Category Archives: Family

Nov 8 2010

It is now Soon

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We celebrated Halloween at Anya’s school. They had songs and stories by the kids, a scavenger hunt, a parade, and a potluck. Anya was a magic princess (she had a wand but no wings, so I don’t know if I can say fairy princess). Last minute I crocheted her some jewelry: a necklace with jingle bells, two bracelets with jingle bells, and two hair thingies. I also made hair thingies for me and bracelets for me, Andy, and my parents. Anya had a fantastic time running around with the other princesses/fairies and the dragons and various creatures.

My parents ended up staying a few extra days to help get the kitchen put back together, which was good because my Mom still hadn’t made me tostados by the day they were originally going to leave. Must. Have. Tostados.

It took me, Andy, and my Dad to get the stone (soapstone…soap stone?) out of the back of our truck. I think we managed to escape injury (Dad, you still okay?) by using the tricks of ancient Egypt: pulleys, raised platforms, and bright, orange, rubberized gloves.

Fascinated with all the cardboard and foamy wrap stuff that the cabinets were packed in, my Mom channeled her sewing energy into making costumes. The curtain hemming plans were thwarted by supreme household chaos and lack of places to work and stinkbugs. She did take the living room curtains home with her to work on. (Yahoo!)

I’m torn between posting a photo of the kitchen almost done or waiting until it is done. We have to wait for a local cabinet dude to fix one of the doors that was sorta not done right when sent to us, and we need to put the last few doors on some drawers, and do some painting, and get and install door hardware, and clean all that stuff off the counter I need to figure out what to do with. Come on, Andy, get busy!!!!

Nov 3 2010

Life is Good

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Quick Update

  • I slipped on the steps going down into our living room and landed very soundly on my tailbone. Two hours in the ER got me a lighter wallet and a suggestion to buy a butt pillow.
  • Saturday we discovered that Larry, a cat we’ve had in the family for about 10 years, is a girl and not a boy. This could explain why s/he’s always been so cranky. Should we continue with life as it was or should we change his/her name to Lorry and buy him/her a pink collar?
  • Anya not only knows how to add DVDs to the Netflix queue, she knows how to move them to the top of the list. Instead of a movie I’d picked, Dora will be showing up in our mailbox tomorrow.

  • My mother loves me. She washed all our dishes for us for about a week…in the bathtub.
  • The day my parents went back home, Andy got our new kitchen sink working (water comes out the faucet AND goes out the drain!). Good thing, too, because I’m not washing dishes in the bathtub.

  • We forgot to carve our jack-o-lantern on Halloween, so we’ll probably do it tonight or maybe this weekend.
  • At the end of the year, I will be resigning from my job to be Loafkeeper Farm’s very own June Cleaver. I have the apron, but will someone send me the pearls?
  • Scrapbook tape (the red-backed stuff that comes on a ring) is an essential tool for attaching drawer fronts to drawers.

  • More pictures soon.
Oct 12 2010

Windfall

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After Anya and I came home from school today, I drug her out to the apple tree. Most of the apples have fallen, but there were a lot on the ground that were still fine and a few really nice ones with a cut or small blemish. Anya got bored quickly, and I told her she could go back in the house but no tv or computer. Hrmpf. I guess apples are more fun than the house-tv-computer. Plus Buddy finally joined us, and he’s fun to talk to. Anya seemed upset when he crossed through the barbed wire fence to the neighbor’s yard and I wouldn’t let her follow. I was tempted to toss her over because it looked like lots of nice apples had fallen on that side, but I figured I’d hit my ‘bad parent’ quota for the day when I sent her to school in pants that were apparently so large her teacher pinched and sewed the waist in two spots to keep them from falling down. (Yeah, Andy dressed her, but I didn’t notice and change her.) Even sticking to our side of the fence, I collected a very full paper grocery bag of apples to add to our hamper.

Anya and I gave one of the more damaged apples to the chickens, but it seemed to confuse them. I told Anya we’d check back tomorrow to see if they’d figured out what to do with it. “Yeah!”

Oct 3 2010

A bushel and a peck

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Today we picked a bushel of apples. Okay, it’s really a laundry hamper full of apples. I estimate we cleared out about half of the non-tiny apples from one of our trees.

And here is Anya using her new magnetic chalkboard wall. Only the magnetic part can be used right now – according to the can, we should wait 3 days (THREE DAYS!) before priming with chalk dust and using. I’m not sure Cabol can wait that long.

Sep 28 2010

Pommes, pommes de terre, and oak

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We recently moved our web host, so you’ll notice this space had changed a little bit. It will probably change again as we have time to play around with wordpress. While we were moving, Andy wouldn’t let me post anything new. Big ole meanie.

Anya has been in school now for a few weeks, and she loves it. She’d live there if she could, I think. They’ve already had two field trips, and I was lucky to be able to arrange my schedule so I could go with her on both. The first field trip took the school to a local farm to help harvest potatoes. The kids had planted the potatoes earlier in the year as part of a farm-to-school program to help get local food into the schools. There were two bus loads of fifth graders from the local elementary school there, too, and the big kids followed the potato plow like hungry cats after an open can of tuna. The kids swarmed over the freshly-turned ground and vacuumed up all the potatoes before the little kids could get there. It was okay, though, because the little kids still got to play in lots of dirt.

On the second trip, we went to an apple orchard a few miles from our house. Turns out we’ve met the woman who owns the place when we went to pick up our milk share. When she bought the property, it was overgrown, and she’s been working very hard to get things back into shape. Alas, the little kids mostly were stuck with picking apples off the ground what with them being shorter than most of the tree branches, but they all still had a great time. This was the first time I’d seen Anya eat an apple peel!

After we picked apples, we had a little picnic in the grass and then watched some of the bigger kids use the orchard’s cider press to make fresh cider, which was (of course) fabulous. I came home with a big bag of apples and dreams of fresh apple pie. Later that afternoon, the school had a little festival to celebrate autumn’s arrival. We ate fresh applesauce made by the teachers and watched the kids race carrying apples in spoons and jump over an ever-widening river in what made me think of a horizontal version of limbo.

Inspired by the trip to the orchard, I decided to investigate our own apple trees. We have three on our property, but we’ve mostly neglected them. The apples always seemed to be puny and wormy and not worth the effort. A spring or two ago, though, my dad and I pruned the tree closest to the house, and I think it paid off this year. A few days ago we went to check out that tree and it is loaded with large and tasty yellow apples. We picked a few to add to my bag from the orchard and had plans to pick more, but then it started to rain and hasn’t stopped.

Andy has been busy on yet another home reno project. The latest is putting down hardwood floors in our kitchen/dining room area. We picked up some “rustic” red oak flooring, and Andy has been face nailing it with old-timey looking, square-headed nails. (Rustic = stuff that is all sorts of colors/doesn’t match and has worm holes and knot holes and other small flaws in it. Rustic also = a lot cheaper. Luckily, we like rustic.) Yesterday he finished the floor in the dining room area. We decided not to stain the wood and just put poly on top. It’s definitely a nice change from the purple-painted sub floor we’ve had for the last three years. I can’t wait for the peeling, dirt-colored, stick-on vinyl squares in the kitchen area to vanish, too.

Sep 5 2010

Last Hurrah of the Summer

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We drove up to NY to visit Andy’s family a few weeks ago. The weather was really nice, and we had all sorts of fun things planned. First, we went to the county fair. Compared to our county fair, okay, our county fair is not really a fair. (I think there were more people at the Erie fair than there are living in all of our county.) Anyhow, we watched sea lions and real lions and pet goats and watched dancers and looked at bunnies and chickens and drank lemonade. Anya was just tall enough to go on a bunch of kiddie rides. She didn’t like rollercoastery type things much, but loved the gentler rides. Her aunt and uncle took her on the ferris wheel, and I guess that was okay because there was no shrieking (at least that we could hear).

We also went to Niagra Falls. Neither Anya nor her uncle had been before. Anya, Chris, and Rebecca trekked down into the cave of mist or the misty caves or something with caves and condensation. During the trek, Aunt Rebecca promised Anya a purple lollipop if Anya behaved. After the trek, we hunted all the gift stores for a purple lollipop. Rebecca finally found a rainbow one, and that worked just fine.

The next day, we all went to the town beach. It was pretty awesome. I reprimanded Andy for having never taken me there before and then wondered if he spent all his youthful summers there. It was an awful lot like a real beach and only a few minutes from his house. How did I not know about the place before?!?! While Anya chased seagulls, Kenny dug a really big hole.

On the last full day of our visit, we all went to a family reunion. We hadn’t been to one in several years, and I was surprised I actually recognized people. Anya and Kenny played with their cousins, and I ate a bunch of frito dip. Andy got a soda he thought was a coke but was orange, and he was sad. I got a soda I thought was coke but was orange, and I was happy.

On the drive home, we made our traditional stop at the FiestaWare outlet. This time we scored 8 plates for $2 each and a big, green fruit bowl that Buddy likes to sleep in.

Jul 20 2010

What I did on my summer vacation

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Anya and I went to visit my family the first week of July. Andy was a big poopie head and wouldn’t come with us. That’s fine. I left him a long list of things to do. (He even did a few of them!)

We had a great time playing in the backyard full of evil mosquitoes and going to our favorite restaurants and shopping at the Goodwill Emporium and getting our hairs cut by Ms. Pat and eating sheep and worm and mouse pancakes and chasing ChewyDog and NonnieCat and BobCat and seeing peaches packed and making cowstumes and squirt-gun-fighting with Grampa and Bubba and having a big ole birthday party with chocolate-cherry cake and candles to blow out! PHEW!

We also played in the pool,

and made tree kites,

and Anya dressed up in her hootchie-mama-Goodwill top (which some lady tried to steal out of my cart – the nerve!),

and jumped up and down at Monkey Joe’s (but not in the hootiche-mama-Goodwill top).

Although part of the journey and not the actual visit, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that Anya went poopoo on the side of the road (not once, but twice!) on the way to Georgia. Ethical dilemma: do you leave the poo on the side of the road (non-populated area) or clean it up? I mean, surely all sorts of things are out there pooing all the time. But then…what if someone gets stranded and steps in the poo? What if a mower mows the poo? What if a bunch of kids stop there to do a Chinese fire drill and slide in the poo and all is ruined?!?!?!?