Ordinary Time

I have now watched the video up above several times and showed it to as many children as I could get to watch it. I don't know what I find so amusing about ducks wearing flower hats, but I do. So I thought, "I have ducks and I have flowers, I wonder if I can put flower hats on our ducks."  No.  The answer to that question was no, I cannot put flowers on our ducks. As I said, I have the ducks. I even have cute white ducks who walk in a line. And smaller ducks who like to swim. But the boys were too busy wrestling (and because this is a family blog, we're going to go with wrestling instead of worrying about the details of male adolescent duck behavior) to care about flower hats. The girl ducks were too busy swimming to care to even look at the enticing flower hat I was offering them. Even while swimming the boy ducks were too busy to be bothered by hats, floral or otherwise. I even tried the baby chickens, but no hats for them, either. Finally, at the end of the day, af...

This doesn't actually have anything to do with the post, but it is a flower in one of the pots by the pond. A flower that I grew from seed this spring. It's pretty so I thought I'd share it.  Ever since R. has come home, her hair has been very thin and when it was washed, what seemed to be great handfuls would come out. J. made the observation the other day that R. hasn't been losing hair like she used to, just a normal amount. I'm hoping that her hair will actual thicken up a bit. But the cosmetic thing is the minor piece. I think her hair loss and now her lack of hair loss tells us an important story. First, it tells us that she is physically more healthy. (Just to be clear, she was very well taken care of while she was in foster care the couple of years before she joined our family. She was well fed.) She has better balance, she moves more easily, she has better coordination. We were adding to the work already done by her foster family and all those people who he...

This post is a little later than usual tonight because J. and I had to go and purchase (yet another) new range. It should arrive next week. It is a very long story, but ultimately, we are being reimbursed the cost of our old range. J. is kind of over spending his free (and not so free) time repeating the same story over and over and over to the warranty company. I suggested that that warranty company should reimburse me for the bread I have had to buy, but J. didn't want to call them again to ask. Let's move on to something non-appliance related and start with spinning projects. I don't have anything completed to show you, but these bobbins are ready to ply together tomorrow. These are part of a bigger project. I've already showed you the bright blue yarn I have finished. Then those two bobbins in the first picture will be a mixture of the bright blue and the navy blue. After I finish that, I'll spin just the navy for the last set of yarn. (It really is a lovely nav...

This phrase comes from good friends of ours whose children were just a little bit older than our oldest. It was the phrase they used when they had decided that everyone was going to do everything all together to have fun whether or not everyone was overly excited about it. I find it to be a useful phrase. In fact, we definitely made use of it this afternoon. It was a beautiful day and J. wanted to take advantage of it and explore an area park that we hadn't made it to yet.  So, we loaded everyone up to go have some fun . We went to Island Park in Geneva which is a lovely park in the Fox River right near the downtown area. See how much fun everyone had! Well, J. and I enjoyed it. We then went to the new Geneva Public Library to look around which everyone enjoyed much more. (It is a lovely library.)  ____ My retreat went well yesterday. I think everyone felt as though they came away with the information about homeschooling that they were looking for. And if there was any doubt, ...

Let's jump right in. I am feeling more optimistic today after a good night's sleep. A good night's sleep where I clenched my jaw all night based on the headache I woke up with. Something is going on since I just generally feel a little edgy, which, thankfully, is not my norm anymore. If it's a traumaversary, then the best thing I can do is ride it out and stop worrying about it. It will pass. Having so many children about the same age means that they all tend to outgrow their clothes all at the same time. So many people need a significant amount of additional clothing. And shoes... ! Since we received our tax money, I have earmarked some of it towards clothes. This also meant that a couple of days ago I took three girls shoe shopping. There is a big difference between shopping with grade school age girls and middle school girls. The younger ones are happy to let me go searching for shoes to try on and then picking from that selection. The middle school ones say things s...

It's been a very low key summer. This isn't a bad thing, but it does mean that in terms of blog fodder there just isn't a whole to write about. So if you've been thinking that the posting has been a little spottier than usual, that's why. I just don't think that the majority of readers are really interested in reading more posts than I already write about yarn or horses. Then when you add in that my youngest are now 13, well, even the child angle kind of dries up. It is a lot more difficult to write about teen doings than toddler doings. Toddlers don't care, teens do. (Though they do like to look back and see what their toddler selves were doing.) So here I am the second night in a row, sitting at my computer, and wondering what the heck I'm going to write about. It's not quite like writer's block. Given a topic, I would be happy to bang something out. It's the difficulty of finding something blog worthy in my day. I mucked stalls. I sorted t...

The week started off with mail... the fun kind. As in a very large box that came from England, filled with: Alpaca fiber! Yes, that whole box contains an alpaca fleece from a friend in England who has alpacas. It's beautiful. So of course I had to get out a spindle and immediately try spinning it. I'm very excited. I think this is going to be my project to spin with my spindle. No, I have no idea what I'm going to do with it. Maybe a 3-ply lace weight yarn, with at least one of the plies over-dyed in dark green, and then knit a lace shawl? I guess I do have some ideas. Next, I got a belated Christmas gift from W. this week as well. Look, my warping board! This is so I can measure out warp for my loom. And he even made me a spool holder down there on the floor so that the spools of thread don't go rolling around as I measure. Here is what is looks like in the middle of measuring a warp. I am very excited because this was the last thing I needed to really be able to make ...