Smitten & Besotted

 When I was a little girl, I remember the day before Christmas as one of the longest days in my life.  We celebrated Christmas at my beloved maternal grandparents house every year on Christmas Eve and that day took FOREVER to finally be evening and for all the rest of the family to arrive for food & presents! 

Well, life has sped up considerably and the last 5 months have zipped by like an express train!

 April 8th found us driving about 2  hours to the hospital to wait for our very first grandbaby to be born!  We loved him on sight and have only become more besotted & smitten as the days have gone by!  I gained my grandma name (GrammyPammy) and gave a huge part of my heart away! 

In between visits with that special little guy, life on the farm does go on, lol!  I found an elk antler in our field on a walk in April....We picked gobs of cherries from our Montmorency Pie Cherry tree this year.

Between our patch and my sweet neighbor Jean's patch, we got a bazillion delicious strawberries for fresh eating & winter jams & jellies!

Our daughter and her little family are about a 2 1/2 hour drive away and we have kept the roads well traveled both ways as we get to know our sweet baby boy!

We haven't neglected our favorite Spring & Summer activities, however, and have been to the beach several times.  Washaway Beach in Grayland Washington is still our favorite, and we always stop there to see how much more land the winter storms took away....and we recently bought our almost 30 pounds of fresh albacore tuna and canned it for our shelves.  We've been doing that for quite a few years - one of the big benefits of living so close to the edge of the continent is enjoying the fresh seafood & beautiful ocean beaches.  When I was a baby, my mom & her family used to camp on the beach that no longer exists where the ocean has taken over,

We've made several day trips already this year and it only takes us about an hour & a half to get to Grayland Beach State Park where we like to camp in our trailer, too.

As I write this, we are just back from a day trip once again, this time to enjoy the Westport Washington Art Festival.  Quite a few vendors of art & foods along the main street.  We had fun wandering & visiting, ate lunch at our favorite Bennett's Fish Shack, of course and then stopped for a 'sissy' coffee (as my hubby calls it) on the way home.

 This diftwood art lion and longhorn cow below were on display at the Tokeland Hotel festival a couple weeks ago - also at the beach.  (I told you we go there a lot!)

There were also chain saw artists & local musicians and a pottery vendor.  We each came home with a new handmade coffee mug!

 We've lived on our farm for over 20 years.  Starting from scratch, we built our shop and then lived in it while we built our house.  We moved in on an exciting April Fool's Day and have been through many days, months & years of life here.  We started here with my hubby & I, my mom and our three kids, ages 8, 12 & 15.  That was a lot of life ago.

 When this sweet little guy arrived, it just cemented the idea that, for our family at least, we should live close enough to go through the rest of this life together!  Our plan is to sell the farm and move near the kids and be a blessing & help to them (and them to us!) in the years ahead!

It's a hard thing to think about, for sure.  We love this farm and living so far from the world...but not living so far from the rest of the family!  So, in the months ahead we will be sorting, cleaning, & repairing a bazillion things around here in preparation for a new adventure!

Lord willing, we will still live on a few acres as we're planning to keep up the gardening & animals and Grampa Dave has to have his bees & tractor! 

In the meantime, we're still doing all the harvest stuff, too!  We just made some really yummy jelly from our Hollywood plums and canned that.  The tuna and chicken broth we canned last week just went down to the cellar and on Monday we're canning the pie cherries that we picked and stored in the freezer.  We just put our wildcrafted mint away for our Winter tea and also braided all our garlic and put our onions in their baskets. 
Life is full and happy, the Lord has blessed us greatly and we fully believe that every good and perfect gift comes from Him!  Until next time (and hopefully not such a LONG time!)  Serve the Lord with gladness!

Spring ahead....It's March already!

January and February flew past and life went along like a derailed train!
It started off fine & slow.  I even had time to arrange a wall of my sewing machine museum to my liking.  This is the 'German' wall.  I think the German-made machines are my favorite - with their well-made mechanisms and lovely inlaid wood.

 Then, we had about 4 or 5 acres near the house logged.  It opened up the view and helped us pay off a few bills.
It made the view from the house a lot like it was 20 years ago when we first built the house and the trees were just babies.  Fir trees are an amazing crop - those trees were less than 4 ft tall when we moved here and now they've been harvested!  Next year we'll replant and it'll start all over!

 The goats have kidded and we've got just 4 youngsters to raise this year.  I held back last years' kids and will breed them next Fall.
Our three girls kidded without any trouble at all this year!  That's Maryanne with Mordecai and Magda just moments after being born.  Shiloh had a doe we named Shinar and Ekaterina, not to be outdone, had a doe we named Egglantine!

These two coffee mugs sat on my grandparents' wood stove each morning to warm up while Grampa made coffee for Grama and himself.  I smile when I look at them, now on the mantel above my cookstove.  Sometimes it doesn't seem quite right that 'things' remain when our beloved people have been gone for so long.

The fixer-upper house deal that my daughter and her husband were waiting on finally went through and the pace of life picked up!  My husband is a builder and his skills are needed!

 Francis and I (Francis is my travelling bear buddy) packed up the camper van and headed North!  We cleaned & hauled and worked on the house.  We drove home again!  We gathered up our suitcases again...and boxed up their little apartment, did more cleaning & repairing and moved them in!  For awhile, when I woke up in the morning I wasn't sure where I was!  And this country girl enjoyed some new city experiences...Did you know that you can actually phone in a PIZZA order and they will bring it HOT to your very DOOR?  Amazing!  considering that we live about 35 or more miles to the nearest pizza place, no one delivers pizza to this farm!

 Thirty five years ago my husband and I had our first daughter...and we looked so very young.  Now, that sweet daughter is 33 weeks along, carrying our precious grandson!  Where did the years go? (I haven't changed a bit, by the way.)

Now I'm home (temporarily) again but fighting the flu bug.  As soon as I get over it, I'll be packing up Francis again and heading for the little house once again, this time to put the kitchen and nursery together!

In the meantime, daily farm life goes on day after day, week after week, much the same...

 Eggs to gather and wash.  Goats to milk and kids to feed.  And always primitives to make for my Ebay and Etsy stores.

 I made myself a happy green slug out of playdough one day.  I don't even like slugs, but this one was kind of cute, don't you think?

Today I've done very little.  Made myself the Potato Soup my sweet mama always made when I was sick.  Mostly sitting in my recliner and impatiently waiting to feel better, lol.

I'm not very good at being sick!  I'd rather be working and the sun was shining today and making me feel like a kid stuck in school on a sunny day!

I started the day with a wicked headache and nasty cough, so my daughter actually did the goat milking chores for me.  She just went out again this evening to feed the goat kids their milk - they get milk twice a day until they're about 8-10 weeks old.  We bottle or bucket feed them so there's milk for the house, too.

 Arthritis in my hands (and me so young, lol) keeps me from milking three goats, so milking machine it is!  The disadvantage is that there's a lot more to clean up when milking by machine and we've been plagued with water problems this year.  First, one of our two low flow wells quit and it's not accessible in the winter.  Then we broke a water line in the freezing weather!

 Besides the fact that he's been working on the kids' house more often than he's been at home, my dear husband also sprained his knee and has been on crutches for the last couple of weeks!  And no, it didn't slow him down much.  Trying to get him to rest is nigh unto impossible!

One day I got hungry and rustled up scalloped potatoes in my crockpot.  Of course I put ham in the other crockpot and dinner just wasn't complete until I made a pecan pie and banana bread!  Wish I had it today, though I can't taste much of anything so I guess it won't make much difference what I eat until this bug is gone!

 Ripley the cat is my faithful sidekick.  He's a funny little guy.  He doesn't like my daughter (who raised him from a kitten!) but loves me!  When he needs to go outside, he walks over and 'tells' her by mewing until she gets up and lets him out the door.  He likes to give her ankle a good swat as he walks by!

This is Rip and I in our favorite recliner chair.  (Oh, and by the way, I lied earlier.  I have definitely changed from 35 years ago, lol.)

We had a few days of ice and snow - while we were travelling back & forth, of course!  It's so pretty, but this year I'm glad it's gone so we can get back to easy driving. 

 The primitives selling business has been ridiculously busy!  I've been coming home from the kids' place to sew/craft/paint like a mad woman!

People have been buying not just seasonal items either, but out of season things like pumpkins, squirrels and bats, oh my!

 This was a couple of weeks ago and now I've got just about as many orders again!  Takes me longer when I'm ill, but I'm still working at it a bit each day anyhow. Now my younger daughter is my partner in crafting, which makes us a lot more productive, working as a team!

Well, that's what's happening here on the hilltop at the moment.  Hubby left this morning to help the kids pick out kitchen cabinets and set them.  He'll be gone for a couple of days working on that.  Then he'll drive back (about 2 3/4 hours) and get caught up at home again!

We're starting to think about the garden - just got a roll of landscape fabric & barnyard bark to work up some raised beds for the strawberries.  I ordered vegetable seeds and will start them as soon as they arrive in the mail...and as soon as I get over the flu!  Stay well and I'll sign in again when I have a chance!