A Morning Project

 It has started to warm up outside and we have this one room in our house that was a finished from a sitting porch in the 70's. It was originally enclosed to be a place for the original homeowner to do his dialysis every day. When we bought the house it was all brown cheap paneling, and there was this weird hook up for a sink with only cold water. There was one aluminum window and an aluminum glass slider (a very poor design choice if you ask me). The window didn't open and the screen fell off the door shortly after we moved in. We have replaced the window with a new wood window that opens to get some air, but we can't agree on what to do about the door, so there it remains. This room has always had temperature problems, freezing cold in the winter and super hot in the summer. There is no duct-work from this room to our central air and furnace and it is completely sealed off from the rest of the house, as it used to be the exterior. We use it as a mud room even though we don't use the door. We tore down the rotting deck that the door led too a couple of summers ago. The temperature has been better managed since we added the new window, but the sun beats in that back door from noon until dusk and it heats up the room to at least 85 degrees on any sunny day. This in turn, heats up our house and we all know that it is nice to have a cooler house on warmer days. Especially our house since it is like a little brick oven. This last week I decided that enough was enough and I sewed up some curtains for the door to reflect some of that heat back out.

Yes my sewing room is my dining table. I wish I had a craft room, or better yet a studio, but sometimes we have to work with what we can.

I estimated this project to take me about an hour and I used a flat sheet that we used to use on our bed before the fitted sheet ripped last fall. I wasn't too upset as I had gotten them used when we were first married. So now this old sheet is getting used for the third time. I like to use things until they can't be used anymore.

This fun little project took me almost three hours to finish because I never take into account the time my kids seem to need from me when I am involved with something other than them. They can play for extended periods of time and not need me at all, but when I pick up a project they need me non-stop. My littlest one got her blanket out when I was rounding the corner and could see the finish line and started bouncing on her bum on the couch saying "nuggle me momma!" That means snuggle me in two year old speech. What did I do? I nuggled her of course. Oh and it took me so long because I no longer have an iron. Mine broke, again, at Christmas right in the middle of sewing Christmas presents at the fastest rate I could (that's the second time my iron died on me in the middle of trying to sew Christmas presents). Due to living in the modern era I can never remember to buy a new iron, or prioritize it since everyone always needs new shoes, or shampoo, or art and craft supplies. Nonetheless I found a way to get the curtains done and they work great at cutting the heat down and they look much nicer too, inside and out.

Oh and the sweetness of these kids when they want to be. I have been trying to sneak pictures of them on these moments. They can do such nice things together. I think they are pretending to read to each other. I hope someday when we have moved into a larger house that they will remember these times here. Days full of closeness, and simple things.

And yeah they are totally in their pajamas...

Easter In Pictures

Spring Projects

So I have decided I have a happy spring garden. I am also pretty sure I like to have a lot of work to do all the time. I take care of my house, my yard, my kids, my animals (a dog and 5 chickens) cook and bake all my food from scratch, and home school my kids. None the less I seem to feel the need to create more garden projects every year. 

This picture is my front lawn. Last year I planted a fleur de lawn seed mix from here. I love the English daisies that grow in it. There is also a lot of clover that grows from the seed mix. We cut the clover sparingly and let it flower for the bees. Plus it makes our house look like an English cottage. I wish I could figure out how to get rid of the dandelions though. 

Grape vines make for a great late winter early spring project. It is not perfectly round but it was fun to make. It was also nice to have something to use the vines for instead of throwing them away.

This year I decided to over haul my back yard. I AM SICK OF MUD. As it turns out our back yard just got too much traffic from the kids and dog that it always turned into a giant mud pit in the winter and spring. Also we have some really odd drainage going on back there. If it snows it eventually melts and then it doesn't drain and I would get huge sheets of thick ice completely covering my lawn. It is so weird. So this year I was determined to fix it all. I am not done yet but it is coming along nicely. So far so good. Everyone loves it. I had my suspicions that it would be more fun but it is nice to see the kids liking the new set up. Even the dog gets more excited back there. She runs and runs and runs and we have concluded that she must see it as an obstacle course. In the end I have high hopes as we will convert our sprinkler system into drip.This summer the hot summer sun that beats down back there, with no shade, will get to do some use by giving garden plants energy instead of beating on a lawn no one wants to play on because it is too hot. The part that is the paths will eventually get gravel.

Its a lot of work but I love it and it is so fun to see a project come together. I think it is going to fill in and look amazing when I plant my garden seeds and starts. Just picture it full of herbs, veggies and flowers. Finally my dream garden.

Daydreaming of Summer

I was cleaning up some photos today and I got to see all the pictures I took last summer of my garden. I always try to document my garden so I can compare it later. It is fun to look back and see the progression of my work.

Summer is such a vibrant time. Oh the lusciousness of it all. When I look out my windows right now the garden is brimming with spring ready to burst, but it is still all buttoned up. Frankly right now all that I see is a whole lot of mud with little hints of green. It doesn't help that I have been digging up all the remaining sod in my back yard to make more planting areas, and less grass that no one wants to mow. We have a lot of mud, mud an more mud.

I remember last summer just as it was heading into fall. I remember being so sad that the season was leaving. I remember looking around my yard and loving what it had become. I remember a certain sadness that I had never felt before at the change in the air. Up until now I can always say that I have had happy, cozy, feelings of renewal in the fall, and quick excitement for the coming winter. Last year was different. For the first time I was very seriously mourning the departure of summer and the slowly creeping cold. I think this marks a very important change in me. I will always love all the seasons of the year but last year made me realize that I have crossed over from a winter girl to a summer girl. I am no longer a snowboarder, I am a gardener.

My kids are starting to share my excitement even though they might not want to eat most of what I grow yet, they love to talk to me about what we are going to plant this year. I love thinking that my garden is a magical oasis for them. I have had so much internal debate over digging up my remaining lawn and with the winter mud being the last straw, I realized that they do enjoy playing on the garden paths more than the lawn. In the summer the sun is too intense most of the time where the lawn is and a garden will grow nicely while providing them cover for imagination and shade for their eyes.

My goal this year as I have planned where to plant and where to dig is to reduce our need for outside veggies. I am going to try harder to provide enough for most of our fresh eating. I have my seeds that I ordered from here all safe and sound in the basement and I should be prepping my planting areas soon with finished compost. I don't start seeds early, I only purchase seeds for the plants that will germinate and grow in my area straight in the garden. Those are things like sweet pea, beans, zucchini, nasturtiums, sunflowers, greens, radishes, beets and pumpkins. I buy my tomatoes, peppers, basil, and cucumbers as starts every year. I don't have the room or the patient attitude for growing my own starts, maybe someday when I have a much bigger garden I will get into that. For now it is much more cost effective for me to buy starts.

This was my new bed that Hubbs built me last year and the bean tee pee that I put in. Last year I grew scarlet runner beans on it but we didn't care for them on the plate. So for this coming year I am going to grow a regular green bean that is supposed to grow tall enough to cover the structure. I loved the way it turned out and am excited to use it again. I just transplanted all of the herbs from the garden box and put raspberries there instead. I'm not sure if I will like the way it will look as much but my raspberries needed a new home that would help them grow. Herbs can grow almost anywhere

Last year when I was building the vine tee pee I displaced quite a lot of sod as I put pavers underneath. I am not good at throwing away yard waste so I put the sod to use as the new planting area seen in this picture to the left of the sidewalk. I just took some cardboard and made the size I wanted on the existing lawn, checked for sprinkler heads, then flipped the displaced sod right over on top of the cardboard to make it all mounded up. Then I covered it all with a few inches of finished compost and edged the grass around it to make it look neat. After that I pretty much planted right in it. I planted a few perennials like globe thistle, black eyed suzan, and lambs ear. I also planted a gooseberry bush that should be really fun to cook with when it bears more fruit, as well as some Siberian iris, and teddy bear sunflowers. The whole thing was very golden by late summer so this year I need to add some other colors. I was so happy with the way it turned out but I was a little nervous as I was making it. In the spring, when I garden, it feels like I am just going crazy in the yard. It always feels a little like I am a mad scientist throwing some garden debris this way and that. Then it comes together magically the end and people think I have some great talent or know what I am doing.

My littlest was always stealing tomatoes. As much as I wanted to be upset about this I couldn't as it is one of my greatest wishes for my kids to love tomatoes as much as I do. I remember being a teenager and getting up really early in the late summer to go practice my diving at the local pool to get ready for swimming season. Then when I got home I was always so hungry and craving a nice tomato sandwich. Yup, just bread, mayo tomatoes and salt. That would be my breakfast at 7 am, and if I was really feeling crazy I would toast my bread.

A view from the front just outside the gate. I have worked for 4 years trying so hard to fill my gardens in as they were so boring and bare when we bought the house. Last spring I was looking around for the first time thinking, "I have to start dividing and giving some of my plants away." It was really an odd feeling because it had felt like such a poor mans scramble for so long and then all of a sudden BAMB, too many plants!

This is looking just the other way than in the picture above. I can hardly believe my eyes when I look at these pictures as it still just shocks me that my flower garden is so full. I almost described it as complete, but I am not sure if there ever is such a thing as that in the garden.

My pretty house and her flowers. So lovely. Oh summer why do you ever have to go away?

More flowers from the front. It is a close up of some of the wonderfulness I am looking forward too. I find myself buying cheap bouquets of flowers this time of the year when I do my grocery shopping as I am longing for the color, and smells of the flowers. Last year I had yet another ah ha moment when I remembered why I wanted to plant so many flowers. I remember in college a bunch of girls that I knew moved into a house with a bit of a garden and one of those girls said to me, "We had flowers to bring in all summer long." I thought to myself that I would have that one day. I realized last spring that my garden was full enough that I could finally bring in flowers all summer long, and I did.

Being a kid in the summer sun is so magical. I love my kiddos so much and hope from the bottom of my heart that they are able to make those special memories here in our yard that will carry them through the rest of their lives. I have many memories from the various gardens of my childhood, the way that they felt will always stay with me. Those happy memories that I used to make as a child in the garden come back to me in the smells and textures of my own garden.

I planted some pumpkins in the front of the house in a flower bed out in the middle of the lawn that has been hard to grow stuff in for various reasons. I learned last summer that pumpkins don't get enough sun out there, but lucky for me a little squirrel (so I think) decided to replant one in the back by my vine tee pee. Well that pumpkin loved its new home and grew, and grew, and grew right along the concrete wall on top of the concrete patio. We had an empty sandbox sitting there and I didn't even know there were pumpkins on the vine until one day when my kids moved the sandbox. Before I knew it they chopped all of them off except one and it became my prized white pumpkin!

I don't have to look at all of these photos at the start of spring to remind me that I need more land. Deep down I need more land to garden. I need the room to have the garden to grow 40 tomato plants and 10 bushels of potatoes. It is one of my deepest dreams to have a large enough garden to home can all of my tomatoes and cucumbers every year. Right now I am only able to plant enough plants for a batch or two plus fresh eating. I need to get out and keep at my digging as I am almost 60 percent done turning over sod. Hopefully I can get some pictures of it plus some pictures of my kids, as at least they have been loving the mud!

Round Here Something Radiates

I just spent about fifteen minutes typing up some grand thing to say for the people that look at my blog. Then I deleted it.

I don't need to explain the thoughts in my head, or write about why I am trying to do certain things here. I am posting because it has been a long time. We have grown up and are still growing around this house and good things are happening. We are doing our first year of Kindergarten and it has been fun but more of a learning process for me. I find that I have to learn how to manage my time and how to let certain things go so we can do what is really important.

We have been having a month or so where someone is under the weather. Right now we all have some sort of nasty little cold. There has been a lot of herbal tea, soup, and more TV than I would like but we are surviving. Today I only have half a voice and it is surprising to me how serious the kids know I am just my my eyes.

I have been busy this year making a lot of wooden toys to use for our school time. I tell them a lot of stories and sometimes we have fun setting up the scenes and acting it all out. I have had to re-arrange my life and my house a little bit to have a place for all of these creations. I liked the end result more than I thought I would. I enjoy seeing all of the bright toys sitting on the bookshelves.

A big thing for me happened a couple of months ago, I finally got my husband to install the large farm sink I bought 4 years ago when we moved into the house. It was problematic as the sink is a different dimension that the old one and we can't just get a new counter top for a reasonable price as the old one is completely custom in every way. So just a little sink project has turned into a huge debacle. So the new sink is in and I love it but it is not on a pretty counter. I will keep dreaming but for now I am so happy to have a more functional sink in our tiny kitchen. We even went as far as to install a water filter directly to the line so as you turn your cold water on for a nice drink woalla! Fresh tasting water right out of the tap. What can I say, it is getting luxurious around here.

With all of this new sink came some other fun things in the Kitchen as I have been baking our bread with a San Francisco sourdough starter. I have been using the organic flour you can get at Costco and it was rising like a dream. It was super nice, predictable and fast (for sourdough). When we did our NO spending month in January and part of February I had to use some regular flour for a while  (due to running out of flour unexpectedly and having no money to get new flour) and it started to rise less and less and my breads were predictably turning into bricks. When I had used all of that flour and was able to go back to my regular flour my bread has begun to resemble its old self. I found it an interesting experiment to say the least.

A few pictures from around my house are here in this post as it is always interesting for me to look back on them a year or more down the line. Can you see that branch thing hanging on our wall back there. When my dad gave me my scroll saw, that was the first thing I made out of some scrap pieces from a piano we tore apart in the basement when we bought the house. We use it now as a little place to set up our seasonal displays. Due to my feelings of not wanting clutter and how small our house is I was having a hard time finding a place for our nature table. Now we just use the branch and the desk. The branch was not an easy first project for my scroll saw but hey, that's just the way I work I guess. Most of the time I just jump right in and sink or swim.

This is almost how my kids room looks now, of course it is the one room that changes the most. I still can't believe I have three kids crammed in that little room. Sometimes I get really frustrated that our house is so small but then I remember that it is really good too. We are close and we don't have a lot of useless stuff. This small house has taught me that I can be happy with less, and that if something is going to be brought into my house, I better love it. It has been a process but I often think of what my mom said to me one time, that living in a small house and sharing rooms with her siblings made her family closer.

Of course the cram of three kids in one room wouldn't be possible with out this great toddler sized bunk bed that my dad made for my kids. We didn't want a full size bunk because it would have filled most of the room as well as the concern of them falling out. When I stand by the one we have my shoulders are at the top bunk, and the mattresses is as skinny as a crib mattress. I love this little bunk bed as it is sturdy and made out of real wood. I also love how I can snuggle them on it because I just fit, head to toe length wise.

Things are always changing and that is good. We have fun most days and we are gearing up for warmer weather. We didn't really have a winter and so it has felt like spring for almost a month and a half now. I have been working on some pretty big garden projects and am excited for some upcoming adventures.

These Long, Short Days of January

 Time moves so fast. I cant keep up. I'm not sure if I care too much to keep up with our life online with this blog. I know I have some dear family and friends who wish I would post more. I often think "I should blog this or that." Perhaps I will play a little catch up, perhaps not. I do have a computer to work with again so I may pick it up again. Often I struggle with my desire to have a beautiful blog for all to see and my desires to keep my children's life a private life and not an online life since they are not able to give their consent.

Things have been going well around here. Christmas came and went with ease and we received many wonderful high quality gifts. I love homemade or handmade treasures for my children and we were so blessed this year.

We had a birthday and a very special girly turned two! She got a tea set and the very next day I found these two troopers up to a tea party in the front window. It surprised me because I didn't guide them or prompt them and they knew just what to do. It was the sweetest thing.

Speaking of sweet things I have my very own sweet tart around here who is about to turn one! She is so quirky and loud and determined. I cant believe how much of a mover and shaker she is. She knows what she wants and makes everyone else know loud and clear. I love her so much and am so happy she is in our family.

We have been just enjoying our short cool days of winter playing and learning in the walls of our home. I have been wanting to post some of the activities we have been doing for preschool learning. Although to be honest, it is mostly me doing the activities and them being near me asking questions and doing other things of their interest. The days are getting longer and we are getting calmer since we got our puppy. Sorry I don't have any pictures of her, maybe next time!