The Chickens Lived

As the sun came up we noticed chickens out in their yard.  Uh oh.  We forgot to put the chickies away last night.  Actually, we don't put them away, we just close to the door, but it's important.  That could have been free dinner for a fox.  But they made it.  It's by the grace of God we have any chickens this morning.

With chickens running around at dawn, the girls filled their food and water and the gathered eggs.  One had frozen solid and split. 

There were seven eggs.  Yesterday we had five and today we have seven eggs!  These are big numbers! The books say that egg production is all about light and we sure are getting a good demonstration.  The temperature dropped to 12ºF overnight, but egg production is up.  Praise God for the sun!  Friday we celebrate crossing over into a ten hour day.

With the pots sterilized, I transplanted until I ran out of pots.  Those lettuce and cabbage were full of healthy looking roots.  With plants and dirt all over the kitchen, I used warm water to moisten the soil so it was pretty pleasant.

The plants have plenty of room to grow now and the bench is big enough for all of them.  These little plants are only a month old and looking so good.  It occurs to me that I should get some more lettuce started because a month from now it will might be warm enough to put them in the garden with some black landscape fabric to warm up the soil. 

Learning to Adjust

We got two eggs yesterday and we are happy!  Since the days have gotten dark our flock doesn't lay much.  We could put a light in the coop to get more eggs, but instead we're trying to live with God's design — chickens don't lay much in the dark.  Last week we went several days with no eggs or one egg.  That was hard.  Then we got four!  We were so happy.  I've learned to modify many of our recipes for fewer eggs.  Last summer when we were getting eight to twelve a day, I modified recipes to use more eggs.  This sustainable living means constantly adapting to the reality of the food God provides for us.

My husband is making a big batch of sausages he is calling chorizo.  He mixed the meat, spices, and curing salt three days ago.  Today he rolled them out into logs using wax paper.

He laid the logs out on roasting pans and dried them in the oven at 200ºF all day long.  The house is full of smell.  Each time he comes into the kitchen he said, "oh, that smells good."  Each time the girls and I come into the kitchen we say, "ugh, what is that smell?"

I made a monterey jack cheese two days ago and it bombed.  I tried cutting the curd in a different way but it didn't knit together well.  This time, I went back to my old way and things turned out better. But not perfect.  I wonder what I'm doing wrong?

We have been eating that jack that didn't turn out, with kids raving about how good it is.  It's so bland, but there is a hint of good flavor.  It is good to have a slicing cheese.

Taunting To-Do's

My husband made his favorite thing yesterday — pepperoni.  He thawed out six pounds of hamburger, mixed it with curing salt and spices, and let them cure in the frig for three days.  Then he rolled out logs and dried them in a warm oven (170F) all day long.  This morning he'll slice them up and pizza is on the menu for dinner.  He's still perfecting the recipe and we'll post it as soon as he's happy.  After his first sampling, he says these need a little more hot, but the pizza tonight will be the real test.

I made a jack cheese yesterday, my 11th cheese.  I keep a notebook of each cheese, referencing the book and noting any changes or problems.  This is my first set of notes that doesn't include the word, dang.  "Temperature shot up too fast, dang!"  "Accidentally used mesophilic instead of thermophilic start, dang!"  "Lots of matting, dang."  But this time it went pretty smoothly and the cheese looks beautiful.

The three gallons of whole milk we started with gave a nice big block of cheese, about 5" high in a 6" diameter round.  It also produced over two gallons of whey, the yellow fluid that comes out of the curds.  This whey still has some good protein in it.  We'll give it to the chickens, who need good protein and don't get much this time of year.

Our cow shed opens towards the back, toward the pasture.  Every morning my husband cleans out the dirty straw, throwing it in a pile just outside the back.  During the summer, these piles were small and we cleared them out about once a month.  This pile is huge!  It's probably been two months since we've cleared it out and with the cows hanging out in the shed all day long, there's a lot more going into it each day.  This will be fantastic fertilizer for the garden — I'm fantasizing about the big healthy vegetables — but right now it's just nasty looking.  It's a great big to-do just taunting us... and making us long for a tractor with a bucket.  I never thought I'd have tractor lust, but I sure do now!

We were reading about mountain men and their leisurely winters.  It's winter and we're not very leisurely.  We finished shelling the last of the dry beans yesterday, along with milking, making butter, cream cheese, jack cheese, and tapioca (we have to use up that milk!).  They are full days; every day has a lot of somethings that need to be done.  I guess the mountain men didn't have milk cows.  Of course, I'll don't think they ate cheesecake and tapioca while enjoying their leisure, either.

Bonus Eggs

Seven eggs!!  We got seven eggs!  The twins ran in from putting the chickies to bed with eggs rolled up in their shirts.  How will I use them all?!

I had shifted my thinking to three or four eggs a day. I had accepted it as God's way and in humility, I adjusted.  Right at that moment to have seven eggs in one day feels like God winking at me: that's right, it all came from me in the first place, and today I felt like a bigger gift just to surprise you.

It is so easy to take control from God.  When we got our first laid egg last February, it was magical.  The eggs were just there and all we had to do was go get them. But as time went on, I began to feel entitled to those eggs.  When they started to decline, I was a little out of sorts.  I felt the eggs were mine now, that somehow I had earned them.  I had gotten to that place without thinking about it, without any conscious or malicious thoughts toward God.  My eyesight had dimmed until God was the small wish-giver that pervades most of American spirituality.  And then God reminded me, again, of who is the Creator and who isn't.

Christina looks different this morning.  Her udder is rounder and the birthing area has become red and a little swollen.  Three days until her due date.

We pulled out the last cheese I made before Christina dried up.  It had more holes in it than I had hoped, but the flavor is good, although mild.  It tells me that I still don't have it all figured out (dang!), but things are moving in the right direction.  When Christina freshens I'll make extra cheese so some has time to sit around and get sharp. This cheese was two months old.  We have to let it sit for six months to get sharp.

With two bushels of grain corn drying in the garage, we figured it was time to use some.  We popping the kernels off the cob and then we ran it through the grain mill.  It ground fine like wheat flour.  Tomorrow I'll add some to our bread and see how it goes.

A friend told me about being caught in a blizzard years ago and having to live off the canned food in the pantry for a week.  I realized that we could probably live off the food we have stocked away for at least a month.  We rarely get traffic stopping blizzards here in Boise, but now I kind of look forward to one, just knowing how well we'd eat through it.

A Good Name

"There's a mouse in a bucket," my daughter came running in to say.  My husband put another bucket on top to capture it and they headed out to release it.  I told her, "take it away from the house." Boy, did she mind.  She took that mouse all the way to the back of the pasture. She came back in with her head held high and said with a lilt, "I took care of that mouse."

We have been at this homesteading thing for a year and a half.  Our first summer was just cleaning away weeds and trees and garage.  In August we got chicks.  We butchered the roosters in December, had our first eggs in February, and this past summer was our first growing season.  We are still in our first year of eating off the land and finding an annual rhythm that matches.  With so many squash to eat, I've found lots of good recipes, but most of them use eggs.

Our egg production is down to three to five per day.  Yesterday we got four.  In the summer, this favorite nesting box of the hens would have upwards of ten eggs every day.  Today there are only two.  We could push the hens into laying more by adding light to their coop, but that feels too industrial.  We will live with the way God created chickens to lay.

In the summer we were coming up with ways to use eggs, and I'm still in the habit of using them up.  But suddenly we have only a few in the frig and I have to pay attention.  This is part of the annual cycle that I am still learning.

While taking the picture of eggs, one of the hens came to check things out.  They really do look like little dinosaurs, don't you think?

Six days to Christina's due date and she seems the same.  My husband calls this area of the shed the cow's nest.  It's funny to call it a nest for such large animals, but it's a good name.  They each have their own place where they lay down, but they are always free to go out to the pasture if they want.  Today is cool and damp and they've been in the shed more than usual.  I think that beefy just hangs out wherever Christina is.

Christina has never kept a calf before so we don't know how this will go.  I'm not that worried about the delivery, but afterward we need to get Christina the calcium supplement as soon as possible, and watch to make sure that she doesn't reject it, and watch that beefy doesn't bully it. I guess we need to watch the weather too. 

Naming is an ongoing conversation at our house.  A boy calf will become a steer for meat so we'll only give it a reference, like jerky (or beefy).  But a girl calf will become a new milk cow.  Her name is important.  The girls are on in hot debate between Clarabelle, Jody, and Gracie.  My husband and I like Clarabelle, but the girls prefer Jody.  What would you name a cow?

Cozy Warm

It is a day of cooking.  I started with putting together a big stew, made mostly from homegrown food — carrots, onions, potatoes, turnips, tomatoes, peas, beans, yellow squash — along with beef, celery, rice, thyme, salt, and pepper.  I kept cutting and adding until the pot was full.

The onion skins, celery tops, etc. went into anther pot with a beef soup bone to make stock.  We'll simmer them both all day and see what happens.

As soon as the soup was done, I realized that we are out of bread, so I ground the wheat and made the dough.

The pumpkin bars I made yesterday, from a recipe in Simply in Season, were a big hit.  They were gone by evening.  I put another batch in the oven for today's snack.  We called them zucca bars. My two-year-old was so cute saying, "dat good, dat zucca bar."

It's been two months since I put that parmesan to age.  The book says to oil it to keep it from cracking.  Without saying a word, I handed the block to my daughter and asked her how it smelled.  She took a long whiff and said, "that smells like parmesan."  That's a good sign!  I rubbed it with olive oil and put it back in the cellar.  Next July we'll find out if it tastes like parmesan.

It been freezing at night but warming up during the day.  Our automatic waterer for the chickens had a layer of ice this morning.  Before letting the chickens out of the coop, my daughter broke it up enough for them to get to the water while the ice melts during the day.  Soon, we'll have to switch to the heated waterers, which means filling them every few days.  Last year we didn't have warmers so we took water out three times a day in the coldest weather.

Christina seems the same.  We are one week from her due date.  This morning as my husband headed out to feed the cows he said, "well I think I'll go count cows."    She'll probably be late, but we're still watching her.  We are down to three gallons of milk and one quart of cream in the freezer.  I'm hoping it'll be sooner rather than later.

Yesterday we entered the twelve darkest weeks of the year.  Here in Boise, we also deal with haze for much of the winter and it makes it even darker.  Today with the sun shining into the kitchen and the cooking stew warming the house, it feels cozy.  Thanksgiving this year will be special with so much harvest of our own.

Paralyzed by Rain

It's rainy and cold.  Being from a place with average rainfall of only 12 inches a year, rain drives me inside.  I have a friend who grew up on the Oregon coast and he once commented about how people here are paralyzed by the rain.  It's true!  I'm paralyzed!  We just stay inside and wait for it to dry out.

Except that we can't sit inside!  The first frost is predicted for this evening so we are bringing in the last of the tender harvest — tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, and okra. 

The garage is getting fuller and fuller of stuff that needs attention but we're spending all our time getting stuff into the garage and not any further.  The piles of squash I set out to dry in the sun have been rained on, so we brought them in to dry off.

Because we are from such a dry climate, we call all liquid precipitation rain.  My nine-year-olds commented that we can tell from the chickens how hard it's raining.  They will stay out digging around in drizzle, but when it really starts coming down, they congregate under the coop. Even the chickies know to stay out of the rain!

The apples we have left to can are getting softer and softer.  I'm not yet recovered from last week's canning day, but we have to get going.  Today we started another batch.  It's a lot of work, but we love all things apples — fresh apples, applesauce, apple butter, dried apples, apple pie.  We're going to need more.

This working when I don't want to is part of normal life.  I've been an adult long enough to just plow through it.  It reminds me of God's presence in the everyday, even without the high emotions of mountain-top experiences.  It's easy to sense God in the midst of an intense retreat or an inspiring conference.  But in everyday life, the low emotions of valley experiences, God is just as present.  In these times of working just because it needs to be done not because I want to, I remember how God is with me whether I know it or not.  God is with me whether I want God or not.  God is just with me because of what God wants.

Lets Start by Mowing

Our last child fell to the stomach flu.  It was another mostly sleepless night, but the main activity has subsided and she is resting now.  I am the only one who hasn't fallen, but today I don't feel great.  A week of less than my share of sleep and more than my share of work has taken its toll. 

At dinner last night there were only four of us — two children gone, one in bed, and one moved out.  One daughter commented on how empty the table felt, "and this is the size of a normal American family."

I love having a large family.  I love that our house is full of energy and warmth.  I love that we are together most of the time, not pulled away to school or the office.  But there is a downside to so much life — illness takes a long time.  This bug that takes a person down for three days has lasted two weeks in our family.

As our daughter lay in her sick bed, we gave her some good news. The injured chicken starting walking.  This is the daughter who named the hen Soody.  Last night we let her into the garden with the rest of the flock and she held her own.  She still kind of sinks sometimes, but she walked around capably and even ran at one point.  Thank you God that we don't have to kill that chicken.

This was a week off of homeschooling.  We had big plans to get some things finished outside, none of which got done.  With the majority of the family recovered, we started by mowing the lawn for the first time in a long while, maybe since July.  When it's hot the grass doesn't grow as much and I congratulate myself at the lower carbon-load by not mowing.  But it's not hot any more and we waited too long.  The kids cleared the lawn off and then watched from inside while I drove the machine. Only once did my husband have to fix it.  The job was huge.  Bags had to be dumped every pass and the blower filled up several times. 

Our compost pile is in with the chickens.  I read that chickens make great compost turners by digging through the pile.  Not having to turn the pile ourselves is pretty compelling so we have given it a try.  At the least, the chickens love the fresh green grass and they do kick it around.  Next spring we will have to move it out for one year before it's used.  I've heard that fresh chicken manure, which they add regularly, needs a year to compost before it's safe to put on the garden.

We feed our chickens a mix of wheat, oats, and corn that we buy at a local grain elevator.  It's cheaper that the pre-mixed stuff at the farm store and I like that it's just straight grain.  Yesterday when I went out to check on Soody, I noticed that the chicken food barrel was almost empty.  I pointed it out to my nine-year old who usually feeds them and she said, "oh yeah, we're almost out."  So yesterday afternoon my husband and I made a unplanned run for grain.  While we were there, we drove past a livestock shed and I noticed ears sticking out.  I looked closer and discovered several large pigs housed in the shed.  I pointed it out, "look, there are pigs right there and you can't even smell them." Hmmmm.......

Clipped Wings

Last spring we got four new chicks to add to our flock.  They have been laying for about two months and finishing their final growing.  They've also gotten strong enough to fly out of the pen.

This morning we found one outside the pen again.  We could build the fence higher, but it's easier to clip their wings.  Thankfully my daughters are able to catch them pretty easily.  She held the chicken while I clipped off the end of one wing.  It's a little creepy, feeling the scissors cut through the feather quills, but it doesn't hurt the chicken any more than clipping finger nails.

Farm animals come with a moral responsibility that gardens don't have. If a farm animal is hurt by me, I feel morally culpable. Since we are raising our own meat, we've had to develop a new morality around caring for animals that we will kill later on.  We've decided that the animal would die anyway, whether we butchered it or somebody else, but that our job is to give it a good life.  Never having worked through this before, I find myself swinging back and forth between too much compassion and too little.

The truth is that all eating comes with moral responsibility.  If the rich man had moral responsibility for Lazarus (Lk 16:19-31), then we have it too.  That is part of what has driven my family back to the land.  What we eat and the way it was raised has implications for the animals, the people, and the land.  And whatever we support we are responsible for.  If you buy your meat at the store, it's no small feat to find out where it came from and how it was raised.  An organic certification helps, but our whole food system has become so depersonalized that it's nearly impossible to track food back to its origins.  At least for the food we raise ourselves, we know the moral culpability we take on.

The sick chicken has been given a reprieve while we recover from the flu.  I noticed last night that she was standing up a little bit.  Maybe she will recover.

The peppers I planted last spring are producing.  I planted lots of different kinds, but many didn't germinate. Things got busy in June and I just started throwing little plants into the soil without keeping track.  Actually, I didn't expect any of them to live, so I thought it didn't matter.  Well, most of them did live and now we have a row of peppers and I haven't a clue what kind they are.  Most of them look like sweet peppers, but I know that I planted some hot ones too.   We picked that row and filled our harvest bucket.  I pulled two off one plant that might be hot.  I'll let my husband try one to tell.

Green peppers are beautiful when they freeze.  I dice them up, just as if I was going to saute them, and lay them out on a cookie sheet.  After freezing solid, I transfer them to a bag.  They freeze as green and perfect as if nothing had happened.

The root cellar book says that if acorn squash turn orange, they won't keep very well.  I noticed that two of our squash were getting orange spots, so I figured it was time for our first squash pie.  After cutting them in half and scooping out the seeds (we'll give those to the chickens), I bake them for an hour or two, until a fork pokes in easily.  I used to cut squash with a knife, but they are so hard that I worried about slipping and getting seriously hurt.  One year I discovered that if I use the little carving saws they sell at Halloween, they were easy to cut.  After baking, I scoop out the flesh and run it through the blender.   Then I cook them up just like pumpkin pie.

Eggs?

Only eight eggs yesterday.  A few weeks ago we were struggling to keep up with a dozen a day, and then suddenly it dropped off.

This happened last summer.   Late one day we discovered that the coop door had accidentally closed.  We open it right up and laughed at the line up of hens at the nesting boxes.  The next day egg production suddenly dropped.

Two days later we found a dead hen in the coop.  The book said that sometimes hens die of being egg-bound.  The hen doesn't lay her egg and it gets stuck.  We think that's what happened, but because we weren't sure, we treated the hen like she died of disease and carefully wrapped the body in several layers of plastic before whisking it off to the garbage.

Afterward, we made sure the flock had lots of good quality feed and slowly the production came back up.  It took weeks, but it did come back.

Now it's dropped again.  We have one sick chicken, although she might be injured and not sick.  But then, how would we know?!  How do you tell a sick chicken?!   They don't have noses that run.  How could you tell if they were pale?  I don't even know how to check for a chicken fever, and I don't think I'm interested in learning. 

Then something else occurred to us.  It's still warm, but we are on the other side of the equinox.  The books say that chickens lay best with 14+ hour days.  By the end of December when we'll have only nine hours of daylight, production will drop by more than half.  In commercial egg farms they take care of that by using electric lights, but we're going to stay with the sun.  Today we have eleven-and-a-half hours.  Maybe our flock is on the normal decline from shorter days.  We haven't gone a whole year with chickens so we are still learning how their normal cycles work.

I hope it's just normal seasonal decline.

The sick chicken is doing the same.  My nine-year-old checks on her several times a day.  This morning she went out to check on her again.  When she came in I asked how Soody was doing.  "The same," she said confidently.  It's been a week with no change.  Then I asked, "do you think she is suffering?"  My sweet little girl dropped her head, leaned against me and and said, "yes." 

Ghost of Parenting Present

Last night we were visited by the Ghost of Parenting Present — a daughter with the stomach flu and gastric reverse action all night long at about twenty-minute intervals.  Things finally slowed down about 6:30am.  Today we feel like ghosts ourselves.  A life in synergy with the land means that nothing we were going to do today couldn't wait until tomorrow, but the rest of family life went on.

Yesterday I made pancake syrup.  It's so easy I can't believe that I bought the high fructose corn syrup stuff for so long.  Mix one cup water,  two cup sugar (we get organic fair trade sugar from Costco), and 1/2 teaspoon mapleine.  Bring to a full boil for 2-3 minutes.  Let cool for a bit and put in jars.  We found these old syrup jars in my in-laws stuff.

The girls discovered an injured chicken today.  It was on the ground not moving and the other chickens were pecking it.  Cannibalism is a problem with chickens.  The books say that they sense when one is injured or sick and a group can quickly kill a defenseless bird.  My husband rescued the hen and moved into a pen by itself.  He put food and water near it.  My daughter asked, "are we going to have to kill it?"  We'll give it several days and see if it heals.  If not, it will have to become a stew hen.  I hate butchering.

While outside, I noticed how much the fruit trees have grown.  We planted sixteen fruit trees in the chicken pen area last spring.  We have apples, pears, cherries, plums, peaches, nectarines, and apricots.  Chickens love nothing more than bugs.  I've read that if you have chickens around your fruit trees, they will eat all the worms before they crawl up into the fruit.  We have big plans for lots of worm-free fruit without any poison spraying.

Since my other children were feeling fine, I asked them to flatten the onions.  When onions get big, they need their tops bent over for the final maturing.  In a few weeks we'll pull them out of the garden and let them dry on the patio for their final preparation before long-term storage.  Even the two-year-old got involved.

When you are a person who wants to follow God, discerning God's direction can feel like such immediate work.  Sometimes I wonder if it's more like today's work.  God welcomes time of rest and times of work.  God's opportunities aren't one chance and then gone.  Instead, if today is good, God work things out.  Or if tomorrow is better, that's OK too.  This garden is more God's work than ours, so it seems that the patterns we find there must have some reflection of their Creator. 

The Last Day

We milked Christina for the last time today.  Well, until November.  But it feels like the last time.  Seven weeks ago when she arrived, I longed for this day.  Milking our first week was an ordeal.  I had read lots of books but had milked only twice in my life.  I felt incompetent and overwhelmed.  At the end of each milking I remember thinking, "oh my God, I have to do that again in 12 hours!"  I had to hold on for seven weeks and then it would be over. 

But today I don't feel relieved; I feel sad.  I'm not overwhelmed any more.  I've learned how to grab the top of Christina's teet and pull with a satisfying gush of milk and cream.  I've learned to love the taste of her milk, more than I ever thought I would love milk.  I've learned how to make butter, yogurt, ice cream, sour cream, and cheese.  And I've felt cared for by a large brown animal with dark eyes. I've seen God's abundance in the simple grass transformed into milk and cream just waiting for us.  All we have to do is go get it.  But tomorrow it won't be there.

After moving from the dairy and feeding us for seven weeks, Christina gets these two months off to grow strong for the birth of her calf.  On or about November 18th we'll go through our first calving.  Another first.

I've felt so called to this life of sustainable living but it's been a year of crazy firsts.  I'm a city girl.  There's no farm or livestock in my past.   We've read lots of books and had wonderful people with real knowledge who have helped us along the way, but we've been living a sitcom learning so many things the hard way.   Only a year-and-a-half ago this all started when we moved to a house on 1.5 acres.  Now we've got a big garden, 14 laying hens, about 20 meat chickens in the freezer, a milk cow, and a beef calf that will be ready for the butcher in another year.  We've rejected most every disposable that had been part of our normal American life (except toilet paper, good God!).  We've reduced our energy consumption by putting in sky lights, switching to low-energy appliances, hanging our laundry to dry, and learning to live with heat in the summer and coolness in the winter.

It has only been as we've intentionally moved to this life that I've realized how dependent we have  been on modern food systems.  I carried an assumption that since I had money I had a God-given right to the food I bought and that it would always be there — magically, just always on the shelf, ready to be bought.  But the truth is that I was profoundly dependent on the labor and intelligence of others, many of whom don't have the money to eat as well as I did.  I also had become dependent upon the practices that provide cheap meat, food in boxes, and ingredient names that look more a chemistry supply list than God-created food.  Food was a factory product.  I was a committed Christian who had lost touch with with the God who feeds us.

Today I am slowly moving to dependence on God the Creator... God acting on this land, growing things in their own season, as is proper and right for the plants of God's creation.  What I used to see as just plain old land, a source of dust and dirt and weeds, I now see as sacred ground, as life-giving, as a way to find God.

Our family-life has been redirected toward the fertile soil.  My nine-year old twin daughters begin their day by "getting up the chickies."  Early in the morning in their outdoor shoes, they fill the feeder, open the coop door and rush out of the pen.  They love the chickens but are still a little intimidated by them.  Our 15-year and 13-year old daughters have become competent milkers, taking over my spot in the evening milking with their Dad.  Our 2-year old son has learned to play in the yard while we work in the garden right beside him.  He joins his sisters when he can talk them into it and squeals, "Christina," every time he sees her.  Our 19-year old son moved out this summer and shares little in this adventure, making me struggle with how do you be a family member without being a household member.

Our lives have taken on an easy rhythm of caring for animals, homeschooling, cooking, harvesting and back to animals before the night slows the tempo into satisfying rest.  Our family life has become centered around food and family rather than clocks and schedules.  Sabbath rest is an exciting freedom from weeding, harvesting, and cheese-making giving time for lazy eating, movies, books, and music.  But every day is each other.

Even our education has moved into the family.  We've homeschooled for several years, off and on, but there is a contentment in homeschooling this year that I've never felt.  Learning, a life-long activity, has become interwoven into the life-long activity of eating.  After trying lots of different things, we've settled on a curriculum that uses lots of narrative.  Starting our third year with Sonlight, I have fallen thoroughly in love with their approach and don't plan to ever use anything else.  Immersion into history and historical fiction makes deep learning nearly effortless.  After many years of mistakes, we've learned how to push enough to create the excitement of challenge but not the despair of burden.  Watching their eyes spark as they grasp a new concept and their shoulders square as they approach a problem with confidence is a constant source of joy for me.  My husband and I joke that each evening we arm-wrestle to see who gets to homeschool the girls the next day.

Our two months "off" begins.  We can leave if we want, only needing someone to feed the animals while we're gone.  Our milk will come from the 20-gallon store in the freezer.  My arms will rest and heal into a strength that I hope will prevent the carpal tunnel from returning.  Although we are approaching the equinox, it feels like we have entered the winter solstice and will wait for the silent land to wake up.