Our Autumn Wealth

Most of our possessions this last season have been an increase in our knowledge & skill sets but friends & family are always valued too. Here our pastor is helping Mike lay the beams on the cellar after his shift at his shop was over.

Miranda LOVES laundry. She is a persistant, though not a rapid plunger & have you ever seen a baby wash her own diapers so cheerfully?

Victor had done an extra job outside of the usual realm of his chores & was paid accordingly. He then made this entire breakfast of bacon, eggs & toast on his own. He even cracked the eggs, which he hates & sliced the bread, which scared me. This is a man's breakfast, a daddy breakfast, & he is bursting w/ pride in the picture as I bestowed the crowning glory; a tiny cup of coffee.

After watching the block go up by our neighbor & helping where he could, Mike figured he could lay block himself & finished the wall so we could start the back fill.

Charlotte had an entire week w/out a single accident. I proclaimed her potty trained & Mike went & bought a ginormous balloon for her. Thomas lasted one week until everybody decided to take a train ride at once & jumped on him. She happily threw him away which relieved me. We still have shreds of our last balloon that won't be parted w/.

We thank God for allowing us more wisdom & control, & hope that these new skills will be a blessing to others as He leads.

Oddments of Summer

After the rain.

Someone didn't pick up their toys!
Our little branch after a heavy shower.

A new square of heirloom pole beans.

Not a cucumber like I thought. We've got cantelopes!

A pumpkin.

Did you know potatoes grow fruit? It's poisonous.

The root cellar gets deeper.

"Providence's Perpetuation" as the Siffords say. 5!

A fairy egg. Tiny, w/ a thick shell & no yolk.

Size comparison to lady Gaga's for fun.

Mountain Laural.

Every year shows us new wonders from God that we get excited over & thankful for.

House Tour Update

I posted a house tour last year, but we've re-arranged as the need arose & as things & schedules changed, so I took a few more pictures to add. Here's a video of when we put in the woodstove, it shows the living room in live action. But, here's the girl's room. We got rid of the crib in Victor's room after realizing that Miranda could sleep just as safe in the trundle bed, so he's got his own room now & the princess prints fit in nicely for 2 girls.


This is how Charlotte "makes" her bed. I had the hardest time trying to figure out a way to make a bunkbed w/ rails. Victor just sleeps in a sleeping bag to avoid the chore & Charlottes comforter is also folded in half like a sleeping bag. We just pull it smooth in the morning to avoid tucking & then she lays her friends down.





I think Victor has the coolest room.


He's got his own little office right here. The book case was in the girls room, but Charlotte went on a book ripping spree so she lost literary access for quite awhile. The only single drawback is that his bed is so high that the sheets can only be changed w/ a great deal of difficulty. He also cracks his head on the ceiling at least once a month.

While up high & changing his sheets one day, I noticed all of the cats. The 2 brown tins on the little shelf are of cats in antique (spanish?) fancy dress. There is another colored picture of an alleycat on the wall that you can't see. There is an orange cat on the dresser from Bahrain, a black cat windchime from Va. Beach over the dresser & a Kit Kat clock from the Great Depression. No, it's a replica. And the weird beach towel tapestry from his late great grandma. If you didn't know the boy, you would thing cats were the dearest thing to his 5 year old heart instead of war, battles & soldiering.

Unable to resist, I asked, "Victor, do you like cats?" "I like them, but I like Star Wars & battle & robots better." "Would you like a passel of war kittens?"

If you don't have tv, you won't get it & if my commercial reference is that out of date, well, that's about where we quit watching tv. His eyes totally lit up & I felt remorse for having to crush his hopes.

Here is the slightly different living room since we've put in the stove. On mom's visit, she gave me some exquisate doilies & things hand made by my great great grandmother. Mike isn't big on doilies, but I thought that the one on the book case, the runner & the curtains made it look much cozier.


Miranda into mischief. I changed out that little nautical clock for the one in the kitchen since we changed out coffee pots & w/ it, our only reliable kitchen clock.

From the entryway. Hmm, maybe it's joint mischief.

Where I am sitting now, the office/ tool shed w/ Mike's "me" wall. See the calvary sword? He wasn't always a boatie snipe.

School drawers & files. The little table in the girls room has since been moved into the office. It seems like furniture keeps getting moved out of there, but honestly, when the trundle is pulled out there isn't alot of space in there. I generally don't get to it on Sunday's & our go-to-town day.

That concludes the tour for 2011, who knows what next year holds?

Mommy's Newest Helper

Miranda is getting big, she's about 14 months now (10 or 11 months in this picture) & I'm certain that she is my sweetest baby yet. Helping is her passion; she loves to be in on the action. I remember that Victor was the same, Charlotte, not so much. Another fabulous use for the corner sink (I love my sink!) is to have baby do dishes w/ me. Up until now I would just hold her on my hip & wash w/ the other hand, but she is just getting too heavy. Here she can sit w/out my worrying about her falling, I just have to keep her out of the cat food. Buck is less pleased about her doing dishes in her space.

She is also my climber & always wants to be as high as she can. She's gotten so that she's able to get her feet on the first rung of Victor's ladder, but then she's stuck & cries piteously until she's rescued. As you see, the vacuum is a favorite mode of transport for her, she just climbs on & straddles it waiting for a ride. She's been crawling for about 4 months now & in that time her legs have gotten too long for the usual on-your-knees crawl. She's graduated to bear crawling everywhere since it's faster for her, but again, her legs are lengthening too fast for what is easy & she's beginning to do a weird scoot-on-your-bottom-dragging-a-leg-behind-you crawl. That's the only kind of crawl Charlotte ever did & only for 1 month when she started walking at 10 months. I hope it's soon, I can feel the strain on my shoulder sockets carrying her everywhere.

Though this picture indicates otherwise, she does enjoy sorting & organizing. She's the baby who picks up whatever she sees & then drops it in the nearest open container, clapping in the pleasure of her accomplishment. 8 times out of 10 this is very sweet to see & I'm glad to applaud w/ her. When the open container is the toilet or diaper pail we need some re-directing.

As of this morning she's pulled those q-tips out for the 3rd time; I'm considering them a total loss & relegating them to the firearms cleaning section.

And here's the long awaited 14 month picture for my mom. Portraits are out for us right now so I improvised & I think it turned out very nice w/out the headache that the dirty Wal-Mart (or other, cleaner) portrait studios create.

Legacies

Every Christian parent wants their children to come to a saving knowledge of faith in Jesus. No thing is more important.
That is not exactly something one can give as a wedding present however. I begin planning wedding presents fairly soon after I find I'm carrying. I want to give something of value, something generational as a new generation steps out together. I've been blessed by our family doing that w/ us & in every likelihood I will pass those same physical gifts on w/ one or two new ones.
I'd mainly like to pass on an ethic of hard work & a collectively fading knowledge of how to do for oneself. This isn't something that was really taught in my immediate family, my great grandmother had the greatest store of such knowledge & wasn't pushing to get it learned. She passed at 91 the week after Charlotte was born & all of her know how w/ her. I wish I'd gotten her to teach me to sew or have her grab my hand & say "You're going to learn how to sew." but that wasn't her way. I might be drafting patterns by now if it had. She canned & gardened everything but never w/ any help that I know of.
The tough practical every day skills that were commonplace are lost & have been replaced by the supermarket. I can't say what I want to say w/out plaigerizing, so here's a post from a 17 year old girl w/ her head on straight.
The Yellow Rose of Texas
American Woman;
Weakened by Power


I have a good friend. This friend asked me to come over and help her butcher a troublesome rooster. She had never butchered anything or watched an animal be butchered. She is very squeamish about these things, and was unable to watch some portions of the butchering. She helped me when I needed an extra hand, but seemed a bit distressed about the whole affair.


I was pondering all this awhile later and decided I was angry. Not at my friend, no, I like her very much. I had decided I was angry at the society for stealing from women. For while the feminist movement portrayed women as a fragile creature and called for us to gain the courage to stand up, be strong, and do things that we couldn't before, all it did was weaken us. Now we can sit at Congress and be governors and maybe even be President, but we can no longer butcher a chicken. We cannot gut a pig because we think that is gross. We cannot ( or will not ) clean a chicken house or muck out a horse stall. We can't make cheese or bread or candles, weave fullcloth, braid baskets, grow gardens or even educate our children. We rely on a faulty system to feed our families and shape our children's minds while we are away running companies, fighting wars and leading countries.


But if you ask us, our chests swell with pride and we say we are free, strong, and powerful. But it is still not enough. Say, why can't we play football? We have fooled ourselves into thinking the feminist movement has done so much for us, made us strong and independent. In all truth, it has made us slaves. We have sold and lost all that was admirable about the classic American June Cleaver. We disdainfully think of how our mothers and grandmothers slaved away and they couldn't even vote! What these women don't realize is that the very things they despise about the pioneer woman were her virtues. And, really, if any early nineteenth century woman saw us today, she would have to laugh at how very soft and helpless we are.


So why are we surprised when we find out the food we feed our children contains so many body destroying substances such as corn syrup, MSG, aspartame, aluminum, and so many others? Could we expect much more?


Of course it should make sense when we look at the current teenage generation and a shudder runs down or spine. What will happen to us when these kids run everything? If the pregnant, drinking, smoking, foul mouthed, depressed, brain dead young woman we see every time we go to Walmart had had the womanly influence she needed that her mother could have provided, maybe she would be a very different, happier person. If her mother had not just raised her and actually trained her, maybe things would be a bit different. Maybe. We should not be startled when a small child asks us where milk comes from or if eggs come from trees. It's not cute, it is disturbing. Women are largely responsible for our new generation of confused youth.


If we talk to our grandmothers they may tell us of a time when we knew exactly what went into our children's minds and mouths because we were there, raising them in the honor and admonition of the Lord. We fed them from the wholesome bounties of our home grown gardens. We taught our daughters and passed on skills and wisdom. We raised our sons to be men. We loved our husbands and worked to make our houses homes. We fought a more important war on the home front. We fought a war in our children's minds, in our youth's hearts. We barred the way of Satan's inevitable tries to corrupt our children, the next generation. We were strong, and we did our God-given duties. What could be more admirable?


But we nervously laugh and say we are glad that age is over.
" Just think of doing all that work from dawn till dusk. All that slaving and sweating? And for what?"


Titus 2: 4 & 5 " That they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children; To be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the Word of God be not blasphemed."


We should do it because it is our duty. We should do it for the Honor and Glory of the Lord.
A worthy cause to say the very least.

Blessings to you and yours.

Tracy Bunker

I can't say I had the same mind set at her age but what must she know already that she can pass on to her as yet unborn children?

Anyways this post was supposed to be about heirlooms though it's turning into a knotty ball of oddments. Mike & I are learning as many skills as we can to pass onto our children as common skills that uncommon times ahead may call for. Our electric cooperative puts out a magazine every month that warns of steeper electric prices, aging infrastructure, scarcity of resources, choking senate bills, warnings of scheduled blackouts in the years to come plus local stories, recipes & a swap shop. It's good bathroom material.

But w/ those thoughts in mind I can know that the gifts we have might be the more practical & hopefully appreciated kind. Mike wil give tools of his collection but I don't know who gets what. These are from me.

Gift #1 Happy Black History Month!




I'm a little late, though I started this post in Feb. My great-grandfather got this at the school sale of the Washington Elementary school when it was desegregated back in the 1950's. It's a bit big for a school room clock, I don't know if it was in the hall or what. The school has since been turned into an apartment building. He gave it to grandpa, who gave it to dad, who gave it to me, who'll give it to Victor probably, or the first married child. But I don't think he'll want ....

Gift #2 My Receipt Box (as in recipes)



I got this box about 6 years ago & 4 or 5 packs of recipe cards. I've got 1 pack left. I'm trying to not only add recipes (There is a disparity between my breads & desserts vs. meats. I'm working on that.) for food, but laundry soap, herbal concoctions, canning things, cleaning solutions, just household things. Whatever gets written on a card is in my nicest handwriting & filed accordingly. Old headings have been crossed out & new ones written in; I don't do "light" or "microwave".



Recipes on other cards are also put in, that front bit sticking out is a whole crockpot recipe booklet.

Gift #3 The Family China

A typical expression for her in regards to pictures.

You can't see the pattern, but her cheerios are in the china. That's our birthday thing. The china is incomplete & missing some pieces but it is still pretty, gold & cream on white. It is perhaps not quite as useful as a clock or box of know-how, but it doesn't run on batteries.

Mud, Glorious Mud

I'm a little behind in posting this but one of the biggest adjustments to living in the land of no pavement is the mud.

One of my favorite things about my clothesline in Va. (this will sound silly) was the circle of grass beaten around it. I would rotate my hanging spot every week so the spot wouldn't get too bare.

You can barely see it but it's there. Pretty grass!

Let me tell you a bit about our mud. Our mud is red. It is thick. It is sticky & w/ a steady supply of snow & rain from Nov.-Feb. it is prevalent. I didn't care so much last winter but then we got goats & our mud became even more special. Now w/ goats we have muck.

That's what I step in to hang clothes. If the clothes fall or the goats get hungry for a cotton snack I have holes & red dirt that stains forever. I'm tempted to lay my clothes in the mud to color them uniformly, ha.

These are our main steps, though not the front steps. We are very seriously planning a small porch here in a year or 2. Yes, that is poo you see, they are not allowed on the steps but they love the warm wood. Their platform doesn't get sun until mid afternoon so until a dream porch is realized we just deal w/ the morass.

Most of the mud ends here in the appropriately titled "mud room". I think "laundry room" sounds pretty but that is truly its secondary function. I vacuumed that carpet remnant 20 min. before this picture was taken. Mike tells me not to bother when it's rainy for a few days but until I built the boot elevator it got tracked into the kitchen pretty frequently & muddy boots lay everywhere getting tripped on. It was a family headache. I actually only slapped together the top tier out of some scrap, the bottom is a very sturdy wooden crate. Mine has weight limits, that soap bucket had to move after I made a new batch.


Any unexpected trials in a new house of yours?

Keeping Toasty

After receiving our heating bill month after month last year w/ all of the snow we knew that that was probably not sustainable. The previous owner was a truck driver who put in a 3 ton air handler unit. Very nice but the heat pump runs non-stop when it is below 40 degrees outside.

We set aside a bit each month w/ a goal towards a wood stove wanting a nice one that would be sealed, double walled, modular home approved, big enough to heat w/ our high ceilings, etc. I personally wanted a cook top in case the power goes out in other giant snowstorms & the answer was sitting in my brother-in-law's neighbor's basement for only $200., much less than we had estimated & saved for. Hooray! We can afford chimney!

Knowing nothing, we spent a week on the Internet looking at specs, installation techniques & plotted our course. (I say "we", it was all Mike.) I decided how to rearrange the furniture, lol. He cut enough carpet & padding out to lay two 3x5 cement boards on the plywood & tried his hand at laying tile. We covered a floor vent doing this.

The finished result is very nice, yes? I helped w/ the grouting. Those spacers really helped & my personal favorite was my Pampered Chef nylon scraper.

The tile is set & the stove is in its new home up on some pavers for some extra inches up off of the floor. Safety standards for the chimney pipe are 6" away from the wall, but wanting to be extra sure of keeping our house intact we kept the double walled chimney 10" away from the wall.

Measuring for the chimney...

Ahhhhh! Our pilot screw actually went through a joist, but we're at the point of no return now.

That box at the very top actually made it much more sturdy than we thought. The stove is definitely the focal point when you walk in, very massive.

This didn't actually happen. After we measured we realized we were 2' short of chimney, so we had to go exchange it for a 3' chimney. The storm collar is on & the excitement is mounting....

When we were almost really ready we realized that we hadn't shielded the wall. This was an extra step but the wall behind my brother-in laws house is melting (not exactly; his is stuccoed all the way up but one of his outlets is melting.) so we screwed in that length of sheet metal for some extra peace of mind.

Here is a happy man enjoying the fruits of his labor. I didn't do to much except occasionally gopher & keep the chickens at bay, it was about a 6 hour work day. We're easily able to keep the common areas in the mid 70's. The wall behind is cool to the touch & the warm tile is a new favorite place for the cat. We are thankful to God for allowing us this further reliance on Him & the land He's provided us to keep it stoked & my brother in law who helped us bring it in & install it.