Going Full Hippie

These are chickens.

Six Rhode Island Reds to be exact. They have taken up residence in a corner of my living room and are happily peeping away. 

I completely blame Morgan.

My kids are over the moon excited. (I'm pretty excited too...) We're looking at plans to build a chicken coop, and hopefully, within a few months, we'll be able to send the girls out first thing in the morning to collect the eggs. 

We're also planting phase one of our garden on Monday.

So, go for it. Best "hippie" joke wins. As far as I'm concerned, all I'm missing are some dreads, birkenstocks, and maybe a goat. 

Catching up in pictures

Well. 

My goodness, it's been a while.

Do you remember me? (Do I remember me?)

So, it was Christmas. We like Christmas.

Now it's winter, and there is much snow and cold. A week or so ago, it was -18 degree when I woke up. Yes siree, it makes getting up to teach 6:30 am violin lessons extra inviting.

 So what do you do when there's 2 feet of snow and ice all over the place and your 4 year old is bouncing off the walls? Bring his bike inside. Then curse yourself repeatedly for thinking that a bike in the kitchen was a good idea.

Then, in the approximately 2.5 minutes when there isn't snow on the roads, you take your kids out for a walk. Greet the animals and splash in the puddles, quick, because you won't see the sidewalk again for months!

So what else have we been doing?

 Sleeping through Sunday School,

 Preparing for our new lives as famous recording artists, 

 Ruining Mom's high scores on iPhone games,

 Beating each other up with swords,

Learning to ice skate,

 Baking pies, (mmmm, pies!)

 Making gigantic messes,

 Getting by with a little help from our trusty friends, 

 Making more giant messes, this time of the artistic variety,

And looking ridiculously cute in our pjs and matching curls.

Don't forget the fact that winter and spring mean lots of practicing, performing, and Abby's first big violin competition. (Gulp!)

 So Ashlynn is practicing for the piano festival,

 I'm working on perfect bow hands with my students,

 Abby's performing everywhere,

And even Max feels the need to practice. (Will someone get that boy a cello already?)

Other important happenings: 

 The boys are developing their talent in photography. 

 They're both going through a rather experimental self-portrait phase.

Max has another impossible to cure ear infection. I didn't think you wanted to see pictures of that. (You're welcome.) We're heading into February, the dreaded month of illness, and I'm crossing my fingers that this is as bad as it gets.

I even took all the kiddos to get new pictures taken, and we all still liked each other when it was over. Check out the sidebar. Pretty impressive, right?

So there you have it. 2 months, two dozen pictures, and you're up to speed.

We're busy. We're happy, we're grateful.

If you're wondering...

One box of peaches+one afternoon equals:

7 quarts of bottled peaches,
15 cups of strawberry-peach jam,
1 pan of fruit leather,
1 peach cobbler,
4 kids with bellies stuffed full of fresh peaches,
2 loads of dishes,
1 very trashed kitchen,
1 house hotter than the surface of the sun,

and...

1 very pleased mama.

You know it might be time to mow the lawn when...

You very nearly lose your seven year old in the backyard jungle. 

Keeping it Real

Sometimes, I worry that I'm the only one chronically incapable of keeping a clean house.  

I like to blame it on the fact that I have two girls, a crazy terror of a toddler, and two adults living in approximately 1600 square feet spread over three levels.

I also like to justify it by saying that my baby has had ear infections for virtually all of 2010, and anytime I've done anything that doesn't involve rocking him in a rocking chair involves a screaming, crying banshee.  But that might be a little bit of an exaggeration.  Just a little bit.  (As a sidenote, because I know you're all dying to know, it seems that after three antibiotic shots last week that we have finally conquered the ear infections.  Quick!  Knock on wood!)

The truth is, I'm just not a great housekeeper.  I don't have any huge internal motivation to eradicate every particle of dust from the house or to make sure that there are fresh vacuum stripes left in the carpet five times a day. 

It doesn't really help that my mom was a cleaning fanatic growing up.  The vacuum stripes in the carpet bit?  We lived that.  The vacuum was virtually always running at our house.  In fact, we had to buy a new vacuum every six to eight months.  That's right, a new vacuum, not just new bags or new hoses.  Do you know how much vacuuming you have to do to burn out a vacuum in six months?  It's ok.  You don't want to know.  Seriously, it's better that way.  I think my unwillingness inability to clean is really a not-so-subtle rebellion against the endless hours of Saturday chores.

But I go to other people's houses, and they are (almost) always clean, picked up, sparkling with no rings in the toilet.  Now my house isn't on the verge of being condemned or anything like that, but from where I sit, I can see crumbs on the kitchen floor, counters that haven't seen a washrag today, and more baby toys than I can count covering every spare inch of carpet.  Oh, and there's two weeks worth of groceries out in my van waiting for my kids to get home to help unload them.  My kitchen is up a flight of stairs from the main entryway, and I'd rather just wait the half hour until my kids come home than climb up and down the stairs 27 times.  Sigh.  There are just so many things I'd rather do than clean the house.  Like sleeping.  Blogging.  Reading other peoples' blogs.  Reading my latest novel.  Going on walks, talking on the phone, finding things that keep me busy so I can avoid the housework, etc.  Sure, I really like clean houses, but actually doing the work to get there is another matter all together. 

Take this bookshelf for example.  Now, the rule is, no laughing.  No throwing things. I already warned you that I'm an impossibly bad housekeeper. 

Remember those worksheets you used to do in Elementary school where you would circle the things that don't belong?  See if you can find:

Two dead cell phones, and a cover for one of them.
A soldering iron, with two rolls of soldering material.  (I'm sure there's a technical term better than soldering material, but I don't know what it is!)
A picture hanging kit. 
A homework folder that should have been at school in a certain child's backpack.
A camera.
A level.
A drill.
A charging cord to one of the dead cell phones. 
Two ward lists.
Two very overdue library books.  (You would think those would be hard to find seeing that you're looking at a picture of a bookshelf and all.  And they would be hard to find, if say, my girls put them with the other books where they actually belong!)
A sippy cup.
Lip gloss.  (There goes the theory that it's everyone else in the house that makes the mess!)
A haircutting kit.

So really, since we live in the aforementioned house that is only slightly bigger than the average postage stamp, and we have no storage space, and no room in the kitchen for a "junk drawer," this bookshelf became our junk drawer.  The biggest problem is you can't close a bookshelf.

Enter a Saturday, a mom fed up with the "junk bookshelf," a tax return and an IKEA within driving distance.

Here is picture proof that at least in one little corner of my universe, everything is precisely where it's supposed to be.  Well, everything except my husband's tie.  I guess you can't have everything.  My favorite are the little white boxes from IKEA. Genius because now, all the little clutter things can just get stuffed away where no one can see them. 

So if you come over to my house, ignore the crumbs all over the floor, the thermometer on the stairs, (don't ask.  I don't know either....) the homework on the counter, or the ring in the toilet.  Just come admire my beautiful new bookshelf.  And then tell me I'm not the only one that doesn't have a house that looks like it came straight out of a magazine. 

Wonders Never Cease

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, I present to you my first ever pie made with homemade pie crust.  That's right.  I made a blueberry pie, including a crust from scratch.

I must be channeling my mom or something, because not only did I make a pie that would have made Betty Crocker weep because it was so good, but I also taught four violin lessons, practiced with my own daughter, (who is sounding pretty darn amazing on the Vivaldi concerto she's working on), did two loads of laundry, cleaned out my refrigerator, made a complete nutritionally balanced dinner, and prepped and taught Family Home Evening. 

Yes, it's a good thing I had that Diet Coke, or I'd be translated right about now.

And I fully expect to wear my pajamas, eat leftover pie for breakfast and not do a single productive thing for the entire rest of the week. 

You can't come back from this

My house is a disaster.  An epic disaster.  You know, I hear you in the background saying "Yeah, you should see my house."  But you don't understand.  I can't even post pictures because then CPS and the health department will have evidence against me when they show up at my door.  And I can't find my machete to hack a pathway through to where ever the camera may be hiding.

There is a baby's tennis shoe in my bathtub.  And a peri bottle, a package of cough drops, a few used kleenexes, several bath toys, and I don't know what else.  I'm too scared to look. 

There's an unidentifiable stink coming from the garbage can.   Make that several two garbage cans. 

I have two baskets crammed, stuffed full of clean laundry.  My dryer might also be loaded with clothes.  And I may or may not have had to rewash a load of laundry this morning because it had sat in the washer for two days because I couldn't empty the clothes out of the dryer because there was no more room due to the mountain I've recently named "I don't wanna fold clothes" taking up all the room. 

My girls may or may not have worn the same jeans three days in a row due to the aforementioned mountains of laundry. There's no visible dirt, so its okay, right?  They do have on clean underwear.  I hope.

There is a broken cabinet door in my kitchen where, in a fit of frustration, Max broke the door off because he couldn't open the cabinet because of the childproof latches and proceeded to hang off the door until the hinge broke.

The floor of my entry way downstairs crunches when you walk on it.   It has approximately 27 shoes (none of them matching of course,) a bag of dirty clothes waiting to got to the dry cleaners, and mail from the last three days scattered all over the place.

You don't really need to change the sheets on your kids' beds do you?

There are alphabet blocks in every room of my house.  Somehow 26 alphabet block multiplied when we were all asleep, and I can't walk two steps without stepping on one of them.  They are on every stair in the entire house since the baby boy finds great delight in standing at the top of the stairs and throwing the blocks down, one by one.

Despite the fact that I know we have mopped the kitchen floor this week, there are stains in every color and shade of the rainbow all over the floor.  That flourescent orange blotch?  Yeah, its from when Max decided to empty all the leftover mac and cheese out of the garbage, flinging it all over the room, all because I had the audacity to take 30 seconds to pee.

So really, I don't think there's any way to come back from this type of disaster.  I'm pretty much thinking that we should just demolish the house and start over.  In the meantime, I'm ignoring it.  I'm gonna just sit here, in my pajamas, eating my townhouse crackers with cheese, drink my Diet Coke and watch last night's Grey's Anatomy on my DVR.  And as long as I don't see any animals running around that don't belong to us, I'm gonna call it a happy day.

I wanna be a domestic Goddess

I grew up with a mom who was a domestic goddess. She could sew anything, including most of the things we wore. We rarely (rarely!) went out to eat- there was always a home-cooked meal on the table. And we had a huge garden- half the size of our back yard. There were six of us, and we joked frequently about being slave labor when we were sent out to pick the peas, beans, tomatoes, (just for the record, you get in really big trouble when you get in a tomato fight with your siblings when you're supposed to be picking them!) and whatever else was ripe at the time. We had cherry pitting parties, movie nights shelling endless bags of peas, and nights on the deck covered in splatters of tomatoes as we ground them for spaghetti sauce.


Now that I'm a mom and trying to live more frugally and eat more healthy, I'm really wishing I would have paid more attention to the massive amounts of canning that my mom did every summer. In a fit of domesticity, I decided that all the apples we picked last week needed to be turned into apple butter. After a few calls to my friend Jules who gave me the recipe, and to my mom the canning guru, and 24 hours with the apples in the crockpot, I ended up with this:




7 very pretty, very yummy jars of apple butter. It tastes like apple pie on toast. And they all sealed! Its not much, but combined with the 24 jars of freezer jam we did a few weeks ago, and we're going to have lots of yummy toast this year, if nothing else!