one of Zoralee and Grandma Rena's conversations

[eating lunch together while I was laying Ziah down for a nap]

Grandma: Be sure to eat your chips with cheese, Zoralee. You need the protein!
Zoralee: I'm drinking all of my milk instead, and it has protein.
Grandma: Yes, but the cheese has more protein, so you need to eat it.
Zoralee: Grandma, milk has cheese in it.
Grandma: Well, cheese has milk in it, yes.
Zoralee: No, milk has cheese in it. My mom told me that milk has cheese in it.
     [back and forth dialogue on whether cheese is in milk or milk is in cheese....]
Grandma: Okay, fine; whatever you say. I'm not gonna argue with you. When your mom comes out, we'll ask her.
Zoralee: You came here to be rude!?

from the prairie's edge: sitter, friends, parents, house, rummage, geese

I'm gonna write as much catch up / goings on info as I can before bed, and even if it's short or barely edited, I will hit the publish button; oh yes I will.

My parents should be arriving tomorrow, which is only awesome and a half. They're here to help us make optimum progress on the house renovation and move. We're down to the last two weeks in the rental farmhouse here, so it's delicious timing. While Dad and Jason work on the new place, I've decided Mom can take over a few little things here like cooking, taking care of the kids, and house cleaning, and I'll do everything else the family needs done, like blogging, surfing ebay, and going thrift-store shopping in Minot. Kidding! Duh, I also need to pack up a few more things.

We've been spending a bit of time at the new house. The other night we got a sitter so that I could help Jason put in the 3rd of 4 windows he's replacing on the main level. By the way, getting a sitter, letting someone else be responsible for meeting the kids' needs, is tremendous! We've only had her over while I'm/we're there, so I do wind up meeting a need every now and again, but I'm gonna stick with the adjective tremendous. When you don't live near family for the freedom to be free, you gots to buy your freedom. But we happened upon a gem of a gal, so yip! Anyway, work on the house. Jason has been taking video footage with his phone, and I hope to put the clips together soon to show the progress. (Soon = sometime in 2012)

I am as happy as a clam to have met up with about a dozen moms who are also transplants into this town. We trickled into a play group organized by one of them. About half of their husbands or partners work with mine, about half are in the oil fields, and one or two have other work. I imagine that we cover the entire gamut of perspectives about parenting, politics, faith, and other life issues, but that doesn't seem to deter us from getting along, holding each others' babies, going to lunch and movies and Minot, informing everybody about the presence of cilantro or kale at the stores - the stores here aren't what you'd call predictable - and playing Bunco. I am very thankful for these women. It would be an entirely different existence here without them; that I can see.

It's already rummage sale and goose migration season. It sort of felt like winter was draaaaagggiiiinnng ooooooonnnnnBUH-BAM!springishere! The weather has been ridiculously warm for a week. (Sorry, Alaska and northwest U.S. friends. I know your winter has been horrible. Sorry. I'm so sorry to mention it, but WOW, this is fantastic! You should come visit.) We are in the center of some sort of major migratory path for birds, says my husband. Well, he knows the actual name of the path. I am telling you it's some sort of one. A flock I saw a couple days ago was just phenomenal; hoping to have out my camera for the next big surge.

This weird bug was the exact deep-deep-orange-almost-red of our water bottle.

Steve Martin has a new book out called, "The Ten, Make That Nine, Habits of Very Organized People. Make that Ten." There are a dozen recent examples of how well that title fits my nature, but this photo should be sufficient. I was multifrantic-izing one morning at breakfast time, and when I glanced over to see if Ziah had enough bites at his place, I realized I'd put Zoralee's slippers on him instead of her. He wasn't complaining, but this did precious little for her cold toes - or her confidence in my child-detection skills / eyesight.

I think that'll do it for now. Later I'll update you on the fact that Ziah now has two teeth.

Oh, what the heck. Ziah has two teeth. Good night!

smoothie remnants

Good on Elisha for her quick and correct guess!

You can only get these amazing miniature enchanted forests if you don't do dishes for a few hours or days. It's worth it though, and that's why I sometimes hold off on dishes unless there's a pressing reason for doing them immediately after eating [cough]. I am willing to sacrifice tidiness to the greater ideal of promoting spontaneous art in the home and in the world.

what is this?

(any guesses?)

Brotherly Love and Hair-Pulling

survive and nose dive friday: slow and quick plant deaths and a whole beef miscalculation

(from despair.com)

Today I have several unfortunate incidents to report.


#1) We were initially ecstatic about the high germination rate and quick growth of the plants in our container garden. Our enthusiasm turned to confusion when nearly all the basil and cilantro grew up weak and spindly, dozens of wispy little stems that bent over to form toy train tunnels. Our confusion ended in dismay when we learned that those are symptoms of too little sunlight and that our best bet was to pull them up and start over. The plants had grown so quickly to find light; placing them at a window and supplementing with a full spectrum light bulb were obviously not enough this time of year. (We have a real grow light we should use.)

#2) Aside from the herbs, it appeared that our three or four tomato plants were growing at a more sure and steady rate and developing thicker bases. "Yippee!" we thought, and took care that the light was lovingly and disproportionately focused toward them versus the decorative pea plants and some other random edible leaf thing Jason had planted (which are also faring well). Yesterday morning, while Ziah was taking a leisurely early morning bath at an hour that no other children in the entire earth were awake, I decided to water our container garden. It's in the middle of the bathroom, the warmest room with the best light. When the container's reservoir was full, water began to trickle out the side hole - that's the way we know it's full - so I grabbed for a towel. It came off the door rack hard, and its opposite edge, with the precision of a judo chop, flung backwards toward the container and snapped every one of those tomato plants off at the base. None of the other plants was affected. Just the tomatoes. My jaw was agape. Then it was clenched as I reached for the cell phone to inform my dear husband by text message what I had done. He texted back, "Hmmm." and then, "Oh well." He's a good man, that one. A good man who, should North Dakota be the focus of a nuclear threat in the next month and our family be confined to the house, will sit with us and look over at that container of decorative pea plants, then look over at me, who will shrug my shoulders as we die of starvation, and he won't say two words of meanness.

#3) Late last summer, we got in touch with a local guy who raises and sells grass-fed, hormone-free beef. I talked with him by phone several times, often at length about how the cow is raised, butchered, processed, etc. The term he always used for calculating what we'd pay him and the butcher was "hanging weight." The cow's hanging weight was estimated to be about 750 pounds, so the meat would be around $2.69 a pound - hamburger, steaks, roasts, ribs. How excited was I? I called a couple girlfriends and talked them into the deal, and they likewise talked a couple more people into it. After all, you can't even get cheap-o crap-o hamburger for that price. So we all went in together on a whole cow and placed our order to the butcher for how we wanted it wrapped - how much hamburger per package, how thick of steaks. Then we waited several months until our cow was ready for butcher. Fast forward to a couple weeks ago when we got the call that the beef was available for pickup. One of my friends took four boxes in to pick up her meat, and they filled up two boxes 3/4 of the way full. After some phone calls and google searches, we realized our (MY) mistake: hanging weight and take home weight are two different things. So, any of you who plan to buy a half beef or something, figure on taking home about 60% of the hanging weight.

In the end, the beef cost us just under $5 a pound. That's expensive for hamburger (though currently, the cheap-o hamburger at Wal-mart is just under $4 per pound), but it's a good deal for roasts and steaks and ribs. Plus, we all got several packages of liver, tongue, and other delectables. heh heh. I don't know if I really want to google cow tongue recipes.

Lesson learned on that one was to not rope your friends into something unless you're darn well sure of yourself. We did offer to buy the meat from anyone who wanted out of the deal, but everyone decided to stay in.

Storycorps stories

Have you seen any of these Storycorps stories? I saw one at Matt's blog, and the kids and I have been clicking from one to the next for the last half hour. They're audio recordings of anecdotes from around the country, set to animation.


Here's a great one called "Miss Devine..."



And another that makes me want to submit audio recordings of Aunt Sue's stories to Storycorps.

love is alive

I've been humming a song from childhood for a couple months: "Love is Alive," by the Judds. These three people who share a home with me - I love them. I love them with an exhaustive (and exhausting), living love. And I am loved too. There is nothing better; I am very, very grateful. 

Love is alive and at our breakfast table every day of the week.

Love is alive, and it grows every day and night, even in our sleep.

Love is alive, and it's made a happy woman out of me.

(after Zoralee's birth)

Oh, love is alive
And here by me.

visit to the new house

Last weekend while we were in town, we decided to drive out to the new house. Too bad we hadn't brought the new key, but it allowed us to walk around and see the property from lots of angles without that backbrain drive to get inside the house. Gorgeous day.

We've owned this place for a solid month now but haven't done much with it on account of J's schedule. That has changed now, and he'll have better times available to start work on the main level - several window replacements, back-filling insulation into the walls, replacing the floor, and painting the walls! He wants to do that before we move, then do the upstairs renovations as we live along. We've got a bunch of boxes packed up and ready for transport, so we're itchy itchy itchy.

See the low spots on that top photo, where water has accumulated and frozen? Jason is thinking of how to work with the natural contours of the land in a Sepp Holtzer kind of way, i.e.; pond-building. And yes, we are going to consider any elevation change of six inches or more a contour. Hmm. Better make that three inches.    

We love the trees!

What, if any, of the big main barn is useable?
It looks like it could slide off the foundation at any moment.
There's something decidedly unromantic about sending the children
out in their hard hats to gather eggs.

our precious Viking child

This is a "garage." Rrrrrrrright.
It will be made into a pile of aged barn wood
that we can maybe incorporate into the house
or make oodles of picture frames from.

saturday's frost and fog

wishing she'd come out walking with Ziah and me