Ordinary Time

This week hasn't been nearly as productive as last week was, so I'm not sure what I'll have to share. The lack of productivity was not due to the fact that we were back to having six children at home, but because of the heat. Well, the heat and the fact that our air conditioning has stopped working. We're pretty sure that the system is as old as the house which makes it forty years old. And having just had to buy a car and are scrounging enough money to pay the upcoming property taxes, there is absolutely nothing left to fix the air conditioning. It's been a lot of sitting very still. Well, those with a new PS5 have been sitting still while working a controller. It's pretty much been the ideal scenario for having a new gaming system because there really very little else for them to do.  Yesterday, J. drive K. to Iowa for him to stay with my brother for a couple of weeks. K. really likes cows in theory and now he'll get to see if he likes them in reality. Th

I came across this poem this morning. It seemed to fit well with my post from Tuesday . And I really like Mary Oliver.  Invitation by Mary Oliver Oh do you have time          to linger                    for just a little while                              out of your busy and very important day          for the goldfinches                    that have gathered                              in a field of thistles for a musical battle,          to see who can sing                    the highest note, or the most expressive of mirth,          or the most tender?                    Their strong, blunt beaks                              drink the air as they strive          melodiously                    not for your sake                              and not for mine and not for the sake of winning          but for sheer delight and gratitude --                    believe us, they say,                              it is a very serious thing just to be alive          on this fresh morning   

Nineteen years ago J. and I had five children and drove a smaller minivan. With three children in car seats, the van was extremely crowded. It was also at this point that we started to seriously think about adoption. Our car situation was one of the problematic things to figure out. There was literally no room for another child.  Enter my mother-in-law. She knew our small van was a tight fit even without another child. Having had full-sized vans for years, she loved them and knew how useful they were. So she and J. went looking at vans. (I don't go car shopping. I bought my first car after college and swore off the activity afterwards.) They found a new 15-passenger van. I was not excited. It was huge! How on earth was I going to navigate that boat through the narrow streets of Evanston and Chicago? It was just too big. And fifteen passengers?? Why did we need so many extra seats?  I was eventually worn down and resigned myself to driving a vehicle just a few feet shorter than a se

I came across this phrase as I was doing research for my action research project and I was immediately taken with the phrase. It's so accurate, isn't it, as to how most people feel these days; they are literally starving for time. I'm convinced, though, that what people are actually starving for is unstructured time. Space to pause and think and be instead of do. But there seems to be some unwritten societal rule that time not filled with tasks and activities is wasted. And while we are all so busy not wasting our time, our schedules are making us sick. Here is the whole quote. "Melanie Rudd, who studies consumer psychology at the University of Houston, wanted to know if awe, by focusing our attention on the present moment, might expand our perception of time. Anything that could do this might be a great discovery 'given that there is a huge time famine in many societies in the world,' as she puts it, 'and this has a huge impact on mental and physical healt

Last week with my very empty calendar and only two children at home, I planned to get a lot done towards actually getting the fabric woven for the dress I want to make. So on Monday, I happily started to measure out the warp I need. I wound the first warp chain and started to panic that I wasn't going to have enough yarn. Since the yarn was a thrift store purchase of unknown provenance, it wasn't as though I could just get more. I decided to leave pause for a bit so my brain could stop panicking.  On Tuesday I decided that it wasn't doing me any good to make contingency plans if I wasn't going to need them. The best course of action was to measure out the next chain. This would be close enough to half that I would have a better sense of how the yarn was holding out. This was a very use choice as I happily discovered that I was going to have enough. By Friday I had wound all 502 ends of a nine foot long warp.  In process on the warping board. Some of the completed warp c

Everyone has arrived safely home from Guatemala! It sounds as though it was a truly phenomenal trip. Here is a picture that one of the adults sent me of G., L , and K. in Antigua. Y. had decided to go back to the hotel to rest.  Today is B.'s, G.'s, and L.'s birthdays, but we will celebrate tomorrow. Today TM stopped by so we could meet his new puppy! I love other people's puppies. This is Bandit and he is five months old. He is going to be a very big husky. Bandit was particularly interested in the ponies and Buddy has never met another creature he doesn't like. Trying to get Bandit and Aster to sit nicely next to each other for a picture. It was not overly successful. When I was at the thrift store the other day getting children appropriate clothes for the trip, I paused to look for a coffee grinder because I was tired of crushing Vienna's seven pills twice a day. I didn't find a coffee grinder, but I did find a mug warmer! I am so excited. I had one years

I've always known that at some point it would just be me and J. along with H. and R. at home. I've also always wondered what that was going to actually look like. After this past week, I can tell you that it will look okay and I have crossed it off my list of items to vaguely worry about.  For the first time sin a long time, I have had absolutely nothing on my calendar (which is not great from a business standpoint, but lovely to have all the unscheduled time), so this was kind of an extreme trial. We're we going to get along or was I going to lose my mind. I actually had no idea. We ended up having a lovely week. Both H. and R. can do things such as get themselves dressed and one of H.'s household jobs for the past couple of years has been to get R. breakfast. This meant that I only needed to worry about getting myself up and dressed to get out to the barn because H. and R. we're fine inside. I also made the decision that the mornings needed to be spent in some sor

H., R., and I did a little more gardening this morning before it got too hot. H. is extremely helpful and capable. She planted a bunch of sweet alyssum under the peonies next to the front walk. (We will finish planting this flat before fall!)  Here is a better view of what she did.  I continued to weed some very overgrown areas. Look! I rescued some iris. There is still a lot more iris in that patch of overgrowth to the left that need to be rescued.  Here are a couple of successes from Monday and Tuesday. The pond is looking as though someone actually lives here  The frogs who live in the pond and probably don't care about landscaping. Then I came across this beautiful flower while weeding Monday. I had completely forgotten I had planted it last year until I unearthed it from the weeds.  If I were filthy rich I would probably hire a gardener. I really do love a well-tended garden, but you would be hard pressed to know that from the current state of mine. 

Did you know that even if you do just an hour of gardening a day, that even by the second day things start to look better? This is probably a known fact to many of you, but it feels a bit revelatory to me. My typical mode of gardening is to do hours at a time to get as much done as possible. This leaves me feeling completely done in so that my motivation to garden more is very low. There always seems to be so much to do that just an hour hardly seems worth the effort. But, I guess that hour is better than nothing which is what happens for weeks after one of my compulsive all day sessions. I sometimes have difficulty finding the middle ground.  But this week, because I want to do something with H. and R., gardening for a bit each morning seemed like a good activity. They both enjoy it and I can usually find ways they can both help. Even with just a couple of hours I'm noticing a difference. There's my life tip for you. Reasonable amounts of time spent on something really do make

Over the weekend I was given a couple of decade's worth of back issues of Handwoven magazine. I am in heaven! So many patterns, so much information... I haven't even made a dent in really looking through them. This morning I was looking through one as I ate breakfast and came across a short article about dyeing wool with bindweed.  I paused.  Bindweed, check (so much bindweed) Girls who could use some occupation, check Mordanted fiber (what you need to do to fiber you want to dye with natural dyed), check  A completely free day, it looked as though we would be doing some experimenting  H. and R. were all in, both for rescuing the flowers from the bindweed and for the dyeing experiment. We spent two hours weeding this morning and ended up with possibly a lifetime supply of bindweed. (It's amazing how much better a garden looks when you actually spend some time weeding, isn't it?) The afternoon was spent making the dye solution and then dyeing the fiber. Here is what we s

TM and his SO came by this evening with a birthday gift for me. Or, should I say gifts... There are a lot of gorgeous perennials here, including a wisteria, one of my all time favorite plants. I'm so excited. I suppose I need to do a bit of weeding to figure out where they should go. The chicken was very interested.  And I'm happy to report everyone made it safely to Guatamala this afternoon. Also, Emmy is still annoyed I'm keeping the ponies in dry lot jail. 

It's been a very busy two days, so the update is a day late. Yesterday was my birthday. To celebrate, J. and I went on a date to Costco and spent two more hours driving around getting all the last minute things the four leaving for Guatamala needed.  J. and I did get to go out to dinner, so that redeemed the endless errands. Tomorrow K., Y., L. and G. need to be at the airport at 6:00 am. The airport is about an hour away, so it will be a very early morning. Yesterday was also spend spraying clothes because some mosquito borne diseases do not have vaccines. I spent the day demonstration weaving at Fine Line Creative Arts Center for their arts ramble, a type of open house/art fair. As always it was lot of fun. On top of all the errands yesterday, we also had a pony rodeo. When I went out to give the ponies their lunch, I didn't hear them yelling at me which was odd. So I paused to locate them, but... no ponies. There were no ponies because somehow the dry lot gate had opened and

I've spent all day doing bills and paperwork and such, so staring at a screen to write something just isn't in the cards. So I'll take advantage of the fact that K. was out taking pictures and shared some with me. Here are a couple:

In the ongoing PS5 saga, my pastures were cleaned to such a point where I received a text from a child asking what to do if the wheelbarrow wasn't completely full, but they could find no more poop to pick up. Such was the urgent need to earn money to buy the disc reader. Then yesterday, a package was delivered to our house and I hear Y. telling L. and G. that they had an early birthday present. This announcement was followed by shrieking and then absolute silence. I was baffled. Y. explained to me that K. had bought the disc reader for them for their birthday the day before with his Amazon account. I had no idea this was happening. You can imagine how much of today has been spent. It was extremely generous of K., though as Y. pointed out, he had some games he wanted to play and they were only available on PS5.  Our children working together is more the norm than sibling bickering and fighting, and this has been true since W. and B. we're little. I also know that this seems unus

I'll tell you up front that I am doing a bait and switch with this blog post. First I'll share a picture of Vienna. I'll even tell you that Vienna is doing extremely well. She even was a little spicy for the farrier yesterday. It shows how much back to normal Vienna is these days. The farrier was so happy that she wanted to cheer for the spicy pony who was giving her a bit of a hard time. I'm so happy to have my little brace pony back to herself. It's been a long 5+ months.  But that's not really what this post is about. I needed to open with a pony picture because I didn't want this to show up in the thumbnail and have someone assume my support of it as a result. I'll say it right out loud. This is wrong. This is child blaming writ large. A more accurate version would say, "Parenting a child with past trauma is constantly filling your child's cup with love, only to watch it bleed out of them and have them say, 'I don't feel loved.'&

First off, I have finished the sampling process for the fabric I plan on weaving. I would show you the finished sample, but in a photograph, it's going to look very similar to what I had already made. It's how it feels that's the difference, and that isn't something that comes through a photograph. Once I get the actual fabric started, I'll show a picture of that. In theory the sampling is the most time consuming part. Weaving the yardage should be fairly straightforward.  What I really want to show you are these little Structo Looms . Aren't they adorable? They were given to me as a gift because I teach young people fiber stuff. It is the perfect way to introduce students to four shaft weaving. The one that is warped is threaded in a very odd way. I may rethread it to a 2/2 twill structure which would be more useful.  Of course this also means I need to find a place in the studio for them to live. With just three years of homeschooling left, I have been slowly

I have some very excited people living here right now. This afternoon was the meeting for the Guatamala trip four of them are going on. They will be near Guatamala City and then have a day in Antigua. Our church has a long-standing relationship with another church in a small town near Guatamala City and they will be doing work there (work gloves are on the packing list)as well as meeting people and hearing their stories. The church will be cooking them lunch everyday. For my adventurous eaters, the anticipation of authentic Guatamalan food is very high. What I appreciate most about our church and the adults leading this trip their focus that this is a chance to learn about a culture they are not familiar with. They are going to meet people and hear their stories, not as some do-good trip where the well off people descend to do something nice for those seen as less than, but as fellow human beings.  Next Sunday morning they need to be at the airport at 6am. We have started our to-do li

We spent the evening getting to visit with the M. Family and W. Family. We don't get to see them very often, but it is wonderful when we do. They are the types of friendships that it doesn't matter how many months it's been, you just pick up where you left off. Friends you have done life with for decades are like that. (Click the link up above if you're nee here and haven't met these friends yet.)  We talked and laughed and ate and visited the ponies. I even tried to convince them to read Lonesome Dove so I would have someone to process it with, but that was about as effective as my perpetual suggestion that they both move out here so we are all closer. I'll wear them down eventually, right?