Dear Santa, Love Mama Podkayne

Dear Santa,

This Christmas I would like my house in Des Moines to sell to a loving owner who appreciates it's history and architecture, but I'd settle for anyone who can offer what we have mortgaged plus closing fees. You know, though if I was wishing big, I'd ask for you to pay for the mortgage and I'd donate the house to orphans. It would make a great orphanage!

I would love to replace all the bee equipment that I had but gave away just when I was feeling hopeless about ever getting a farm. A hive full of bees would be the bees knees too!

A cider press/sausage press like my grandmother used to have. The old fashioned cast iron kind.

A 10 button folk accordion. I know, I can barely pluck out a tune on the piano, but accordion is in my Cajun blood.

I would like my husband to shoot a deer. Not just shoot at a deer, but to hit it and manage to address it for meat. It would do great things for our freezer (though we don't technically have any room), but also for morale.

Appeture.  A macro lens, a zoom lens, and a new uv filter. Maybe a fancy sparkly camera strap.

I also hope for the weather to be nice. We don't have our chimney lined yet so our wood stove is not hooked up and functional.

Oh and world peace while I'm asking for things. I have enlisted family delploying to Afghanistan this summer. I'd like them to come back to their beautiful daughter, even better, make it so they won't have to go at all.

Love, Mama Podkayne

PS, each girl has their own list. I'll send those along soon.

PSS......Say hi to the elves for me, distant cousins they are!

This Life

The girls are growing so fast. Everyday Blueberry adds more words and Lil'Bug inhales everything she can about the world around her. Our days are filled with good food, paint, and farm chores. I am teaching extra classes and it feels like a whirlwind this semester with all that has happened in the last six weeks. When I get a minute I just stop and watch the girls instead of blogging or chatting on the phone or even just catching my breath. I don't want to miss a minute of this wonderful life.

My car should be back from the shop in the next two weeks. Great Grandma is visiting for the holidays. Semester finals grading crunch begins soon. All in all it has been a fantastic year for us here on the farm, busy but productive. This is the life we dreamed of and each day it just gets better and better. It doesn't hurt that I learned to cook. Ha!

All Sunshine and Roses

I was thinking about this as I did dishes this morning. I was thinking about marriage and rose hips. Roses are a pretty symbolic flower: love, thorns, etc. But if you wait and let the flowers mature you get rose hips which are tasty and high in vitamin C. Not many people can resist picking the flowers, showing them off in a vase, only to have them die a short time later. Some people prefer plastic or silk roses which will last until they get tattered and dusty and fall apart. Not many know about rose hips at all. Some people can't make the time to harvest them or think it is worth the effort, even though nurturing and letting the rose mature to its next phase is healthier for the plant. Is it a metaphor for marriage in our culture?

There is a magical belief that everything changes after a wedding. As a new bride almost 11 years ago, I had a rosy vision of the future, just as many blushing brides do. It is pretty magical to begin making a family and a life together. For us that road included infertility and complicated pregnancies and many years. The daily grind was the same. I could file for student loans without being at the mercy of my relatives' whim on sharing required documents, but that was it. Prior to that we had a home, were best friends, spent all of our time supporting each other. That part just gets better and better but it does so gradually. There are good years and bad years, yes YEARS, but overall each day makes us stronger.

An expensive wedding didn't get us there. We could have been married by a judge or in a park or with a hundred other couples in Central Park, that part was important, but only for the vows and dedication and work we put into it. We were married by a minister, who was also a neighbor, in front of a small group of neighbors and relatives in the middle of a really bad snow storm. We didn't do the rituals leading up, I only had one bridal shower and there were no other gatherings, no bachelor/ette parties, no last flings, not even a rehearsal dinner. No dress fittings, no engagement photos. Nada. Actually, I wish we'd done more with photographing the event itself, as I have only 3 pictures from it. So it goes.

But, I digress, my main point is not the economics of getting married, but the practical logistics and reality of being married.

Marriage is hard. I know people who have been married for longer than we have and who have held us up in our struggles, even if for some of them the law doesn't legally recognize their union (which in Iowa it can now!). It takes the support of friends and family to hold up a couple. Real friends, real family, and to some extent even casual friends that you surround yourself with. It's the daily work that is hard. Have I said that before? I mean it. Hard. Work. But it is like chopping wood, it is back breaking work but when its 40- degrees with windchill and you can be warm and toasty inside with roaring fire, you know it was worth it. Plus the fresh air and exercise is a bonus as well. You know? It's good, honest work.

I've been trying to come up with something to write to my my sister for her first married Christmas, but every time I turn back to my own experience. Some of our friends and family tried to break our marriage, and were very nonsupporting and unloving. Those same will be holding up my sister and her new husband in their fragile first years. I pray for them to have the same resilience and to remember who their partner is. I hope she begins to know that she should never speak ill of her partner, even if she is wicked angry at him. Those words circulate though the community, like it or not. Words that can be like a drop of poison in the wellspring.

As I was sitting in the ER with the baby last month, I thought for a moment how hard that would be if I was a single mom. Thank God I am not. Dearest arrived, I got to care for Lil'Bug, eat, and rest a bit before taking back over while he did the same. His Dad sat with Lil'Bug in the waiting room. We were there all day. I could not have done that alone.

In fact, the daily grind would be harder too. I may have more laundry to do, but I also have someone to help with it. Same with dishes. We can take turns driving on road trips. I have someone to cry to and say out loud those feelings that I have that are hard to say out loud. I share my heart and my life and my family.

Being married to Dearest is the best thing that ever happened to me. I hope that for my sister marriage is also a blessing and brings her more joy than she can even begin to imagine. I do think that, in the thrall of wedding event madness, the actual marriage and the daily life that follows is veiled and covered with roses. The laundry piles will still be stinky and a tripping hazard. The dishes will still pile up in the sink. It will still be the same bills that need to be paid and the same bat poop in the ceiling. The ring doesn't make those things disappear or annoy you less. On the other hand, if you work at being married and being loving everyday, something magical does happen. That's the secret.

Marriage is easy and hard and wonderful. We'll have many more adventures ahead, together. That's the real bliss of marriage.

To-Do update from last year

Last March I posted a to-do list for sprint, summer, and fall. Status update is below.

The list of stuff to get done this spring/summer/fall -

Grain bin turned Chicken house - get ready for summer, install false ceiling, electricity, and heater before november I got made fun of a lot for this (scowls). Some people even insisted I was going to install air conditioning. Electricity will be done in the next couple of weeks for this, mainly for a light and a heater to put in the bowl so the water won't freeze. I'll be putting some strategically placed hay bales in there so the birds can huddle in a warm place if necessary.
rebuild front porch - roof done, new supports placed, stone columns do be rebuilt in spring.
remove bees from front porch column - done - hive was dead so this was less complicated than we thought.
new roof on both porches - done
repair main roof - we reroofed it - done and done!
repair/replace gutters - skipped gutters - might install in spring, might not be necessary.
paint house - mostly done - we need to rent a cherry picker to finish since we can't walk the metal roof, will probably have to happen in spring now.
weatherize addition and basement This'll be done before Christmas
cut enough firewood to last through next winter - we have a lot, but the stove isn't in. Not sure if it's enough, we'll see.
line chimney - still working with the chimney folks on this, hopefully before christmas.
fix enough fence for us to get a bred milk cow next spring - We'll be doing some fencing, though I'm not sure if it will be used for this or not. Might have to wait until spring if the ground freezes soon.
clean out haunted chicken house and make sure it's in good enough shape to use as shelter for the cow when necessary - done
rock driveway (and the casbah) - only the casbah was rocked.
clean up trash and get a big brush burn done - (last on list since ground can be frozen when we do this) lots of trash removed from property, still a lot of burning and removal to go.

I also posted a tentative to do list for sprint/summer -

Get Bees - still on the list
replace main roof - done!
change the opening for the old basement garage into wall with exterior bulkhead door and storm shelter - maybe . . . maybe not.
prepare fence and housing for bred sow to be purchased spring of 2011 - We may be bumping this up to this spring.
fence and shelter for sheep in spring of 2011? - still on the list
expand cow facilities? - hmm - I think this meant fence the actual pasture. We'll have to see - that's going to be expensive.
prepare for brooding hens to hatch spring of 2011 - I need to have a good place to hatch the meat chickens this year - it'll probably happen in garage.
finish junk cleanup - we'll settle for making progress. There is a lot of junk.

That's the update. I'll post a new to-do before the year is out.