New Life Old Farmers

As of this moment, Winter is officially kicking our butt.  I had managed to maintain a sunny outlook on things, (even though there has been NO sun for a while now), utilizing an ‘attitude of gratitude’, as I drove to work in -12 degrees.

Frozen hot water pipes…

…glad we have a home with pipes to freeze.

Seriously, this only works for so long…

My Loving Spouse went straight to worry, which I cannot blame him.  The guy has three metal joints in his body and the SUB ZERO temps are making him ache.  The thought of burst pipes, cold  spaces, and crawling around under a house was a tad terrifying.  Luckily, he managed to thaw out the offending pipe, with fans and heaters and the bad British word.  We now do what goes completely against my drought laden Californian roots, we leave hot water taps dripping.

For warmth, we are burning a lot of wood and the bedrooms are running a lot of electricity for heaters.  We might have to sell the fatted calf next month to pay the electric bill, except beef prices are currently down.  Speaking of cows…the animals frost-free pipes all froze last weekend.  There was talk with Our Friend the Farmer about heat tapes, and other contraptions to thaw them out, but eventually we just had to get water to them the Californian way, which is why there is now 150 feet of garden hose in my beautiful claw foot tub.  We cannot leave it anywhere else or it will freeze.  We drag it out every other day to fill the animals water tanks and feed them lots of extra hay to help keep them warm.  I wish all I had to do to keep warm was eat more!My Sort-of-Smart phone’s weather app tantalizes us with reports of warmer weather in a few days time, then they change their mind when the days actually come.  Tomorrow was said to be 25 degrees, we had planned to clean out the poop filled chicken house, so the hens would start laying again.  Currently, we only have two hens laying and often by the time we get to the eggs, they are frozen.  Now, the app is saying that it will only be 20 tomorrow and I bet by the time tomorrow comes it will be lower still.

When we go out to take care of the animals, we prioritize and do the most important jobs first, food and water…poop can wait, and since we are feeding everybody more, there is plenty of frozen poop.  It is true, your nose hairs can freeze.  I come back inside when my hands hurt too much from the cold.

We are planning on a bug reduced summer, as these temperatures apparently do them in.  Now, that is a silver lining.  As I write this, it is starting to snow, which is always pretty and it means, that things are warming up!

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

Stay warm my friends!

Yesterday, I was touched by a truth.

My Librarian shared with the kids, that 49 of our 50 states currently had snow on the ground.  The only state that did not have snow?  Florida!  My Loving Spouse has not been handling this winter cold snap all that well, in fact he keeps going around the house, muttering….Florida, Florida, Florida.  I personally do not find it funny…not at all.

Everyone it seems has snow.  We are in this together.I was working with a little guy the other day at school.  He is anxious to learn, always has a smile, and thinks school is great.  There is lots of room for his family circumstance to be better.  I noticed his hands.  They were horrible.  One hand was rough, dry and red, the other was rough, and cut all across the knuckles.  It hurt to look at these little hands affected by this cold, dry weather.  The school nurse did what he could…

Quite a few of our kids eat two meals a day at school.  There was a caring group who worried about what these kids ate all weekend.  They started a weekly  program that sends home a bag of healthy snacks for these kiddos each Friday.

I quickly began to wonder, if we couldn’t find a way to send some hand lotion, in these bags at least once.  I told my friends who pack the snacks about my concern.  One of these good souls, went to the local Pharmacy and got some special test bottles of extra protective lotion especially for this little guy and his sister.

We have another 107 bags to get some hand lotion into.  I didn’t think it would be that hard, we just needed to put the word out.  After all…how many of us have those hand lotion samples from various travels sitting in our bathroom drawers.  One announcement at church and the little lotions are rolling in.

I am practical enough to know, that getting the lotion into the hands (pun totally intended) that need it, does not guarantee that it will help.  My hope is just that it will at least help some…

I took the special protective lotion to the teacher for the little boy and girl, whose hands were so bad.  As I gave her the lotion, I must have expressed my concern, that the effort would not make much of a difference.  She said,

“Sometimes the acts of caring for them is enough.”

The ‘acts of caring‘…

..and I am blessed, and as my mentor has told me many times,

We are blessed to be a blessing.

It is winter and it is cold.  We are living in a multi-climate house.  It is very exciting.  No, that is a lie, it is crazy.  My goal (eventually) is for this home to often/usually/mostly be the same temperature (livable), give or take a few degrees in all the rooms.  Right now, it is a tad…chilly…but, not everywhere.  The family room and kitchen are toasty warm.  The bedrooms are reasonably comfortable with heaters and electric blankets.  The living room is a tad chilly.  The sewing room downright cold and the pantry is freezing!  Going from room to room…is…crazy.  Each morning My Loving Spouse or I fetch coffee for one another.  We adorn ourselves in slippers and robe for the journey to the kitchen.  My Loving Spouse wears all that stuff, because he is British.  I wear all that stuff, because I don’t want to freeze.

How cold is it?This was today’s single digit, when I went out to feed the animals.  The important part is the wind, catch the ‘feels’ like temperature.I fed the horses, put them out and cleaned their stalls.  I have learned it is easier to do this right after the horses have been in their stalls and everything is still ‘warm’.  Scooping up soggy hay is easier before it freezes to the barn floor.  The ‘road apples’ (horse poop) on the other hand seems to work the other way, once it is frozen, that poop just rolls around like marbles on a tin roof.

I was then off to school.  School is never canceled and certainly not for cold weather.  Recess in the country is a beautiful thing.  The playground is huge and the kids have plenty of play time.  The weather?  Handled with age-old common sense.

Wind?

Go outside and play, you’ll be fine.

Snow?

Go outside and play, you’ll be fine.

Rain?

Go outside and play, you’ll be fine…and you, kindergarteners do not stand under rain gutter down spouts.

Cold weather, single digits as we had this morning?

We do not send them outside, don’t be silly.  We wait until it warms up.

15 degrees?

Go outside and play, you’ll be fine.

…and they were and always are, and we are as well.

A year in review?  I don’t think so!

However, as I do reflect on this year, I cannot help, but be gratefully amazed at our two biggest life events of 2016, the accident and the kids.

My Loving Spouse’s accident will always be a few seconds, where time stopped still for me.  Seeing him hit with that chainsaw…thinking I’d witnessed his death, we both have scars from that day…and an awful lot of gratitude, because it could have been so different.

Our ‘other’ kids, Mr. T and Z are embedded in our hearts.  We have transitioned to being their ‘Grammy and PaPaPat’ and how we love them so…

We see our kids on Sundays and sit all together in church.  Mr. T runs with open arms to be scooped up into our own, and let’s just say, we never think twice about going to church.

The best blessing is that the kids are doing great.  Their mom is not well, and it would seem, that this situation will not change, but for these two, at least, they are loved, they are safe, they are being given the best chance at a healthy life, with ‘foster’ parents that love them and provide positive role models for a different life, and for this and so much more, we are grateful.

Mr. T and Z and their new big sister M come often to the farm on Sundays for pancakes after church.My Loving Spouse and I revel in how well they are doing and to be honest, we love how much they love us.

Mr. T likes everything to be exactly the same every time.  The train comes out, the books are read and the toys are played with.We are happy to oblige and be a consistent part of his life.We never knew, when we started walking alongside these little ones, where it would lead…but God has been faithful….

and we are blessed.

Happy New Year to you all.

At the risk of making the rest of you jealous, we/I/Glory Farm has the best Christmas tree ever this year.

One year when Team Offspring was young (ages 5, 7, & 10), my good friend was doing deep sighs about Christmas.

“The hard part”, she said, “Is that it is all up to me, up to me to create all the magic.”  She had her own Team Offspring, with similar ages to mine.  

‘Don’t your kids give presents to each other?’ I asked.  “That is my favorite part of Christmas, when I hear my kids saying to each other, “Wait, open the one I gave you.”

“Well, they don’t really have any money”, she said.  (You should know that she and her husband were doctors, so they did have some flexibility in their budget.)

I like to hope, that I said this next part kindly, but I am aware, that sometimes we all have selective memory.

“Well, a Beanie Baby is only $5.00, give them some chores to do, so they can earn some Christmas money”….and so she did and so they did and they had the best Christmas ever and lived happily ever after…or something like it.

That is still my favorite part of Christmas, that and singing in church with them.  Sharing the magic and sharing the work that can come with the Christmas season, which is why we have the best Christmas tree ever!  We have had trees that had a few more needles.  We’ve had trees that fit in the room a bit better, this is our first wall to wall tree.  We’ve had more expensive trees.  We’ve had a lot of trees that fall down, but we’ve never had a tree that Number Two Son and My Girl went off to procure together, to help, to surprise us and to be part of the magic/work that is Christmas…and I love it.I hope you find joy in the magic/work that is Christmas…and I am blessed.

My Loving Spouse got another new knee for Christmas.  The title of this post is sort of a lie, because we still do not have a Christmas tree.  However, Team Offspring has plans to rectify this situation today (12-16-2016).  They have a tree permit and are going to cut one down, which is very cool.  No, wait, it might be very cold, the weather today is calling for single digits.  Single digit weather for Christmas tree foraging for two Southern California born kids.  Team Offspring has acclimated!

The great news is that My Loving Spouse did get another new knee. He now has very few original parts left, luckily his sense of humor remains intact.  After the quantity of Bad British words uttered (by me), when he got the right knee replaced, I insisted that he find a different surgeon for this left knee.

I had one day to get the new Christmas lights we ordered for the house up before we left for THE OTHER New Knee.  The lights were going to be great.  LED, one long string, clear wiring….one long string, no really, one really long string.  Note to self:  put up lights in the Spring, do a great job and leave them up forever.  No sane Washingtonian puts up Christmas lights after it has snowed.  Check my birth certificate, it does say…Pasadena, California.  I could have skipped the lights, but darn it, I wanted them up.  I wanted something to signify that we were not Grinches, we were just behind!

Number Two Son offered to help me, I think because he likes Christmas lights, or he likes me or because he didn’t want to drive me to the hospital, if I fell of the roof.  We opted to leave out the highest roof line and safely started to string the lights on the hooks we’d put in place a few years before.  Shoes on roofs with snow are slippery, socks, however, stick pretty well, yes, my feet were cold!  Number Two improvised a light installing tool with a broom handle and a cup hook.  Before we knew it, we had the scary part up, next we just needed to run the lights along the first story.  The weather on this day was about 23 (cold degrees).  We did take a few short cuts putting in the cup hooks, because the darn things did not want to screw into the cold house, so the first story lighting is not as straight and taunt as I’d like, but they are up, they are on and no one got hurt.  We will redo the whole thing properly this spring or at least this summer, for sure by fall, but never again in winter.  I love that we are lit up, even if we do have a glowing ball of light in the right corner of the porch where the other multiple hundreds of feet of lights remain waiting to be strung.As far as the other New Knee, it went extremely well.  The surgeon was spectacular, My Loving Spouse, had a spinal block and will happily tell you how he could hear the procedure being done, if you have a strong stomach.  My Cousins were a blessing as they came and took me to lunch and sat with me during the procedure.  The hospital was stellar, relieving my early doubts when I saw that it was surrounded by cemeteries.

We are home, he is well, the house is lit up and Team Offspring is back with a tree, and I am blessed.

The last 6-8 weeks have been our ‘busy season’.  This is what I tell myself.  It helps me to make sense of our reality, that while some of you on this second weekend in December, have Christmas trees and Christmas lights, we have pumpkins on the porch covered in snow.

We’ve been sewing and sawing and creating.Making clocks out of packer wheels, art from old windows, gift baskets from old fabric and nativities from old wood.Pillows, quilts and bunting…We had the second annual Homespun Holiday Bazaar here the Saturday after Thanksgiving.With the house filled with friends selling their creations, the day was a resounding success!  It is such a powerful affirmation, that people not only like what you’ve created, but that they purchase your creations.    My Loving Spouse and I were practically sold out.

We needed to get busy (again) to make our commitment to the Cave B winery, where we had agreed to be a vendor at their Holiday Bazaar.

So the sewing room, got messy…er, messier.   Our kitchen table got full…As we worked toward creating…and re-creating….Sewing more pillows, truck quilts and wine bags…

Our booth is hard to see…because of the glare…from the snow!It is always a good news, bad news situation with bazaar’s at wineries.  The good news is that the guests might drink a bit and buy a lot…or they might drink a bit and buy nothing, because they are busy buying wine, and really who can blame them, even when there is a really fabulous Christmas truck quilt, that they could be buying since they had admired it so.

The day was not actually what we’d hoped, or maybe we ‘over imagined’ our potential.  In other words, it was not heavy on sales, we are sort of ahead now for next year.  My Girl and I did have a fun day together and when you are at a winery, eventually someone gives you some wine, because…that is just what they do!

We are officially creatively pooped.

Maybe tomorrow, I’ll do something about those pumpkins.

We’ve spent plenty of time upgrading, restoring and cleaning our wonderful old barn.  My Loving Spouse has now added new function for the old space and our two old boys are very happy about the upgrade.Our horses are not young, sort of like us and winter can be hard on them.  Unlike us, they can easily loose weight in the cold winter months.  My Loving Spouse wanted to bring them in each night, so he set about making stalls for each horse.He managed to find lumber that matched the style of the barn and built the new stalls out of beautiful long planks.  He used EMT to create see through spaces for each horse.  Beau and SunDance can see each other, but not bite each other, which can be known to happen.He moved a bit of wiring, built a few doors, made mangers, added some straw and before I knew it, our horses were ready to spend the night indoors.The horses quickly got the hang of their new routine.  We fill their mangers at night in each stall, open the barn door and stand back as each horse makes their way to their new bedroom.  We can keep a better eye on each horse through out the winter, knowing exactly how much they are getting to eat and that each one can eat at their own pace.The barn looks so good and the horses are quite content with the new arrangement.

Beau and SunDance…every nag should be so happy.

Dear BJ,

Do you remember the wonderful quilting pattern book you sent me?  Oh, I am sure you do.  You probably don’t know, that I do not usually follow patterns or instructions or directions…but I just, love that book!  That gal with a Bee in her bonnet, sure is creative.

I used that book a lot this summer.  When I was lonely and wanted/needed to sew, while My Loving Spouse gone.  It was wonderful.  That farm girl gave me some good ideas, especially when I did not have enough cowboy fabric to make a cowboy quilt, but I just needed to use it!It gave me a place to jump off of and try something new and this quilt came out, well, if I do say so myself, pretty darn nice.We both know, that I have a thing for pumpkins, but that doesn’t mean I can sew one…or two.  The book was just the thing!I even leapt into a house quilt, because of the book.  Some of my houses were the wrong colors, so I took the ‘good’ ones and made a table runner with them, which is sort of cool.So, in closing, I just want to say, thank you again.  I love that book.  Even I can sometimes follow directions!

Thank you, for blessing me!