The first milestone of note is that we were actually able to host another large family for dinner! At our last house, we were rarely able to host families with kids; there just wasn't enough space.
And another major milestone: we finally started the school year!
We logged a single week of school, and then as a reward, we packed our bags and headed to Tennessee for vacation. We attended the Fight Laugh Feast conference, which is where we met our current church folks for the first time last year. We visited with friends, listened to pastors and speakers, sang psalms, drank beer, and had a grand old time. Not a single kid got car sick, not a single one had a blowout diaper or needed to stop for emergency elimination along the side of the road. I would say that's a recipe for road trip success.
The one major catastrophe we faced on the trip was losing Chewy. Chewy is Juni's very special pal. Chewy is an old pillowcase, ripped up and chewed on until she is barely recognizable as such. Chewy is tattered and smelly and crispy and gray. Chewy is therefore clearly irreplaceable. Well, when it came time to pack the van, Chewy could not be found anywhere, and I mean ANYWHERE. We searched backpacks and the trash and the van and inside the bedding. We asked our AirBnB hosts as well as the cleaning lady to let us know if it turned up. And... nothing.
Well, pillowcases come in packs of two, and I just so happened to possess Chewy's twin, whom we named Newy and tried to pass off as the real thing for a day or two, but it was a no-go. "I don't want Newy! I don't like Newy!" all night long. AND THEN!.... And then, someone thought to unzip the visor in Ophelia's car seat, and stuffed inside was Chewy. That silly Chewy. Thank goodness she is safe and sound.
Once we were home, we took a day off to rest and recover, and then we jumped back into school, so as of today we have offically logged three weeks of school so far this year. Shame shame.
More milestone news: Ophelia sprouted some more teeth (bringing her total number of chompers to eight), and is now sitting up. She sits with us at the dinner table and eats table food alongside us - most days she gets an egg yolk or two, some raw butter, and bits of meat.
When we got back from Tennessee, I took about a gallon of our raw cream and turned it to butter myself, and HOT DANG. I'm not one to brag or anything, but you guys are all going to want me to be the milkmaid on your apocalypse farm. But I will have to decline all offers with regrets, because these are crazy times and I have my own apocalypse farm affairs to attend to. You understand.
She also turned 10 months on the fifteenth! In the immortal words of the oft-quoted Tal, "Time goes by so fast." I can't believe we are single-digit weeks away from her first birthday. I just love her so much. Her fuzzy warm head, her eyes that "are two earths," in the words of my neighbor, her little pointer finger that she waggles at everyone, the way she picks everything up so daintily in her slow little pincer grasp. The way she still swims around the house like a mermaid, even though she knows how to crawl. The way she sings and says "amen" with the congregation. The way she waves her little hand in a circle like royalty when she's saying hi. The way she says "Mama. Mamamamamama" with her lips all tucked in. The way she will probably never learn to walk because she is always being carried by someone who loves her. The way she cries when she knows she is being left out of playtime in a room with the door closed. Goodness gracious, how did we live our lives without her? How did we not just drown in our own ennui while we waited for her to show up on the scene?
And not to be outshined, the other kids also decided to celebrate some major milestones as well:
Atticus celebrated the fourth anniversary of his baptism.
His present this year was a Swiss Army knife to replace the one that literally got left inside the wall at our Columbia house.
Penelope celebrated the fifth anniversary of her baptism.
And the other six kids all got baptized this weekend too! It was quite the weekend, and I will show you photos in a separate post. But here are a few "behind the scenes" photos at home while we were gearing up to go.
Both sides of the family came to celebrate, and Todd's parents got to meet Ophelia for the first time! They also brought bikes for all the kids, so needless to say everyone has been in bike heaven.
Learning to ride one-handed.
And other than that, we've just been up to a little of this, a little of that...
A little movie-making...
Today holds a trip to Tractor Supply to get the things we need for a chicken run, since our coop and the chickens are coming home to roost tomorrow. A friend has been watching them for us for the last couple of months, and we're about to be reunited. Not sure for how long, as we have fence-climbing, sewer-dwelling racoons on our street, as well as hawks nesting in the trees behind our yard. But we will do our best to make our chickens' last days as long and pleasant as we can.
