Rose ended up with no less than two birthday cakes because a consensus was never reached about whether the cake would be strawberry or raspberry.  It served the dual purpose to ensure left-overs, as someone around here is very greedy with other people’s birthday cakes. This is one of my favorite grain-free cakes – It…

Yesterday Ethan caught three little rabbits near the garden.  We are not sure what to do with them.  We had caught one little wild rabbit years ago (eating my garden!!) and he did not take well to captivity.  We could release them (to go eat my garden) but….   (caution, snake picture) There were actually four…

We had a crazy birthday weekend.  With Rose’s seventh birthday coming up on Tuesday, the celebrating has begun.  She requested going out to Satchel’s  for pizza for her birthday dinner.  We did that on Saturday.  We hardly ever go out to eat, maybe once a year, so it was our yearly stop by Satchel’s, the…

  We got bees about four years ago after we attended a top-bar hive building workshop and built our own top-bar hive.  Unfortunately, we didn’t know that the hive had to be completely level or the bees will draw their comb funny and the frames will not be able to be removed.  We got busy…

This is turning out to be our best and most ambitious fall/winter garden so far.  We got some major garden work done over the last week.  There are three beds that are manured, hayed, planted, hooped and netted.  The hoops look so nice and professional – definitely a step-up from the ugly pvc pipe hoops…

This yellow thing is the bin we get literally a ton of spent barley grains in every so often.  The girls thought it would be fun to play in. After only a few minutes, Clothilde decided she was bored and climbed out. Even though it’s almost as tall as she is.  Isn’t that terrifying? I…

Since Mirin’s pit has expanded so much lately, the old tarp roof did not fit anymore, and rainwater was eroding the sides away.  He rebuilt one side of it with wood from old pallets layered with brush and dirt piled on top.  This is where the fire pit is now, and it even has a…

All this year I’ve had one awful random physical ailment after the next that keeps me from sleeping.  It started out with a wheezy month-long chest cold my dad brought back from Cuba last December, and since then it’s just been a constant parade of things from whooping cough to pityriasis rosea to having my…

This week has been trudging along so slowly.  What, it’s only Thursday?! We are doing better this week, but still queasy.  The hardest thing about a stomach bug is that I can never think of what to cook and everyone starves on the awful things I do manage. Apart from that we’ve had an exciting…

Years ago I wanted to learn cables, so I picked up Cables Untangled and set to work on a few projects.  One of them, rather ambitious I think now, was a cabled vest for Mirin. It sat largely ignored for a couple of years, but last year he picked it up and decided he loved…

Grasshopper  Katydid   Green Lynx spider eating love bugs (I thought they looked toxic!) We have some redwood-like dog fennel in one of the pastures where I limed with a generous hand.  I’ve never seen the stalks grow so thick and tall anywhere.  Mirin brought one of the stalks home and it is as tall…

I went to a Steiner study class called Foundation Studies on Friday and Saturday, leaving Ethan with the children.  On Saturday the big kids went with their Baba to B. B. Brown Gardens for a butterfly lecture he was doing, so it turned out to just be Ethan and Clothilde. They were busy, very busy…