The Wild Month of May

If August is as expensive as December (which, with the number of kids we have in school--and the accompanying number of supplies and fees required at the start of the school year for each--it pretty nearly is), May is certainly as busy. 

I think maybe busier!

 

After a recent semi-sleepless night (my brain circling around all the things it was supposed to remember), I sat down and tried to get it all down on the calendar. (Though new things are brought to my attention daily.) Penny's graduation, seminary graduation, recitals, plays, fieldtrips I'm helping with, elementary olympics (with different times for each grade), Civil War reenactments, class award ceremonies, Girls' Camp planning. The kids Great Aunt Sarah and I are even (at her amazing suggestion) bringing her cotton candy machine to each of my four elementary kids' classes to make cotton candy with them. Anyway, I quickly realized that the idea I had of a month of semi-calm before the wildness of summer ... was never going to be.

In any case. A wee bit of miscellaneous things from the beginning of this wild month:

Summer and Mette have friends whose cats just had kittens. When we came to pick them up they rushed one out to the car for Starling, the most ardent cat and kitten lover I have ever known, to hold.

More things happening at the house. (And a bit of frustration as those little square windows are a fair amount higher than they were supposed to be. But it also has been very exciting to go over and see new areas of the house framed every day!)

Goofy child.

Worst cows ever. (OK, just one of them is. No matter where we move them, how much grazing space we give them, or how sure we are they are secured, one of them finds a way to get through the barbed wire.)

After Summer's orchestra concert.

Mette as Florence Nightingale.

Two of her close friends even came to support her. So dear.

Talking about farmy things at the farm.

Abe with his five oldest children. (He was a bit nonplussed when he went to Penny's play with several of his siblings and was told, afterwards, what an excellent job his daughter did.)

And now onto the rest of May!

Abe's BYU Graduation, a Piglet, and Hints of Other Things

Abe graduated from BYU in their ACME program at the end of April. (The ACME program is a fairly intense route you can choose to take if majoring in math. It stands for: Applied and Computational Mathematics Emphasis. Abe often just tells people he majored in "applied math". What that actually means, and what he actually knows, and has researched, and done ... I can explain only about as well as six-year-old Starling might. But he could tell you! [And then you could continue to be just as confused as you are now.])

We had all the kids with us but Penny (who had something she could not miss with final preparations for her last play of high school underway). Gayle even bravely joined us in our full van.

(It always feels an enormous shame to have one child missing from what might have been a complete family picture.) 

And we had more than just Abe's graduation to be excited about (though that was certainly a very big deal). 1. Mike was picking up a piglet. (Well, two piglets. Sadly, one died the very next day. It was my fault. I insisted that if he was going to make us get piglets, we take the tiny runt of the litter as one of them--even though it looked nowhere near as healthy as the rest. I was right that the kids would love the puny thing. They did! But Mike was right in his suspicions that it might not survive to adulthood. Sad.) And 2. We were meeting someone who will very soon be a permanent part of our family. But shh. No more about that. You might spy an unfamiliar face in these pictures, but I'm saying nothing more until there's a very official announcement to be made.

For the briefest moment as Abe, in the blue cap and gown he borrowed from Daisy so he wouldn't have to buy one, stood, confidently, to walk towards the stage (and onwards from there towards graduate school and the beginning of a family of his own [hush! I said we aren't mentioning that in this post]), I had a bit of a flashback. Abe was five and driving off with Mike to his first day of kindergarten. He was clutching a little paper with a list of questions and worries that Mike promised he would make wait to make sure Mrs. Kilby answered before leaving.)

Anyway, congratulations to that boy/this man. A very happy day.

Many Things Including Easter, Daisy's Birthday, and More Escaping Steers

The last week or two has seemed very busy and full. And, alas, the fact that there is much going on that could be written about always means ... there is no time to write it! 

There's been General Conference (do we capitalize this? why won't I find out once and for all instead of vaguely wondering every time I write it?) and Easter, and Daisy's 23rd birthday, and cows escaping (and me in tears over it), and getting goats set up at our bishop's dairy and helping with the ensuing fieldtrip, and school concerts, and planting 30 bare-root trees in buckets, and a colonoscopy (grimace), and Mike fixing things that weren't done right on the house, and ... all sorts of things!

Some of these things have been delightful, and others (e.g. the cows--it was a rough day) have had me considering the line Nephi says about the women traveling through the wilderness with them ("and they began to bear their journeyings without murmurings") and wondering if perhaps I might ever get to the point of bearing my own journeyings ... "without murmurings". Mike will tell you that I have not gotten near that point yet. Well, actually, he will not tell you that. (Though he's the one I call to whine and cry to.) He's far too good of a husband and makes every allowance for me. Which is one of the many reasons I love him. Nevertheless ... I do have some work to do.

In any case, I should like to put many of these photos in tidy, little posts all their own, but being pressed for time, I will just dump them here in a heap alongside the occasional brief comment.

General Conference Weekend. All of the kids were home (always happy!) but I took very few photos.

(As you can see everyone listened--intent and alert--throughout the entirety. :))

And working on the farm. What did we ever do with weekends before the farm?

One bad steer out. 

Usually he would just get out close by the pen and could be easily coaxed back in with grain, but the day I cried (and bore my journeyings ... with murmurings) he was out by the road (far far from the pen) in the muckiest parts of the farm with all sorts of fencing and obstacles he would need to be lead around to get back, with me all alone, and a helpful neighbor warning me my steer was going to get the bulls across the street riled up and breaking through their fence and that animal control was going to give me a $500 fine. (Luckily the guy building up the dirt around our house saw me out there failing horribly to get the cow where it needed to be and came to help. A bit humiliating. But nice all the same. [And I did pray for some angels to be sent to help me. I'd expected the sort with white robes that my mortal eyes couldn't see. But I guess sometimes they look like a middle-aged fellow with a backhoe and white tennis shoes that will never be the same after the mud he had to wade through to hedge up the way of the steer.])

Planting trees in buckets to eventually place around the farm. "Anywhere I can see a house we will plant a tree," I tell the kids. Haha. That may not be practical. But heaven forbid I look out my window and see another house.

Our ground is so wet that many trees will not grow well. So I am going to have to more completely embrace the lowly, stick-dropping willow. Mike already appreciates them fully simply for being the native tree out here. And I do think the flame willow's red branches will look very cool all bare and covered in snow in the winter. We also got a bunch of lindens (which I know nothing about).

The poor steers in a smaller pen until we can get the barbed wire fences more escape proof. Why must they bring such consequences upon themselves? At least Hans kept them company for a bit (while the straw I put down was still fresh).

Jesse pretending to drive the steam roller. (There are all sorts of interesting construction vehicles at the farm at present!)

Cute little Star feeding a baby cow on her fieldtrip. (This was the one we brought our goats to, and that I came and helped with. It was another fun time of feeling the connections we have begun to establish with the community up here as there were a number of other people who had either brought animals or who were helping with the kindergarteners that I knew.)

Mette and I in matching Dolly Parton shirts. (Clearanced for $3 at Old Navy.) (Mike used to have an Olene Walker t-shirt. Perhaps his mom had done some campaigning for her or some such? But every time he'd wear it, I would feel compelled to sing "Jolene" with a slight change to the name. "Olene, Olene, Olene Ohhhhlene. Please don't take him just because you can.")

A delighted card stacker.

Abe got to spend a weekend in Chicago for work. Mike said something in jest about the mafia. I later found Summer in bed crying over Abe's safety (or potential lack thereof).

A little violin concert for Summer's orchestra. (She's in the back in the red sweatshirt.)

Saturday was a busy day. Mike cleaned the church. We took the kids to an egg hunt in Mendon. Mike and I ran to pick up the trees. We all went to the farm to plant them in buckets. We picked up our van that we've somehow survived without for nearly six weeks. We celebrated Daisy's 23rd birthday. (With me rushing to make dinner and cake between the mess of the farm and giving kids baths and before needing to leave with all the girls [minus wee Starling] for a showing of the 2005 Pride and Prejudice.)

(Starling found a friend from school at the egg hunt.)

Easter morning we had our traditional hunt and then, before church, went to the empty tomb replica in the Tolman's barn. The primary had given the kids all real palm leaves the week before and told them to keep them in water and bring them to lay before the tomb. People came and went between 6 am and noon and just sat to listen to music and ponder. I thought it might be kind of odd just sitting there, but there was actually a really lovely spirit about it all, and it was a nice way to start Easter Sunday.

Abe celebrated his final project before graduating in BYU's ACME program.

And that's all I've got at present.