Monday Ramble

We finished the garden work just as the storms arrived. Emery was putting away the tiller in the rain. After taking about a dozen loads of bricks to the brick pile I gave Casi a call to see if he would like to help out his, by then feeling very old mother in law and come take over my job for a bit. He did, and their friend Matt was with him. Melanie and Mei-Ling came along too. The work went so much quicker with two strong young men there to help. I went in the house, played with Mei-Ling for a bit. She is changing so fast these days, crawling everywhere, walking the furniture and clapping with baby delight at just about everything that makes her smile. After a bit, I found myself ready for a cat nap which left me feeling refreshed and ready to head back outside to help. We made the garden spot a bit bigger, so took the fencing down. The house and garden now have about the same square footage. This year things have become so expensive, organic veggies in the store cost a small fortune, so we will grow more of our own. The price of gasoline may reach $4 a gallon by summer, which will make us stay home more. All in all, a bigger garden seems a wise choice. We are thankful for the land we have to grow much of our needs. To start off, this week we will be planting about 10 lbs of seed potatoes, which should yield between 200-400 lbs of potatoes for us to eat.

The weather man told us last night to expect snow tonight. Last week it was like summer weather and now we will be getting snow. It seems strange, but we will all enjoy it, provided we can all stay inside. Melissa has had so much snow in Vermont, she is so anxious for warm weather to arrive. You get really tired of winter by February and by March it just feels unfair to have more snowfall, I remember well the feelings. I used to skip school in February when I was a teenager. Just needed to do something different, so off to Harvard Square I would go. Hang out in Hungry Charlies, a good place to have deep discussions over a cup of coffee that you could make last for hours. I got caught once skipping school and that ended it. Never did it again. Of course it was the February of my senior year which may have been the reason it was my last time !

Melanie had an appointment this morning so I volunteered to watch Mei-Ling. I sat rocking her by the fire for over an hour, watching her sleep in my arms, just as I did for her mother and Melissa. What a profound blessing to have our grandbabies live so close to us. We are so surrounded by love. Our life so full of simple joy and contentment and to be honest we worked at it being that way. Early on in our marriage we set our goals for a happy home and took the steps we thought would create that for us. Seeking the lasting things as goals and not the things that make your life stressful. We set goals to live with no debt and met those. We spent all our time and energy on raising our family and putting aside the things that would take time away from that. We took unpopular life roads, homeschooling when our families lectured us on how we would be creating socially stifled children, choosing to live simple and plain and care less about what the world had to offer us. Its paid off in so many ways. Our children are such blessings to us and now we have the added blessing of wonderful grandbabies. Emery and I share a love that surpasses what we ever dreamed possible and we know it will grow even more in time.

I guess today, its just my day to be thankful for our life.

Didn't get pictures of the garden since it started storming just as we were finishing !

Mei-Ling arrived at Grammies with her cap on