milk and cookies party

Last December we invited all of the people on our street to our house for a Milk and Cookies party. It was the easiest little gathering in the world to plan. The house is already looking festive and all you have to do as the host is provide the beverages (and clean your bathrooms).

It's a great way to see neighbors in the wintertime and an easy way to build community with the people you wave to nearly every day. This year Ivar helped me make invitations by watercolor painting the back side. Last year I just made ten phone calls and verbally invited everyone.

I wanted to throw this idea out there, because I have a feeling there are many of you readers who would totally be up to hosting something like this. And it's still early enough in the month to pull it off. Don't over think it. Just go build community! Eat cookies! And enjoy your neighbors!

hay bales and humble pie

Our field was baled this week and there was enough hay for two and a half jumbo bales. I cannot tell you how happy I was to have round bales in our field. There used to be a field on our drive to Nebraska that took my breath away every fall. It was full of hay bales, and every time I drove by on the interstate I would think, "I should risk my life sometime and pull over to get a picture."

Thankfully I never did that. But I still love a field full of bales. Even a field full of two bales...

This field has been a bit of a test in patience and has left us with great feelings of lack of control. You might remember we had to wait and wait and wait to get it planted in the first place. Due to a super late spring, super busy farmers and it's small size (four acres isn't enough to gain much interest) we had a terrible time finding someone we could hire to plant it for us.

Then when did find someone, we couldn't find the right seeds. So instead of alfalfa with oats as a cover crop we planted alfalfa and barley (on the seed dealer's advice). It wasn't cheap either (for the labor or the seeds). But we'd only have to do this once and the alfalfa would grow for 3-5 years, making a small sum with each cutting. A few days after it was planted we had major flooding in the area, and half of the seed ran to the corner of the field.

When it was time to harvest the barley, we were told it was too green. We were told to wait a few weeks. But weeks turned into months and we couldn't get the guy to come back and finish the job. If the cover crop wasn't removed it would smother the alfalfa next Spring.

It's funny to be in a place of utter dependence. It's not a common place to be. But this field left us with our hands tied. We don't have a tractor. We are smack in the middle of learning everything from scratch.

Luckily for us, we recently met a neighbor down the road who took pity on us. The same one who gave us his cattle's manure for our garden. In a last ditch effort, Rory stopped by, explained our predicament and asked for help. When he heard our sad song, he started working on our behalf. He sent his guy to come and cut the barley. Then he sent his son to come and rake the barley. And the third night his son came back to bale it. We're covering his costs and he's getting the hay bales... but we are so, so grateful for his help. So grateful!

Tonight our farmer friend came to get the two bales, he told us some terrible-but-somehow-fitting news that the barley should have been cut way sooner. In fact, barley shouldn't have been planted at all. Barley overwhelms other crops. He doesn't think the alfalfa has much of a chance to come back next Spring. He recommends tilling it all under, and starting over next year. It's too bad because we have spent so much money on this field. So much money. And we're going to start next Spring in the same place we started this year.

Except that we have learned a lot. And we have found a farmer friend who has been generous and kind.

Sometimes things don't go as planned. This field would be one of those things. But how adorable are these pictures? Worth a thousand bucks? 

We'll keep telling ourselves that.   

a lovely long weekend

We had an awesome thanksgiving weekend celebrating on Thursday with both my parents and Rory's whole family at Kyle and Lisa's (this is Kyle's awesome picture above). It was so great to have only one place to go and meant we got to partake in the "lay low" part of Thanksgiving. Lisa is an amazing host, and even had Ivar sitting at the kids end of the table with Elsie in between her two grandma's. Lisa Groves, I am thankful for you!

The rest of the weekend sort of took us by surprise. We hadn't planned anything for our long weekend which meant all sorts of things happened: I cleaned the garage a bit and then decided to paint more of the house. This time I went for the hall around the staircase and painted it red. In a last minute decision I decided to go up the wall with the red, and now I regret that. (Which means I will soon be going over the red with primer and then many coats of...antique white. So that's too bad.) We decorated the outdoors a bit and the indoors too. We drove to a quilt shop and an antique shop on Saturday and found some treasures. And tonight Rory was on a quest to make the perfect al dente spaghetti noodle. It took three tries, but he found perfection on pot number three. All in all, a great weekend.

mama j

Sunday night I had these friends over:

This is us 20 years ago:

During my three years of middle school my homeroom teacher was Mrs. Johnston. Her classroom was the one I started every day of sixth, seventh and eighth grade. She was also my math teacher in sixth grade, joined our church and her mom and dad became dear friends of mine too.

Mrs. Johnston loves her students. And we loved her right back.  She was the teacher in charge of Ski Club, and took a school bus full of middle schoolers down hill skiing every Friday night of the winter. It was just for fun. And it was all fun. She chaperoned our middle school church ski retreats and all I remember from those trips is laughing with aching abs.

She got a group of us together to wake a teacher up on her birthday with our own little band. She threw a surprise birthday party for me after ski club one year and another year woke me early to take me out for a surprise birthday breakfast. I babysat her kids, built a friendship with her daughter and exploded a bowl in her microwave when I tried to reheat the old maids from the popcorn bag.

When we graduated from 8th grade, she threw us a murder mystery party. When I was in 10th grade, my parents went to Israel for two weeks, and I went to stay with Mrs. Johnston (who had now become Mama J). While staying at her house, I fainted at breakfast and hit the gallon of orange juice and cheerios on my way down.

Mama J's parents became dear friends of mine at church. Her mom was the secretary that I got to talk to every time I needed to talk to my dad. Alice kept close tabs on me this way. I loved that.

At my dad's retirement party I was milling about from person to person in the narthex and then I saw Mama J and burst into tears. It was so instant and surprising to me that I reacted this way. I wasn't sure why I was crying so hard, other than I missed her. And there she was. She looked awesome, had lost quite a bit of weight and I just felt her love. I can't explain that very well, but Mama J loves me so well. I just know she does. She is one of my biggest fans. She loves me and believes in me.

A few months ago I got an email from Mama J's daughter Sarah, telling me that her mom was going in for tests. It looked like it might be cancer. And a few days later it was confirmed stage 4.

It knocked the wind out of me for a long time. Until I called Mama J and heard how upbeat she was and ready to fight. She knew the reality of all that she faced, but she also was ready to seize every day. I felt like a babbling idiot. I never know what to say in these moments. But she was so comforting and I was so grateful.

Ivar and I went to visit shortly after. We brought her a jar of zinnias from the garden, and Ivar had wanted to bring a jar too and chose just one hot pink zinnia for her. But when it was time to go home, he picked up his jar with his one zinnia. I told him that it was for Linda, but he protested and said that he would like to take it back home. Linda was gracious and Ivar took it back home. I kept that zinnia in my window sill for a long, long time. News like this is just so hard to understand and impossible to swallow.

Sunday night I had Mama J and a group of friends over that I first met in middle school, some of them in kindergarden. Twenty years after working our way through 6th grade word problems, drawing tessellations and spending each Friday night of the winter skiing together, we were back together again. It was a sweet, sweet time and just as we did all through middle school, we laughed all night long. It was a joy to be together. And a joy to celebrate Mama J.

aqua aerobics

This week I went back to aqua aerobics. When Elsie got hand, foot and mouth disease, I lost my rhythm. But I went back three times this week. The class is held at our local senior center and I am a few decades younger than everyone else. They are there through the senior center, I am there through the YMCA. But let me tell you, that senior center is so awesome and offers so much that it makes me excited to one day be a senior citizen!

Until then, I'll just enjoy my Aqua Aerobics class.

Can I tell you why I love this class so much?
1. I get out of bed and move around my quiet home. Then I drive to the pool in my quiet car when the sun is just rising. Quiet. This is the first reason I love aqua aerobics.
2. The pool at the senior center it is warmer than the bath I draw for Ivar and Elsie. When I wake up cold, I keep thinking about walking into that warm water. When we begin it is still pretty dark outside and the pool is all lit up. It's so welcoming.
3. The exercise itself is like yoga in the water. Lots of stretching, lots of water weights, lots of water jogging. And it feels so good. Especially on my lower back. Elsie is a hip child, and this is my time to stretch it all out. And this morning they were playing ABBA. Awesome.
4. It's super social. The instructor talks through the chatter, but there is lots of conversation. And this morning I got invited to the aqua aerobics cookie swap. Come on!
5. When the hour is over, I join a few others in the hot tub. This is downright luxurious to me.
6. I get to shower. By myself. Well, come to think of it, not by myself, but without my daughter pulling back the shower curtain trying to hurl herself into the tub with me.
7. On my way out I grab half a cup of coffee, already made, and drink it on my drive home.
8. When I come home, my family is sitting at the breakfast table, happy to see me. And my husband mumbles something about how the garage door woke the baby again and how he's been up since I left. (This happened Monday...today she slept until I got home!)

The people in the class are wonderful and the instructors have been great. In fact, I told Marilyn, our M, W, F instructor that I was blogging about our class today and told her she should read it. Hi Marilyn!

And that sign above? That's on the swim suit ringer. It made me happy the first time I saw it. Not every generation would know how to knead stiff bread dough. I know how, because my grandma taught me. And interestingly, she was a faithful aqua aerobics attender in her own town. :)