-
satisfied.
Thanksgiving has passed. I cried out for help. You answered the call. Thank you very much. All in all, I think it was a pretty fabulous day of giving thanks and eating delicious food and relaxing with friends and family. I hope yours was as well. The day before the food feast, the kids went to work crafting personalized place mats for every member of our family, as well as our six guests. We used supplies we had on hand – which turned out to be primarily felt – and I think the results are sweet. We saved our own and let the guests take theirs home. We’ll definitely do…
-
How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways.
What I Love About the Farm: Hanging out with Sally and Emma and Sarah. The wide open spaces. (No neighborhood in the distance. No cell towers. No highway over the ridge. Nothing but green trees and green grass.) These two boys developing a brand new buddy-ship. No Internet connection. (Yes, I love this. I type these little posts at night, lying in bed, through my phone. And even that service is sketchy and unreliable. And I like how that makes me feel marvelously distant from all other realities except the one wide-open reality in which I am currently experiencing.) The loud chaos of so many children playing at once. And…
-
Tradition.
The farm has little to no Internet. So it’s phone entries again for this girl. But I’d say the view makes up for the Internet-less. And then some. It’s that wonderful holiday. Sort of my favorite holiday. (Especially if we don’t count birthdays.) July Fourth. The week where the farm in Virginia is completely over run by hordes of romping, dashing, enthusiastic children. And we eat our meals all together and we always have dessert. We stick ourselves on top of old tire tubes and willingly place those tubes and our bodies in the muddy cold waters of the Pigg River. We gather all together and eat picnic foods all…
-
tradition
tradition: a long-established custom that has been passed on. Yes. Perfect. I love tradition. I love events and details and activities that you do year after year, holiday after holiday, season after season. And I love July Fourth. Love it. Love the mad rush that leads up to the day. Love the kids helping decorate the porch so it looks all shades of blue, red and white festive. Love the tattoos that every kid chooses to slap across their cheeks. I think part of what I love is how you can try to make so many particulars the same – the food, the location, the order of events (guns, tubing,…
-
Hello Holidays.
This weekend we finally opened our doors to the season surrounding us. (We’re a little slow like that sometimes.) We dug out the fake tree. Again. This year the result of our Fake Tree vs. Real Tree debate has nothing to do with travel plans. Instead, it has lots more to do with the logic presented by a seven year old. London somehow fell on the Fake Tree side of the argument. And she presented three very reasonable arguments for her cause. She articulately stated . . . 1. We already own a fake tree. It’s in the storage shed. It’s already free. 2. You have to water…
-
More Kids Than Adults: Lessons Learned
I haven’t been home for a full week. Seven days. Seven nights. It’s July. And in our framily July means one thing. The annual July Fourth party. A tradition at least twenty years in the making. And – oh boy – will I have a lot of things to say about this past week. Here’s the first . . . Lots of us slept at the farm house. The grand total was something like this – 5 adults. 9 kids. (And some days held more children drifting in and out.) The point is – the adults were outnumbered. The kids could have thrown a coup and forced us to feed…
-
First Annual
It finally happened. The much-anticipated First Annual Pickle Juice Drinking Event. Yes. Pickle juice drinking. For some crazy reason the Keigley children discovered that they enjoy the taste of consuming copious amounts of pickle brine. Apparently, it’s genetic. Because so does their Aunt Betty Ann. Once this information was leaked to our children the idea began forming immediately. Drink pickle juice. With other people who like to drink pickle juice. Profound. London even wrote a letter to her aunt, requesting that one day they could share some memories over a glass or two of the almost neon-colored stuff. The stars aligned. Suddenly, there we were in London, Ohio. Hometown of…
-
This Bowl
Growing up, every spring for longer than I can possibly remember, my mother made strawberry jam. It was delicious. We never had Smuckers at our house, we only had homemade strawberry jam. I am not entirely domestic, but the strawberry jam tradition has been one I really wanted to continue. Now, every spring I find myself picking strawberries and making oodles of batches of what my husband refers to as “red gold”. I don’t buy Smuckers for this house either – I prefer the fresh strawberry goodness. Here’s the funny thing. Many years ago my mother gave me the particular bowl in which she always prepared her strawberry jam. (Which…
