Life, as it has become

Staying home has been different. I have so much more time for projects and yet…not. Kids have a funny way of doing that.

I’m doing things I haven’t before as a mother. I’m not used to making their breakfasts or their lunches during the week. Of course I had enough requests for bacon and eggs today that sometimes they’re rather indistinguishable. Home made chicken and french fries is always a hit. Today it was picnic on the floor lunch. This always ends up torturing our giant dogs who sit a respectable distance and wait for the kids to abandon their plates. Oh how many tears have been shed over abandoned plates being consumed by ravenous canines.

Picnic

I am often lost on how to occupy them as well. I’m anti-electronics, which limits my winter time options. Luckily we have an unfinished basement. Unluckily the spiders loved our unfinished basement. So we fumigated. It did a pretty decent job. Now I’ve simply had to clean up all of the stuff we’ve left down there. It appears that whenever we had something I didn’t know what to do with, I simply put it in the basement. Procrastination is my thing. Things are cleaning up nicely and the kids have all of the things they’d not normally be able to play with in the winter. We have bikes, scooters, roller skates and some large plastic tractors down there. We also moved 1/3 of their toys down there. It’s been a great place for us to go and work off some of this winter time energy.

I’m also trying out this whole kids crafts thing. They’ve finger painted (whole body painted is more accurate) on a tarp in the living room whilst I mudded the new drywall. We’ve done pipe cleaner building. Ok, ok, I’ve built things with pipe cleaners and the demands were pretty ridiculous. They each have their own boxes of personal supplies: pencils, glue, scissors, etc. Things are going pretty well.

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Still, I’m struggling. They want TV. It’s blizzarding. I’m out of occupying ideas. I guess one show won’t kill them, or me.

Speaking of me, well I might just drive my poor husband batty. He came home one day to find our bedroom furniture in the burn pit. I did some re-arranging to say the least. Every day he comes home and something is different. Walls are missing, walls have appeared, stuff is in different places, I’ve got a new project. Building trains with the kids had me close to the windows and….

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I think I have an idea about what to do with one really tall one. Now to get the right plants and some planters and and…..sigh. Help us!

Mini-Krater gardens first snow.

Harvesting Snow in a Krater Garden

I’ve been intensely interested in how much snow our Kraters may collect. They’ve done pretty well with rainwater collection and I assumed they’d fill with blowing snow, but wasn’t sure. The results are in after our first snow.

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Deepest Krater with pawpaw island. Had about a foot of snow all around.

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Largest Krater in circumference. Snow only collected on one side.

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Goji Krater, did the absolute best. For some reason this Krater is just in an ideal location. It always collects the most water, the plants here did the best and it collected the most snow. I’ll have to think and observe why this krater has done so well.

Just for fun here are a few more pics of our first snow collection and fun:

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This is our newly renovated driveway drainage ditch. Filled about 3 feet with snow.

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This is another driveway drainage earthwork and the path from the garage to the ditch filled pretty well with snow. Enough for the kids to enjoy fully!

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As you can see from this pic the snow blows and sometimes we will have 0 snow on large amounts of the property as there is nothing to catch and keep it. We experimented with our earthworks, which work well, and also selective mowing of our incredible sweet clover sections. Selective, on contour mowing harvested a ton of snow. It was far from the house, and the kids were happy where they were, so I didn’t get pics of this. I’ll try to later on.

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My kids are so adorable!

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I convinced them to go to the barn to feed the pigs and they did this while I was busy doing chores.

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Our akbash is such a weirdo. He doesn’t know what to do with the pigs. He just stood there wagging his tail and doing this high pitched whine that the pigs didn’t like at all.

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Such cute little piggies! Getting friendlier every day.

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Meanwhile, thanksgiving dinner keeps threatening me.