real life decorating

We drove home from Thanksgiving and got all fired up to spend the next day decorating the house. We talked excitedly to Ivar about putting lights on the chicken coop, setting up all of the nativity sets and hanging the advent calendars on the wall. 

We went to bed and woke up the next morning and I was in a terrible mood. Just crabby. Rory was ready to hit it, but I was annoyed that the kitchen had been hit by a bomb. I wanted to take half a day to clean the house before we added more stuff to it. And then I said, "what I'd like to do is rearrange the furniture in the living room, but if we do that, I really should just paint the walls when we have the china hutch moved out in the middle of the room. And if we do that, then we really shouldn't hang anything on the walls yet, until the walls are painted and we know where everything is going."

At this point Rory told me he'd be outside hanging the christmas lights on the chicken coop.

He walked outside and I heard what I had just said. I decided to take a timeout. A timeout for me includes a cup of coffee and putting my contacts in. I took a few moments, let the caffeine hit my system and realized I wasn't up for moving furniture either.

The miraculous part of the day is that it actually turned around. Rory came back in the house and I told him I had uninvited Crabby Becca to our Friday. I introduced him to Caffeinated Becca and it worked. She was much nicer and we actually had a second start to our day.

That, and I completely lowered my expectations realizing we couldn't do everything I wanted to in my head. I had Ivar play happily with all the decorations from one bin while I cleaned my kitchen and got a handle on my house. I was completely able to join back in the merriment.

It's funny the way life actually plays out sometimes. The vision you have in your head versus the reality of the moment. You don't ever see bad moods on Pinterest. I was thinking about Friday's events while we unwrapped our tree tonight. We had planned on getting it with Mark and Kathy again on Monday, but the forecast is supposed to be terribly cold, and we each have little kids. The awesome idea of cutting our own tree and the reality of freezing temperatures and blowing snow just didn't match up this time. So Rory went out tonight....by himself...and bought a tree at Menards while I gave the kids a bath. It's not a super inspired story, but it's real life. And the tree is beautiful. 

Anyway, I think I'm writing all of this to say that I believe I am actually making progress in letting things go. Pinterest can set the bar pretty high. And some of those things are possible, but not all of those things are possible. And sometimes the heightened expectations can turn a girl into a monster. But what I'm learning is that the girl still has control over the monster and can reset her ideals in order to make a much happier home. 

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.