I'm a Teacher

I have sung the praises of my planning book, and it continues to make life easier for all of us.  I've been really digging this super organized Melissa chick.  So new and unexpected and effective!  I was out on my own the other day and someone asked me, "Are you a teacher?"  I was a little unsure how to answer.  I asked why and she said I just look like a teacher.  I am a teacher, since I home school.  I do lesson plans, grade papers, calculate scores, and encourage.  I also have discipline problems in my school, disruptive students, and my janitor leaves much to be desired, to say the least!

And I put off grading papers on Saturday to sew!  I made some skirts for my girls out of embroidered pinwale corduroy which are just too cute, if I do say so myself!  A longer one for Mini Me:

And this (For Baby Jane), of the remnant, to which I added violet gingham to make it long enough and ruffly!

This one only took me about an hour from start to finish, but I have to put in elastic still.  They were both just rectangles and ruffles, super easy to cut and just throw together.  No rice paper to pin, no markings to make, no zippers to wrestle with, and super cute!

Why I Hate Halloween

I hate to be scared. Sometimes, at night, when my husband comes home and I didn't hear him and I see him out of the corner of my eye when I'm doing dishes or something. I freak out. By this I mean that I gasp, I scram, and then I actually cry real tears because I'm so startled and scared, and throw myself into my husband's arms feeling happy that he's not a bad guy while he apologizes for startling me. My stepmother always said it's because I have a guilty conscience that I get startled so easily, but really, I'm just a scaredy cat. I hate scary movies, I hate haunted houses, I hate it when people talk about ghosts or paranormal activity, and I absolutely, positively abhor anything that celebrates witches, ghosts, goblins, murders, blood, ghouls, demons, or pretty much scary anything. Which sort of rules out Halloween. Which is sad, because I love to celebrate. I celebrate obscure Saint's Days, just because. Also, I love to wear, make, plan, and look at costumes. To top it off I really adore the idea of visiting one's neighbors to say hello and share a little treat. I'm happy to celebrate things that promote goodness, generosity, bravery, selflessness, new life, thankfulness for a good harvest, love, rest, friendship, or joy, but I will not celebrate fear, evil, darkness and debauchery. Bah Humbug!

I do have and alternate idea for the fall, that incorporates treats, visiting, partying, and all fall wonderfulness, such as apple dunking, pumpkin treats, and also, bonus, dancing!!! I think I'll have a Hoe Down in the fall. It could be a family event to which everyone brings treats, sort of like a dress up dance, only it's all Cowboys and Prairie Princesses. I could incorporate a talent show, or a one-act play, or even a comedy act.

People who think like me usually hunker down on Halloween, hoping no one too scary comes to their door asking for candy, but this would be much more fun. I've been wanting to have an annual "event" to which I invite my friends for a big blowout. Perhaps I'll throw a great big Harvest Dance in a barn somewhere in October to sort of replace Halloween for me and my kids. I don't mean a normal Hallelujah party with costume competition and trunk or treating with a "salvation message" thrown in... I mean an old fashioned Hoe Down, that celebrates that all the hard work of summer is over and the harvest is in and we have time to throw a party (put your "hoes down" ladies and gentlemen!). I wonder if anyone else would come if I specified that it was "Not a Halloween Party", or "Western Dress Only"? The menu could include:

Corn dogs: they're portable and kids love them
Candy apples: ditto
Apple butter and pumpkin spice donuts
Crudites
Cheese and Crackers
All the finger foods and desserts people care to bring to share
Hot apple cider, Iced tea, lemonade, and a cooler of cool water to cool down after gettin' down!

To solve the whole costume envy thing, we could move the costume party to New Year's Eve... then the whole scary undertone wouldn't be there and people could get as creative as they like, without offending my delicate sense of all being well with the world. Why not just completely remake cultural norms because I want to! Get on board people!

A New Farmhouse?

So... I haven't posted in MONTHS! I know you're all busy and hardly noticed, but I missed blogging. I always wondered why people decided to take three months off in the summer instead of having year round school... and now that I have a little mini-farmlike lifestyle, I KNOW WHY! Summer is hard work. The freezer needs to be filled with veggies and fruits and chickens, and the pantry needs to be filled with jellies and jams and canned tomatoes. If we had a cow, we'd need to make cheese and get all that surplus milk dealt with. Not to mention the laundry. Yeah, it was a busy one!!!

It is fun, though, to open a jar of your own tomatoes, from your own garden when a recipe calls for 28oz canned tomatoes. It's fun to work with your kids around the kitchen table putting those tomatoes into jars, too. The knitting and sewing suffered over the summer, too, and now that cool weather has returned and I'm indoors more the urge to clothe people is compelling me to make stuff. So far I've made a shrug and bonnet for a friend's baby, a sweater vest for my baby, I finished the knee socks, started a pair of socks for hubby, cast on a stranded sweater vest, and have knit the back and left front of a cardigan for hubs. No sewing. Guess why....

We've been house shopping! We toured and compared, we walked lots and explored pastures, we debated gas vs wood fireplaces, and we finally signed a contract to buy a house. Of course, it's a short sale, and so many things could fall through before we close on the house. As a matter of fact, I'm trying to reconcile myself to it falling through now. I mean, if I don't get this house I'll know that God wants to remind me that Heaven is for the afterlife and not the here and now, because that house is perfect, OK, it's darn close to perfect.

It's yellow. My very favorite house color (I'm so ordinary). It has five bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a family room, and a great room attached to a kitchen with granite counter tops and an island and a double oven with a gas range. It has beautiful distressed oak floors (exactly the kind that my husband daydreams about when we talk about our dream home) and gorgeous light fixtures that are the perfect mix of traditional and simple. It has a front porch with a tin roof, a fenced yard, a creek, a pasture, lots of trees, and a view. I wouldn't even need to paint... and I like the carpet, and the windows are big, and it's only 3 years old... Should I go on? I mean, I could, if you want me to. I could mention the great big storage room.

I really have appreciated the farmhouse here, and the farm itself is glorious, but we are a bit shoehorned in.... not that the bedrooms aren't adequate, they are, but there's just one living area and we do EVERYTHING in there. It's a foyer, and a schoolroom, and an office, and a playroom, and a living room, all at once. So it gets messy, and really downright dirty rather quickly. Living in a house built in the 20's is rather romantic.... but the windows are really old and one can feel the wind in the winter, and the floor isn't insulated, and the furnace burns heating oil, which is stinkin' expensive. The stinkbugs and ladybugs just wiggle right into the house through the windows in the fall and try to hibernate in the bedrooms by the hundreds. Not to mention the constant battle with paint chips and lead in the pipes that would make any mom rather worried. So we're ready to go. In the spring.

What have we learned here on the farm? We learned that we can grow a whole lot of our own food. We learned that we love chickens and the eggs that pastured hens lay. We learned that we are NOT city people. We love the country life, and we love the outdoors, and we love to be able to LIVE in our house and not just sleep in it. We learned that we love Jersey milk from Josephine, the cow who provides it...and we like knowing our milkmaid's names too. We learned that it's waaaaaaay harder work than we thought it would be, but it's fun, too. We learned that my husband wants to be able to go on vacation, so we'll probably never have our own cow! Oh, also... that largish yellow labs sometimes like to steal eggs from chicken coops and can squeeze themselves through remarkably small chicken doors to do so. AAAAAAAaaaaaaand that I hate raccoons and love MaryJane Butters.

Piedmont Hunt

If you look way into the middle ground of this photo, you'll see some people on horseback. They're part of the Piedmont Hunt here in Fauquier and Loudoun Counties, and they're fox hunting. Oh, yeah, hounds, guy in red coat blowing a horn, and lots and lots of people in riding habits on beautiful horses jumping across our bucolic countryside. It's oh, so Jane Austen-ey. It's like they're wanting this to be the US version of the British countryside. That's fine with me, it's wonderful, picturesque, and they actually just chase the foxes, and try not to let the hounds kill them, since killing the fox would make it impossible to chase! This hunt was on Thanksgiving morning, and we had wanted to watch it leave from the farm down the road, but we all were just too tired to leave in the morning. To my surprise the Hunt Master (I think that's what he's called) appeared right in front of our house and blew his horn at the hounds, who were baying in the pasture behind our house. I was so excited I made my sister get out of the shower to come look, poor thing.

Grey November

Well, it's been very autumnal here. Beautiful changing leaves, crisp air, overcast skies, with a few balmy days thrown in there that are perfect for working to clean up the yard and put it to bed for winter. This time of year, I always have the urge to make woolie warm things for my babies. I usually have way too many projects going and only the small ones get finished. In January last year, I started a grey Aran sweater intended for my oldest son. It's an Elizabeth Zimmerman pattern that lends itself to modification, but requires lots of math, counting, gauge swatches, and luck. Once I got through a few inches I realized that it was too narrow for a boy, so, instead of frogging the project and starting over, I decided to make it for my oldest daughter. I had done a lot of work on it and my daughter wasn't very excited about the idea because of the color. Against all these knitting obstacles, one can't help but lose some ground in morale. So I just put it away. Since then, I've been campaigning for more grey in my daughter's wardrobe. She has lovely grey eyes and grey brings out the pink in her little cheeks beautifully. Well, it worked! She now thinks grey is just perfect for her. Sooo, I finished the sweater. It involved steeking which was a new and scary thing for me, but it turned out fine. I was going to use teal buttons, which would have been smashing, but the pearl ones would go with more, or so says the Princess, and she is turning into quite the little stylista.

She pretty much adores this skirt. It's swirly and twirly and made of soft, warm, fuzzy flannel. No pattern for this skirt, I just cut and sewed and added a couple of ruffles and elastic waistband. She has a couple pairs of warm bloomers to wear underneath. One is a pair I made of dollar a yard flannel I bought at Walmart. The other are made from a grey wool sweater that shrunk in the wash. I cut and sewed and turned the sleeves into a pair of knitted bloomers that are soft and warm. I bought more fabric, too, for garments for the princess. A grey damask, a white cotton with silver and yellow print, and an oyster with blue and grey geometric floral for blouses.

Holiday Preparations

We love holidays, celebrations, and feasts at our house. Since Thanksgiving is only a few weeks away, we've been getting our menu together and inviting people to eat with us. We usually invite people who are away from family to feast and give thanks with us, since this holiday is all about family for so many. My dear sister is visiting, too, which I'm really, really excited about. She's wonderful and we've been calling each other consulting about what to make, and what do to while she's here. I plan to put her to work a lot... sorry, sis.

We plan on roast turkey... (shocker), and cornbread and sausage stuffing (shocker again). We always have pumpkin pie and apple pie, and this year my sis has requested blueberry cherry pie. So lots of pie. Rosemary roasted veggies, per hubby's request, and my husband always makes a fruit jelly or chutney, this year it's a cranberry pear chutney. We got a lot of recipes this year from the Better Homes and Gardens Holiday Recipes magazine. We usually have both mashed potatos and cheesy hash brown casserole and I make giblet gravy. And we usually ask guests to bring their favorite recipe to share. We eat early, a late lunch, then play games and sing, play/watch football (Cowboys, of course) and nosh all evening. I think this year, if it's not too cold, a hike is in order. Just talking about it makes me all excited!

Our First Egg!

Soooooo, guess what! We got our first egg. My 11 yo son was feeding and watering the chickens and letting them out for their day of foraging when he noticed one chicken didn't come out. He usually counts them as they come out of the coop, and since one didn't appear, he looked into the coop and saw one of our hens in the nesting boxes! He brought our four year old out after breakfast and they found one little brown egg in the nesting box! I know you all are just as excited as we are.


We've been working on some apple butter here. I love apple butter. I know not everyone appreciates the taste and the color is objectionable to some people, but to me, there's no beating good apple butter on some freshly baked bread. We don't have apple trees, but we went to a pumpkin patch on Sunday and bought a peck and a half of apples to make apple butter and an apple pie. No pictures of Apple Butter yet, but I have a picture of my pickles to share! They were my first attempt at pickles and they turned out pretty well. I mostly use pickles in recipes like potato salad and tuna salad, though occasionally I'll put one on a burger or something. The pickling spices made the pickles more complex than I'm accustomed to for eating out of hand, but they are really good in recipes.



Yum! On all accounts.

Mama's Day Out

Coming to you live from Panera Bread in Warrenton... I needed a vacation, bad... so my husband, wonderful, beautiful, generous man that he is offered to give me a whole day to do whatever I wanted now that the youngest is old enough to leave alone for a while. So, this morning, I took a walk on the farm, which I'm always wanting to do, but never actually doing. I took a few pictures, which I thought you'd perhaps enjoy.

Pretty, huh?!