Dusting Off the Old Blog: Year in Review

Wow, has it really been since MAY since I posted? Somewhat fittingly, it appears my last post focused on the general feeling of living life like a chicken with its head cut off, a feeling which characterized much of 2015.

I’m happy to say things have slowed down just a tad as the year comes to a close – enough for me to update the blog! – although I fully anticipate the whole “head above water” thing to jumpstart again soon enough for reasons which will become abundantly clear in just a mo’.

So here’s a sampling of what we’ve been up to since May of this year:

• About a week after my last post, we learned there would be another little critter added to our homestead. Of the two-legged variety. And, no, I’m not talking about chickens. Here’s Willem making the big announcement for us:
   

  And here I am today at 34 weeks. Baby #2 is due January 30, 2016, and we are thrilled (oh, and it’s a boy!):
  

• The Keystone-Monon Community Garden work chugged along, hitting a number of snags, all of which were pretty much out of our control, which drives me bonkers. I’ve learned a tremendous amount already about launching such a project from the ground up, and I am completely thrilled that, after one last hail Mary pass right before the changing of the guard with the mayoral elections in November, we’ve made it happen! We have our agreement with the city signed to begin building at Arsenal Park in 2016, we raised over $3,000 in 2015, we have a coalition of excited neighbors, and we’ve secured insurance. Now… WE BUILD! We’ll be picking back up in January to plan out what needs to happen to have our official ribbon cutting in May. I am hoping to still be massively pregnant by that meeting and not have recently birthed a small child… but we’ll see.
  
  Painting out the outlines for the garden:
  

• In the span of about a month, Chris and I listed and sold our wonderful first home and moved into a new one! We tried to find a way to make our old home work for our growing family, but at the end of the day it just wasn’t happening. And then we found our new home: a half-acre of land only a few blocks from our old home (in other words, in the same part of the city we know and love). Three bedrooms, two baths, a giant maple tree out front, and a garage I can actually park in. And did I mention the land? It all worked out just as it should: the first people to see our old home put an offer in the next morning, and within a month, our beautiful little homestead in the city was sold. It hurts my heart a little that I won’t get to enjoy the asparagus I planted this past spring or the strawberries and blackberries, but I can plant all of those again and then some in our new space. And, oh, I will. 

  The old house, all prepped for sale:

And the new place!

Chris and my dad building the new coop:

Moving the bees:

Our amazing maple tree:

• What else, what else? Oh, right. Chris got a new job! Well, that happened back in April, but this year he has really settled in and flourished. I am so grateful that he found a place where he can grow and be challenged and has the support to do so. Also, I quit one of my part-time jobs as of this month. It was a tough decision, but I already feel lighter. And I have no clue how I was going to pull it off once I had another little kiddo to care for all day.Oh, and Chris’ new place of employ? It’s a big enough company to host a holiday party  (I’ve only ever worked for small non-profits, so this was super novel to me – can’t resist a photo booth):

  

 And a glimpse into the rest of the second part of 2015:

 

 

 

 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from our half-acre of happiness to you and yours!

Wendell Berry: Still the Man

I don’t know if I’ve posted it here before, but I stumbled across one of my favorite writings from Wendell Berry today. I love being reminded of a beloved poem or essay or quote and breathing in the words all over again. This poem is an old friend who I haven’t seen in a while, and re-reading the words is like meeting over coffee and picking up right where we left off.

• Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, Wendell Berry (click on the title to read the whole, beautiful work)

Case in point:

“Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.”

And the closing:

“As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.”

Fleeting Fall

The leaves seem to already be falling to the ground, and I feel like I’ve barely had the chance to enjoy them shifting from green to yellow to orange to red on the trees. What’s the deal, fall?

We’ve been in the throes of fall cleanup around here. A few weekends ago, the chickens got their coop and run deep clean. Last weekend, I dug the sweet potatoes and put more of the garden to rest.

There’s always so much excitement to see what’s buried under the soil on sweet potato digging day:

And then? Sometimes, this happens. Yup. That is the entirety of our sweet potato “crop” this year.

Sad trombone.

Still left to do: planting the garlic, cutting back the perennials in the back, and cutting back our newer/smaller perennials up front. Then the snow can fly.

This weekend? This weekend, I took care of most of the older perennials in the front yard. We usually leave the coneflower all winter for the birds and other little critters, but we were a little distracted this summer and didn’t do much in the way of staking them as they grew. The end result was a bunch of beautiful, wild, crazy flowers laying across the lawn and each other. So… they had to go.

I feel like we should be doing “fall stuff” with Willem – taking him on hay rides and to pumpkin patches and little kid costume parades. But really? At this point, those things would be more for us than him, and he’s just not terribly keen on big crowds. He had such a great time playing on his blanket in the sun this morning, watching me hack away at the bushes of false blue indigo, butterfly weed, and coneflower. So instead of pictures of Willem with pumpkins, we’ll have pictures of Willem on my Grandma Farm’s colorful quilt in the front yard.

Can you also tell our latest exciting development? Willem now has two bottom teeth coming in! His gummy smile is a thing of the past. Sniff…

I must say, though, I can’t wait until he’s old enough to snuggle up on the couch with us and watch a movie or go play at Conner Prairie or the Children’s Museum or really have a blast watching the Christmas train display at the Eiteljorg Museum. Don’t grow up too fast, kid… but when you do, we’ll have some awesome stuff to do.

A Gratuitous Post All About LOVE and THE FUTURE

Today marks our one-year wedding anniversary. What a wonderful, insane year it has been.

For instance, we now have some new residents: tens of thousands of bees and an adorable almost-seven-month-old.

Willem adores his BFF Crosby:

As always, we are looking to the future. I think that’s one of the coolest things about us as a couple: we push each other and support each other and egg each other on with whatever latest hairbrained scheme one of us has until it doesn’t seem so hairbrained anymore and we actually do it.

Today’s discussion (during lunch at La Margarita, our fave Mexican restaurant, which I hadn’t visited since my due date) centered around finding some land/buying a farm so Chris could start raising nucs and building top bar hives (the latter he could do here; the former, not so much). I also had a really freaking amazing idea last night centered around food deserts and a new way of getting produce to communities who would maybe love to eat fresh produce if only they had access…. And that’s all I want to say about THAT because I might actually want to try to do it at some point.

I’m also exploring new ways to spread art into the world (and maybe make a little cash on the side so we can maybe, possibly, actually get us some land one of these days) and have re-opened my Etsy shop! Visit me at www.etsy.com/shop/famousthecat and get yourself a custom “home sweet home” print to display your own family love all year round.

Here’s ours:

ALL THE THINGS!

TODAY:

• Dig out all the weeds growing in the lettuce bed.
• Steam some green beans for Willem’s lunch.
• Cut back the blackberries.
• Pull ALL THE WEEDS.
• Lay down plastic to KILL ALL FUTURE WEEDS.
• Mow.
• Buy winter rye for cover cropping (and a bunch of other seeds) from Johnny’s Selected Seeds.
• Update a website and track the produce from our last CSA of the summer.
• Get some more work done on our family portrait.

• Make rosemary-lavender simple syrup.
• Go buy some fixings to make a pumpkin pie. I need some pumpkin pie like whoa.
• Play with, feed, talk to, smile at, put down for naps, read to, and change the Willem.

• Take at least two showers.
• Drink ice water, eat ice cream, watch the series finale of The Killing, and drink pumpkin beer in our underwear under the fan once all of the above is complete.

Also? It is stupid hot and humid out there. STUPID.

Senor Sleepyhead and Madre Fancypants

As I conquered this morning’s “while you were napping” chores, I got a brilliant idea for a children’s book – all about everything stay-at-home/work-at-home moms manage to get done in those brief, ephemeral snippets when their children are napping.

It would start with the normal stuff – laundry, answering some emails and writing grant applications, returning calls, maybe even scrubbing a toilet – then move on to more advanced mommy multi-tasking skills – baking a loaf of banana bread, washing the diapers, roasting some veggies for that night’s dinner, filling the sweet potato bin with more dirt, mucking out the chicken run, or, gasp, plucking an eyebrow or two!

Then it would get all hyperbolic, of course, and end with Madre Fancypants saving the universe from total annihilation. Whadda you think? Maybe it would start with some kind stranger remarking on Madre Fancypants’ amazing arm muscles “from lifting the baby all the time.” But then you realize she’s got crazy, mad muscles from SAVING THE WORLD, one nap at a time.

Saving the world, one nap at a time. Seriously, I think we’ve got something here!

This morning, the first-nap-of-the-day chore: mucking out the chicken run. Which, OMG, based on the smell, was very overdue. On the plus side, we’ve got some amazing organic matter (read: POOP and food and worms and leftover bit of kale and chard and did I mention POOP?) in our compost bins now, and we’ve got some very happy chickens, pecking through the fresh hay and scratch in their run.

And whenever Senor Sleepyhead wakes from his nap? We’re going to the Indiana State Fair, y’all! Baby’s first cows and pigs and Ferris wheels and funnel cakes and and and… other State Fair stuff!

The whole fam-damily:

Willem, learning from the best:

Balance

So… I was supposed to return from maternity leave to my old, full-time, wonderful job on May 15. I had been there six years and had very much climbed the ladder (and had been given the opportunity, trust, and support to do so from my boss, co-workers, our board, our members… everyone) in terms of both salary and job responsibilities/title. It was an awesome place to grow and learn, and in those respects it was very hard to not go back.

In the I-have-a-Willem-now respect, though, it was very, very easy to not go back. I just… I can’t even imagine working full time right now and am utterly thankful I am not having to make that work. However, being completely focused on a baby and someone else’s needs? That gets old fast, and so I am super lucky and thankful to be working very part-time for Growing Places Indy as their operations manager. I’m writing grants, tracking donations and entering data into QuickBooks, doing graphic design – basically, whatever needs getting done, I’ll do. It keeps me tied to the real world in an awesome way, since I get to work for an organization that is doing some amazing stuff in my city and that I really believe in and am interested in already.

I’m pleased as punch to see my signs around town for our new u-pick farm and farm stand:

And the other day we got notice that we received funding on the first grant I’ve ever applied for. It seems weird that this is the first grant I’ve actually ever applied for; I’ve worked on grants for other people before but never really been the head grant-applicator. Or something. Anyway, it’s awesome, and it means we will be able to grow produce year-round AND support a year-round urban farmer, which is huge. I’m super proud.

P.S. Backyard panorama, just for scuzz.

P.P.S. Speaking of “balance,” I’d be remiss to not post a picture of my Willem being cute, right?

Happy (Almost) Anniversary, So Bro Homestead!

Seeing as I can’t be relied upon these days to actually remember things like anniversaries – at least, not on the actual anniversary – I’m taking this free moment I have right now to post an ode to our house.

It’s been three years now in the So Bro Homestead! Chris closed on the house on Friday the 13th of May 2011. And it’s been three awesome, exciting, fun years. We’ve learned a ton and done a ton. We now have trees (sycamore, red bud, river birch, and apple trees) and chickens and a BABY and bees and a dog named Birdie. We got married. We built a garden and brew beer.

And you know what? We have plenty more plans to get us through the foreseeable future. We are happy.

The happy human residents:

Happy anniversary, wonderful little house!

The Day Has Finally Arrived*

*No, I am not in labor.

Nope, folks, the day has finally arrived when:

• None of my maternity shirts actually cover my stomach anymore, and I have resigned myself to a wardrobe of dresses and leggings or my own frightful incarnation of the bare midriff style (just imagine your average American Apparel model, then add 30 pounds to the belly region and 20 years).
• Looking in the mirror in the morning is more to get a good laugh than to actually make myself look presentable or, dare I even try, CUTE.
• Not leaving the house for three days in a row does not seem shocking; leaving the house, on the other hand, sounds like waaaaay too much work.
• My idea of a party down, no holds barred weekend is planting seeds for the summer garden, making a giant vat of black beans to freeze, knitting a sweater, and making fun of the commercials playing during the Olympics (Fritos on a sub? I can’t think of a food that would be a better antonym to “eating fresh.” Also, are we really going to liken some fat slob biting into one of his 20-for-$5 chicken McFrankenNuggets to an Olympian biting his/her gold medal? REALLY?! And don’t even get me started on the health benefits of drinking an ice cold CocaCola. I’m sure Olympians the world over are chugging that shit down).

I guess all of that is just to say we’re still here, and we’re still waiting. Here are some recent scenes from the current waiting game:

39 weeks:

Me and Birdie, taking selfies to distract ourselves from the hideousness that is ice dancing (no offense if that’s the kind of thing that rings your bell):

Super sweet, unexpected (and maybe handmade?) gifts from super sweet neighbors. I guess they noticed me living on my bike last summer!

Chris’ superhero outfit (err, I mean, protection for insulating our attic. Did I forget to mention he went on a house insulating kick a few weeks ago? He really needs to figure out some sort of amazing Halloween costume with this getup):

And the part I’m most excited about: the beginnings of our 2014 garden! I am loving the stories behind our seeds this year, many of which are heirloom varieties purchased from Seed Savers Exchange. I think I’ll be doing a dreamy regular feature this summer on each of their stories. Because I get into that sort of thing. I also love how our no-frill, inauspicious setup will produce the most amazing garden and food all summer long.

Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That

Chris has channeled this wise woman for his pre-baby philosophy of life. I must say, living the “ain’t nobody got time for that way” is very effective and has started rubbing off on me.

So what don’t we have time for these days?

EXHIBIT A: Lingering Ambitious Flooring Projects. Chris finished the Ambitious Flooring Project of 2013/2014 last weekend, and it is wonderful!

With two adults, two cats, and one dog, our old carpet (which was stained and gross when we moved in) was just not getting any prettier. BEFORE:

Now? Oh, now we have a thing of beauty – flooring that will be easy to clean all of the various mammalian residues and deposits off of, which will be especially awesome once the baby gets here. Also, it’s dead sexy. BEHOLD – AFTER!

EXHIBIT B: Intimidating, Yet Deceptively Simple, Baby Stuff Assembly. Today I experienced a great accomplishment. It involves an infant car seat. Seriously, have you ever tried to install a car seat? Because everyone freaks you out so much about installing that damn thing that it almost paralyzes you with fear.

Not only was I able to fit the infant car seat into my roller skate of a car, assuaging my fears that I would need a new car to accommodate the dang thing, but I was able to figure out how to connect it properly, armed with just a user manual and my own brain piece. SUCCESS!

EXHIBIT C: The Chickens Ain’t Got Time for That, Either. The chickens have jumped on the band wagon, too, and decided that nobody’s got time for winter and its short, cold days anymore. Spring time is around the corner, and for the first time in three months, we have two more chickens who have joined Boo, our workhorse leghorn, in deciding to lay eggs again!