bear with me (ha! another pun!) as the site may change it's look from time to time. we're trying to launch a spring look for smithical (because i'm a fashion designer and all) and we're working out color and print kinks. i'm not quite happy with it, but my graphic designer husband has a full-time job that takes him away from MY honey-do list. if only i shared his graphic design and computing knowledge. i'm just a lackey with a loud voice....

• sawyer calls his stuffed frog, "booby." i have no idea where he came up with it, but they have crazy names for a lot of their animals...this one just stuck. funny.
• when we're listening to music in the car and it's turned down low, sawyer's way of asking us to turn it up is, "can you please low it up?"
• rowan still says, "todeger" when he means "together."
• adam is our first child that babbles. he has his very own language and way of speaking and it's clearly intonations that hears from our speaking. he does have many words, and repeats very clearly words that we say to him. but he chooses his babble talk over actual words all the time. for now, i'm not worried. if he's still doing this in a year...i'll begin to worry. i'm trying awfully hard not to talk for him. he is "the baby" afterall!
  
• the boys love our cat, greymalkin. they call her "pet" and follow her obsessively around the house, creating sleep ares for her (piles of blankets) and go through periods where they want to feed her 10 times a day. grey has had a lot of illnesses recently, and she's coming up on her 17th birthday. we're worried how they'll take her passing on.
• art time: how long does it last with other people's kids? we do painting, sketching and gluing (we had a bad moment with scissors the other day...sawyer's sworn them off after a small, but nasty, cut he got last week) and all of the art times last about 7 minutes. all that set up and clean up for 7 minutes worth of art? i know this is typical and generally it doesn't bother me...but i'd like it to last longer. eventually. to make the clean up worth it! i'll reintroduce more kid-friendly scissors to sawyer soon and then bring him back to his other scissors when i know he's over his new cutting phobia.
• speaking of art time, we made some lovely felt crowns last week. i still need to sew the elastic on them and i think these ones will be a proto-type to a better felted (real wool) crown we'll make later. hopefully when their cousins ramona and astrid visit later this spring. BUT...my sewing machine broke. and my other one? it's extremely fussy. i'm in need of a new one and i can't decide whether i will spring for a good one now (with tax return money) or save for 6 months and get a cheapo one now? advice?
  

you'll have to forgive the abundance of bee puns i'll be making around here. i just can't help myself.

the honeys (short for honeybees) are moved in and all unpacked, living and working in their new hives. kenny takes the boys down to the hives at least 23 times a day "to say hello." but in all these trips he's noticed that the bees seem to be doing their job. they enter the hive with pollen on their legs (a sign that the queen might have already come out of her cage and is already laying eggs to make more worker bees), and on yesterday's check of the inside of the hives, they're busy making wax, or the little compartments that you can see in your mind when you visualize a honeycomb.

it's exciting stuff. the life of a honeybee is fascinating. if you give it just a little of your attention, you'll be hooked.  we are very impatiently waiting our next 6 pounds of bees in the mail. we should have another hive up and buzzing (see? i just can't stop) in no time.

i really wish kenny was the one writing the honeybee posts. because i'm like a 2nd grader giving a report on honeybees and he actually knows what he's talking about.


more photos! rowan, kenny, and buzz, our local beekeeping friend. yes, that's his name. appropriate, no? i wonder what cars driving by thought when they saw these three walking our yard:

rowan and kenny, suiting up to install the bees (every inch of your skin is covered). rowan and sawyer (and eventually adam) have to share the kids bee suit. they love getting dressed up in it. i'm thinking it'll make a great costume for halloween (already made!):

at 7:19 a.m. this morning the phone rang. it was the post office in our small little town (since the general store closed down last summer, the post office and the methodist church are the only thing in town next to several houses).

10,000 honeybees were waiting for us and i don't think they wanted to wait until our normal 3:30 pm delivery time to get them out of their office. kenny and rowan hopped in the car and went to pick them up.

it certainly is that time of year again...the time to dig in the dirt and enjoy the mess. warm temperatures and sunny skies have been dominating the cloudy weather lately. i can't wait for this book to come out next month. i plan on finding some fun stuff to do outside all summer long!

kenny's been wanting to plant trees for a while now, so we spent yesterday evening planting three new fruit trees in our yard. our orchard trees are old and produce maybe a pear once a year or so. there are three diseased trees, so we're cutting those down and we replaced them with three healthy, brand new cherry trees (2) and a peach tree.

we've been planning out our vegetable garden. if you remember from last year, we had many a critter problem (including our very own beloved chickens!), so the first order of business is to dig a trench and put up a fence. a small one, but a fence nonetheless.  no broccoli or pole bean will go in the ground until that fence is up. we're getting a little nutty this year: we're going to do a few rows of corn and maybe some potatoes, sweet potatoes and soybeans! i'm hoping to really can a bunch of tomatoes and beans and pickles this year.

go celebrate this fine earth we've been given to cultivate! get your hands in the dirt and get dirty and muddy today! happy earth day!

please join me in wishing our beloved chickens a happy birthday today! a year ago on this date, it was frigid...20 degrees and windy and we bundled up and headed west to pick up a small box of squeaky chicks. today, not one of those chickens would be able to fit into that small little box.

we've lost only two chickens in one year, and that is remarkable. the other day, rowan asked me, "will the 14th and the 15th chicken that got taken by the hawk and run over by the car turn one this week too?" and then sawyer asked if we stay with jesus forever in heaven when we die, and then the conversation got way too complicated and difficult for me to continue on a 3- and 4-year-old level, so i quickly changed the subject and decided it was lunchtime at 10:30.

any way...

we celebrated today with homemade BBQ sauce over baked chicken (ha! get it?!), rice, and green beans. we have cupcakes to eat and share with the chickens tomorrow. they love leftovers, those chickens!

last week, when serina and i were sitting in crawling traffic inside the liberty tubes (who knew that there was a wikipedia source for the liberty tubes?!), we chatted about the struggle of Everywoman in america today: the desire to raise goats and sheep.

fortunately, we are of one mind on this issue (well, she more than i, but i'm getting there), so we were able to talk up our dreams and encourage each other that it was within reach. and that's where my problem begins.

i don't know if it was the culture in which i was raised, or the culture in which i started to make my own adult decisions, but at one point along those lines, i realized that i love to consume. new things. bright, shiny things that make my life so much easier, faster, and stress-free. and then recently, since meeting kenny at least, i became aware that that isn't necessarily a good thing. especially when you are a professing follower of Christ.

so then kenny and i began daydreaming one day over our sunday morning fairly-traded coffee at the bagel warehouse about moving out to the country and raising not only a family, but animals. that can help us live more simply. fast foward 6 years, and here we are: acreage, 3 boys, chickens, honeybees, enough grass to pasture several more animals, and a barn (that needs a bit of a fixin') to house more animals. we are in the position to live an incredibly simple life, eating our own (chicken) eggs, drinking our own (cow or goat) milk, shearing our own sheep, and working good and hard to make this life possible. we have enough land to garden organically, put up jars and cans of fruit and vegetables, we even have a small orchard of fruit trees (that do need some pruning, but could probably produce fruit again some day). we have a huge laundry line out back and i only air-dry a fraction of our laundry in the spring and summer.

so why do i still feel the need (or desire?) to go to Target, Sams, Barnes and Noble, and Giant Eagle (local grocery chain) to provide almost everything that we can grow/provide ourselves? we have this simple life in reach, and yet i push it away and still want to buy, buy, buy!

and not only that, i want to look good doing it. not me, per say, because i've already landed the man of my dreams...but my home. i want a pristine home, bursting with spring flowers, summer bounty, autumn foliage, and serene scenes of winter. our current chickens are free-range and they've torn up the base around most of our trees, and they dig up all the flower beds, not to mention they leave their droppings everywhere, including the front porch.

we've been spending the majority of our days on the outside of the house lately. it feels great to not need a coat, and to roam the yard again without heavy boots and deep snow keeping us from walking easily.

maybe it's because this yard has so much more foliage and life beneath the ground than our old yard did...but this year again, i'm surprised (by joy, of course) at the new buds forming on the otherwise dead-looking tree branches, and the bright green shoots sticking up out of the earth after a long hibernation. even though we're expecting it, it's always surprising that life returns after such a long, cold, dead winter.

i spent the day in the city on saturday. my friend serina and i (and her 5-month-old son, asher!) headed out bright and early to the salvation army fabric fair. we didn't realize just how nuts the fair actually is until we tried to maneuver our way through the crowds. i tried two or three times to browse through the patterns/book table, but the ladies wouldn't budge. these women meant business. we did score on some great new fabirc (cheap!) but made our way through as carefully as we could without getting hurt. :)

that afternoon, i met kenny and the boys (and my mom) at our old church for the shape note workshop i was so excited about. it was a lot of fun to sing in a group again (i rarely get this opportunity anymore since i'm not the singer in the family), and it was interesting learning a bit more about it. but kenny and i made the same observation about the actual singing: at this point, we'd much rather listen to it sung (by those who sing it a lot!) than to sing it ourselves. there was a huge need to pay attention to the line of music that you'd sing, and i honestly can't remember actually hearing the music being sung because i was too intent on getting the notes right. so i keep listening to the pieces from the Awake My Soul web site to get my fix.

in the warmth of the afternoon sun on sunday, we labored in the garden. now i know that this is (an example of) the type of work that God requires us to abstain from on the 7th day of the week...but seriously, is it work when it's so enjoyable? when it's all you've been wanting to do for the past three months of frozen temperatures? because it felt great to see the ground again, and to see the garden getting ready to be a bed of growth again. the boys helped us with their garden tools while adam napped. we breathed in the earth, the sun, the tractor diesel fumes....  if there is one thing i'd like to do away with, it's the tractor diesel. i wish there were such a thing as an affordable, green tractor that would make all the rest of our organic gardening and earth-keeping worth it. perhaps one day, the barn will be fixed up enough to house a few goats and sheep. because they're the perfect earth-friendly tractors around.

AND...we lost another chicken today. it was one of the black and white ones (silver laced wyandottes) - the ones i call george washington (they look just like him!). we believe she was hit by a car as she was lying, wings sprawled, in our rock/shrub garden. we're not sure it was a natural landing that put her there, or if someone put here there after doing the damage. she's had a proper burial and yes, we told the boys. and this after we were just telling someone how we've never lost a chicken to traffic, even though they freely walk in the street on a daily basis (cars normally slow down, honk, or stop). this puts our daily egg count down to about 10-11. thank goodness for friends who readily take eggs off our hands.

we recently got ourselves into a lot of trouble, kenny and i. we made the big mistake of purchasing two packages of playmobil knights and swords for rowan and sawyer's easter baskets. 

it was a bit of an embarrassment when they kept calling the swords, "pokey things" and kept asking what to do with the shields, and wondering just why they needed "metal" armor on top of their clothes. we made an even bigger mistake by then getting the take-along playmobil castle complete with 84 more knights, 115 swords and shields, and one horse.  when they opened this up, the questions kept coming: "what does this pokey thing do?" "why does this man have a feather in his helmet?" "is it cold out? is that why they need these big hats to cover their faces?" "why do they have to protect the castle?" "what princess?" "what bad guy?"

i think it's time to introduce our 3- and 4-year-old boys to knights in shining armors, princesses-in-distress, and real-life heros like st. george. fortunately, we celebrate this day on the 23rd of this month. i just found a half price copy of St. George and the Dragon (even though it's a fictitious story of the actual St. George, who I'm learning is not actually British!), but i'm hoping it will enhance their castle-play at the very least.

are there any other recommendations for knights and castle and medieval stories for young children who don't know that a sword isn't really an inch tall and made of plastic?

when i first came across the web site for the movie Awake My Soul, i was struck. kenny sent it to me just two nights ago, and i still can't get that music to leave my head. i scoured the web site for further information on this "shape note singing" and almost mysterious, however historical, hymnal, the Sacred Harp. i then scoured the internet for further information on this type of singing, this type of worship. i love this artist's vision of shape note singing.

that music is so...haunting? spiritual? weird? freakish? beautiful? intriguing? i still can't find a good description for it. i almost told kenny that i wanted to up and take a long drive into the heart of the south to find a sacred harp singing group or church so we could experience first-hand this singing.

fortunately, kenny and i have the opportunity to attend a shape note singing workshop next weekend. i'm STOKED.

i hope we have the opportunity to see the film very soon, however it doesn't exist at netflix, and it doesn't seem to be on the local PBS schedule anytime soon (anyone reading this have a copy we could borrow?).

i'll report back on our experience. if anyone else reading this has shape note (or sacred harp) singing experience, please chime in!