Christmas Photos

As is always the case on Christmas day, we had a merry day, but I am now beat and will throw some pictures and captions your way rather than trying to form a coherent narrative.

So! Stockings!

And very poor lighting.

Presents and general chaos!

And more poor lighting.

A brisk walk/ride in the early morning before it got windy.

Four children, two dogs, and a horse. What a circus. But good lighting.

And tamale making with helpers.

Which is why it took me like an hour to assemble 26 tamales, but whatever. Family bonding is the name of the Christmas game.

I hope your Christmas was merry as well, whatever that looks like for you.

Post-Move, Pre-Unpacked

Hello from our new house, my lovelies! The internet guy showed up completely unannounced today and hooked us all up with phone and internet service. You can all thank Ray for the fact that I am now able to unleash my regularly scheduled (or rather, sporadic and random) drivel upon the online world once again.

So what have we been up to? Well, we moved. And we ate dinner.

First dinner in the new house, as you can tell from the background chaos of boxes, random wires, and crap on the floor.

That, by the way, was supposed to be the night that I was too exhausted to cook and I was planning on just setting out whatever random assortment of proteins, grains, and vegetables I had on hand to let everyone get their own meal. 

Yeah, so much for that. I was exhausted, but I still cooked pasta with salami and cream cheese and an egg scramble with peppers and onions and cheese. I think I might have Compulsive Cooking Disorder. I just can't make myself sit down to a "meal" of random foods if there's any possibility of having a cooked meal instead.

Anyway.

Now that we no longer live 200 yards from the school, the boys take the bus. This school only has two (very small) buses. The bus that comes to our house only picks up one other child. It's a pretty good situation, as far as riding the bus goes.

Plus, the view while waiting for the bus is pretty great.

I'm still trying to adjust to my new kitchen--the stove burners seem to go directly from scorching flame to extinguished without much middle ground, and there's really no convenient place to hang my dish towel yet--but A. put up a temporary clothesline for me today, so I know I really live here now.

I just have to be really careful not to drop anything in the dirt while I'm hanging it up.

A. also very kindly set up the bunk bed for Charlie and Jack--this took him four entire hours, as he was doing some adjustments to the original structure--and has screwed in approximately five million screws for hooks, racks, bookcase braces, and various other things that need to be attached to a wall. 

All the furniture is in place and I'm slowly working my way through all the boxes and bags of very-hastily packed things, some of which I never found from the first move. I'm going to have to brave the dreaded Walmart again to get a few things that I don't want to have shipped (laundry baskets, trash cans, and so forth). But soon. Soon everything will be put away in some semblance of order, and then all I have to do is keep it that way.

Well, I can hope, anyway.

Mad Minute

Or rather, Mad Five Minutes, as that is the amount of time I have allotted myself to pound this post out. Here we go!

I am standing at the counter in our completely empty rental house. I just finished the final cleaning of it in preparation for handing in the keys tomorrow. This house still has our phone and internet hooked up, until the company switches our services to the new address. There is currently no phone or internet at our new house. Thus the radio silence the last couple of days.

We're moved in, though! Every last bit of our stuff was in our new house by yesterday afternoon.

It sucked. I hate moving. Not that I am alone in this, but I sincerely hope I don't have to move again for a very, very long time.

I have to go home now because A. is there with three rampaging boys and one very cranky baby, who was apparently awakened from her too-brief nap by said rampaging boys. Thanks a lot, boys.

We are not amused.

And that's my five minutes. See you back here when my internet is up and running. Peace out.

Good-bye, New York

We're ready . . .

We're excited . . .

We're gone. 

Crazy/Awesome

The other day as I was watching A. build a water catchment system for the well he hand-dug in the back pasture, I had an interesting thought: The things people think you are the craziest for planning to do are ultimately the things people think are the most awesome after they're done.

When A. first said he would dig a well in the pasture--by hand, with a shovel--so he could set up a gravity-flow pipe to fill the cisterns? YOU CRAZY.

Once he had dug the well and it was filling the cistern? AWESOME.

When A. said he would build a greenhouse for the tomatoes out of trees? YOU CRAZY.

Once he had built the greenhouse and we had ripe tomatoes for months? AWESOME.

And so on.

Of course, the crucial middle step to going from crazy to awesome is successfully completing whatever plan everyone thinks is crazy to start with. Otherwise you just stay crazy, I guess.

I think our move to New Mexico is going to fall into this category.

I'm pretty sure when we announced to family, friends, and the world at large that we were going to pack up our children and our lives and move to a tiny village in the middle of nowhere New Mexico that only A. has been to, and that only a couple of times, the general (though unvoiced) reaction was, "YOU CRAZY."

Possibly. But once we've done it, once we've made the move and settled in, and have our little family in our little village within driving distance of cousins and out of the punishing northeastern winters? Well. Then it will be awesome.

We just have to get from here to there, starting with our road trip commencing tomorrow*.

Awesome, here we come.

* I can hope the road trip will be part of the awesomeness, but I'm afraid it will fall squarely in the crazy category. Wish me luck, and lots of it.

Whistling in the Dark

Or perhaps more appropriately "listing in the chaos."

I am not a list maker. Maybe I fear the failure of not checking everything off of a list. Maybe I feel making a list is more work on top of the work listed. Maybe I just never got into the habit. Whatever the reason, I do not make lists.

Except for now.

I am currently facing down the second portion of our move. We will be loading a U-Haul trailer with our remaining worldly goods on Saturday and starting our drive to New Mexico early Sunday morning. There are many, many things that need to be done between now and then.

And so, of course, I'm focusing on food. You expect anything else from me?

With six people--four of them small children--on a multi-day car trip, there are not going to be many restaurant stops. It would be too expensive, too stressful with all the children, and would delay us too much. Thus, I'm planning on pretty much feeding us all breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks out of coolers and microwaves at motels.

So I've made lists.

A list of meals and snacks for each of the five days we think it will take us to get there.

A list of the foods needed for those meals and snacks.

A list of the foods I still need to buy.

A list of the foods I can prepare and freeze ahead of time.

A list of foods to be prepared and put in the coolers.

A list of the non-food items needed for feeding everyone.

That's a lot of lists.

But if all goes as planned, we'll make it from New York to New Mexico without having to get in and out of a restaurant, unless we really want to.

And if all doesn't go as planned? Well, it can't be my fault, can it? I mean, I made lists.

A Summer Resolution

This will probably sound ridiculous, but I have made a mental resolution to have more fun this summer.

This has been a very stressful summer so far--moving cross-country with many small children will do that--and I really feel as if I am more not-fun than usual. Kind of grumpy, as a matter of fact, which is good for no one.

And so, I have consciously vowed to myself to have fun.

I understand that it is not New Year's Eve, the traditional time for resolutions. It is also not a traditional resolution, as I believe most people's resolutions are of the un-fun variety, like lose weight or keep the house cleaner.

A thing I know about myself, however, is that I'm really good at doing the not-fun stuff that requires routine and responsibility, and not good at doing the fun stuff that gets me off my routine. I'm, well, kind of uptight.

But I want to have fun! I want my kids to have fun with me!

Yesterday, that meant that I promised the boys that not only would we go swimming, but we would have a cookout down on the beach.

I dislike cookouts because it feels like more work to me to have to more or less transport the kitchen to the beach, and then eat while dealing with the sun and bugs and kids that drop their food in the gravel, and . . .

Well, like I said: I'm kind of uptight.

But this is the Summer of Fun, so I did it. I even wore my swimsuit and went in the water with the boys before dinner, which is so rare for me that they all remarked on it many times and I honestly could not remember the last time I had worn my swimsuit.

I helped Jack--who is not comfortable in the water by himself--float around and practice swimming while the older two swam in circles around us. Then I got out and had a gin cocktail that I had packed along with the food (alcohol isn't a requirement for fun, but it's a nice addition sometimes), organized the eating of the beach cookout food, and removed many rocks from Poppy's mouth*.

We were down there for three hours, which made the boys very happy. And you know what? It was fun.

Win.

* That girl wants nothing to do with actual food, but put her in proximity to rocks or leaves, and they will be in her mouth pronto. I suspect if I had the baby chair with the tray and could set her up with little pieces of soft food, she might actually eat on her own. That will have to wait, though, as the chair and tray are currently in New Mexico and we are not.

Keepin' It Rollin'

The Great Western Move of 2018 continues.

When you move, you really want to get all your stuff in the back of the truck, drive to your new house, and unload it all. Even that is a challenge, but you add in an infant, two pit stops for more unloading and loading, AND a nail in the moving truck's tire, and you have one hellish move.

The nail was in the tire when we picked the truck up from Enterprise. A. noticed the soft tire (but not the nail yet) and asked them to check on it before we took the truck. They filled the tire, but didn't see the nail. A. saw it two hours down the road when we were stopped at a gas station.

Four hours later (nationwide chains are not my favorite), we finally had a new tire. This meant that instead of getting to our house in the north at 2 p.m. to load the truck, we got there at 6 p.m. And then spent the next five hours loading the truck (mostly A.) and finishing packing the house, plus cleaning (mostly me).

For those keeping track, that meant we worked until 11 p.m. And then Poppy inexplicably decided she was done sleeping for awhile exactly as we moved the mattress into the living room to sleep at 11:05 p.m.

So basically, there was no sleep on Thursday night.

At six the next morning, we were back at it, finally finishing up in a mad rush at exactly 11 a.m. The truck was completely full and not all that carefully arranged*. We booked it back to Blackrock (no nails this time, hooray), getting back at 5:30 p.m.

After a life-saving dinner the MiL had made--food was not the priority during our northern moving blitz--we started unloading a third of the truck with things that are staying at Blackrock. But first we had to take out all the miscellaneous things that had been piled in front of the rugs and beds and A.'s work papers that had to come out. And then we had to put all those miscellaneous things back in.

I say "we," but it was mostly A., while I dealt with our frankly hysterical children and tried to direct A. regarding what was staying and what was going.

He finished at 9:30 p.m.

At 9 a.m., he and Cubby started off for their drive to New Mexico. They're due to stop in Wisconsin at 11 a.m. tomorrow morning to pick up furniture at my aunt and uncle's house, before continuing to New Mexico.

I will not be there to help with the unloading, obviously--and I can't say I'm sorry about that--but I contacted the secretary at the school to ask if there were any high school kids who might want to earn some money helping A. with the furniture that requires two people. She gave me the number of our neighbor, who has both a husband and a son who can help.

Yay for small towns.

So the moving continues, although my part of it is over for now. Until we get to New Mexico and I have to unpack all the very-hastily "packed" boxes and bags, and find places for it all.

But I won't think about that now. I'll think about it then.

Godspeed, A. and Cubby. May the road rise up to meet you and the nails stay out of your tires.

* One reason it was so full is because when you move from a rural area, there is no leaving things for the trash collection or for free for neighbors. Not enough neighbors and no trash collection. It all, including the bags of garbage, had to go in the truck.

Here's the Plan

The house is mostly packed up. I even brought most of the stuff out to the barn already, so we can just back the moving truck up to the barn and wheel it all up the ramp. Theoretically. I know there will be a few boxes of randomness that I'm gonna just throw in at the last minute, but hey! I mostly did it, while working around insane end-of-year school craziness and four little kids and all their incessant needs.

Where's my medal?

So here's what's going to happen*.

Today I got all the suitcases packed with the clothes we will need for a month at Blackrock.

Tomorrow morning we're going to get the cars all packed up and ready to go before church. After church is over at noon, we'll come back to the house to pick up the geriatric collie and then hit the road for Blackrock in both our cars.

We'll be at Blackrock until Thursday, during which time I will be packing up yet more things that never made it up to this house.

Early Thursday morning, me, A., and Poppy will leave the boy children with their Grandma and pick up the moving truck to bring it up north, load it, clean the house, and go back to Blackrock on Friday. (That all sounds so simple in that one sentence. It will not be simple.)

At Blackrock, we'll unload the things that belong there (mostly rugs), load up the things I packed from there, and A. will--we hope--leave somewhat early on Saturday to start the drive to New Mexico. Possibly with Cubby along for company.

He'll make a pit stop at my aunt and uncle's house in Wisconsin to pick up some furniture that my grandfather made decades ago and that no one else in the family is using at the moment, and then continue driving until he arrives at our new house.

He and Cubby will unload the truck, then turn around and drive back to New York in the truck, arriving within ten days of picking it up. (This ended up being cheaper than a one-way truck rental and airfare.)

And then, sometime at the end of July, the whole family will drive out to New Mexico together for good.

This is not the most uncomplicated move, but we wouldn't want to make it easy on ourselves or anything.

Okay. You ready for this? Me neither. But the only way out is through, so here we go!

* As if this matters for any of you. But it makes me feel better to write it out.

Ready To Be Enchanted

Did you like my offhand comment last week about moving? I was wondering who would be the first to ask for details. It was the MiL's friend Mary. And so, to satisfy her curiosity, as well as all the other hordes of people who are dying to know (or rather, the dozen or so who might be mildly interested), I will tell you.

We are not moving to a new house in this community.

We are not moving back to Blackrock.

We are not moving anywhere in New York state.

We are moving to New Mexico.

Yup, you read that right. New Mexico. Northeastern New Mexico, to be more precise. Although not too precise, because you wouldn't know where this place was even if I told you, and, well, I'm not going to tell you.

I know. Mean. Just trust me when I tell you that you've never heard of it and that it is the middle of nowhere. Even more rural than where we are now. For example, the nearest Walmart is 88 miles away. I have no idea how far the nearest Target is. Probably closer to 200 miles.

Good thing I hate to shop.

So why New Mexico? Because it borders Arizona, where 80% of our children's grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins now live. We didn't want to live in Arizona particularly, though, and definitely not in southern Arizona. Too hot.

Our new home is at 6,000 feet, which means that it has four seasons. Even snow, though nothing like here, obviously.

We're renting a house in the village--official population: 94*, soon to be 100--to start with. The kids' new school has 50 students in pre-K through 12. None of those numbers are missing a digit.

It will be by far the smallest place I've ever lived. But it will undoubtedly also be an adventure.

Land of Enchantment, here we come.

* Edited to add: As Drew cleverly noticed, I did indeed first put 96. I realized this at about 2 a.m. after posting, when my proofreader brain suddenly thought, "Wait, did I write 94 or 96? I think it was 96. Damn. I'll fix it when I get up." The reason I originally wrote 96 is because my brain is conscious at 2 a.m. (and many other times during the night) instead of sleeping. But thanks for the eagle eye, Drew. I commend your careful reading and advanced math skills.

Travel-weary Tomatoes

Last summer, I did not plant a single tomato seed. In fact, I didn't plant anything at all. This was a particularly wrenching decision, because that very spring I had been sent several packages of tomato seeds saved and stored by my good Internet-friend Finny. 

She lives in California and actually farms for a living now, but this was before she was a farmer and she had an amazingly prolific and well-cared-for backyard garden from which she got impressive quantities of tomatoes. And then she saved the seeds. And then she packaged them up all pretty in little special envelopes with photos on the front of each variety and description of the fruits. 

It was all very efficient and exact and totally not the way I do things. Finny's a nice friend to have.

But then I didn't plant anything. So the seeds sat in my freezer, patiently waiting until I got off my ass and had a garden again.

This spring, I did. Thanks largely to Cubby's enthusiasm for planting tomato seeds, we started quite a few in the spring and got the plants in the ground in due time. A. had to surround them with fencing to keep away the aggressive deer, and they set quite a lot of fruits.

Then we moved. All those poor tomatoes, abandoned at the very cusp of ripening.

However! All those trips A. has been taking back to Blackrock, while challenging for me, do result in him bringing back large quantities of produce from the garden. The MiL certainly can't eat it all, so every time he comes home, he brings me something from the garden. 

When he pulled up yesterday, he unloaded a box of tomatoes and an entire Styrofoam cooler totally full of basil.

I spent about 45 minutes this morning making at least two quarts of pesto, and then I roasted the tomatoes with a head of garlic (also from the garden at Blackrock). They were almost all Finny's tomatoes, which had traveled in seed form from California to Blackrock, grew in the garden at Blackrock, and then traveled from Blackrock to the Canadian border.

They look pretty good after their long journey, don't they?

Of course, a box of Finny's tomatoes must be made into Finny's sauce. So they were. And it was good.

Jackpot

As the child of a military officer, I was accustomed to moving every few years when I was young. It wasn't easy, of course, because what child likes being the new kid at multiple schools? But my mother in particular did everything she could to make it easier, anyway. One of the things she did was what she jokingly referred to in later years as "pimping for friends."

In an effort to make sure we knew some other kids as soon as possible, she would take us to the local playground or the pool, or go out into the street when all the neighborhood kids were out riding their bikes, identify some child that looked about the same age as me or one of my siblings, start talking to him or her, and then introduce us.

My mother is a naturally friendly person, and children in particular respond well to her, so she was often very successful in her pimping.

And now here I am, providing the same service for my own children. Almost every day I've taken the children to the local library, pool, or playground. I am not a naturally gregarious person, but for Cubby's sake in particular, I've been initiating conversations with any child I've seen who looks to be around six years old. We've met a few Cubby's age, but they've all been students in different school districts.

I really, really wanted Cubby to know at least one other child in his grade, though, because he's naturally shy and I knew knowing even one name would help him.

Today I had to go to the school to drop off some paperwork and I told Cubby and Charlie we could play on the playground there after I did that. Jack decided not to take a morning nap today, so we went somewhat earlier than I had planned. There were a few other children on the playground already, a couple of whom looked around Cubby's age. So as soon as we walked onto the playground, I asked the two adults standing around the ages of the children present.

One of the girls was six and would be in first grade at Cubby's new school.

BINGO.

Then I had to keep bringing Cubby over to where she was playing and finding things they might do together (like climbing the side-by-side chain ladders) or talk about. Luckily, she was a very friendly little girl, so she compensated for Cubby's shyness a little.

Even more luckily, her father told me that his mother was one of the first-grade teachers, and that lady showed up a few minutes later. I didn't know which of the two first-grade classes Cubby would be in, but I towed him over to her anyway, and started to introduce him. I got as far as, "We just moved here and my son might end up in your class . . ." when she interrupted with his name.

This was his teacher. She already knew his name (probably the only new kid in the grade, I'm guessing). She gave him a big hug, called him "honey" multiple times, and generally gave off the impression of being a woman who is very happy and enthusiastic about her job. 

Cubby was too shy to talk to her much, but she'll be hearing enough from him in the coming year as he loosens up. Not a silent child as a rule, that Cubby.

So one child introduction and one teacher introduction, and still a few weeks before school begins. The family pimping tradition lives on. My mother will be so proud.

In Which It Gets Real

After  an unnecessarily long trip back to the new house in the north woods on Saturday (it is road construction season, after all), we arrived home just in time to set up the kids' beds and have dinner before there was a knock on our door. It was our nearest neighbor.

Hooray for the Welcome Wagon!

Except instead of a plate of cookies or the take-out menus for nearby restaurants*, she came bearing her phone, on which she showed us a picture of the bear that was in her backyard the day before.

Oh. Welcome to the north woods.

She lives only about a quarter mile down the road, and the photo was taken by their motion-activated wildlife camera at 12:10 in the afternoon the day before. It was a really big black bear, presumably there to eat the berries. She said she knew we had small children and she wanted to make sure we knew about the bear so we could be careful with them. And maybe keep the dog inside.

Righty-o. Guess I shouldn't be letting the kids out by themselves to pick berries, then.

We haven't seen any sign of the bear since then, so we can only hope it's moved on.

I'm mostly unpacked; I've been to the grocery store and the village library twice already; and I am preparing to go to the cheese factory store right now to stock up on all my dairy needs, so we're settling in nicely. Assuming the (flaky) dude actually shows up to install our internet tomorrow, I may actually be able to use a computer at my house instead of driving ten miles to the library.

If you don't hear from me tomorrow, the guy either didn't show up, or I got eaten by a bear. Anything's possible here on the frontier.

* "Nearby restaurants." HAHAHAHAHAAAAA. There are none.

Grimly Soldiering On

Not to state too obvious a point, but DIY moving really sucks.

Thank God for the carrying capacity of a minivan, though.

Tomorrow we load A.'s trailer with the beds and a bookcase and the rugs and some other miscellaneous stuff that won't fit in the van, and off we go to the north country. Where we will unload it all with three children scurrying around. And then I have to unpack and find places for it all.

I'd better make sure the ibuprofen is in a very accessible spot. And the gin may ride shotgun with me tomorrow, just to make sure I don't lose it in all the chaos, you see. I think I'm gonna need it.