we're real farmers now

Yesterday, while a friend brought the big kids home from school and Charlie was at his piano lesson, the two little kids and I drove up to Holden. The feed store had called an hour before to say, "The chicks are here! Do you want 5 extras?" Our 17 new baby Golden Buffs were put in little boxes for their transport home, each child carrying one carefully by the handle and base as we walked across the wet field. We had the chicken coop placed on the far side of the garden because that was the most level spot and wouldn't be upwind from the house, but it is a long trek, as I'm finding out. We lined the box with paper towels and shavings, filled their waterer and feeder and gently placed each bird in their new brooder under the warm light. 

Today's weather is a repeat of Friday: cold, windy, and rainy- more reminiscent of late March than the cusp of June. However, the children didn't seem to mind as they pulled on rubber boots again and again to run out and see the chicks every hour. So far Julia Ellen has been good, but a little demanding that she get to hold the baby birds. I will hold the door key to their coop in reserve if she disobeys and goes out to "visit" without me. As I told the little ones, the chicks are only 1, and now 2 days old and are very delicate. 

I too, am very excited about our new acquisitions and was worried last night if they were too warm or too cold and what I would find this morning when I went to change the bedding and water. But my fears were relieved, when at 5:15am, they were all cheeping and busy eating and drinking. Who knows what we are going to do with the eggs from 17 laying hens, but since I won't have to deal with that for months and months, I won't fret about it now. 

school auction night

Last night I sprayed on more hairspray than a Georgia beauty pageant contestant to hold my curls in the humidity, donned my only fancy dress and pearls, and attended the older children’s Catholic school auction.

There are several fundraising events throughout the year, but the big one is the 3 part auction with raffle ticket items, silent big items, and the live auction big prizes. Every family donates something and all the classes make a project in addition to the dozens of baskets of merchandise donated by local businesses. A few months ago I made a queen size quilt and was surprised to find that it was part of the live auction.  Not very intelligently, I realized last night that I didn't take a picture of the completed quilt, just the top.

While our trusty babysitter played games and fed the children at home, Tim and I chatted with friends, put down bids, and dropped raffle tickets in various bags. The auction was still going at 9:30pm and I asked a friend to bid on the quilt and I would buy it from her if it didn’t go above my minimum, as I didn’t want it to sell for less than I paid for materials. But right before we were to leave the quilt came up for bids and I was pleasantly surprised to see a bidding war ensue, with a final price of $400. So, even though we didn’t go home with anything since Tim’s bid of $50 for a John Deere toy tractor was trumped at the last minute and our raffle numbers were never called, we did our part to ensure a quality Catholic education for the students for another year.      

lost and found

Now that we live in one house and are not bouncing from one state to another several times a year I don't misplace half the things I used to. "I guess we left the piano books behind in Maine, I'll have to get the neighbor to pick them up and mail them back to Virginia." I jettisoned many duplicate items that we didn't need, giving them to the thrift store. But we still live in a big house (my guess is about 3200 square feet) and there are 8 people living in it, most of whom tend to lose items on a daily basis. Apparently as Mommy, I am required to keep a mental inventory of every item within these 4 walls, no matter how small. I am asked, sometimes every hour, where a pair of earrings could be, where Geraldine the giraffe has been left behind, where a certain camping item would be found. The other trick I am supposed to have down pat is a running mental list of everyone's consumables, such as shampoo and soap and replenish them without any notification. I really hate being accused of running out of something the evening after I hit the commissary for my weekly shop. 

Most of the time I can easily find whatever a person is looking for as I keep the house pretty tidy, but this morning turned into complete chaos, not for the first time, when a child couldn't find a certain essential bit of their school uniform. Usually the children wear their fancier attire on Wednesday when they walk over to the church for Mass, but since today is a Holy Day of Obligation it was switched. At 6:30am Mary started screeching that her oxford cloth shirt was missing. We searched everywhere, including through the four closets, under the beds, and in pretty much every room of the house. No shirt and since we didn't have a duplicate, she wore Will's uniform dress shirt to school. (By the way, this level of freaking out NEVER happened during our years of homeschooling, in fact Mary often did her schoolwork in her pajamas) After the boys finished their studies this morning, I again started looking for the missing shirt, finally finding it stuffed in Charlie's dresser drawer. 

This must be the week for finding lost items, so far I have found a missing digital camera, a pair of $60 Felco pruners I thought had been lost in the woods for 2 years, and some pictures of the girls from last year's ballet recital. Now the only thing I have to worry about finding is my sanity if I am asked one more time today to hunt for something.        

relaxing prep means fast race?

On Friday I got the big kids up and to school while Tim took the day off to watch the little ones and work around the farm. After a visit to our parish's new adoration chapel ( I figured it would be better to spend that half hour praying than spending it at McDonalds), I headed over to participate in an all day quilt class with Bonnie Hunter, a scrap quilting teacher from North Carolina. We worked on piecing string blocks and half square triangles that in a very long time will be put together to form this quilt, Jamestown Landing.  

The reason it will take so long? 168 string pieced blocks, and 840 half square triangles, and that doesn't even include the string pieced border made of 16 sheets of copy paper string pieced, then cut down the center. In the 6 hours we were there, I made 25 cream blocks and about 50 triangles. But I also socialized with old friends and learned some new tricks for making triangles.  Here is Bonnie demonstrating how to cover the 4.5" newsprint with diagonal strips of neutral scraps for the background blocks. 

Tonight at quilt guild, I'll bring my tote bag full of scraps and keep plugging away. I've mentally designated this quilt as a Christmas gift for my sister-in-law so there is a self imposed deadline.

But all that time away from the children must have relaxed me enough run really fast on Saturday morning. Charlie, Timmy, and I headed out early to Orrington for a 1 mile fun run and 10K. Charlie ran 7:08, Timmy 8:27, and while they were gorging on post-race granola bars and fruit, I ran my best 10K ever with a 44:58 (7:15/mile pace). So three good races in a row have taught me to slow down that first mile and stay on a consistent pace rather than bolt out ahead and wear myself out far before the finish. My next quilting class is in July at the state quilt show in Augusta,the day before the Bucksport Bay festival 5K. I've never done very well in it for some reason, maybe another relaxing day quilting will change that statistic.  

a little bump in the road

Yesterday I woke at 5:30 to shower and take Will to Merit Badge College, but with a cold and intestinal issues, I let him go back to bed for a few hours. He spent the rest of the day helping Tim move and stack wood, getting some much appreciate tractor driving lessons. My muscles were a bit sore from farm chores such as painting the chicken coop floor and moving wheelbarrow loads of compost to the fruit trees, but I got up early again to head out for a 5 mile trail race in town. 

There were only about 30 of us, but we headed down the wooded paths at a pretty brisk clip. I was ahead of all the other women and feeling pretty confident when at mile three I fell and got scraped up quite a bit. My foot twisted and I got up running and limping along, knowing that my nearest competitor was only about 20 yards behind me. She didn't get any closer until the end, where there was a huge incline for the last 200 meters. Luckily I've been doing a bit of hill work and charged up like a crazed person to finish in 36:47. My hard work paid off, after a bit of cleaning up and an ace bandage wrapped around my knee, I took home a $100 gift certificate to Epic Sports. 2nd place got $50, so my mad rush was certainly well worth the little extra bit of pain. The next race is Saturday, a 10K, hopefully my now purple foot will be well enough to repeat a good performance.

spring break for the kids means...

This week can be whatever I want it to be, full of activities and errands, or peaceful and relaxed. Likely it will be a combination of both, judging from the length of my "to do" list. But I've already enjoyed sleeping in until 6:30, finishing a novel in bed, making blueberry coffee cake, and finishing the above-mentioned list.  

Yet, Timmy and Charlie are going to do school this week, I will still have to prod 4 kids daily to practice the piano, and I need to get in some serious running time. So, while spending each day reading in bed for hours might seem nice, I still need to fit everything in like a giant jigsaw puzzle, but without the huge school and extracurricular activity pieces that usually take up a chunk of my week. I also need to keep plugging away at the quilt I will submit to my first quilt show this summer. After 3 weeks of piecing and pressing every single seam open, I finally finished the top on Saturday. 

My first treat of the week was waking up super early yesterday to meet a small group of fellow runners on Mount Desert Island and run up the 4+ miles to the top of Mt. Cadillac. It was very foggy and almost unworldly with ghostly tortured-looking conifers appearing out of the mist. Luckily we did catch one lovely glimpse of the view of the water and islands when we were coming back down, but the bone-chilling cold stayed with me for much of the day. 

So, now after a little blogging and browsing time while sipping an iced coffee, it is time to go blast the lazy slug-a-bed kids out of their warm beds and get the first day of vacation started.     

time keeps on ticking

One of the things that I recall every time I feel a little guilty about not blogging often is that since the big kids have started going away to school, 2 hours of every day is now spent in the car. That is 2 hours I previously spent quilting, reading, blogging, cleaning, and playing with the kids. Every day now is as regimented as a new Army recruit: wake up, get ready, get kids ready, drive to school, come home, homeschool the boys, run, shower, get big kids from school, ferry some kid to piano, make dinner, bathe little kids, read aloud, say prayers, and finally put the kids to bed. 

So, what has our family been doing for the past few weeks? Well, Timmy, Charlie, and I did the Flattop race. The boys did great in the mile (Charlie 7 min, Timmy 8 min) and I did terrible in the 5K. The weightlifting I had been doing to improve my strength left my muscles so worn out, despite a 4 day break, that I could only barely manage to stay on my feet. Yesterday I did run the Bridge the Gap 10 mile race and did quite well: 1hr 20 min. I ran the first 8 miles with my friend Lisa at a 8:30 pace and felt as fresh ending it as I did starting. I've been going out way too fast and crashing at mile 2, so this was a good learning experience. It was much more fun to pass people, especially on the hills, than to get passed while gasping for breath. 

I've been quilting up a storm since I finished all my obligation projects: a tshirt quilt for an online friend and a brown bag exchange in our guild. I applied to submit this quilt in the state quilt show for judging and have until the middle of June to get it finished. After several weeks, I've now finished all the colored strips and have to connect it all with white sashing next. I'm not really looking forward to working with 34 floppy strips, all 2" wide, but now I have to get it done, and do it well, since I don't want to look foolish next to all the really talented quilters in our state. 

Will was accepted to the fancy high school so I can release the breath I was holding for several weeks. Our other option was to bring Will home for 9th grade and send Charlie to Catholic school a year earlier than anticipated. Now it is unlikely that I will be spending the next year in prison for killing my child because Will and I are at odds so often these days and the little boys will have each other to be best friends with for another year. I didn't think I could go back to more than 3 kids at home during the day, Timmy has made such progress this year without the drama of trying to get the older ones to do their work. I've actually had, despite the loss of 2 hours a day, more time this year to work with him on his studies. 

Julia Ellen is now officially potty trained, or housebroken as my Grandmother calls it. I am happily doling out m&ms as reward for not having to daily wipe a yucky bottom for the first time in 15 years. 

What is next? More quilting, more races, the arrival of our first batch of Buff Orpington chicks in a few weeks, and planting my garden. Spring is late in arriving to northern Maine, the ground is still frozen 4 inches down and there are still patches of snow here and there, but today there is a warmth in the air that hasn't been there before and the snowdrops in front of the library were blooming this morning. Happy Spring!          

splash

An Easter Day that started with eating an entire chocolate bunny, multiple egg hunts, and topped off with a ham dinner was just not going to end well. Julia Ellen had a marvelous day scarfing down all the candy in her basket before 10am, then looking for plastic eggs all over the yard and house that each of her older siblings would hide, and having a nice bath before getting into her new pink polka dotted dress to go to 5:30 pm Mass. We took 2 cars because the boys got there extra early to serve and as the priest sprinkled us all with holy water from the aspergillum, Julia Ellen threw up. 

She not only barfed all down the back of my sweater and her dress, but when I quickly took her to the tiny bathroom to clean up and sat her on the toilet lid, she threw up again all over both of us and the floor. With nothing but coarse brown paper towels to clean up the mess and a miserable little girl on my hands, I sopped up the worst of it and asked the sacristan to fetch my purse and keys from our pew before taking her home in the truck. She got another bath, I took another shower and we both curled up in our  fuzzy jammies until the rest of the family returned home. 

Monday, I did call the church office and offer to come in and Lysol the heck out of the pew and the bathroom, but the nice lady said that these things happen and it would be taken care of. Perhaps next year I can avoid a repeat performance by just not buying 4 bags worth of Easter candy. I thought I was moving out of the stage of life of having to miss parts of Mass because of loud babies and cranky toddlers, but being the mommy of many sometimes means 2 steps forward and 1 step back.

 

isn't today the first day of Spring?

The big kids finally got their first snow days of the year Tuesday and Wednesday. Every big storm previously hit on the weekend or late enough in the day to have the roads clear by morning. So they caught up on homework, Will also prepared for Scout University this weekend, and Maggie, Timmy, and I got lost in the woods. We could have followed our tracks back, but we kept plowing through on snowshoes and skis before ending up in a hay field at the far end of our road.  Our reward was seeing the carcass of a calf that had been eaten by some predator, possibly the bald eagles I saw a few weeks back near that same spot. Yes, it was pretty gross, but Charlie was disappointed that he had declined to go with us when he heard Timmy tell all about it.


Yesterday afternoon Tim got home from work and climbed on the tractor to make some paths to the compost bin and down the hill for a really wide sled run. (Yes, those dark dots are two children climbing back up the hill)

This morning after the boys finished their schoolwork we all hit the slope for hopefully, the last day or two of sledding for the winter. After all, it is officially spring, even in Maine.

underachieving boys

I just finished reading Boys Adrift, The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men by Dr. Leonard Sax. He outlines the reasons he believes there is an whole generation, and soon to be two generations, of slacker boys and men, who don't bother growing up. 

As I have a 14 year old son who is starting to slip into this category, I read this book with a sense of doom and optimism. Doom that I have done things unknowingly that may have contributed to his slacker status and optimism that I haven't done as badly as I could have and may still have time to change his destiny. Since starting Catholic school, Will has become addicted to the computer, which means a fight every night over the Mac laptop that is issued to every middle school student in the state of Maine. He plays MineCraft and Skypes his friends for hours, switching screens back to school assignments when a grownup enters the room. He has even been known to sneak downstairs in the middle of the night to retrieve it for more game playing.

 I have been tempted on several occasions to call Dr. Ray Guarendi, Catholic clinical psychologist and dad of 10 for advice or just throw the laptop out the window (but then I would have to pay for another one). We have told him that next year's school options are the fancy and expensive private school (no Catholic high school in the area) or back to homeschooling and with his attitude and grades, it is likely that his experiment in going away to school will have only lasted a year and a half. Luckily I am prepared to enroll him in Seton, a highly rigorous program with no opportunity to slack off or mess around on the computer. The local public school is not an option,especially since they give every student their own iPad. 

Dr.Sax points out 5 factors that have contributed to the exact problem I am facing: changes in school, video games, medications for ADHD, endocrine disruptors, and the revenge of the forsaken Gods. School has become more intense sooner, which is not good for little boys. Five year old males are not designed to sit still for hours and hours each day. Luckily we homeschool our little ones and with several subjects already completed for the year,formal  school is lasting less than 2 hours total. Dr. Sax blasts video games for their mind-sucking ability, the creation of males who can't function in the real world because they can't control it the way they can in games, and the fact that they take up time that could be spent doing something real- a sport, a hobby, reading, learning, interacting with others. He goes into the stimulant drugs that can make kids lazy and phthalates in the plastic water/soda bottles we all drink from that leach chemicals into our bodies that can cause boys to become more feminized and girls to develop earlier. The fifth factor he discusses is the fact that our culture no longer teaches boys to become men, responsibility is mocked and we are left with the resulting mess, a nation of 13 year olds in men's bodies. 

I'm not sure I completely buy into all of the factors the author proposes, but it does make me think about why a very clear phenomenon is happening. Girls are developing earlier and earlier, girls are graduating from college in every increasing percents each year, leaving their male counterparts in the dust, and more and more men are refusing to take on adult responsibilities but instead living out their 20's and 30's in their parent's basements drifting from job to job and being lazy. Why and how we can change our sons so they have every opportunity to fulfill their potential are questions that many of us should all think about.   

unexpected race

I debated for a few weeks over whether to participate in the Chamberlain March 1/2 marathon or the 5K. I sent in my registration for the shorter race a few weeks back, knowing that I hadn't really done the distance runs necessary, only one 10 miler last weekend. But when I got to the Brewer Armory my running bud Dave only had to twist my arm a little to get me to switch races. He promised 8-8:30/min miles and I thought I could handle that. We started off running together for 2 miles or so, but then I slowly pulled away on the downhills and just kept clicking up 8 minutes at every mile marker. I beat my previous PR by 5 minutes and won not only a box of whoopie pies, but a Road ID gift certificate as a door prize. The compitition in my age bracket is fierce this year, I only came in 3rd, but with my new weekly program including lifting weights and speed workouts, I think I'll do okay. 

progress

One of the things that is satisfying about homeschooling is the feedback, the almost instant information that a child is learning. It has been a learning experience for me, this being our first year sending any of the children away to school, of how little I now know about their academic lives. From knowing everything they do each day to only hearing bits and pieces in the car on the way home, from seeing each piece of work to only having a general idea of how their grades are. Luckily I trust the school (up to a point) that they are being educated. 

My little boys, on the other hand, are still fully under my tutelage, and so I knew a few weeks back that Timmy was struggling in reading to the point of tears and head banging (his leaky eyes and my achy head). I made an executive decision to start over again with Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons and now, I can say that it was the right thing to do. He is now back up to lesson 30, sounding out letters and reading short stories with much more ease and confidence. It doesn't really matter in the long run if he finishes first grade by June or even by next winter, the important thing is for him to learn the basics of reading and to learn to love to read. 

Charlie has really made great progress in his reading skills as well, faster and with better pronunciation than he had even a few weeks ago. We finished both boys science and history books for the year, so I started reading aloud a few chapters every day as part of "sofa stuff," biographies of famous Americans. Timmy and I have read about John Paul Jones, Betsy Ross, Abraham Lincoln, and now George Washington. Charlie really has gotten interested in all things mechanical so I started him on The History of Flight. Yes, he could pull them off the shelf and read them on his own, but part of my job is to select the right books for each child's level and interest.

Reading today about the 80% illiteracy rate of New York City graduates at community colleges, helped reinforce my basic philosophy that the most important job I have as a homeschooling mom is to make sure that my children are excellent readers. Without those skills and eagerness to read for fun, they will still be living at home when they are 30, unable to graduate from college, find a job, and provide for themselves. And after 15 years of nursing babies, changing nappies, potty training, cooking large meals, doing multiple loads of laundry, chauffeuring two hours a day, that is something I don't even want to joke about.  

The pressure is off

I had so many quilting projects going on, all with deadlines, that I was starting to get stressed out. The blue and cream quilt for the school auction in May, a wall hanging that the local quilt group is making for the town's library (somehow I ended up in charge so I had to put together the packets for the blocks, collect them, and finish the top), a t-shirt quilt for a Catholic homeschooling friend, and a  brown bag project for quilt group due in April. A purple and white child's quilt top is complete, waiting for batting to pass on to Bags of Love, a children's philanthropy. 

So a nice snowy Sunday was perfect to allow me to work all day while the children helped their father move wood. This is what I had already completed by 7am and then finally finishing up at 6pm.

I still have an outer border to put on before the top is complete,but with the auction quilt only lacking a label and my portion of the library's wall hanging complete, I'm feeling a lot less panicked about my supposed relaxing hobby.

winter break winding down

This week off from all school has been a real break for all of us, no getting kids out of bed at 6am, no homework, no piano lessons, no Scouts, no basketball, and no homeschool for the little boys. All the children did practice the piano, Will and Charlie served two funerals, and I sewed a great deal. I taught a free-motion machine quilting tutorial at quilt group on Monday night and checked out chicken coops here on Wednesday. I finished the quilt for the school's annual auction and worked on the group's calendar quilt for the town library.   

We had enough snow to sled, but now it is nothing but huge sheets of ice. I have slipped and fallen on my back 3 times this week, including once while taking the vegetable scraps out to the compost pile, it must have been a sight to see eggshells and grapefruit rinds flying through the air. Skiing is out of the question, I attempted it on Thursday, only to find myself careening out of control across the hay fields toward the woods. 

Mostly we have been doing a lot of reading, a lot of hanging out, and recharging our batteries for the last few weeks of winter. I can see the temptation of a tropical vacation, away from ice and snow, but then I would have missed seeing the bald eagle perched in a tree while running yesterday. 

Its snowing again

It  has been a week since digging out from a blizzard and we woke up this morning to another snowstorm with lots more expected today. I am tempted to get out Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter to read aloud so the children can get some perspective. 

Last Saturday, our power went out at 6am and the generator kicked on, only to stop working 20 minutes later. Apparently one part was bad and the whole housing was filled with blowing snow and ice, rendering it unable to start or operate. After watching the thermostats register progressively colder temps inside as the day wore on, since the wood boiler requires electricity to circulate the hot water to the radiators, we made reservations at a hotel, but with no way of getting there. Luckily the power was restored by mid afternoon. The winds were whipping the snow sideways and straight up so there were bare patches of ground right next to 5 foot drifts. 

Sunday we went out and attempted to XC ski, but it is almost impossible in 3 feet of snow. 

Tim made us a sled run through the hay fields with the tractor, leaving a large snowpile at the bottom. Maggie and I managed to catch air after a few attempts because we built up such speed. The boys also built elaborate snow caves and tunnels through the drifts. 

We tried to get Tim to sled, but he wimped out, afraid of getting hurt or losing his glasses. I can't blame him, as I went over the hill yesterday morning I flipped completely upside down and landed smack on my back. I'll soon get some of the children out of bed so we can see how another few inches of snow softens the landing.