first snow

We finally had our first real snow this past weekend. We've had a couple of the fine, light, barely-stick-to-the-ground kinds of snows... but those hardly even count as snow. :)

This weekend's storm was a good one... a snow blowing sideways, drifts (almost) up to your knees, wind howling down the chimney, barn door frozen shut, kind of snow.

It was beautiful.

 During the worst of it, we hibernated inside... only venturing out when we had to... like when Blaze and the donkeys needed food. I gave them extra hay during the storm to help them keep warm, which meant an extra couple of trips to the barn. Blaze was antsy and picking on the donkeys so I made sure he got some exercise by scattering some hay out in the pasture... making him wander around looking for it. That's a trick I learned when we had Stormy, that miserable quarter horse mare we had the year of all the blizzards. Horses seem to need to move around to be happy, but when the weather is bad they'd rather be close to the barn (and miserable) unless you make them move... so I did. (make him move, that is)

When I wasn't slipping and sliding my way to the barn, the kids and I played games (R's decided she loves Yahtzee!) and did some art projects out of a book I got them a few weeks ago just for snowed in kinds of days.

We made egg based tempera paint (and talked about the Middle Ages, when that kind of paint was used because oil paint hadn't been invented yet!) and painted for awhile, then we learned how glass was made, and colored some small "stained glass windows" to hang up in the sun.

M also picked up his knitting again... this time using needles instead of the loom. It's amazing how much better his stitches are this year, compared to last...

Once the worst of the wind was over, the kids grabbed their sleds and headed out to sled down into the gully and the dry lake bed that are on our land.  They sledded for a long time yesterday, but no pictures until today... (yesterday was just too cold and windy to take pictures!)

Here they are this morning, sledding down into the dry lake bed...

 

They sledded for a long time and when they finally came back to the house they were wet, cold, tired and happy...

While they sledded, I shoveled out the trail to the barn.

Here's looking back towards the house at what I'd already shoveled. (Yeah, it doesn't look like much... does it?)

Here's what I had left...

I think one of the things I love most about living out here is that our lives are so connected to nature... to the weather especially. For the most part nature dictates what we are doing each day. If it's warm and dry we garden, or take care of the other outside plants and trees, or work with the animals. If it's very cold and snowy, we stay inside as much as possible, but otherwise on snowy days we are shoveling and/or plowing the snow, breaking ice from the water troughs, and spending extra time with the animals, making sure they are warm and happy.

Out here nature can trump whatever we have planned... if it snows enough, it doesn't matter what's on the calendar, we stay home. If there are vegetables still left in the garden and an early freeze is forecast, it doesn't matter what we had planned... we're working in the garden until everything is gathered in. If an animal gets sick, the calendar is cleared for as long as it takes for that animal to recover.

We experience the seasons through the wildlife that shares our land... In the early summer the does have their fawns, and we watch and listen for the first glimpse of the fragile babies, cautiously following mama through the pasture, wobbling on their skinny stilt legs. In the fall, the bucks go into rut and get stupid, even challenging cars as they drive down the road, seemingly oblivious to danger. In the winter the deer seem to move constantly, never resting, continuously wandering through the pastures and fields in search of enough food to get them through 'til spring. During the winter the weak, sick, and injured deer feed the coyotes, and we hear their chilling yiping and howling as they celebrate a full meal. And in the spring the "little" babies are born... and it's not unusual to find hidden nests of baby bunnies (or mice!) in the barn, in the compost bin, or anywhere else there is shelter for them.

In the city nature didn't seem as "big" as it is here. That probably sounds strange, but there was no wildlife there to speak of, and the buildings all around us moderated the weather somewhat... the winds were blocked, the streets were plowed, the grocery store was only a few block away.  Out here, nature just seems bigger...

I like living around the cycles of nature... I only wish we could have moved out here sooner.

Keeping busy

This past week has been a blur...

One of our next door neighbors was out of town for 10 days, and her husband, who had a severe stroke just over a year ago, spent part of almost every day that she was gone with us. He hasn't recovered fully from his stroke and still needs a little help during the day. I hadn't known him well before this past week or so, and it was so nice to really get to know him... His wife came home yesterday and while it's nice not to have the responsibility of making sure he's eating, taking his meds, getting out of the house, etc., I kind of missed not seeing him at the dinner table last night.

We also have S again. There was an emergency is her family so she came here. She's been here for several days now but will probably go home tomorrow. She's been a little different this time...I could tell she was stressed, especially the first couple of days. She was very clingy with me, but also irritable and impatient. Thankfully she settled down again though, and I think she's had a good time being here...

The past couple times she's been here, she's asked me to teach her to knit. I've put her off, knowing that it would be a time consuming project (like M and R,  S is cognitively delayed) but this afternoon I finally sat down with some extra needles and yarn and taught her.

She's doing pretty well with it... Some of her stitches are beautiful, but some are still kind of funky... extra loops and things here and there.

She was so proud of herself though, as she worked her way through each stitch... I could see the concentration it was taking, and when she got to the end of each row and counted her stitches (to make sure she didn't add or lose any!) she was so happy to have the right number!

M and R had their last Special Olympics bowling practice on Saturday... I'm sad to see it end, I really hate to lose the structure of those Saturday morning practices. Weekends can be hard for M... but the extra structure of Special Olympics helped a lot. Unfortunately, S.O. is over until after the first of the year.

I might have to take the kids bowling one or two Saturdays a month just to recreate a little of that structure.

They had a mini-tournament during this last practice and each of the kids got a nice medal (awarded by some of the local police, who donated their time)...

... and a framed picture of themselves at the bowling alley.

 

The loved the pictures so much they insisted on hanging them in their rooms... immediately! :)

We seem to be having an endless Indian summer here... It's been really warm for late October, and almost no snow still, just the lightest of dustings the other night, so I've been working outside a lot. I've got the kitchen garden cleaned out, and the past few days I've been hauling mulch. A tree cutting business in town is giving away free mulch, so I keep sending dh down to town to fill up our little pickup truck.

I've mulched under my little fruit trees, and under the back porch where the weeds grow through each summer. 

The past couple of days I've been mulching around a big bush that grows outside my kitchen window. It's not my favorite kind of bush, it's just ok looking... It's been surrounded by weeds since we moved in and I'm hoping it will look better when it's cleaned up and surrounded by wood mulch instead.

Does anybody know what kind of bush it is? It gets fluffy, pink, feathery, flowery things each summer, and although it's looking a little rough right now, most years the leaves are just beautiful in the fall.  

Well, M is up... I'd better go.

Knitting

As the weather has gotten cooler, I've been picking up my knitting again after letting most of it lay around for the summer.

I'm not a great knitter. I'm pretty much stuck at the beginner stage... but I like it.

My sister pushed me into learning to knit a few years ago by giving me several knitted dishcloths. I loved those dishcloths, they were my favorites, but they wore out... and I couldn't keep asking her to knit me more all the time. So I had to learn to knit so I could replace them.

I still knit dishcloths, here is my favorite kind... soft and nubby...

Knitting dishcloths is nice and mindless. I can knit while the kids are bowling, or at softball practice,  I even knit in movie theaters sometimes. (It's either knit or doze off and the kids make fun of me when I doze off!)

Recently I joined an online knit-along, which has been a lot of fun. Each month we make a different afghan square. It will take a year and a half but eventually I'll have enough squares for a nice big afghan. This knitting has been more challenging than what I've done before (ANY knitting is more challenging then making dishcloths!) but the woman who put the knit-along together is wonderful about walking us through new stitches and techniques. It's kind of been an online knitting class for me...

This month we are working on one with a pink ribbon, in honor of breast cancer awareness month. My mother had breast cancer and I've been thinking of her a lot while I knit this square... Remembering when she told me she had cancer, and how we both cried a little, but how she was the stronger one, reassuring me... when I should have been reassuring her. And then, after the surgery, when she was in so much pain, she had a big purple stuffed bunny that another breast cancer survivor had given her to hug "when it hurts".  We have that bunny now... it's M's... and he also hugs it when he hurts... although his hurt is a much different kind than the physical pain my mother felt after her mastectomy.

Anyway (I'm so distractible, aren't I?) I've been knitting a lot lately. Working on the knit-along, knitting a few dishcloths, and... my most challenging project to date... working on a sweater for one of my grandkids. Jove inspired me to pick the sweater up again (after not working on it for months) and I'm happy with the way it's turning out. Both sleeves are done and I'm working my way up the body.

I do most of my knitting at night, after the kids go to bed, but I'm not alone... I always have at least one or two dogs laying at my (on my!) feet.

The other evening I had to make a couple of smaller balls of yarn for my afghan square... I had pulled about 10 yards of yarn from the skein and cut it off, but as I started to wrap it up again, I felt some resistance... I looked down and realized that Sweet Pea had sat quietly by me, not moving, while I covered her with yarn.

Isn't she cute?

I pulled the yarn off Sweet Pea and kept rolling it up, only to run into more resistance. I followed the end of the yarn around the back of the chair to the other side and found this:

Quin had somehow walked through the middle of my yarn before settling down and falling asleep...

Eventually I got my yarn wrapped and back to knitting.

Here are some of the afghan squares I've made so far (some of them aren't blocked yet)...

Here's the beginning of the breast cancer awareness square, the pink is the beginning of the pink ribbon that will be knitted into the square.