Snippets

Life with a new baby is mostly a blur, but there are many bright little moments too. Thank you, cameras, for freezing time for us so we can hang on to these for a little while.

Hermione is still tiny and precious. You'd think after five children we'd be getting tired of all this baby care, but honestly, I think it just gets sweeter. In fact, when I look back to how stressed out we were parenting our first child, I'd even venture to say that it's easier now.

Pause, to separate two screaming hellions, respectfully ask two children to return to their room for quiet reading time, and nurse starving infant.

Maybe not. 

I think that if you learn anything after 11 years, it's that time whooshes by too quickly. I'm even savouring (maybe more like toughing) the sleepless nights, knowing that all too soon Mio won't even want to cuddle any more. Rafe has already gone on strike. No more baby. Not even pats on the head. He is so cute yet so dignified, we're hard put to treat him with graveness...

I think we've permanently damaged his ego by pretending not hear him when he asks for a haircut. (This winter, Rafey, not yet...) I just can't bring myself to put scissors into his curls! Could you?

We have started home schooling again. What a monkey circus! Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing more harm than good. But Will is very encouraging, always pointing out that we have happy children. When I fret about the academics moving at a snail's pace, that is precisely the moment that a child comes to me and says, Hey mom, I'm memorizing the Periodic Table, or beg me to please, please read History to him! Or after months of fighting over math lessons, to find that a child can effortlessly calculate in real life. Then Will and I look at each other knowingly, as if to say, Don't you dare let on that this is educational! 

Will is writing his thesis proposal and cutting and stacking the winter's firewood, planning our fall renovations. (Our finances come and go in big chunks, so as soon as the student loans come in it's GO TIME). 

Real home schooling, not just pretending that creative play and all-day art is an academic achievement!

The last precious photos of Matthias pre-haircut and the first of the firewood.

Cozy log house..

Winter soon! We're learning to roll with the seasons. To acknowledge the glory of the present moment. To breathe deep when the chaos overwhelms us.

My winter's project is: learn to be a good house keeper and cut down on chaos. It's only taken eleven years and five children to realize that good housekeeping is possible, just counter-intuitive (for me). But it's never too late.

I've decided that the first step is to give away everybody else's stuff.

My other winter's project: re-visit the Plays of Shakespeare. I'm starting with Winter's Tale because there's a character named Hermione.

And speaking of Hermione...


Swoon! Sweet baby, I love you so much my heart will burst!

Hermione

Hermione Anna Marigold

8 lb 8 oz

Born safely at home, in the water,

July 10, 2015

All is so very well!

While We Wait

Oh, the making and doing, crafting and cleaning that's going on here! It's like the whole family has caught my nesting fever. I am ten days overdue, but not for lack of trying.

New lovely creations for new baby....

New skills....

New shelves....(thank you Will! Successfully crossed off list)

New chin-up bar....(this one must have been on Will's list)

Reaching it is a bit of a problem for the short people. Will basically has to hold them because even if they can do pull-ups on the monkey bars at the park, I have this rule about not falling to your death here. Not in my living room. Not before the baby comes.

New hammock...

Eeek! So exciting! This one I made myself. Seafaring Uncle and Auntie sent me a beautiful hammock from New Zealand when Raphael was born. (It's hanging in the living room) But I wanted an upstairs and a downstairs hammock. So after some reading online (there are lots of pictures of finished products, but very few instructions anywhere), studying it by eyeball, and a trip to the fabric store (3 yards of sturdy cotton) and the hardware store  (a spring, a ring, a carabiner, and a ring bolt for ceiling), I made a supersize one for our bedroom. 

I couldn't really find any step-by-step instructions online (best one is here), so I plan to make another one in the near future as a detailed tutorial. I'll make a page for it here on flying squirrel for anyone who's interested.

Yoga Chick

 We have adopted some chicks which cruel Mother Nature orphaned on our farm. I'm having a hard time not anthropomorphizing our animals, remembering they might only live a short while. Still, with such soothing company as Will doing yoga (I literally stumbled upon this scene in the early morning light....quiet music, forward stretch, chick...)

...and the tenderest love from a doting almost-four-year-old, 

and some knitted company...

...they might be with us for a while!

On Pentecost

Blessed art You O Christ Our God

You have revealed the fishermen as most wise

By sending down upon them the Holy Spirit

Through them You drew the world into Your net

O Lover of Man, Glory to You!

                       - Troparion for Pentecost

Little fishes

 This was a little project I made for Rafe. All our children love the fishing game ubiquitous at outdoor play parties...you know, the little plastic rod and magnetic sea creatures in the kiddie pool. My older kids willingly line up with the toddlers to get their turn. We've gone through a few crappy little sets from the dollar-store, and always ended sweeping them into the bin.

Oh the plastic, all that plastic!

So I made some fabric fishes for Raphael for Christmas. Amazingly, they've lasted almost six months. They are lightly padded with cotton batting and quilted with a few large stitches of embroidery thread. A little magnet sits in it's nose, held in by a few stitches.

It keeps everyone busy on a rainy afternoon.

Will's Work

Last year, before doctoral studies got intense, Will started the Hippie Heretic blog for his farming and creative enterprises. Alas he wasn't able to keep it up. So here I am showing off some of the lovely things he's making and doing.

Barn wood seedling boxes. Aren't they beautiful?

I confess I am very covetous and hopeful (Will, are you reading?) that someday I will have a collection of my own. Will made them deep for establishing strong root systems and carved handles on the side. They are stackable. How awesome is that?

This whole farming thing was 100% Will's project. I get to have all the fun of a farm, like visiting the miniature roosters and taking pictures of pretty things, without doing any of the work. (I do wash quite a lot of milk jars though.)

Beautiful deep garden beds being mulched....We beat blackfly season this year (yes!) and we had gardening goddess Angela here to help...

Angela is now off to England to work at a L'Arche community in London, and then off for a wwoofing adventure throughout the British Isles.

Oh she will be so missed!

Will also did our first large-animal butchering on the farm. We all had mixed feelings about it. Will spent a quiet and sombre day preparing. We gave the children the choice of staying to watch or going away with mama. I was prepared to nudge them away, but they had already decided, wisely, not to watch the slaughter. Our goat was dispatched as humanely and quickly as possible, but like all our animals it was named and known and loved personally. It would have been too sad for the boys.

However, once the goat was skinned and looking like meat instead of a living animal, they were all over the butchering. And I'm OK with that. They are carnivores after all.

As parents, the best we can do is teach them to be responsible and gentle with animals in life, humane in death.

Will carved a thing. (Gambrel?) You hang carcasses on it. It's all very grim, but I'm in love with the fact that he carved it.

So you just take your freshly-slaughtered carcass, cut a slit in the tendons and insert these points, here. Then you take your skinning knife...hey where'd everyone go?

The final stages. Sanitized version.

All gory butcher scenes have been removed. The final stages were quick and skillful. Will's father was a butcher (among other trades) and all the Pembertons seem to have a special affinity with knives and meat. Will sharpened up our kitchen knives and made short work of cutting and wrapping. I definitely have a new respect for meat. I wasn't expecting it all to mean so much: my gratitude for the life of this animal, for the work of my husband and the little hands that cared for it, for the skill and labour that went into processing it, and quite simply, the sacrifice of a life so we can eat. I am humbled.

The boys were all over it, helping where they could, watching everything, soaking it up. They asked for, and got, the hide which Willy salted and stretched. Not before the dogs got it, though, which turned it into the Wiley Coyote Roadkill pelt. The boys want it for a rug. Oh dear.

Our neighbours who are Real Farmers find it very amusing

This ramshackle place is slowly being cleaned up, scythed down, raked up, rebuilt. Slowly. The discovery of the year was a MINE of topsoil. Also the discovery that all the weeds and brambles Will scythed last year have proved an effective deep mulch for this year's garden. The worms came up but not the weeds. Will dug a new garden behind the barns for his experimental crops....amaranth, quinoa, kamut, lentils, blue corn, chick peas.

And below: kids work! I came outside to find this cooperative effort going on. They have repurposed one of Will's chicken coops into an Iroquois lodge. Off to the woods. (I was never such a big fan of binder twine and chicken wire architecture, practical as it is. I felt embarrassed every time I looked at it.) It is now waiting in the woods for bough and bark cladding.

The best part was the sea chanties they were singing. Our kids are big fans of the movie Master and Commander and know all the songs.

And speaking of the Far Side of the World, my sister Elizabeth is doing a sailing voyage from New Zealand to Tonga, along with seafaring Uncle and Aunt. She is blogging about it here.