Happiness is writing a blog while a baby guinea hen sleeps with its legs outstretched in your lap.
After we closed on our new home, we spent a month straddling Lincoln and South Berwick, half moved into one place and half moved out of the other. In late July I finished drafting a report, filled the van and brought the kids down. We had one day to unpack before it was time to head to Annapolis for cousin Aaron’s wedding. Aaron’s bride, Ravia, is the daughter of Musharraf’s former health minister, so among all of the quakers, jewish Nobels, and pakistanis at the wedding was Musharraf himself. (It sounds like the start of a bad joke but it really did happen.) At the Mehndi party the night before the wedding Musharraf danced with the crowd, and the next evening he participated in the ceremony. This four-day wedding event was in fact the occasion that brought him to the US, and led to his being on the Daily Show that week. But Aaron and Ravia were the real celebrities at their event, and they certainly threw a memorable party. In the days after we toured DC with the kids and Zach’s parents, drove back up to NY (with a funeral on the way North), out to western Pennsylvania to meet up with some west coast friends on summer vacation, back to New Jersey for Zach’s work, and finally home, a week-and-a-half later. It was a fascinating but exhausting trip.
Once home, we hosted Zachs’ relatives from Israel, then joined cousin Barry and his wife Helen for a sail on the Nobels’ Alisande in the wooden boat regatta. Jonah lost his first tooth on the dock right before the race. As he was attempting to bite my hand for the third time after being warned to stop, I tried to flick his chin. His mouth was open, ready to take another bite, so the flick landed on a loose tooth and knocked it into the water. After much disappointment over missing out on the tooth fairy, we finally convinced Jonah that having a good story to tell about his tooth was worth a lot more than a quarter.
August was a messy month, a chaotic combination of hosting, taking care of the kids, working, and trying to set up our new homestead. I’m not sure I did any of them very well. The month seemed to last FOR EVER. We managed to find a daycare for Zora – not the fanciest place, but one with really good vibes. Every time I made a visit the kids were all getting along, and even the teachers seemed to be having fun. So despite all the plastic toys, we chose it over the place with the sand table, ant farm, and deluxe play structure. In Jonah’s first two weeks of school, he seemed to get punched nearly every day. But he seems to have found his place there and has even been playing with some of the kids who tried to beat him up initially.
Starting a new life takes a lot of energy. You have to find new doctors, dentists, hair cutters, handymen…you have to figure out where you can go swimming, where to take your kids to the park, and who in the area shears sheep. In addition to setting up a home we are also trying to set up a small farm, so our to-do list is probably at least double the norm for a new homeowner. We’ve spent many weekends so far cutting down brush and mending fences – so much has gone wild and fallen down since the previous owners used the property for farming. In the beginning, we wandered around star-struck, feeling as if we were living in the middle of some kind of eco wellness retreat (at one point in the past this place actually was a B&B). Now that the honeymoon is over we walk around seeing all the things that need to be done. But winter will bring working the land to a halt. Then we will turn to indoor tasks like carpentry (bed frame, shelves), spinning the fleece our icelandic sheep gave this fall, brewing chocolate porter, and cleaning up puppy poop.
The current animal load:
6 grown hens, 6 teenage guinea hens, 1 guinea keet hatched from our incubator, 10 australorp chicks, 15 broiler chicks, 2 icelandic ewes (with a ram arriving in a couple of weeks), 2 eastern painted turtles. An English Shepherd puppy will arrive around Thanksgiving.
We are also feeding (some intentionally, some not) several moochers: hummingbirds, wild turkeys, deer, lots of birds, 2 feral cats, and an ugly muskrat living under the barn.
As Jonah prepares to turn 6 next week, Zach and I have been reflecting on what an amazing year this has been for him. Just since his last birthday, he has learned to ski, swim, bike with no training wheels, defend himself from bullies at school, and read! This morning, with Zach gone on a business trip, he appeared like a little angel at my bedside and said, “Mom, would you like me to make you coffee?” Without my having to get up from bed, Jonah ground the beans, measured the grounds and the water, and came back to announce that the coffee was ready. One of the best perks, literally, of parenthood yet!!
Zora is racing to keep up. Not satisfied to be grouped with the pre-3 “hummingbirds” at her preschool, she asked her teachers for a re-class as a “chipmunk.” When Jonah bikes down the driveway she wants to bike too, and when he swims, she launches herself headfirst into the water. She is making up long stories and songs, which she will tell or sing for as long as she has an audience. She has a large cadre of animals and babies which she tends devotedly, often leaving them with me to “babysit” with a long list of detailed instructions on the specific care each one requires (“Mommy has to go to work now,” she’ll say, then go into the other room to play games on her toy laptop). When I am busy, she will often head upstairs to the reading nook in the loft to read (recite) books from memory for an hour at a time. And she loves to draw and paint. Months ago I showed her how to draw a balloon by making a circle and then a string; since then, nearly every picture she brings home from school is a medley of colorful balloons.
This week Zach and I are celebrating our 9th year of marriage (and 13th anniversary of living together). I realized that in many ways it only feels like we’ve been married 6 years, the time that we’ve had children together. Those three years between the day of our wedding and the time we had Jonah were just like the previous four; we were still in courtship mode, focused mainly on each other, with little responsibility or structure in our lives. Then kids arrived and the real work began, all the profound negotiations and sacrifices that raising children requires. Now that the kids are really coming into bloom we see the results of those efforts – in the things they now apprehend, the times they offer to help out, or the ways they comfort each other. Certainly our kids are not perfect, they are often wild or grouchy, but in general they seem to be securely attached; when they start a new school or spend the evening with a new sitter, the kids say goodbye cheerfully and we usually return to a glowing report. So it will be easy, tonight, for Zach and I to slip away and celebrate. The one thing I can say about our life together, so far, is that we have not been putting our dreams on hold.
