is he refused to go to the store to purchase the lumber I wanted to build a pair of benches, so I decided to rummage through the scrap pile of lumber in the barn to see what I could find. I ended up building this on the fly and am really pleased with it. After some light sanding, my mom stained the bench with two coats to match the deck. The stain also protects the wood from the outdoors and hides the fact that I've used three different types of wood to build it. I'm glad this bench turned out the way it did, sometimes having a handicap or challenge makes you find creative ways to solve a problem.

Bench in use for our first bonfire of the year.

But now that our farm truck hasn't passed inspection, I won't be able to make trips to the lumber store for a whole year (that's how long we plan to try to keep the truck around to plow the driveway, but the truck may have plans of its own). Anyway, next time you visit, maybe you can join us for an evening bonfire on a starry night.

Savannah is the patient marshmallow roaster, waiting for the coals and turning her stick evenly.


Come share some smores with us!

Greenhouse cleanup

2010-09-22T21:53:00.001-04:00

As my summer garden is winding down and my fall crops are busy growing without any help from me, I've been fantasizing about a winter garden. We have a very odd greenhouse that is attached to our home. It is triangular in shape and the point faces south. It is what gardeners call a cold greenhouse because it is not heated throughout the winter so the temperature can fall fairly close to freezing. I've used it to start seeds but haven't kept much growing in it since spring.

View of one side of the greenhouse from the garden. Each side has four sliding glass doors except for the one inside the house (the hypotenuse), which has five.

My greenhouse has been a mess lately so today I spent some time cleaning it up and decided that I wanted to build a table for the corner. Fortunately, I had a piece of plywood in the barn, one last 2x4 and some scrap 1x3 from Savannah's piano bench. During William's nap time, I came up with this:

My wild sweet basil plants started from seed but never transplanted in the garden.

It turned out well enough since it fits two planting flats across it with room on one side for my watering can and room on the other for my plant food, seeds, and wooden labels.

Two planting tray flats deep, one with my seedling herbs, the other with my huge basil plants.

I'm trying to grow some more herbs and winter plants in the greenhouse this year so we'll see how it turns out. I like the idea of tending to green things all year but the truth is that during especially busy weeks I often lapse on my end of the commitment (ahem, watering).

My simple little corner table setup. I wanted something that wouldn't obstruct the view of our garden, woods, or fields. There's plenty of room beneath for two of my 30" trays for lettuces as well.

Savannah is growing some of her own chives by seed and chocolate mint transplanted from a neighbor's garden, so hopefully she'll help me keep up with it when I'm having a hard week. William also loves to dig his little fingers in the soil of my pots and walk around with the watering can pretending to water them. He also helps me pick the leaves off the basil and oregano to add them to my marinara sauce, which he likes to eat.

The start of a great marinara - tomatoes, onions, zucchini, squash, basil and oregano from our garden and garlic and carrots from our CSA.

I hope we can keep the greenhouse going for as long as possible this winter. Plants bring me so much peace and contentment.

Piano bench for Savannah

2010-09-20T14:05:00.000-04:00

A while back I built a piano table for my daughter, who spent the better half of the year practicing piano on the floor. The problem was that after having to sit on the floor, she then had to stand up to play.

So finally, I made her the piano bench she needed, and just in time with music starting in September.

Of all the things I've built, I think this was the quickest, nicest one of all. The pine wood was smooth and straight and a dream to work with and despite the more complicated manner I chose to assemble the bench, it turned out perfectly level, more a relief than point of pride.

Jamming out together: Savannah practices for her evening concert "The Wheels on the Bus", while William copies big sister as best he can.

It fits both of my rascals and is hard to tip - a must for my rascally little climber. The wood was so beautiful, it was almost a shame to paint it, but in the end, I opted to paint it to match the white piano table. It has two coats of white, the same paint I had leftover from all the trim work, and two topcoats of a clear semi-gloss enamel to make it easy to wipe down and smooth to sit on.

Can't wait for all the evening concerts Savannah will treat us to. We are ready!

Front door

2010-09-15T10:54:00.000-04:00

When we moved in to this house, the front door was red and the back door and side doors were bright royal blue, the shade of blue you see all over Greece on the domes of churches. I had planned to replace these door colors eventually but we continued to disagree on door color. My mom wanted eggplant or blue, Kevin wanted brown or red and I wanted green. Then this summer in the blazing heat and humidity, the front door began peeling, first a red layer and then a blue layer of paint until we were left with a metal door that was primed only.

Ugh! All the paint peeled off, leaving behind white primer. I sanded the door with the orbital sander and then painted it.

It was time to do something about the door color and perhaps conveniently, my husband was out of town and therefore, didn't get much of a say in the color I selected. He was home though to watch the kids play in the sandbox while I painted it.

The color is Forestwood by Sherwin Williams and I think it coordinates very well with the exterior of the home as well as the new muted brown stain on the deck. So far I've painted the front door and the back door, inside and out but the deck door is still eagerly waiting its turn.

Compostalicious

2010-09-14T13:54:00.000-04:00

We really like compost around here. Any of my plants that grow outside in our garden flourish in it, especially when compared to the plants in my greenhouse that are grown from organic soil arriving in bags from Agway.

There are many styles of composting, usually dependent on the composter. I happen to be a lazy composter - that is, the type of gardener who piles things into the compost and lets them simmer on low for a full year, without doing a thing. The chickens are very helpful in this department, as they regularly till the compost with their capable feet, seeking bits of food scraps and juicy worms to supplement their diet.

The old scrap wood compost bin on the left and the new scrap wood compost bin on the right. Once we till last year's compost into the garden soil this fall, we'll face both the bins in the same direction.

But one thing we do not like about composting with chickens is that they flatten out the pile so that instead of a neat mound of compost, (with a hot middle) you end up with bits of corn husk blowing around your lawn after the chickens have clawed through it. So, it was time for me to build another compost bin. With the slim bits of scrap wood left over in our barn for the task, it was much more of a challenge this time than last time. I solved the problem by using a middle support beam so that I could use smaller scraps of wood. I still need to add one or two thin boards to the bin. Kevin shoveled and raked up all the compost, which was as rich and dark on the bottom as chocolate cake, into the new bin. Let's hope it holds up for a good few years against the chickens!

Catching up

2010-09-05T15:55:00.001-04:00

You may be wondering why you haven't heard from us in so long. Some of the reasons include, William was sick for 7 weeks this summer, although not continuously, Savannah has been busy with various summer camps, Kevin has been busy with a new position he accepted at work which has kept him traveling, and I've been busy trying to juggle everything from a sick baby, full-time work, a daughter who needs to be driven all over the place, a husband who has been away, house guest after house guest, and a million other garden and farm things that needed my attention (and on a small enough amount of sleep that I'm sure it qualifies as sleep deprivation, which makes me a little loopy and cranky).

Some of the things we've completed this summer include refinishing and staining the deck, a chore my mother mainly took on herself with some help from Kevin. We love the new deck stain (Tugboat by Behr), which complements the house siding color and the natural colors of the outdoors. We hope this will give us three more years on a deck that will eventually need replacing.

Here's the deck before, with paint peeling off, a view from afar.

Note the blue door that is also about to go...

Also, there was Savannah's play fort, a gift to her for her birthday from Mommy (who built it from scratch) and Daddy (who paid for the cedar lumber).


The playfort stage 1 is a success.

It doubles as a pirate lair.

Doesn't she look smashing as a pirate!?

Her other birthday gift was the adoption of a pair of two-year old female guinea pigs, a privilege she earned by being responsible for so long. She calls them Butterscotch and Katie (aka Fraidy Katie), who tends to be a bit more nervous about life than her sister. First I built them an indoor cage.

30" by 45" indoor cage made from cube grids and coroplast.

After Savannah read all about guinea pig care, she told me they needed an outdoor hutch or play area so I first built an A-frame structure for the girls that we moved around during the day to give them plenty of fresh grass to eat.

A-frame for the guinea girls made from scrap wood, hardware cloth and chicken wire.

Then I discovered that guinea pigs can be housed outdoors for much of the year in our climate so I built them their own proper hutch, which contains a metal cage that can be moved from the hutch to the ground so they can nibble on fresh grasses.

Savannah feeds the girls fresh hay.

Blue skies on the farm.

Kevin didn't like the first model of the hutch, which I just built from imagination, no plan in writing first, so I added a back wall to give them further protection from the wind and rain (what rain???) and provide more shade during the day. Since the guinea pigs can't nibble on the wooden frame of the hutch, which I constructed all from scrap wood, I decided to stain it the same color as our deck so it will weather better. Now the guinea girls stay outside all day and night unless the temp drops below 60F. Their droppings fall down the bottom and can be added directly to the compost pile behind them and Savannah brings them crab apples and treats and holds them.

Fancy outdoor living for the guinea girls.

Complete with the Kevin-approved rear wall for added protection.

Time marches on

2010-06-28T13:54:00.000-04:00

As William has been busy growing teeth, his big sister has been busy working on her first loose tooth, which last night, became her first missing tooth.

Savannah's first missing tooth!

It took her a while to decide if she wanted to keep it or let the tooth fairy take it, but she finally decided to let the tooth fairy have it. She was repaid for the favor with some sparkly dollar bills and a fairy dusted certificate of her first lost tooth.

William in the meantime is busy walking everywhere and of all the hobbies to take up, his new favorite is cleaning. Here he is cleaning the top of the wood stove with a clean wet wipe. He also takes toilet paper, wets it in the sink and cleans out the sink basin. Funny little fellow!

Above all he loves to copy his big sister. Here they are "reading" together on the sofa, a new part of our daily routines.

Floating shelves

2010-06-06T23:33:00.003-04:00

For too long I've been working on these floating shelves. I built the shelf arm supports a few weeks ago then put the sleeves on hold for two reasons. One is that my little guy was sick and has needed me 24 hours a day so there was no escaping for mommy to the garage. The other is that I was afraid to get started with rip cuts on my circular saw, mainly because the directions include so many warnings about things that can go wrong...and the saw is heavy, not exactly a girl friendly tool but a necessary one.

Here are the frames hanging out in the garage on Sunday.

And finally here they are screwed into studs on the first floor, awaiting their sleeves, which were drying in between coats of paint in the garage. The new shelves are intended to display my daughter's artwork and her slowly growing collection of awards. I wanted a way to quickly change out her artwork since she creates it regularly in her weekly private art lessons and I don't have the room (or the intention) to drill holes in all the walls to hang everything up.

Now Savannah has her own "art gallery" and she can display her karate belts and trophies.

You can find these floating shelf plans are from Ana at Knock-off wood. Thanks Ana!

A grownup picnic table

2010-06-01T14:53:00.000-04:00

One more item on my "build" list has been crossed off. I started building an adult size picnic table using plans from Ana at Knock-off Wood last weekend and finished in less than a week (that's with two kids running circles around me, allergies, work, and a million other projects that are in various stages of progress at the moment). When it was all done, we hauled it out to the shady area near our largest maple tree and enjoyed our first dinner outdoors together. This was a big improvement for the little guy who, upon finishing his dinner, got to crawl around in the grass and play in his sandbox, instead of throwing blueberries on my oriental dining room rug...

Because we already had the paint, I decided to also paint the adult version in cilantro, just like the Big Kids' version I made last month. Hmm, reusing the outdoor paint I already had, how very green of me. (Hee, hee!)

My mom helped me with the kiddos while I was building and sanding, and also helped me paint the table boards and hold the leg supports in place as I predrilled the holes for the deck screws. I modified Ana's plans only slightly because I thought a 5 foot long table was too small. This one is 6 feet long and a bit of a challenge for little me to move with a helper. Instead of spray painting with two topcoats of Rustoleum's clear enamel for outdoor use, I painted it on this time. I will definitely paint my topcoats in the future, the enamel goes exactly where you want it to and nowhere else,it's faster and easier to handle with less fumes.

Thanks Ana for providing so many great plans! Turns out I love building things and enjoy the smell of fresh pine sawdust, which is a good thing since these days I'm pretty much finding it everywhere... (think of all the places you find sand after the baby plays in the sandbox and you'll get the idea!)

Piano table

2010-05-14T21:47:00.000-04:00

My daughter has been taking music classes this year from The Music Studio in Albany. This program is definitely one of the jewels of our area and we are lucky to have discovered it so early. Savannah loves her classes and practicing on her keyboard at home. Up until now, this has been her keyboard at home...

Yes, I know, it's on the floor of her bedroom so she has to sit down and sort of bend over to practice. And when her little brother decides to attend one of her "concerts" he ends up crawling all over it and inevitably pushes the button to play "Livin' la Vida Loca" at high volume.

A week ago I decided to design my own piano table for her. I built it on Mother's Day and finished it today. It's 24" high and 36" wide and 15" deep to accommodate the keyboard and the space in her room beneath her window. The legs and aprons are 1" x 3" but beneath the aprons are 2" x 2" supports. The top is made from two 1" x 8" pine boards.

Here it is, ready to move into its new home this afternoon! I think she already has enough pink going on in her room, so I painted it with two coats of white paint and two of a satin enamel. The white paint is Sherwin-Williams' Harmony, a no-VOC paint that's great for environmentally minded people and for painting indoors since there are no fumes.

And the after photograph! I'm so relieved my measurements and design plan worked out. There's just one little thing...I forgot to build her a piano bench! But, I bet you can guess what I'll be building next.

Modern farmhouse bench

2010-05-09T15:41:00.001-04:00

I finally finished my modern farmhouse bench. I built the bench during one William nap, but have been "finishing" it ever since.This bench has impressed me with how solid it is. It is only 37" wide to fit the 38" wide hallway.

I wanted a walnut type finish but after four coats of an oil-based stain, I still wasn't happy with the results. Oil-based stains are not nice to work with in my opinion. The volatile chemicals in them require wearing a NIOSH mask and because it's important that the piece remain dust-free while you're staining it, you basically must stain your work indoors, but because you need really good ventilation, the only truly safe place you can do this work, is inside the garage with the doors open. And then after each application it continues to stink for hours. I love the look of stained wood and will try a water-based stain next time I have the hankering for that look. I also like how easy it is to work with and the changing nature of it. If it's not what you envisioned, you can always add another coat.

Finally, I bought a can of walnut spray paint and dusted over the stain with the paint. Then I sanded once more with 120 grit and ended with two coats of an indoor semi-gloss coat. It still needs a colorful pillow or a basket of books beneath it, the window needs some sort of curtain header and the wall, which is recently painted needs pictures and perhaps a floating shelf or two or three...but here it is in the home it was built for.

Here's my lovely bench sitting in the garage back in April, waiting for me to finish it.

Kevin was patient about not parking in the garage for two weeks and didn't make a big stink about my unfinished project that was taking longer than expected. The plans for this bench come from Ana at Knock-Off Wood. Mine is modified to fit a much smaller space though. I wanted a bench to fit at the end of this little-used hallway where there's a nice window view. I recently painted the hallway with Sherwin-Williams "baguette" in Harmony, which is a no-VOC paint, and plan to hang some pictures and redo the trim work in the hall, which I discovered was plastic, sometime this month. Then perhaps it will truly be a finished project!

Update May 22, 2010: Here is the bench in its finished reading nook.

William is one!

2010-05-02T20:37:00.000-04:00

My baby turned one today! For his birthday I made him an over-sized fire engine red sandbox. I held up the paint samples in the store and this was the one he chose. He loves it!

William climbed inside before I even had the chance to fill it with sand. The black cloth is weed cloth that I stretched across the bottom of the sandbox and stapled in place. It permits water to run through it but will prevent the weeds from growing through the sandbox over time.

The frame is constructed from 2" x 12" non-treated pine and the sandbox is 6ft x 6ft. I hadn't yet added the corner seats, but got to it in the afternoon. The corner seats are 2" x 4" picnic bench-style seating, which is big enough for adults and creates extra support. Under the corner seat you might see the snaps I screwed in to the side. A tarp snaps into place to cover it up to keep animals, debris and rain water out. (I designed and constructed the sandbox myself!)

As I filled it, the kids jumped in and got to work with their sand toys.

Savannah was thrilled when I added her little digger. William likes to help fill the bucket. He also likes to throw sand out of the sandbox...

William enjoyed it so much, he thought it might be the perfect place to take his afternoon nap.

Maybe not! At least with a binky in his mouth, he doesn't put sand in his mouth.

For his birthday we ate some of his favorite foods; eggs and pear for breakfast, edamame, oranges and pasta for lunch.

And there was a cake... strawberry cake with fresh strawberry cream frosting and vanilla pudding, made from scratch.

William actually liked his first bite of cake and had five or six bites, clapping in between, which means either he likes it or "more" in his version of ASL.

We practiced our walking (William takes 1-2 steps on his own and then quickly holds onto something as we cheer him on), went swimming in the pond, had a paddle boat ride, played in the sandbox three times, and patted the chickens. The only thing missing was a tractor ride for the birthday boy, but we can save that for next weekend. Happy First Birthday Baby!

Swisher lawn

2010-05-01T22:34:00.000-04:00

It takes an extraordinary amount of time to mow the lawn around our homestead, even on the riding mower. Of course this is time that could be better spent playing with the children, the chickens, or both. Kevin's solution to cut his mowing time in less than half, is a Swisher trail mower.

I know, "swisher" is a terrible name, reminiscent of horse tails swatting at flies, or windshield wipers on a bus, but the contraption, however named, is clever and works well. It attaches behind the John Deere and is offset so Kevin can mow a width of about 100" at a time. He bought it used and saved about $600 this way.

With all this free time, why not take the kids for a paddle boat ride around the pond?

Flat wall book holder

2010-04-25T16:14:00.000-04:00

At Knock Off Wood, there are some great bookshelf designs. We are a family with a lot of books but also with a lot of bookshelves. However, as soon as I saw the flat wall bookshelf, I thought of at least two places in our house where we could use one. The first is on my daughter's room near her bed. She is an avid reader of chapter books. At the moment she is going through The Secrets of Droon series and The American Girl series at the rate of about 10 books a week. At night she turns off the reading lamp attached to her bed and then stashes her books under her pillow. I've asked her to place them back on the bookshelf or in the library basket but due to our infestation with witches, she's afraid to get out of bed at night. So, I made a smaller version of the flat wall book holder for her to hang right next to her bed where she reads. She loves her World Map and wasn't willing to let me remove it from the wall, hence the smaller size (just 14" across). Still, it holds three hardcover volumes of poetry, eight softcover series books, seven hardcover series books, or five Where's Waldo books, another bedtime favorite. Now she can just reach over, stash her book and turn out the light without having to worry about witches.

We painted it dusty rose to go with the muted pink of her bedroom and because I'm so into shiny finishes at the moment, after two coats of semi-gloss paint, I sprayed the shiny enamel finish over it as well. My design is slightly different from Ana's but this is because I didn't have the instructions in front of me when I made it, just a quick sketch with dimensions in my notebook. Baby was napping and I didn't want to run back in the house and risk waking him by getting my laptop. Still, I'm very pleased with how it turned out and most importantly, so is my Savannah!

Strawberry Fountains Forever

2010-04-25T09:42:00.001-04:00

Yesterday was planting day. Our shipment of fruit plants arrived on Thursday and we had to get them in the ground as soon as possible. I ordered 75 strawberry plants to begin my strawberry fountain, which I hadn't yet constructed. I planned to build it from 2" x 12" non-treated boards that were 12' long. With the outer box measuring 6' and the inner box measuring 3', there would be no waste. The idea behind the fountain is that you can better reach the berries to pick them, raise them up so they have warmer soil temperatures and separate them from other crops so you can give them nutrients separately.

Building it was a cinch and all of my corners squared up perfectly except for one where the wood was warped into a minor "C" shape. Kevin purchased a new Makita drill and driver for me and I love it! Not having to change out the drill bit and driver all the time made the job go really quickly. We decided to fill the bottom half of each level with 6" of composted wood chips and chicken manure. The compost was filled with worms and would be a nice layer of nutrients for the greedy strawberry plants when their roots grew through the topsoil. They should also help to hold some moisture in and break up the clay soil for better drainage. If we have another frost, I can sprinkle a blanket of straw on them for the night. Once the plants are larger, I will keep the straw bed on permanently to reduce weed growth and let the decomposing hay add nutrients to the soil.

The three types of strawberries we are growing are early glow, sparkle, and sure crop. Fortunately, while we wait for these to grow and blossom and produce their first crop (most likely next summer), we can still pick strawberries at our local apple orchard to make strawberry jam for the year.

Preparing the raised beds were a family affair! Savannah got her shovel and bucket to play in the soil and William fancied himself a backhoe, digging and pushing soil around. Perhaps he'll own his own landscaping company one day since he adores mulch, soil, and sand. Of course, now the hard part is going to be keeping him out of the strawberry fountain now that all 75 plants have been rooted there. I must begin building the kids' playset and sandbox so they have a safe place to play but I haven't even purchased lumber for it yet!

Poor Kevin, his job was to plant the new raspberry canes, of which I believed I had ordered 4. Turns out, I ordered 3 each of 4 types, 12 total! He had been working hard to prepare a small row for them by hand, which is very hard work considering how thick our rocky clay soil is and he nearly passed out when I told him about the mix up. Fortunately, his dad has lent us his tiller this year which is so heavy duty it does a decent job on our soil.

All in all a good day on the farm - 75 strawberry plants in, 12 raspberry canes in, 4 blackberry canes in and 1 additional blueberry bush. I also planted two peony clusters from my neighbor who thinned her beds and am really looking forward their lovely blossoms.

Big Kids Picnic Table in Cilantro

2010-04-19T16:54:00.000-04:00

Here's what I've been working on and the reason why I needed to finish that pair of sawhorses. Starting on Thursday, I began cutting wood to build this:

On Sunday I finished all the construction and sanding and filling the screw holes with wood putty during one of William's naps. This picnic bench is solid in case you were wondering and the only part I needed my husband's help with was moving it from the garage to the lawn for painting. Even he was impressed with my construction job, which says a lot. He's already wondering when I might build the adult version to replace the picnic bench that came with our house but is rotten. (He even said if I keep up the construction learning, I might be able to build our next house.)

I sanded it very carefully with the orbital sander because I wanted to be sure no one gets a splinter on my account. Savannah helped me pick out the paint color, a high quality exterior paint in cilantro by Valspar that should make this picnic bench last a long time. She helped me paint the first coat after trying it out for size. It should easily fit four of her friends.

I painted two coats of the exterior paint, which has primer in it, then used two coats of a clear shiny topcoat for exterior use so it would be easier to clean and wipe down and have a better feel.

The biggest compliment of all is that as soon as all of this painting business was dry, my daughter couldn't wait to start her tea party in front of the forsythia bushes. She looks so cute in her spring dress!

The plans for this picnic table are available for free from Ana at Knock Off Wood. Ana is my new favorite person. One week ago, I would have purchased this picnic table, but this week, thanks to Ana's great plans and inspiration, I built it myself and it cost me only $15 in lumber, $4 in outdoor screws and $30 in paint and I still have 3/4 of a can of paint leftover that I plan to use on my potting bench, so $27 total. And to my great surprise, it stands solid and stable, perfectly level and square. Yay, Ana and yay me! Also thanks to Ana I now have a long list of other creations waiting for me to build them including outdoor benches, indoor tables, daybeds with trundle, and bookshelves. The possibilities seem endless!

Sawhorses

2010-04-19T07:56:00.002-04:00

Remember that gift I asked for, my circular saw? I said my first project would be to make a pair of sawhorses and thanks to Ana at Knock Off Wood, I did it! Ana posted instructions for how to build a sawhorse table. I didn't want the table, I wanted the sawhorses so I can use my saw for another project. For just over $10 in lumber and $3 in wood screws, I built my first pair of sawhorses all by myself while William napped. I had to spread the construction out over two naps.

I almost gave in to the urge to paint them a bright flamingo pink, but alas, I am a practical girl at heart and these sawhorses are meant to see a lot of sawing action. One tip, build them backwards from Ana's plans. I built one sawhorse following her plans in order and the second starting with the leg cross supports, then adding the legs and ending with the top, and it was much easier, faster, and more stable to work on. I didn't need clamps or a helper or feel like I needed a third arm building them backwards.

Can I just say that I'm so impressed that they stand up strong and level! I finished them on Thursday and have already completed my first project with them, but I'm not yet ready to reveal it since it's drying under a coat of paint.

Some rest

2010-04-18T19:02:00.000-04:00

Spring is a busy, busy time on any farm or homestead. Once that snow melts away, all you can see are projects that need your attention. Last year I thought one thing that was missing from our outdoor space was a hammock so I set out to make sure we didn't go one more year without one. For $99, I chose the polyester hammock from LL Bean because polyester endures weather better than cotton. The polyester is so unbelievably soft!

The package arrived on a Monday and during a William naptime, Savannah helped me put it up on Wednesday between two trees with a 13ft stretch. I wish I could say it was hard work and it took us a long time, but it only took us a few minutes... Nevertheless, we spent the rest of the day in the hammock, feeling that we deserved it.

I'm so glad we have it but I can see this seriously impacting the rest of the work we need to do around here.

Girl's best friend

2010-04-13T09:46:00.001-04:00

There was a time where I might have asked for a shopping trip as a gift or a pearl necklace or a massage. Now, of course, it's a different story. Now I ask for a circular saw (a Milwaukee 6394-21 15 Amp 7-1/4-Inch Circular Saw, to be specific). Already it's a toy the whole family adores.

Are boys just born knowing how electric tools work?

And I haven't even had a chance to rip wood yet...just wait until they see what I can do with it. I'll have to start with building a pair of saw horses.

T-r-o-u-b-l-e

2010-04-11T13:28:00.000-04:00

See that capital "T" in trouble? William's name around here has become William Trouble Bacon. Here's why:

You read the manual, while I take it for a test drive...

Mom, quick, I think something's burning in the kitchen!

Works every time, Flu$h! Flu$h! Flu$h!

Everyone else has electronic toys, why can't I? And the mohawk? I just wake up like this!

Yesterday Savannah was asked to put her chocolates in her Easter basket so William couldn't get to them. She moved the box but had to go back to search for one "missing" chocolate. I'm already half way to yelling at her for "losing" a chocolate when their stains are next to impossible to remove from carpeting and clothing so I help her in her hunt only to find little brother's palms and cheeks smeared with chocolaty goo. The baby scored his first chocolate. Savannah burst into tears and after cleaning off her brother, who was then on high speed Trouble mode, I asked her why she was crying. Fortunately, she said it was because she knew she was in trouble, and not because her little brother ate one of her chocolates. Good answer rascal.

Gardening with chickens

2010-04-03T13:21:00.000-04:00

The view from my kitchen window is of a terraced rock wall partially shaded by pines and with a crab apple tree and forsythia at one end and the chicken coop on the other. Sounds lovely, right? Except that time has taken its toll on the wall so that little of it appears beneath the piles of pine needles. I vowed to reclaim the space this spring after who knows how many years of neglect.

Savannah is my little helper. I suppose William is too since I garden with him in the backpack and he has to cooperate so I can work. The chickens also help! They are eternally curious about the goings on of their human family so whenever we garden outside, they keep us company. As I rake away the pine needles, Scarlet and Penny stayed within a few steps of the rake so they could eat up any tasty morsels uncovered by the rake. Savannah feeds then grubs whenever one is unearthed. As the girls eat grubs now, it means fewer insect problems in the coming months.

I had to pry out of the earth many of the large stones that had toppled over years ago and find a new spot for them along the wall. Each time I lifted another stone Scarlet would run over and eat up any worms, ants, pill bugs, etc that she spotted. The chickens till the soil with their feet. They have powerful legs and claws and scratch the earth much better than I could aerate it with a garden fork or cultivator. Our soil is a very thick clay so I really appreciate the help!

As we work the soil and the girls eat their fill of all natural protein, the boys keep guard. Coburn keeps guard on top of the rock wall while Lucky keeps an eye out from below.

We love our girls (even if two of them turned out to be boys). Three days into my terraced wall project, I've restacked two levels of the wall and removed nine wheelbarrows of pine needles for composting elsewhere. Some of the bulbs I planted area already much happier and the crocuses have pushed through.

Garden planning

2010-03-21T15:50:00.001-04:00

Just as the trees store their resources for the winter and enter their quiet dream state, so the gardener spends the winter dreaming. There may be white snow outside, but the gardener sees the loamy black devil's food cake baking away in the compost heap, preparing to nourish another year's worth of crops. I turned the compost pile yesterday and more than a dozen worms wriggled out of my first pitchfork full.

This year we are expanding our blackberry and raspberry patches and adding one more blueberry bush. We plan to add a strawberry fountain, which I am most looking forward to, even if the plants don't bear fruit until next year. Strawberries are somewhat finicky and can be nutrient hogs. By building them into a raised bed shaped like a fountain, they can receive the best soil, more sunlight and warmth and it's easier to pick them. I'm not yet sure if mine will be square or round, but I'm looking forward to building it and planting the 50 strawberry plants that will arrive sometime this spring. I often order my fruits from the local nursery, Miller Nurseries. I like ordering from a local company that grows and rates all of their plants for my area. It can be cold in NY state and I appreciate that they've already done the testing for me. They send out the plants you order right after your area's last freeze date, so they always arrive right on time, even if that's a different week or month each year.

I plan to test out the three sisters planting method that so many native peoples have used. The three sisters are corn, squash and beans. The idea is that the beans use the fast growing corn stalks as support and scaffolding to climb, while the squash quickly fills in the shaded underside, preventing many weeds from growing up. All three seeds are sown directly into the soil.

One of my favorite places to order seeds from is the Seed Savers Exchange. This organization saves and shares heirloom seeds, meaning these seeds will grow into plants that bear seeds so you can forever propagate your crops by saving the seeds they yield. This makes the gardener part of a long legacy as well as independent. Plus, it's exciting to plant seeds for crops you could never find in a grocery store. Last year we had heirloom organic black beauty zucchini, early fortune cucumbers and beautifully striped Amish melons with pale flesh. This year we are planting many new heirloom varieties. I'm especially looking forward to the yellow tomatoes that look like lightbulbs and the white and purple and white striped eggplants.

Eventually, we plan to grow some of the feed for our chickens. As was recently pointed out to us, even if you have chickens or other livestock, you're not a step closer to sustainability if you're not growing your own feed. I'm not sure how this fact escaped us before but now we can plan a feed garden for 2011.

In honor of St. Patrick's Day this week:

"You will never plough a field if you only turn it over in your mind."
- Irish Proverb

Monster or witch repellent

2010-03-18T21:00:00.000-04:00

It seems every kid goes through a stage where suddenly their imagination turns to the dark side and in addition to imagining Santa and Easter bunnies, tooth fairies and pirate adventures, witches and other unsavory characters start creeping into their dreams. Sometimes it is not enough to simply tell your child that there's no such thing as monsters. It helps, but they're still skeptical of us grownups who make them eat green things. So it helps to have some magic in your bag of tricks.

Here is a special product that I had to "custom order" for my daughter. She's not afraid of monsters (thank you Monsters, Inc!) and is not afraid of ghosts or vampires but ever since her Girl Scout troop sang carols in an old folks home, she has had reoccurring nightmares about a witch in a wheelchair. I told her that I knew of someone who made a special potion that you spray around your bedroom at night to repel witches. She asked if it worked. I told her it was 100% guaranteed to work or we'd get our money back and that it was just like a bug repellent but made just for witches, who have special big noses. Then I got to work fulfilling the order.

Materials:

spray bottle
labels you can custom print on
water
few drops of essential oil such as lavender (optional)

I chose to fill the spray bottle with filtered water and a few drops of lavender essential oil. The lavender gives just enough scent to make it smell authentic without ruining rugs or furniture. Lavender is valued in aromatherapy as a relaxant even for children, so it's suitable for bedtime, but any herbal, floral or fruity scent that you can stand could work.

I packaged it and "mailed" it to my daughter because she likes the idea of special ordering it and it appears more authentic to her. Another option is to present this to your child as a printed recipe or potion and ask your child to help you make it in the kitchen. The instructions for use are printed on the back (mine say to spray once in the doorway and once near the bed) and the bottle sprays a very fine mist so we're not soaking the floors, rugs or bedding. So far, we have one happy little girl who fully believes in the power of her "Witch B-Gone" and sleeps much easier now at night, which means I can sleep easier at night, ahh!

Moms and dads, please feel free to copy this or make up your own version if your child has a monster under her bed or a witch in his wardrobe. I hope it leads to more sweet dreams in your household as well!

Ten and counting

2010-03-02T23:25:00.001-05:00

William is 10 months old already and one thing we've learned about him is that everyday he loves to laugh and make others laugh too. He has three games that he plays with us everyday, one of them is peek-a-boo or hide and seek. If we don't initiate it, he will! He crawls over to the drapes and wraps himself up in them. Then he'll wait there patiently until someone catches on.

Hmm, wonder who could be hiding behind the curtain???

Peek-a-boo! It was William. This makes him roar with laughter, which makes everyone else laugh.

Here he is at dinner stuffing his cherub cheeks with as much orange as will fit in there. He won't eat anything pureed, including yogurt, but adores lumpy cottage cheese, bananas, and whole beans.This funny little guy will also eat Japanese salad dressing with garlic and ginger like there's no tomorrow and gnaw on my spicy Indian chicken with curry and garam masala but try to give him apple sauce, or any other standard baby food, and he's totally disgusted.

His new thing is clapping, which he can do to tempo if the song has strong percussion. He figured this out during Ravel's Bolero, which he appears to adore. Perhaps big sister's music class is rubbing off on him?

Look who's 10 months old!

Bright and shiny

2010-02-24T09:34:00.001-05:00

To brighten up our suddenly white, white winter wonderland, we have a dozen balls of fluff to take care of. They arrived bright and shiny, right as the storm began to hit. This year I wanted to be sure to have one of the earliest shipments of chicks because I want layers by late fall, instead of the middle of winter. I also wanted the girls to be able to be fully grown to enjoy free-ranging safely before winter and to be able to help me in the garden. My big girls will be helping me "till" the garden this spring as soon as the ground thaws. They will also be charged with eating all of the grubs that have overwintered there so they won't hatch and eat my plants, a chore they have been dreaming about all winter!

The babies mesmerize us with their antics. Suddenly a chick will be in a hurry to get somewhere but halfway through its run, will pause for a nap, eventually toppling over and waking up again.

Some will tunnel into their food and feel they are in heaven. Others aren't content unless they are seated on top of another, or have one foot in the water dish.

We have four of each, Buff Orpingtons, Rhode Island Reds, and Silver Laced Wyandottes, all excellent egg layers, all large sized birds (a deterrent to aerial predators when fully grown), all cold hearty and friendly, and hopefully, all girls. It's hard to imagine at this moment, seeing the chicks in their coats of pure fluff and knowing the long road of care that lies ahead for each one of them, but if one does turn out to be a roo, I most likely will have to play the role of Alice's Queen of Hearts ("off with his head!"). At times there can be little room for sympathy on a farm, even an organic one. So let's hope the chicken sexer is profoundly good at his or her profession so we can enjoy the eggs and company of all of our little fluff balls for many years to come.

Savannah kisses a RIR chick that fell asleep in her hands. They often fall asleep as we cradle them - we like to think it's because they're imagining themselves under the warmth of their mother's wing.

Little of this and that

2010-02-21T23:23:00.000-05:00

We've had such a busy schedule lately I never have time to blog about what we're up to. In the homeschooling department, we started a big science kick, robots, volcanoes, exploring our senses, the states of water, and bird form and function.

Here's the papier mache volcano that Savannah made from a toilet paper roll, cardboard, newspaper and the flour and water "glue". She looked at images of real volcanoes before deciding how to paint it in black, brown and red. We mixed some red food coloring and dish soap together along with the baking soda so the volcano's lava would appear red. It looked more pink than red so next time we'll definitely use more food coloring.

For homeschool we do a page of math everyday and since September have completed double-digit addition, double-digit subtraction (now with borrowing), telling time, basic multiplication, and are now working on a unit on money math. Savannah still reads as many as three chapter books a day so I've eased off the reading "for school" and am trying to get her to spend more time outdoors. She always resists but the second she's outside she's in heaven.

Let's face it - some states of water are more fun than others!

I called the elementary school in our district to talk with the administrators about their educational program and attended the open house of a private school near us. I am so disappointed in how little they offer. One school recognizes the importance of reading at different levels so they divide kids into reading groups with two classes having reading groups of just one student where the child is particularly advanced. However, the same school uses one math curriculum for all students in a grade, with no chance for movement up or down, all the kids learn math at the same speed, which is dictated by the slowest learners. The other school lets children work independently in their workbooks during "math" time and children work at their own pace. I noticed one child was on page 3 in her workbook, while another had nearly completed it, but with plenty of wrong answers. I plan to homeschool for a few years mainly because I feel I don't have a choice. I'm so disappointed in the quality of schools and education in our area, both public and private. It helps that Kevin is an engineer and I'm biochemist and writer.

My box of secret items for our blind senses activity. Savannah correctly guessed everything except for the chopstick, which she wrote down as a pencil.

Savannah touching the secret objects to determine what they are while blind folded.

Writing down her guesses! She got 11 correct out of 12. I fooled her with the chopstick.

Pirates

2010-02-19T09:10:00.000-05:00

In case you didn't know, pirates are a big thing in our house. This year in Florida, I asked Savannah if she wanted to help me look for shells and she said, no, she would rather spend her time looking for buried treasure. Savannah made friends with a lady who had a metal detector and before long she had herself a buried treasure, a metal tin filled with coins and bath toys and shells. Not sure who might have buried it there, ahem, but she believes it was Captain Kidd's first buried treasure.

So, it was only a matter of time before William crossed the plank from a landlubber to a pirate... Big sister has ensured his place as first mate on her fine vessel and William hopes to be promoted to Apprentice Captain as soon as he gets his sea legs.

Ahoy thar me hardies!

Arrgh! I take me rum with milk!

Savannah's reward after she's finished her schoolwork and chores is getting to play her favorite pirate game on the computer. She plunders ships and finds buried treasures, romances governor's daughters, and gets into tavern fights to obtain information about her captured family. Let me just say that if I'm ever on a ship in the Caribbean, I want the fearless Savannah to be my Captain.

Nine months baby

2010-02-02T22:17:00.001-05:00

For my nine month birthday Daddy let me hold the remote control and I knew just what I wanted to do with it.

Mommy told me the funniest jokes that made me laugh...

and laugh...

I watched the pelicans dive in the ocean and saw a helicopter too.

I played with a cute little boy who was also named William. And saw the dolphin show at the aquarium from above ground and below.

I swam in the pool, soaked in the hot tub, swam in the pool, soaked in the hot tub and swam in the pool again.

Then I watched the sun set with my family in the hammock and had watermelon for dessert. What a great nine month birthday!

Soda can robot

2010-01-13T14:42:00.000-05:00

After a recent excursion to the science museum, Savannah wanted to build a robot, and why not, her dad is an engineer? So I got a starter kit for her with the idea that this was something she and her dad could bond over during the weekend. One nice thing about homeschooling is that it can take place at any time.

But the weekend was filled with farm chores, family time, pond snow removal, and finally ice skating. So that meant Mommy had to be the assistant engineer. I placed the parts list in front of Savannah (who received the soda can from a neighbor since we never have any) and she had to locate and name all the parts and help assemble them. Little fingers sure come in handy when tightening nuts to bolts in tight places! Her robot can move forward and backwards on its "belly" or upright and most importantly, it has a survival feature, namely, it can outrun her little brother! At least it can this week.

Can you tell she's proud of her creation?

We learned about batteries and motors, axles and cams and had some fun in the process.

Love

2010-01-07T19:58:00.000-05:00

Love has many faces, but you know it when you see it...

This evening while I was making dinner, William crawled out of the kitchen where I usually keep an eye on him. I was worried that I couldn't see William and worst of all, it had become quiet.

When I ran into the living room to check on him, I found big sister with an arm snuggled around her little brother. She had shared her apple with him and she propped her pillow up behind him so he didn't bang his head. And best of all, no one even asked her. Ahh, love...

Tick bytes

2010-01-06T06:04:00.001-05:00

Through necessity, we've had to learn a lot about ticks and Lyme disease since moving to upstate New York. Like many New Englanders and Pennsylvanians, we live in an area that the CDC considers to be high risk for Lyme disease. High risk means that a tick bite here is more likely to infect you with Lyme disease than a tick bite elsewhere, mainly because so many of the ticks are infected with the disease-causing organism, Borrelia burgdorferi. There is still much scientific debate about a variety of aspects concerning Lyme disease, so I feel it is important to be more conservative when dealing with bites. After our daughter's first tick bite, with an attachment time of just less than 24 hours, she became Lyme positive in the middle of winter even though she received prophylactic antibiotics. (She received a second course after her blood titer was positive.) Also while Lyme disease is the most prevalent tick-borne illness in the US, there are others to be aware of, including babesiosis and ehrlichiosis, transmitted the same way.

Here are some of the things we have learned and implemented to help our family.

Preventing a tick bite is the most important thing you can do. Here are the prevention techniques we've found useful:

1. Keep deer off of the parts of your land that you use regularly. No matter how sweet and docile these creatures are and how useful their manure may be to your lawn, they are among the primary carriers of Deer ticks (aka Black-legged ticks). In every study where deer populations were decreased, the incidence of Lyme disease significantly decreased as well.

2. Deer can be deterred naturally through deer-proof landscaping. No matter where you live, there will be a garden or landscaping center in your gardening zone that carries or is knowledgeable about deer-resistant plants. The goal is to keep deer away from your house and front yard so replace any plants that deer usually eat with those they find less appetizing. Bird feeders and salting your driveway in winter can also attract deer.

3. Maintain a clear lawn area without long or tall grasses, piles of leaves, or suckers growing around the base of trees (mulch, mulch, mulch your trees!). This will both deter deer and leave less "habitat" for ticks to wait in while hoping for their next blood meal to brush against them.

4. If you have other rodents around your house, barn or garage, get rid of them too. Rodents can be carriers of ticks and keeping their populations down is just as important as keeping the deer away from your house. In many areas, the white-footed deer mouse is the primary carrier so do what you have to do to remove mice from your garage, shed and barn, and around your home.

5. If you have a cat or dog that goes inside and outside, the cat or dog can carry ticks in that can bite you. Do regular tick inspections on your animals and have a kit nearby to remove any ticks found on them. We are partial to the tick twister for removal from animals and humans alike. We keep a tick jar (a small glass canning jar) filled 1/4 with rubbing alcohol to place ticks in. It helps us to identify the ticks we find on our clothes, or embedded in our skin so we know when to call the doctor or be concerned.

6. When you're outside playing, hiking, doing yard work, or cutting trees, wear long sleeves and socks pulled up to your calf. Then remove your clothing for washing when entering the house. We keep a laundry basket hidden near the front door for this purpose.

7. If you live in or will be travelling to an area that is considered moderate to high risk for Lyme disease (or any other vector-borne disease including those carried by black flies, mosquitoes, chiggers, etc) try the line of clothing by Buzz-Off Insect Shield. We have been very pleased with the results of their long-sleeved shirts, hats, bandanas, and socks for keeping insects away for 70 washings. The clothing is treated with permethrin, a manmade chemical that mimics a chemical found in the chrysanthemum plant. You can order it through many outdoor clothing companies including LL Bean, REI and directly from the manufacturer. Even the very sensitive skins and noses in my house aren't bothered by this clothing and it prevents all sorts of bug bites while making me feel safe-r when sending my daughter out to play. But don't take my word for it, read other customer feedback.

8. Learn to recognize a female and nymph deer tick. Humans are accidental hosts for ticks. They attach to us when they sense our heat and carbon dioxide as we brush by them. A blood meal helps them survive but they require the white-tailed deer to complete their lifecycle.

9. Inspect your body once a day. Remember to check your neck, under arms, groin, behind the knees and ankles and in between your toes. Also check your neck and in and around your ears. I check my children's hair but to check my own, I use a fine-tooth comb. Remember that you don't have to find a tick to get Lyme disease. Ticks will attach for varying amounts of time, feed, and then drop off, possibly without being seen.

10. For tick removal, follow the instructions from a reputable agency. Any method of removal that requires rubbing, agitating, heating or applying a substance to the tick may cause more saliva from the tick to enter your body, which is not good if the tick carries a disease-causing organism. We stick to the tick twister mentioned above or use forceps, fine tweezers. Here are three sources (of many) in agreement for the proper tick-removal process, CDC, Lyme Disease Foundation, and my personal favorite, the U.S. Army's Center for Health Promotion and Preventative Medicine (this one is a nice one-page PDF that you can tape inside a cabinet for easy reference). Swab the area with alcohol after tick removal to kill any possible bacteria on the skin.

11. If you're the farming or homesteading type, consider free-ranging chickens or guinea hens for tick control on your land. Our girls happily patrol the brush along the edge of our mowed land snapping up any insect morsel their keen eyes come across. We went from finding lots of ticks on our skin and clothing to none after letting our chickens free range during a year when local agencies studying the tick population found large increases in the tick population.

Life in the country (and suburbs) is filled with the joys and beauty that nature has to offer. Let's hope for many outdoor adventures that are free of tick bites.

Reflections 2009

2009-12-31T23:27:00.004-05:00

This has been an interesting year for us in our new house turned homestead. I think one saying rings especially true for us this year:

Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.

And apparently, we are still learning from our bad judgment.

Even though I don't always feel that I have youthful enthusiasm, I can say without a doubt that some of that youthful enthusiasm has been thwarted. Every time we try to take two steps forward and stick to a schedule, we are reminded that life doesn't work that way. Life is meandering. Life is organic. And messy. And has other ideas for you. Especially on a farm. Especially in the country. Especially when you've moved there after getting soft from a cushy life in the suburbs. The country knows you've been away and has lessons to teach you.

Some of the highlights of our blunders this year include the time we kept saying, "Pee-yew! It smells like a skunk died in the barn," when in fact a skunk had died in our barn, it just took us two weeks to figure it out. (Yes, two weeks, although to our credit, it smelled so bad we didn't spend much time "exploring" the issue.) The poor thing crawled behind the wood piles for shelter and some logs rolled off and crushed it. It was the pile of wood stacked in the darkest, farthest corner, behind two more rows of stacked wood, and the hardest for us to get to, but finally Kevin had to remove what was left of the skunk carcass and wonder of wonders, the smell actually dissipated after that.

And then there was the time I was hanging laundry in the backyard on a beautiful sunny Saturday, breathing in the fresh air, admiring the Great Blue Herons, and thinking how idyllic the day, the land, the morning's activity, when my husband comes running down with a nearly dead chicken in his arms, my daughter crying at his side. He had guillotined the chicken, ironically after I'd spent so much time teaching my five-year old how to properly attach the sliding chicken door to prevent just such an incident. The nearly-guillotined chicken earned the name Lucky and spent the day in our arms. Lucky's voice box was transformed in the incident and Lucky has a hard time seeing properly out if its left eye and doesn't lay eggs and is skittish of people now, but is fine.

Oh yes, and Lucky who always had the prettiest green tail feathers I'd ever seen on a Rhode Island Red, turned out to be a rooster! So of my seven "girls" I now have four roosters! Seriously! So much for my ideal coop full of happy, fluffy free-ranging hens who lay an abundance of eggs. Year one, our girls turned out to be more of a misadventure. And this says nothing of me, with a background in medicine and biology, that I ended up with four roosters and ignored the little hints and signs along the way until they couldn't be ignored any longer.

And there was the time we had an early snowstorm and instead of plowing the driveway, my husband drives behind the barn, under the pretense of emptying the mulch in the bed, and gets it so far stuck in the mud beneath the snow that the transmission decoupled itself from the axle. We watched it snow, and we watched the truck and plow sink further into the ground. It took two weeks for someone with the right equipment to come haul the truck and plow to the shop.

And there were many other of those sorts of times this year but there were also the times where we trudged into the woods together, our woods, and let Savannah pick out our Christmas tree, which she pulled home over a layer of fresh snow. Or the time we released all the dried milkweed into the air and watched the silk starbursts dance away, filling the sky over the pond. Or the times we made a camp fire behind the barn and roasted marshmallows until the sun set and night set in. Or the times we watched the turtles make the trek across the lawn to find the perfect spot to dig a hole for their eggs, lay them, then trek back to the pond. Or the times we picked all the strawberries we could eat and made the best jam that brings us memories of summer when we load it on our winter toast. Or the times we read our books by the big maple tree, Savannah in the tree swing, her legs dangling down, her head bent over her book, while the leaves turned their many shades of autumn around us. Let's hope for more of those times in 2010.

Funny faces

2009-12-28T17:44:00.000-05:00

Just in time for the New Year William has perfected a new funny face.

Here's the old funny face:

And the new funny face:

The old funny face:

And the new funny face:

Of course, we think he's quite handsome when he's not making faces at all:

But sometimes, it's so much fun to make the rest of the family laugh, who can resist the silliness?

White Christmas

2009-12-25T19:06:00.001-05:00

We didn't have to dream of a white Christmas this year.

It was a perfectly white day - a fresh glistening coat of frost on the deciduous branches, a dusting of powdered sugar on the pines, a white foggy sky, and a pond of frozen ice that William decided must be the perfect place for his afternoon nap.

Kevin cleared the snow from the pond and practiced his hockey while William and I skated and Savannah played in the snow around the pond, eating as much of it as she could.

Santa was generous; Savannah received the harp she asked for,

William, who can't yet ask for things other than his Mama, naps, or milk, received a wooden play cube that we think he and big sister will enjoy for quite a few years.

Highlights included William's tractor book from Santa,

and his dump truck

(made in the USA from 100% recycled plastics),

Savannah's vehicle construction set and the wooden top and yo-yo from a local artisan (this top never stops spinning!),

Kevin's blu-ray player, which he has yet to convince the rest of the family is really a family gift, but we'll see! I lucked out with some items from my Amazon wish list and chocolates in my stocking, the good ones that I'm reluctant to share.

I'll always remember this Christmas for our ice skating,

Savannah and Kevin constructing a fork lift together (and caterpillar and robot),

for William's all day snuggles, nap on the pond,

and new funny face.

Best wishes to all for a Merry Christmas evening.

Don't eat too much of the trimmings...

Solar energy

2009-12-23T16:49:00.020-05:00

I love our photovoltaic system! We don't have to lift a finger and everyday it generates clean energy that it feeds back to the grid. We just hit the 2 megawatt mark, which is very exciting considering it has been active for only four months and missed the sunny spring and summer months. Having produced 2 megawatt-hours of energy is the equivalent of planting 15 mature trees and not driving 1,609 miles in a standard car.

Without the summer and spring we are just breaking even with our system so I'm hoping that a full year of PV will put us slightly ahead.

Closet Renovation

2009-12-06T22:51:00.001-05:00

In the basement we had a closet that was intended to be devoted to wine. However, the amount of wine we drink in a year could have fit in just one of the small diamond cubes of this rather large wine closet. In the meantime I need more pantry space, more room for towels and sheets and more general storage space. So, my mom helped me rip out the old wine closet shelving so I could build a new one.

Here are the four generous shelves I constructed from pine. I was only able to do this because my mom was helping watch the kiddos while I cut the wood and screwed them to the shelf supports on the wall. Because I like wood smooth, I used the sander on all the edges and especially rounded out the front edge. I sized and spaced the shelves to permit two of Savannah's large plastic bins (for organizing her crafts) to fit beneath.

After the shelves were ready, my mom painted it white with Harmony's Snowbound. Harmony is a Sherwin Williams paint that contains no VOCs, so it's fine to paint with it even in cool weather when it's hard to ventilate. Snowbound is the color we use on all of our ceilings.

I love my new shelves and can't wait to put them to work organizing my home. Now that the girls have done their part, we just need Kevin to add the sliding door back to the closet. It was removed months ago when we tiled the floor over the radiant heat, but now that the ball is in his court, it might take a while.

Family Tree a Thanksgiving Gift

2009-11-18T10:12:00.000-05:00

As oral tradition becomes a lost art, I think family trees become more and more important. There are times in one's life when the only way to go forward is to first go backwards, return to one's origins. I think it is powerful to see where you've come from, the long line of those who have come before you, each contributing some role towards making your unique life possible. I like the organic form of the tree as well to portray the family lines.

This is my Thanksgiving gift to my family - our family tree. The children appear as apples resting on the tree's roots. They are the "apples of my eye", and in our house it's true that "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree". I can look at the tree and trace my daughter's love for crossword puzzles, reading, and word games and our uncanny knack for finding four-leaf clovers in a field.

Each frame is 10 x 20 because nothing else seemed quite large enough to read without squinting and standing directly in front of it.

His side of the family tree...

...and her side of the family tree.

Farm Fresh

2009-11-17T20:18:00.000-05:00

Look what we started collecting this week...

...our own farm fresh large brown eggs. What to have for breakfast is an easy decision.

William's half birthday

2009-11-02T07:35:00.002-05:00

Look who turned 6 months old.

His favorite thing and best love is still his sister - in play clothes.

Or in jammies, they always make each other laugh.

At six months William drinks water by himself, tastes some oatmeal and our homemade applesauce, sits up by himself, and can go where ever he wants to by rolling, pulling and pushing - his semi-crawl maneuvers. If he would get his fingers out of his mouth, he would be actually crawling, but we try not to tell him that.

He also says "Hi" and "Hungry."

Halloween Witch

2009-10-31T07:27:00.001-04:00

I'll get you my pretty!

And your little dog too!

But if you give me some candy,

then I won't turn you into a toad!

Savannah's scary witch costume and William's frog costume for Halloween. Savannah filled her cauldron with Halloween treats despite the initial downpour.

Fall glimpses

2009-10-02T23:38:00.000-04:00

William is five months old and busy breaking his mother's heart with his babyness. He loves his toes, his thumb, and his big sister. His first word may very well be "hungry", which we hear almost everyday, but I'm waiting to be sure he knows what he's saying (he appears to!) I hoping I'll hear "mama" soon!

He adores the baby chicks and watches the brooder with interest a few feet away on the safety of his blanky. He doesn't get good traction when on a blanky so he tends to spin in circles rather than inch his way forward, as he sometimes does.

Savannah is busy with her home school year well underway. Music lessons, private art lessons, story times, nature hikes, play dates and the chance to choose two of the four topics we learn about every month. She enjoyed her first spelling test so much, she asked for another one! Topics covered so far: apples, caterpillars, farms. Upcoming topics: fire and fire safety, bats, pumpkins. Each week she also has a cooking day where she gets to do most, if not all, of the work. I'm trying to teach her basic scarf knitting as well but these fine motor skills are still a challenge. For her craft this week she made a haunted forest with a haunted house and decorated our house for Halloween. She also taught herself multiplication by 10s and 1s last week, "by just thinking about it".

Making apple crisp "by hand" from the apples we picked.

Baby Golden Sebright Bantams

2009-09-28T19:33:00.005-04:00

We have three new family members today - baby golden sebright bantams. They are so tiny and so beautiful, even as chicks.

They grow to about 3 pounds and their feathers are outlined in black. These chicks are siblings from a neighbor's farm. After just one day of caring for them, it seems they're already family members. Guess who loves them already?

It's quite appropriate that we're caring for baby chicks now because our homeschool unit is about farms right now.

Solar laundry

2009-09-22T12:36:00.001-04:00

Our photovoltaic system has been up and running for just over two weeks now. It's working very well and it's fun to read amount of energy in kilowatts we've generated each day, usually about 36 kW. The system also tells us (for fun!) how many pounds of carbon dioxide we've saved.

Now that we check the amount of energy we're producing every day, we think more about the energy we are spending everyday. So, finally, Kevin installed the clothesline he purchased many months ago. Really, its installation was a joint venture with everyone pitching in something - digging holes, mixing cement, stringing the line, etc.

My helper

According to DOE EIA statistics, 5.8% of a household's electric use goes towards dryer use. I'm not sure what percentage of our electric bill goes towards that since we have an energy efficient dryer and a washing machine that gets rid of more water during the spin cycle than non-front loaders. Anyway, hanging laundry is fun and it's one more chore that gets us outside.

One cute baby sock blows in the wind like a Tibetan prayer flag.

This interesting website (Project Laundry List) claims that if every American line dried their clothing, it would be enough to close several power plants. Imagine that! We are looking forward to the energy savings so our solar system will make a bigger impact.

Garden treasures

2009-09-17T18:34:00.000-04:00

We still have bushes full of basil, sweet bell peppers, black beauty zucchini, early fortune cucumbers, and tomatoes. Some little creature discovered how to get through the garden fence and systematically ate all the carrot tops off. When we pulled them out of the garden, they were mostly too small for eating. I hope our melons ripen soon.

Savannah's giant pumpkins are amazing! The first viable fruit steals all the plant's resources by sending out a chemical that kills off all the others on the vine. As they wither and rot, the big pumpkin hoards all the food for itself. This is the small one about 12 inches in diameter.

This one is so large, I'm not sure how we are going to get it out of the garden at the end of October. Savannah can ride on it like a St. Bernard. We'll have to roll it up a plank into the cart so we can haul it up to the front of the house with the tractor. There's no way I could fit this one in the wheelbarrow. It sure will be fun to see it in front of the house this fall.

Everyone pitches in on a farm

2009-09-14T21:20:00.000-04:00

Savannah and Dearest mow the front lawn after dinner as the sun sets. Savannah has had enough "experience" on the John Deere that she is sometimes permitted to steer it herself. She always wears her ear protection.

Wood in

2009-09-07T20:54:00.007-04:00

Last winter we had an energy efficient soapstone woodstove installed. It provides wonderful warmth and heat to two floors of our house. Instead of ordering wood this year, Kevin has been bringing it in himself every weekend in the woods behind our house. He goes out with his chainsaw and removes the dead hardwoods that fell in the ice storm, hauls them back behind the barn and chops them into woodstove-size logs. He also removes the pines and anything else that has fallen on the hiking and snowshoeing trails behind our house.

Today I went into the barn to see the progress. Here are two rows 16-18 feet long stacked 7-8 feet high.

And another short row.

And behind the barn two more enormous stacks of wood.

Someone has been very busy this season preparing for winter. Last winter we thought the weather was fine but everyone told us it was a long hard winter for the area. I think we'll be more than prepared for the upcoming winter and I'm looking forward to the family snuggles we'll share while keeping cozy and warm in front of the woodstove as the snow falls.

The girls love to keep Kevin company when he's chopping wood. The bark falls off and the girls go crazy for the bugs beneath. Long after he's stopped chopping, they continue to eat the buggies.

Four months old

2009-09-02T20:15:00.005-04:00

Hi! My name is William and I am four months old today.

I like to roll on my tummy and suck on my fingers.

And I like to practice crawling. (It's great fun to see the worried expression on Mommy's face!)

Look! I can do them both at the same time!

Also, I like to practice yoga.

Yup, in my diaper.

I am quite the guy!

Scarlet's new roost

2009-08-19T00:24:00.003-04:00

I had been warned that chickens not only do not care what their housing looks like but that they often prefer something other than what their humans give them. Scarlet is one of those chickens.

She prefers the Saab roof rack to her own accomodations,

which explains the bird poop on the garaged car, as well as the tracks up and down the trunk.

Nature's Bounty

2009-08-18T09:54:00.004-04:00

We've been enjoying our first real yields from the garden. Must be the sunshine! When I finally got out to pick zucchini for the first time, they were nearly the size of baby William. We've been grating them into baked goods and fritters with grated onion and potato, sauteing them and slicing them into lasagnas and ratatouilles, etc. The zucchini are Black Beauty heirlooms.

The cucumbers are also delicious! We pick them and take a bite right out of them. They are Early Fortune heirlooms. In between salads, I've been slicing some up and placing them in a container in the fridge overnight with some vinegar and sugar for a little treat in the heat.

The squash, pumpkins and two varieties of melons are all doing well. So are the sweet peas but we eat them all right out of the garden so they never even make it up to the house.

Our blueberries have been slow and steady but we are enjoying them now for breakfasts on the weekends or for a quick "whenever" snack. Yum!

Unicorns and Puppies

2009-08-05T20:49:00.007-04:00

Savannah went to Build-A-Bear for the first time to use her birthday gift card. She chose the pink unicorn with sparkly stars all over it. (Big surprise!)

Then she dressed it in a pink dress with pink shoes...

...and named it Loosy.

And since she had extra left over on her gift card, she decided to make a puppy for her baby brother,

who napped through the whole thing.