last moments (and makings, and some other things too…)

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Our first day in this house (I mean that house!) seven years ago was on Chessa's birthday, we crossed the state line back into Colorado the day she turned 3 years old. And now she is ten, and her birthday celebration also marked the last days of our being in that house.

Hey, ha, we could pretend I actually got around to doing a "feeding our families" post this month. And I was going to write all about birthday cake. (No, not really.) It was a very good birthday cake, lemon with strawberry layers and lots of whipped cream.

Somehow I thought it was a good idea, in the midst of packing, cleaning, and moving, to make Chessa a doll for her birthday. There was an old doll at the antique shop that she had been quite in love with for some time. I did contemplate getting it for her if it was still there, but getting myself secretly to the antique shop would have been much more challenging than secretly stitching on this doll in the wee early morning hours.

Also, and I know this sounds kinda weird, but I had this doll head stashed away from a few years ago, and I just knew that Chessa was the one meant to love whoever this doll (head) was meant to be.

So with bald doll head already done, I started working on my first ever jointed limb doll, which was also my first ever boy doll. I don't know why I was always so intimidated with making boy dolls, especially with a simple crochet cap for his hair, it was fairly easy and fun.

I wasn't up for making a set of doll clothes though (I mean, I would have liked to, but with the whole moving out of the house thing going on, well I was trying to pretend that I wasn't really all that crazy with my last-minute doll making…) So we had Aunt Nicole get "boughten" doll clothes instead, which does have the slightly strange effect of making him look like a boughten doll, but no, he is not, he is a handmade by mama doll. His name is Billy, he is already smudged and a bit worn and very, very loved.

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Moving was hard. That could probably go without saying, as it is never an easy thing to do. But gosh, could we have added more ways to complicate it? Let's add in a bit of remodeling, new bedroom floors, lots of painting. Oh, and becoming landlords for the first time, showing the house, trying to find ourselves some good tenants - that was all super not fun, but fortunately worked out well in the end.

Jason, amazing husband of mine, worked so, so hard, and did just about every single thing by himself. I recall helping move out my super heavy bulky antique sewing (secretary) desk, but other than that he was the mover. I guess he got all the other big heavy antique furniture pieces out on his own, including the second desk. I do wonder how he moved the chest freezer by himself. Hmm. I was the packer. And I kind of drove Jason crazy with my method, but wow, you would not believe how well organized and labeled those boxes and dresser drawers are. (I will explain later why it was important to have well organized and packed dresser drawers.)

Now we are gone from there, that house. And being gone makes me even more aware of how much trauma we suffered there. Seriously. I know I said I was going to mention it only once, but it is going to take a while to get over it. To heal. We were under attack, for so many years. You know what it was? It was bullying. Ugly, pathetic, bullying by ugly, miserable people. (Don't worry, we feel that the house tenants will be safe from these people.)

Something else that really disturbs me is that when I came out and mentioned the situation we had been dealing with here, so many other people left comments and sent emails that they too are in or have been in similar situations. Lots of bullies out there! Why??? Are those of us who choose to live in a way different than the norm so threatening to others that we must be attacked and made to suffer for our choices? We don't go around criticizing them for their (over-consuming, toxic, ignorant living) ways. But I guess all of us happy people living an authentic meaningful life are just to much for these other people to take.

Oh well.

Time to move on.

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We are so, so, so ready to be settling in at the land. But we are actually not quite there yet. We had been asked to house-sit for friends traveling in Europe and so that is where we have been since the beginning of the month. We are glad to be here at our friends home, it is a happy peaceful place, filled with musical instruments, including a piano! which the girls love to play, good books, including Steiner, Waldorf, and homeschool books!, and set in what certainly must be one of the most beautiful spots in the world (we stayed here for them last summer also, you can see here what it looks like right outside their door, although those photos don't show any of the majestic peaks of the continental divide that are surrounding us.) It is kind of funny for us to be house-sitters, and staying in a home other than ours. Us who haven't even been away from home but maybe once in the past decade. It is a nice place to be though, and we enjoy helping care for their gardens and animals, which this year also includes chickens.

It has kept us from doing that settling over at the land though. These kind friends are now closer neighbors, but still it at least a 20 minute drive over to the land. (Perhaps I should start calling it "our home" rather than "the land".) We have been spent some good days there working on the gardens, as that is of course our priority at the moment, and we are looking forward to being there permanently in another week or so.

Maybe I will come here and write/post lots over this next week while I have such convenient internet access. Although that was kind of my plan for our first weeks here and obviously that didn't happen.

Sometimes life does not go as planned. I bet you all already know that.

But life does go on, perhaps the plan is not entirely ours to make, but we can always make the best of it.

I hope you all have been having some good and beauty filled days!

With love,
Renee


P.S. Oh wait! I forgot to say… well there you see my darling newly 10 year old, and no, you sure do not get even a peek of the nearly 14!!! year old… but look at sweet little baby playing with the dollies! And she was doing the softly murmuring to herself thing as she played, and my heart was thrilled!

P.P.S. Yes, she toddles, she walks and she runs, but still she is our "baby".

(Okay, beyond P.S.'s now. I didn't get this posted last week as I had planned. I find it interesting that my last post included our dear wonderful Cairo dog. And now she is not with us anymore. Many sad hearts. But she was almost 18 years and the sweetest and happiest thing to her very last moments. Our Cairo love…)


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house. home. land.

..

And so now I suppose I shall have to go ahead and tell the story, except that I am still kind of unsure of  sharing it. Not all of the parts were happy, and actually this is really only just a speck of the story.

Sometimes it's easier to just not say anything, and in some ways that's what I've done with this blog over the years. Anything you see and read here is truth and real, but that doesn't mean it's everything.

I want to get this part out of the way so that we can move on to more of the good stuff, and also because I think it will allow me to go further here with more of the story, whether happy and beautiful or not. (Thankfully I know there will be a whole lot of goodness, happiness, and beauty. It's always part of it.)

So like I said, pencil and paper. I wrote this last week. I made brief mention of it here. It's my little way of tricking/forcing myself to get something done. Now I have no choice, so I'll just get on with it…


Home is not necessarily in a house. We have done very well at creating a home for our family within the walls of this house. Especially if you consider some of the difficulties and sadnesses that we have had to go through while being here.

Sometimes we joke that we accidentally bought a house. (And sometimes it is so not funny.)

Always, from the beginning, Jason and I barely past 20 years old, we were going to buy "our land". That is a whole story and dream itself, it is part of who we have always been. (Once we were even going to wait to get married until we were on our own land, and have our babies on our own land. That was about 1998, and lasted until about 1999. It's a really good thing we didn't wait!)

So it really was odd that instead of buying land we bought a house on only a ¼ of an acre in a rural mountain subdivision. Oh my gosh, sometimes it is hard to not feel some regret at not having bought the land right then. But we were faced with a move back to Colorado and somewhat overwhelmed with the need to find a home for us, our children, our pets. It kind of seemed like we needed a house. (For us that feels like such a silly thing to say!) So we would stay in the house for a couple or few years and then buy land.

Hmmm... I think I have shown and shared pretty well of the happinesses that we have had here, and I of course have been grateful about a billion times that we have a home, safe shelter, at all… but oh! has this been a hard seven years!!!
(Yes, here we are now seven years into it, not just a few…)
Good, great, beautiful, wonderful years, but also a lot more than that. Also a great big gigantic struggle.

(Okay, this is the one and only time I am going to mention this here, but the worst of it is that there have been very unkind people in our world since moving into this house. And unkind is not even close to the correct word. Really really really really mean, and that too is not even close to an accurate description. But I have never wanted to bring that ugliness here. It is not what we choose for our life, our world. We just unfortunately got accidentally stuck living right next door to it.)

Yuck. Okay. That's over.

(Also I will say, it's not like I have kept this a secret. Those closest to us know the story well, including some of my dearest blog friends. Melanie, Jules, Lisa, Tonya, Jeanene, thank you for your friendship and sharing and understanding and ability to somehow really know me.)


The good part of the story continues…

The land dream, the land dream, the land dream.
It is still not over, someday we will get our "big land", but for now we finally have our own few acres.
Our own little mountain, our own forest, our own giant fir tree.
It is our home, and we are headed there right now…


(Some peeks from last year at the land here, and here, and here…)


Thank you for letting me share our stories with you!!!



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january daybook...

FOR TODAY

Outside my window…   Snow finally falling, gently, and only sometimes, but maybe more soon…

I am thinking…   That it is kind of strange to be doing this in the middle of the day, and I do want to get to my knitting. Not that I am letting myself be rushed. I guess it is probably because Elsa is napping and I of course feel like she could wake any moment…

I am thankful…

yes…

In the kitchen…   baked bread this morning that wasn't our usual recipe

I am wearing…   light green/cream plaid top (I have actually made two shirts from this fabric over the years) and the brown/green vintage fabric wrap skirt I sewed myself for my birthday a few years ago. I wonder if I am always wearing something plaid when I do these posts…

I am creating…   so many things in my mind, you know, like a list of all the things I want to/hopefully will make some day… never-ending sewing, pretty things for home, and necessities, clothing for children, warm woolens, tidy corners. I get bits of all these things done, there is some progress, the list will always grow, I like all these things very much...

I am going…   Staying home at the moment. We were all out twice last week, which is quite a lot for winter. It was nice though. A day at the land. A small visit with a friend another day.

I am wondering…   What my bigger girls are doing. And I think it probably has something to do with music. And perhaps scissors and fabric or pencils and paper on the side… 

I am reading…   Bedtime story with Chessa every night, while getting Elsa settled to nursing and sleep.

I am hoping…   I mentioned it in my last post… I am hoping lots of snow comes soon, all of February would be just fine, and not too much in March or April please… (I keep trying to be polite about it…)

I am looking forward to…

So many things.

I am learning

to be the mother of a teenage daughter.

Around the house…

Elsa. One year olds very much get around the house.

I am pondering…

while I knit, and many other times of the day. It is one of my favorite things to do.

A favorite quote for today…

Tonya shared a passage from Martin Luther King, Jr. earlier in the month, which Jason and I read together, ending with…

"The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood.  The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious freedom have always been nonconformists.  ...... In his essay "Self-Reliance" Emerson wrote, "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist."  The Apostle Paul reminds us that whoso would be a Christian must also be a nonconformist.  Any Christian who blindly accepts the opinions of the majority and in fear and timidity follows a path of expediency and social approval is a mental and spiritual slave."

You could also just take that Emerson part and call it a favorite.

One of my favorite things…   

Well now Chloe is here so I can't concentrate so much. But hey, she is one of my favorite things!

A few plans for the rest of the week:

Brigid's day! Candlemas!

A peek into my day…   I had these photos collected already. I wasn't really planning on doing this Simple Daybook post right now, but had recently been thinking of trying again to do it throughout a whole year. And now here we are at the very end of January! So...

Moments with Elsa...

 

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belated 2013 moments...

 ..

My chivalrous husband rescued my ball of yarn as it went tumbling down the mountain!

There was one night last year… into bed early with just the girls, baby nursed to sleep, bedtime story over, and then the quiet talking began…

Two hours of wishes, dreams, hopes for the future.

We talked of  land (the little land we have now and the big land that is still out there somewhere waiting for us), midwifery (a passion that has been slightly replaced by cowgirl dreams at the moment), having a dozen children (or maybe just six), santa claus (does he ever keep bringing gifts to adults?), off-grid living (we don't refer to it as that, but eldest intends to have no electricity in her home (cabin) when she grows up, and those 6-12 children will be using an outhouse…)

We talked about homeschooling (they want me to help waldorf homeschool their children), holidays, family traditions… on Sunday's they will send their own girls over to my (grandma's!) house (it is just along a path through the forest) so I can brush and braid their hair. (Okay!!!)

We talked about 100 or 1000 other things it seems, all that just so warmed my heart and made me sigh with (almost) disbelief at how amazingly awesome and wonderful my girls are!!!

I want to remember that night forever…


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knitting priorities and taking care of self

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Hello dear friends (and other random nice people who visit me here)… I hope you have all been enjoying these days of christmastime and ending of the year…

And now to the beginning of this happy new year!

I decided a few months ago, as the days began to get colder, that knitting had to be more of a priority. There are all these homestead chores and tasks we do, daily cooking, baking, gardening and producing our own food, clothing our family. Clothing our children! I have always made most of the girls' clothing, even much of my own, (hardly anything for dear husband, but trying/planning to be better at that). And in recent years, being able to add warm knitted woolens to the list of what we are able to make for ourselves, well that has been really great! (I had been knitting for so so many years, but never sweaters. And I have such a love of cardigans you know… (I mean, some of you know…))

So yeah, we live it the mountains, can be cold in any season, baby's pants were not at all long enough anymore, and I needed to do lots more knitting. It was okay to sit down and knit. I wasn't sitting knitting doing nothing, getting things done in the kitchen is not always more important, or at the least could occasionally be considered equally important. It's been going pretty well. (Except for a recent week when a much needed ball of yarn was missing,  but all is well again.) I am almost finished with the first leg of a second pair of pants for Elsa, and I think I am going to make good progress on the next leg too, and I think these pants are going to be very lovely on her…



I was talking on the telephone to a friend a few days ago and she was asking me how I was feeling, physically and emotionally, in a fairly detailed kind of way. A sudden random leg muscle injury has us trying to figure out what might be going on and wanting to make sure that I am as healthy as can be.

So I told her, well yes, I am very emotional, but that is nothing new. I am not at all depressed, not even when I'm sad, not even when I'm an emotional wreck. I'm an exceptionally happy melancholic person really ;)

And we talked about how well I am taking care of myself. And my honest answer ranges somewhere between just fine and not at all.

I told her that I am trying to get extra rest, so I'm making sure I sleep in and stay in bed until 5am. (This is a huge improvement over 4am rising! And don't worry, I go to bed very early…)

And I told her that I am not eating well enough. I am eating good food, but not enough of it, because when there isn't quite enough food then I give more to everyone else and take much less for myself.

And I told her that I have probably been doing too much around the house. Because rather than ask for help, that is sometimes met with grumbling or arguing about who should have to help, then I am just doing it all myself.

And my friend told me that it all sounded very familiar to her. And I'm afraid it may sound familiar to many of you too!

My dear wonderful mother friends, we must take good care of ourselves!

We put our families first, and I cannot say that that is incorrect, it feels absolutely right to me. But, if we are not taking proper care of ourselves then we cannot take proper care of our families.

Following a pregnancy filled with constant nausea and puking, it was really easy to feel great after that! And just go, go, go. And sometimes it seems like that works just fine. But it is obviously not a good long term plan.

So please, take good care, rest well, feed your body good food, feed your soul, your creativity, your imagination. Do all you these things for yourself, not just for your children.

Please. Thank you.
Happy day and happy new year to all!!!
With love, Renee


p.s. linking to one of my wonderful mama blog friends, lovely Ginny.


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notes from the weekend...

 ..

... accompanied by those way too many baby pictures I mentioned the other day.
(Because Mel and Jules encouraged me.) (But I already knew they would want to see them...)
(And also just cause, just for us.)

On Saturday morning Jason and the girls went to town to do our errands and pick up our raw milk. At about the time I was expecting them home, they called to say they were delayed. They had to make an unexpected stop, but they would be home soon, and they had a big surprise. I was unable to think of what it could be, for about 2 seconds, and then I realized that they must have found some apple trees.

Apples, apples, apples!!! I nearly danced around the house with Elsa, happily singing apple songs, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the harvest.

There was only a brief moment when I let my enthusiasm dampen, realizing that I could be wrong, and maybe there weren't any apples.

But oh yes, apples apples apples!

Hmm.. You would think I might have some lovely apple photos to share...

You might also think that Sunday was a day full of apple chopping, saucing, etc...
But no, it was not.
I guess it had something to do with scissors, needle, thread. Fabric, sewing machines. Things like that.
Thank goodness apples don't turn as quickly as peaches.
(Did I even mention this year's visit to the abandoned peach orchard?)

Looks like today will be filled with a little bit of homeschool lesson time and a whole lot of apples.
Hopefully there will still be some moments for handwork.

Wishing you all a happy week ahead!

p.s. Babies sitting on top of tables is not very safe. But it is pretty cute. And apparently quite fun for baby.



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