what's up weekly. (Barfing, Canning, Throwing Away Dead Chickens)

Well, hey there! I'm going to try to keep this quick because I have a lot to tackle in addition to blogging: mainly, I need to finish my grocery list and planning for this morning's grocery trip.  I only go once every four weeks, so when I go it's a doozy and I have to go organized or I might as well stay at home.

So let's jump right in so I can get on my merry way.  Last Friday, Todd thoughtfully picked me up a steak on pizza night, since pizza has been giving me heartburn lately.  Unfortunately, something was weird with my stomach, and I immediately threw it up.  You can say it was pregnancy-related, but it's been months since I last threw up.  You can say it was something wrong with the steak, but Penelope ate what I left unfinished and she was fine.  You can say it was a stomach bug, and you might be right - Laurelai came down with the barfs later the same night - but I felt totally fine after that, I never ran a fever or threw up again.  

Unfortunately for Laurelai, she didn't have the same experience.  She was up through the night throwing up, and spent most of the next day in bed with a fever.  BUT none of the other kids got it... so...?  I still am not totally sure what happened.

Because she'd had a fever within the previous twenty-four hours, I kept her home from church on Sunday.  I love about our church that the kids are genuinely disappointed when they can't go.  After the others got home, we discovered that one of our pipes had frozen and the book room was getting water.  That has become a whole thing - for a few days, we worked on keeping the pipes warm enough to get the water through and stuff started drying out.  Then it warmed up and started melting, and simultaneously raining, so then we were getting water in there for other reasons.  So we've been running fans and the dehumidifier and trying to get the books moved to a safe place until things dry out.

Otherwise, this week has been spent focusing on keeping our noses in the school books.  This post-Christmas stretch is always so long and difficult, but I'm really trying to keep us on track because the baby is due right at the end of the school year and I'd love to finish even a couple weeks early if we can.  So no slacking for us!  We are halfway through the six-week stretch before our next break, so we only have a couple more weeks to go before we can get a little breather.  I'm hoping the weather is nicer by then so that I can get a few outdoor/garage projects done, like putting the Christmas decorations away in the garage attic instead of just leaving them in the middle of the garage floor like they are now.  But it will be mid-February then, so who knows what to expect.

Life was made interesting by the continued subzero temperatures that kept the kids inside and downright squirrelly.  We were worried about the chickens, so multiple times a day the kids would go out and check on them, breaking the ice in their water and making sure they were eating to keep their metabolisms revved.  Later in the week, temperatures warmed up quite a bit and everything started melting... and then a chicken keeled over.  How did she survive the arctic conditions and then die when it all let up?  Chickens are a never-ending conundrum.

I kept the house warm this week by working on a few canning projects.  First, I tackled some meat chickens (not ones we've kept here; these are the ones my friend raised and I went and helped butcher over the summer) and made broth with their bones.  Fifteen quarts of broth and four jars of chicken soup, along with a jar of chicken breast meat, hit the shelves.  Then I started clearing the freezer of the last remaining beef from the half cow we bought last winter.  I canned up some beef stir fry, beef stew meat, and a few jars of broth I made.  That was eleven more quarts altogether.  And then I made carnitas with a pork shoulder I had in the freezer, so that was three more quarts.  

I'm getting excited to see the canning shelves filling up with meal ingredients before the baby comes (every pregnancy, I start postpartum prep earlier and earlier), but it's a little unnerving to see the freezers emptying.  Things are looking pretty spare, and I don't like that!  It makes me feel nervous.  So once I get things consolidated and the freezers defrosted and cleaned, I will hopefully make some progress on refilling those.  The older I get, and the more kids I am responsible for keeping alive, the more I feel the precariousness of being understocked, and I hate that feeling.

I'm hoping to find some good sales on meat in the next few weeks.  There were some great ones while everything was frozen solid outside and it was too icy and cold to go out, and I'm still kicking myself over missing them!  Wish me luck as I go hunt and gather today.

what's up weekly. (Polar Vortex, Pregnancy, and Not Much Else.)

What's up, party people?  It's Friday, and you know what that means:

I'm exhausted.

Not that it was a hard week or anything - I'm actually amazed that we're already through two weeks of school since break, and nearly through three weeks of January.  It's gone smoothly and quickly.  But gooooood gravy.  I am starting to think I got my pregnancy dates wrong and I'm somewhere in the 39-week range.  I'm getting to the point where hauling myself around places is becoming tiresome and complicated, and I feel insanely large.  (Partly because I am insanely large - I have never gained weight this quickly in pregnancy.  More on that later.)

22 weeks.  It's not twins, it's just a lot of extra Paige.

Anyway, I'm glad it's Friday.  I'm glad we don't have any events scheduled for this evening or over the weekend.  I'm glad the snow is still on the ground, making the house so bright.  I'm glad I've been able to do some canning this week, if only to get some humidity into the air because my whole face is peeling off from the dryness in the air.

It's because, on Friday night, we went to the monthly Psalm Sing.  This month, we got an off-season deal on a venue barn here in town because our Psalm Sings now regularly boast over a hundred people and they're getting too large for folks to host in their homes.  Unfortunately, because the barn is primarily used for summer weddings, there wasn't heat.  (I heard they had heaters running that were projected to be able to heat the inside of the barn to about 45 degrees, but I'm not convinced they were working quite as well as that.)  Complicating things were the subzero temperatures that night, and the ice and snow that had fallen earlier in the day, making it a bit perilous to get there.  We left our coats and hats and mittens on the entire night (and some fairy godmother genius thought to bring hand warming packets, so we had those too), and I had brought a blanket as well.  But we were still frozen, and some of us are STILL dealing with chapped skin on our faces a week later.  My face is peeling off and I'm not sure I'll have any lips left after they're done scaling away.  Hence my gladness at the humidity from the canner.

I like winter canning so much better than summer canning.  Our house holds heat really well, which is wonderful when it's cold out but not so much when you're paying to try to cool the place down.  So I'm hoping to spend the next couple of months canning up the stuff in the freezer has been waiting for me since this summer, when I threw things in there because I couldn't bring myself to heat up the house.  And it's especially good timing right now, as I'm starting to think through postpartum prep.  Last night I got some chicken soup canned, and I'm hoping to get some stew meat, ground beef and potatoes done soon.  It will make life so much easier to have meals and ingredients already prepped and ready, and it will be nice to have cleared out some freezer space for other prepped meals.

And speaking of pregnancy, my taste for chocolate has returned in full force and then some.  Through the beginning of pregnancy, I couldn't stomach it.  Now, I am dangerously close to giving myself diabetes, and it's all thanks to my chocolate cravings.  Luckily, I have in-house bakers at my disposal, and I believe they've made brownies three times this week.

They don't seem to be complaining.

Which brings me to my crazy weight gain.  Obviously, the brownies aren't helping.  But this isn't my first rodeo, and I'm not eating much differently than I normally do when pregnant.  The difference seems to be that I started a bit heavier than normal and am pushing middle age.  Apparently those factors make a difference - who knew?  So now I get to figure out what to do about it, if anything.  (It doesn't help anything that I'm constantly in layers these days - in part to keep warm, in part because I basically develop Sensory Processing Disorder when I'm pregnant and can't stand clothes that have any texture touching my skin.  So I wear soft, textureless, thin pajama pants, and then a pair of warm but scratchy sweats over the top.  Add my layered tshirts and sweatshirts over my giant pregnant belly, and I literally look like a giant walking marshmallow 98% of the time.)

Trying to help Oey understand that there's a baby in my belly.

Oey showing me her belly.  I'm not convinced she quite understands yet.

Okay, moving on.  Since we're already on a depressing topic, let's pivot to the other depressing thing happening this week: Polar Vortex.  It honestly wouldn't be so bad if it was just the snow, and it wasn't so COLD!  We got a few inches of snow, and it has stayed and accumulated further, which is nice to look at and makes the house light up beautifully.  But with the exception of a couple of days of decent temperatures, it has been downright frigid.  A few days with highs below zero.  

The kids are stuck inside, other than needing to go check on the chickens extra times throughout the day, breaking the ice in the waterer and making sure none of the hens has frozen to death.  We don't run heat lamps out there, so a few days we left the coop closed up to trap heat in and then just set their food and water inside.  Not that the chickens minded - they seem to be afraid of the snow so they wouldn't come out even when they could.  But it feels different to leave them locked in the dark all day without options.  The really random thing is that one of them suddenly started laying eggs again once the temperature dropped and they were trapped inside.  (We haven't been getting any eggs since September from any of them; we will be culling them soon so we can start with a fresh, healthy batch of chicks in the spring.)  Unfortunately, all the eggs freeze before we find them and bring them inside, but they're still edible so we've had extra scrambled eggs this week.  Random.

Another result of the cold has been a frozen, and therefore leaking, pipe in our basement book room.  Luckily, the kids seemed to have found it pretty early on in the leak: the wall and carpet were wet, but no major damage had been done.  And luckily the leak was right where an access panel already was, and once Todd started running a space heater on the pipe, it resolved.  (Well, it would resolve as long as it was warm, but didn't take long in these temperatures to freeze up again if the heater was removed for long.)

It looks like we'll have another couple of days of frigid weather, followed by much warmer weather and rain, so things could get interesting, saturation-wise.  I'm already not looking forward to this thawing out:

I've already had the boys chip the bucket free and remove it, but I will probably have to send them out for some more ice picking in the next few days to get the ice away from the house before it thaws.  There's always something to tackle around here, but that's what keeps things spicy.

Anyway, all we have left on the agenda for the rest of the day is to finish up school and hunker down for some more inside play until things start to thaw.

I LOVE our fireplace.  It's so cozy, and it warms up the whole upstairs SO quickly.

what's up weekly. (back to school, back to school, to prove to dad that I'm not a fool.)

WELL WE DID IT.  We made it through our first week back to school after a three week Christmas break, and I am so proud of us.  Granted, we missed two days of school out of four so far, but that also means that we DID two days of school out of four so far, so that's something.

Saturday was a flurry of activity.  It was Epiphany, so we took down our Christmas trees and Todd hauled them to the yard waste place.  Then I spent about seventy years trying to vacuum pine needles out of my rug, until I finally gave up and now we are just the owners of a really unpleasant rug and we have to make our peace with that.

Todd and Finneas also worked on hauling a bunch of trash to the trash site on Saturday.  When we first moved here, you could put anything on the curb and they'd take it.  Then our city took advantage of some government initiative and "progressed" to handing out free trashcans to everyone, and all you had to do was put your bags in the official trash can.  

Except now they wouldn't accept anything that didn't fit inside the trashcan, such as the piece of crap vacuum a person might want to get rid of, or cardboard boxes that all the moving military families or the Aldi shoppers inevitably need a way to discard.  So now you get to figure out how to dispose of that yourself.  

I forgot to mention they'll pick up "extras" once a month if you set it out, except that OH YEAH they never actually come for that stuff because it takes a million times longer to collect the regular weekly trash now because, while they invested in the fancy trashcans, they never invested in the fancy trucks that actually empty the trashcans, so at each house the garbage workers have to reach all the way down in and take out bags one by one to throw them into the truck, a job that takes much longer now that things aren't just set on the curb. So they barely make it through regular pickup, and are often days late while your bin just sits on the curb getting picked through by racoons, so you can bet your bottom dollar they don't make it around for specialty pickup.  

So your garage just ends up piled up with cardboard boxes and crappy vacuums and broken box fans they won't take even though you know they're capable of taking it because they used to.  It's a whole thing, but I'm told it's progress and it's climate friendly, so I have that reassurance when my husband and son are spending the day at the trash site even though we're still paying the same for full trash service.  It's fine.  I'm not annoyed.

ANYWAY.  It also snowed a little on Epiphany, so while I was inside dealing with the trees (another whole story in a minute) and Todd and Finneas were dumping trash, the other kids were outside building a fort.

Now let me take a second and just document our Tree-bacle.  So, remember how our living room tree was eleven feet tall and massive?  The only way we got it through the door in the first place was because it was tightly netted.  But removing it from the house, unnetted and very, very dead and crumbly, was going to be impossible.  So I pruned off every branch that wouldn't fit through the door, which was like all of them.  The tree had been beautiful in its heyday, but I was definitely muttering cuss words at it at this point.  So it made it out the door in many pieces and with a "don't let the door hit you" farewell.  The basement tree was still fresh and green and fit out the door perfectly and didn't drop hardly any needles the whole time it was in the house.  This year's clear winner was Home Depot Tree.  Next year we'd like to find some friends and do a Twelfth Night bonfire on Epiphany with all the discarded trees.

Okay, okay.  After that, I baked a King Cake for our Ephiphany feast, and I hid a bean in it.  In years past, I just cut the cake into the exact number of pieces as people to serve, but the pieces were always MASSIVE and no one could finish them.  So this year, I was like, I'll cut normal sized pieces, and pass them out - the odds are in our favor that someone will get the bean anyway.  Well, the bean was found in the eighteenth slice.  I don't even know how many pieces Atticus went back for himself, looking for the bean.  I ended up being the one getting it in my second piece, but then there was a near-coup and cries of election rigging, but seriously - if I had rigged it, it would have been in my first piece.

What did I do in my reign as Queenie Beanie?  I vacuumed up more pine needles and cake crumbs.  The royal life is a high, lonely calling.

On Monday, we jumped back into school, and can I just say THANK THE LORD for this structure in my life?!  I ate better, I exercised, I got my Bible reading done, I caught up on laundry, and I got meals and cleaning tackled on time.  Structure begets structure, and I dread the day the fullness of this life starts waning because I'll turn into a complete potato.  I just know it.

Tuesday, it snowed again so we declared a snow day (for the most part).  We took the morning off of school so the kids could take advantage of the fresh snow and play with the neighbor kids who were home from school.  We did still tackle afternoon work, though, because I sat down on Monday and looked at the calendar to discover that our last day of school and my due date are the same day, so I really have no wiggle room to put things off!

Waking up to fresh snow is one of the best experiences childhood has to offer.

Tackling snow gear for this many kids is one of the worst experiences adulthood has to offer.

One of our neighbors stopped by and said he had bought a sled for his visiting grandson, but now that his grandson has left, he was wondering if the kids would want it.  What a kind gift!

They're lucky they're so cute in snowpants or none of this snow day nonsense would be worth it.  Close call.

Wednesday was another productive, standard school day.  In the evening I got the last of the Christmas decorations boxed up and moved to the garage.  I love having the Christmas stuff out, and I love when it goes away for another year.  After Christmas, I am so grateful to have the open spaces and natural light of my house back, and to have less clutter and noise to navigate each day.  It's wonderful to enjoy the fullness of the season, and then it's wonderful to feel the freedom from it.

Oey helped me pack away the decorations.

Thursday I had my first midwife appointment.  My midwife was kind enough to meet me at our house, and will continue to do so through the pregnancy.  What a blessing.  It was a long appointment though, and a long day, and no school got done.  I think I may try and do Thursday's work today and double up Friday work (science lab) next week... Except that we're supposed to get more snow today and I can foresee needing to call another play day.  I still haven't exactly figured out how we'll rearrange things to fit everything in.

My midwife appointment went well.  I'm now 21 weeks, and the baby is measuring right about 20 weeks, which is very typical for most of my babies at this point, so things seem to be trucking along like normal.  My new midwife is great; she's been practicing for 42 years, and is unsure how many babies she's caught: she stopped counting at 1800!  She is really knowledgeable, really experienced, and very likeminded.  We won't be getting any ultrasounds this pregnancy, and she doesn't even use a doppler (did you know that five minutes of doppler exposure is equivalent to 25 minutes of ultrasound imaging exposure?!).  She still uses a stethoscope, which is a wildly different listening experience than listening to a doppler.  I feel like I learn all kinds of new things with every pregnancy.

And, as a special note: I forgot to mention last week that I had finally cleaned out the chicken coop over break.  It was quite the job as it was wildly overdue, and I am not exactly at my peak athletic ability.  But done it got, once Atticus offered to help (let me reiterate how much I love having big kids, and also  having sons), and all of that bedding got spread on the garden beds to compost by spring. The coop is now much cleaner and drier, and therefore warmer.  And then suddenly, for the first time in MONTHS AND MONTHS, we got an egg two days ago.  And then another egg yesterday.  Now, it could be the clean coop for some reason (some ladies just feel more relaxed in a clean home, so I could see it), or it could be the drop in barometric pressure from the cold front, or it could be the new feed we started giving them on Saturday, or it could be just a wild fluke.  But the fact is, I thought they were sterile from that virus they had, but apparently not entirely.  

We're set to get more snow today, along with the rest of the midwest, and then a super cold snap (-2 is the projected HIGH on Sunday).  I am grateful for how warm our house stays, and for how wonderful our fireplace is at warming things up even more.  So far, it's been a relatively enjoyable cold snap.  Now it's time for spring, don't you think?

what's up weekly. (Where am I? What day is it?)

What day is it?  Is it Friday?  Or at least close to Friday?  I think we're getting close to Friday, so I'll go ahead and blog.

It has been The Week After Christmas Week, that notorious, disorienting vacuum of time which I will never get back.  I should have spent it putting my food room back in order.  I should have spent it being diligent with my exercise and Bible reading routines, since there was nothing else on the schedule competing for my time.  I should have spent it eating better, as it is now January and I've heard people are back into that kind of thing again.  But no.  I have spent most of the week laying on the couch in my pajamas, eating fudge and reading books into oblivion and then complaining that I don't feel well.  It's been magical, let me tell you.  Or, it would have been if it wasn't so blah.

Well, "blah" for me.  The kids had a grand old time, playing outside and building table forts inside.  I'm told there will be a screening of an original production of the Nutcracker today.

However, that's not to say we didn't have at least some fun this week.  For starters, I got some cooking and baking and cleaning done on Saturday, which was such a blessing after the chaos of illness and Christmas hit our house so hard through the first two weeks of break.  Then I served "brinner" for Sabbath dinner and was awarded the Greatest Chef of All Time Award from the kids.  What's the secret to having your husband praise you in the gates and your children rise up and call you blessed?  Apparently it's pancakes for dinner.  Code cracked without having to do all that other hard stuff in Proverbs 31.

On Sunday, everyone was actually healthy and able to attend church!  Then, as it was New Years Eve, we had a cheeseboard to celebrate.  Unfortunately, I was an idiot and thought buying the kids party blowers was a good idea.  WHEN WILL I LEARN.  If I had been tempted to let the kids stay up until midnight (which I wasn't, nor do I even think the kids know that's a cultural tradition or an individual option), I would have had to send them to bed at the normal time anyway just to get the blowing to stop.  Todd and I actually found ourselves still awake at midnight, watching Frasier like good citizens.  (Well, even better citizens would have been in bed by a responsible 10:00 p.m. so they could log their tight nine hours, but this was good enough for a subtle little pat on the back anyway.)

On New Years Eve, we have a little mini talent presentation where everyone is welcomed to share a portrait of our family as it was in the given year.  Todd, Penelope and Rocco shared poems.  The other kids shared original artwork.  This is Callista's drawing of our family.

This is Laurelai's.

This was Finneas'.

This was Atticus'.

On Monday, my family came down to celebrate Second Christmas together.  We opted to serve just a bunch of appetizers in place of a formal meal, and the tribe of cousins all ran around like well-mannered savages, and we all exchanged presents.  It was glorious.  

Then, there was Tuesday.  As it was the first day of post-Christmas relaxation, I quickly slipped into the coma that lasted for the rest of the week.  At one point, I made a trip to Walmart and the library with the big girls.  I read a few books, including one that I though was going to be about aging in place but turned out to be how to survive 2012's IMMINENT CLIMATE COLLAPSE.  (I was too lazy to change the channel, so I read the whole thing, but wowza.  Glad that's not my worldview or I'd spend a lot more of my free time calculating the carbon hoofprint of milk goats and weaving cat hair into potholders and breathing into a recycled paper bag.  Sounds like a delightful existence, but I'll pass.)  But I'm pretty sure that's the extent of any signs of my vitality.  

Today I really should clean the bathrooms.  The kids will be assigned to deep clean their rooms.  I will attempt to get in the first workout of the week.  Tomorrow will be Epiphany, so we will spend it taking down the Christmas stuff (I really should wait until Epiphany is officially over, but the day after Epiphany is Sunday, and the next day is the first day back to school, plus I am ready to yeet this giant dead tree) and then having our last cheeseboard of the Christmas season, including our King's Cake.

And then it will be Monday, and we will start a long stretch before our next break.  Wish us luck, and pray for our endurance.  After watching myself live this week like a total sack of sludge, I'm a bit worried about my own transition back to the land of the living.