eat sleep and farm

I didn't realize back in 2017 that I'd be taking a 6 year break from blogging - but rest assured, I'm back ;-)  Ethan is 17: driving, working outside the home, in the 11th grade and, even though he was our hardest most difficult toddler/child, he's been an amazing teen and young man. The power of prayer, am I right?   Rachel is 15, in the 10th grade, learning to drive, my built in best friend, great with the jokes and witty humor.  Kara is 13. she's in the 8th grade, busy learning how to care for the chickens & ducks, learning how to play her ukulele, and recently obsessed with vinyl.   Miles turns 10 next month! T E N. Not sure how that happened so fast. He has taken to farm life very well and loves to be outdoors. Preferably barefoot :)  Jane... Jane wasn't even around when I last posted! She's is 3 1/2. She's our miracle baby in every sense of the word. She's potty trained, sleeping in a big girl bed, talks a storm, makes us laugh until we cry...

Blogging feels so weird to me now. In the same way writing a hand written letter feels weird and texting a quick message feels normal. I hate to say it, but I've become one of *those* people.  When I was introduced to Instagram I knew it would take over. Only because I know the Grandparents, Aunts and Uncles really only care about photos since we keep in regular touch on the phone and via skype. And I was really only blogging in such detail for them and for my own memory sake; I still keep journals for each kid and a silly quotes journal to remember all the hilarious that goes on in our home.  I'm going to throw some pictures in here randomly for those of you who aren't on Instagram and haven't seen my kids in over a year...  since I last blogged, Rachel turned 11! This was taken a few weeks ago at her Essentials class.  I also feel like, without babies or toddlers, life feels much less "note worthy", if that makes sense? Each day is differ...

I think I found the secret to helping January go by quickly and feel less... depressing. 1.) Don't overly decorate your house for the holidays .  Just a little here and a little there goes a long way and when its time to clean things up, your house won't look like you took away all the fun and brought back all the boring ;-)  2.) Travel .  Nothing extravagant or expensive. Just leave. Go somewhere further away from home so it really feels like you're getting away. Ethan and I went to LA to visit friends and family and I'm telling you, between the getting ready and anticipation of that trip, the going and returning, it really helped January feel fun and exciting!  I feel bad for January. It gets such a bad rep because it comes after all the holiday crazy, it has winter weather (hello! its a winter month) but for some reason we all expect maui temps to return simply because Christmas is over.  3.) Don't cram every little thing into December.  Beca...

Need I say more? ;-) Sometimes we have days where we just need to be out.  Away from the kitchen table.  Away from chores around the house.  Away from the everyday, mundane.  My kids recently told me they love doing their art lesson out in  nature, so I've been trying to do just that on the days we do art.  Sometimes that means we go sit out on our trail, behind our house.  Sometimes I means we drive to the beach.  This beach is called Seahurst Beach Park and its one of our favorites.  It helps that one of my favorite coffee shops and used clothing  stores it just up the street from it :)  We use an art program called Artistic Pursuits and we love it.  Its taken us a while to figure out which curriculum we like most and this  one has been a favorite.  I read the lesson and the story, then we talk about what we learned,  we try to find real life ideas and then they draw...

I saw the title and intro to my last post and laughed out LOUD. Oh well. I'm not even going to talk about it anymore. My only defense is that for most people, blogs are a thing of the past. I refuse that to be true for me (I still sit once a week and catch up on my favorite blogs). To me, it is as personal as you can get, without being face to face or talking on the phone.  My run-down for how 2016 has gone so far can be summed up in 3 words. Wonderful and unexpected. I think when you come close to death the way I did last year, it takes a lot to get you in the depths of despair (as Anne would say), so while parts of this year have been beyond sad; Jason's Grandma passed away, my health continued to cause major issues, etc... I am still forever so grateful to have life. I see my kids growing each month, learning new things, struggling with big kid issues, having "the best day ever" many days over I've lost count and I realize those things alone are blessings we...

I'm getting better at this blog thing!  I think its because I updated my side bar with all the blogs I read and now I come here to check those out and read up. Its a win-win situation. The New Year started off fun with a trip to the Children's Museum in Olympia. We drove an hour south to this museum for 3 reasons. Its tradition for us to venture out to a new place every new year's day. We've heard uh-mazing reviews on this museum and I've been wanting to check it out for a long time. I found a Living Social deal that we couldn't pass up! So we drove down and we all had a blast, not just the kids. We spent several hours there and needed many more to really cover the whole place and enjoy each spot, so we're definitely going back. We also visited the state capital for the first time. I felt really bad doing that (finally) after living here 7 years, but my good friend who's lived here 38 years told me she's never been, so... guilty feelings averted! ...

Remember that song? "Christmas time is coming, the goose is getting fat... please put a penny in the old man's hat. If you haven't got a penny a hay penny will do, if you haven't got a hay penny, God bless you!"  My Mom would probably laugh so hard if she knew I walk around my house singing the silly songs she taught us when we were little. I know so many more like that one. My kids think I'm super cool at this point and I'm hanging on to that opinion as long as I can. Christmas is a few days away and since I'm still in "healing" mode, it doesn't fully feel like Christmas. The other day I found myself saying "I miss NORMAL!" and as I said it, I asked myself, "but what IS normal?" Like, isn't normal where we are right now? Why do we always think normal was the last time we were happy or stress free? Before I was married I was single. Single at one point was the norm for me. So why didn't I freak out after I ...

This has been an interesting year. It started with me telling Jason in mid January, "this isn't going to be a good year." and I hated that I said it the minute the words came out of my mouth. I hate being the pessimist, but I was admitting what I felt deep inside. The truth is, I typically don't like the odd numbered years. I can go all the way back to 1983 when my Grandma died so suddenly of Ovarian Cancer and that kind of started all of it. Some odd numbered years haven't have anything terrible or tragically significant happen in them (that I can remember) but 1989 was full of deaths and a very bad earthquake, 2001 was September 11th, 2011 is when we lost 2 babies, etc... There are more in-between but I didn't want to completely depress you :) This year seemed to be going fine. I was actually shocked, especially when we found out we were pregnant! September greeted us with that exciting news and boy, were we excited. It was going to be the biggest age gap...

I'm not even going to apologize anymore for the lack of posts - mostly because I think I gave fair warning that I wouldn't be posting on here *that* much and because, I don't even think anyone reads this, haha! I'm pretty sure this has become more of a journal for me and less of an actual blog for readers, which is cool. September has been good, fast paced and exciting! We started the month off with a week long trip to a beach house on the Washington Coast and it was SO much fun! I got hit with an icky head cold while we were there, which put a damper on the trip for me, but it was still pretty amazing. We went back to Seabrook Cottages, about 16 miles from Ocean Shores. {I realize if you don't live around here these names mean nothing to you, but in case anyone is interested, its a great place to rent any size beach house and a really fun way to spend time as a family.} There's no Internet service which we love, there's a fully stocked kitchen in each h...

Summer has been delightful. I want to blame it all on the fact that we've stayed local and have already soaked up so much relaxing family time, but who knows. We have a pool and hot tub, so we swim a lot. That's kind of an understatement. We swim all the time. And the other night, my husband got home from work and I thought it would be romantic to surprise him by pulling him in the pool with me. Thankfully due to the 95 degree weather, he thought it was funny and refreshing. I'm not feeling as wordy these days so I'm going to do more of a run-down of our life the past month. *We've enjoyed using our fire pit and making all kinds of sugary deliciousness. *kids have lost teeth and the tooth fairy is going broke. Rachel likes to pull her own teeth out and this impresses her Dad, so she tends to get quite a hefty amount of moola ;-) *If anyone's wondering... mosquitos still adore me. Burts Bees and Honest Company make amazing bug sprays THAT WORK! (yes,...

Some months seem to take forever to go by and some fly by so fast I have to remind myself they were here! May was that way for us. Lots of wrapping up the school year, end of the year field trips, testing, filing paperwork, holidays and Spring cleaning in our yards. So, June arrived and I had hoped it would go by slower, but here we are, June 12th and I'm feeling like June 1st was literally yesterday. This year we chose to stay local for Jason's vacation. We've always gone to CA to see our families and while we love our families, we've really felt like we needed to have a STAY-cation. So that's what we did. And it was amazing! We decided we'd do at least 90% of things we've never done since moving here. Things we've always said, "oh, that would be fun to do that!" So we made a list and picked what was on the top of that list. We did things that included Ride the Ducks tour in Seattle (a must do!), we walked most of the city, including Kerr...