Busy Hands Homestead

(written almost entirely while on hold with Team Heath) I have hung the diapers, stepping on the sweet smelling pineapple weed ( Matricaria discoidea ) at my feet.  Ivory is napping on my bed and I just gently deposited Sylvan on his sisters bed. I sighed and picked up the phone. I am sitting here, tethered to my phone, being transferred from one person to another. Somewhere along the way I have gotten dropped and am back to the first step in the process, I was just transferred back to the Team Health billing center. I have been on hold so long that the battery on my phone is noticeably warm. This has become a weekly ritual. It all started on March 23 rd , 2011 when Sylvan was 7 weeks old. We were visiting family in Oklahoma and he developed this horrible mucus in the back of his throat. He would choke after nursing and instead of spitting up milk, he would spit of masses of sticky slime. I had him sleeping propped up, terrified to fall asleep myself... It...

The day after Adam defended his master's thesis, we loaded up a rental truck and he drove from Stillwater, Oklahoma to Missoula, Montana. A month later I crammed our tiny car full of all the things we managed to forget to pack into the truck, put my daughter into her car seat and made the trip north to join him. I took the Orange street exit, and I will admit it, promptly got lost. So rather than being absolutely ecstatic, I was more than a little grumpy when I finally managed to fine the MUD site where we would be living for the next year. I was even more grumpy when I walked into our new home, only to see how literal my husband had taken my request to not move in completely with out me.... everything, and I really mean almost everything was still in boxes or laying on top of boxes. So, I unpacked, sorted, moved furniture and slowly put my life back in order and started to explore this new place we lived in. In August Ivory and I will have lived in Missoula for...

For Ivory's first birthday I made her carrot cake and lemon zucchini cake cup cakes with cream cheese icing. She tried one bite, and decided she would not have any. Instead she shoved handfuls of watermelon into her mouth, dripping and sticky, but immensely happy. On her second birthday, we had carrot cake with cream cheese icing. It was much better received this time.    By her third birthday I had discovered a wonderfully rich and moist chocolate beet cake. She proudly told everyone who would bend down to listen: “I had a vegetable cake for my birthday!”, which was followed by confused looks in my direction... and my subsequent interpretation of Ivory's statement. I came across the recipe while perusing the pages of a tiny little cook book that was given to my husband as he commenced his year as a VISTA at Missoula Urban Demonstration Project (MUD) . The cook book is the 2006 edition of Eat Local, Feel Noble! compiled by Lauren Caldwell as a ...

We were supposed to be drifting in a canoe on a lake, but instead Ivory is drifting in and out of sleep on the sofa. I cancel all of our play dates, and resign myself to a quite day at home. I pick up the yard (where does all this clutter come from?) drifting in and out of the bedroom the living room and the yard to check on the sleeping children. It is a drifting kind of day. The flat pod peas Ivory planted weeks ago are ready to be harvested. But picking them can wait for her, and I leave them hanging, translucent in the morning sun. “Stir-fried with thin slices of beef”, I think to myself. Between naps, we read chapters of Lucy and the Green Man by Linda Newbery. We read about the passing of seasons, summer waning, winter arriving. That seems so far away. Summer and sunshine seem to have just now entered our lives. We read about Lucy's grandpa passing away and my voice cracks a littl...

“I've got this”, is the thought, or the more the feeling I relish in as I wake up, change a diaper, nurse my son back to sleep and slip out of bed. My husband is already in the kitchen making breakfast and his lunch after having taken out the dogs. We dance around each other, resembling chaos more than a waltz, and before my whole wheat pancakes are done he is gone. Sylvan has joined me in the kitchen, and we clean up while we wait for Ivory to join us. What to do today? On a beautiful sunny day like this? I briefly consider an outing.. walk along the river, visit the library, but no. I think we will just stay home. Throw open the doors and windows and relish the day. Ivory walks out of her room in a foul mood. Already crying about how she wants to keep on her shirt, and how Daddy told her she could.... Oh, no. Not to today. “How about you go to back to bed and we start over”, I say, trying to come up with some solution so that I can cling onto that 'I...