Spring Break: More Driving Without Actually Going Anywhere

 

Spring Break has such a nice ring to it.  After all, it's meant to be a break from school, work, and our busy lives.  And it's supposed to happen in the spring, when it's warm and sunny and green.  This week is spring break for our region, but I can assure you there is no real break for Mom, and it is definitely not looking or feeling like spring here either.

Part of the problem for our family is that there is no school for most of our children, but not all of them.  And while there are no classes in session at the local university, that doesn't mean there is no work for my husband.  And on the farm, there is truly no vacation, especially now as sheep and goats are having babies.  That means leaving the area to travel to a warmer climate is a challenge, to say the least.

Additionally, as all you mothers know, this week might mean a vacation from school for the kiddos, but it's certainly no vacation from the regular household chores for Mom.  And when it comes to chauffeuring children to and from their activities and interests, spring break simply means that job goes from being part-time to a full-time position.

While it's nice to not have to get up at 5:30 or 6 each morning to help them get ready for school and see them out the door, the rest of the day I feel like I am at their disposal.  Their excitement and hopes are high for what fun things this spring break week will bring them.  Many of their friends' families have taken this opportunity to go to Disney World, or the Caribbean, or Europe.  The ones that remain at home are making plans to get together with friends for sleepovers, playdates, or trips to the movies.  My teens are hoping for shopping excursions and jaunts to the DMV to take their driver's test.  My younger ones want to stop at the ice cream parlors or the park and spend time with their little nephew.  I'm trying to use this week to squeeze in sports physicals, dentist appointments, and vet appointments so they're not missing any school or extracurricular activities to get these things accomplished.  Plus, unbeknownst to me,  even though some of the schools are on break, that doesn't mean there is a break from sports practices.  So every day I am still driving thirty-five miles one way to take my two track participants to their two different schools at two different times for training. 

Since Sunday we've driven to Church, a sporting goods store to buy new running shoes, a birthday party, a Mexican restaurant and a bookstore so a child could buy some art books, grocery stores three times, the doctor's office, the schools numerous times, the carwash, a craft store, a creamery, the dentist's office, the gas station, the dry cleaners to pick up a prom gown, and TJ Maxx so we could look for shoes to match the prom gown.  So far the rest of the week involves trips to our son's house to pick up and return our grandson, more trips to the schools, dropping off a child at a sleepover 45 minutes away, picking up the same child at a sleepover 45 minutes away, a trip to the DMV, dropping off and picking up a goat at the veterinarian's, a possible playdate with friends who are also stuck at home on spring break, and possibly driving to the church again to help sell pierogies on Friday and then back to the church again for a rehearsal for Stations of the Cross on Saturday.  That's just what I know of now.  It's subject to change.

I should have set my odometer on our SUV to track just how many miles we're putting on it this week.  It's probably more than most of the domestic vacations we would have considered.

Does anyone else out there feel that spring break is not all that it's cracked up to be?

Babies, Babies Everywhere!

 

I've been rather "blah" lately.  Maybe it's the spring teaser we got in February when it was over seventy degrees for a week, and this morning it was nine!  Maybe it's this long stretch between holidays with nothing very exciting to celebrate.  Maybe it's Lent.  Maybe it's middle age.  Or maybe it's just my funky mood.  Regardless, I don't have many creative juices flowing through my veins right now, and I don't feel especially witty or interesting or profound.  So instead of talking about nothing, I thought I'd show you what life is like around the barnyard these days.  We just had another set of twin goat kids born on Friday, and there are babies all over the place.

 

We have baby goats.

 

Black goats and brown goats.

 

 

Tan and creme colored goats.

 

And we have baby sheep.

 

White sheep and gray/tan sheep.

 

 

 

 

And we have goats who ride on sheep.

 

I would certainly be remiss if I didn't include my favorite baby around here who doesn't live in the barn.

From the dining room/multipurpose room of the Preppy Mountain Farmhouse, I'm wishing you all a week that's not "blah."

 

A Taste of Summer

 

For the past month or so, I've continued trying out several new recipes weekly for our family dinners.  The above dish went over especially well with all family members, and it reminded us of summer.  Coincidentally, we had this during a particularly warm February day when the temperatures soared into the upper seventies, and we were able to pretend that we had fast forwarded to early June.  I modified this recipe because there were no fresh peaches in the grocery store, and I didn't have sherry vinegar on my kitchen shelves.  This is from the Cooking Light: Top Rated Recipes book that I've been using this year.

BBQ Chicken with Peach (or Mango) Feta Slaw, p. 16

Combine 1/4 cup olive oil, 1 Tbsp. white wine, 1 Tbsp. vinegar, 1/4 tsp. pepper, and 1/4 tsp. salt in a large bowl, stirring with a whisk (I used a fork.)  Add 2 sliced mangoes and a pkg. broccoli slaw.  Toss gently to coat. 

Sprinkle 3 boneless chicken breast strips with 1/4 tsp. pepper and 1/8 tsp. salt.  Heat 1 Tbsp. olive oil in a large cast iron skillet over medium-high.  Add chicken to pan and cook 6 minutes or until done.  Place chicken in a large bowl and add 1/4 cup barbecue sauce; toss to coat.

Divide slaw mixture among 4 plates.  Top evenly with the chicken strips.  Sprinkle with crumbled bacon, crumbled feta cheese, and chopped fresh chives. 

Over the past few weeks, we have also tried:

Chicken Yakitori with my lo-mein

Mini Bbq meatloaves and Roasted Broccoli

Dilly Salmon Packets with Asparagus

Pork Chops with Apples and Brussels Sprouts

Hamburger Steaks with Sweet Onion Mushrooms

Wild Mushroom Farfalle with Braised Balsamic Endive & Radicchio

The children liked all of those recipes except for the salmon and the endive/radicchio side dish.  I have no clue how anyone eats radicchio.  I put a heaping serving of it on my plate and was excited to try something new, but that was so incredibly bitter.  None of us ate it, so it went to the goats and sheep.  This evening we're having Hungarian Beef Stew.

This can be found at Amazon.

For these recipes and more, check out the above Special Edition of Cooking Light.

Adventure & Altruism: The Kindness Diaries

 

Friday evening I was looking through Netflix for something decent to watch with my children.  It's not often that I find anything new that I feel is worthwhile to sit through and is appropriate for all ages of family members...and isn't boring.  But just as I was about to give up, this Netflix series caught my eye: The Kindness Diaries.  Though it's not religious, this is a great show to watch as we go into Lent.

Leon Logothetis was apparently a stock broker before he decided to travel the world on a motorbike on a quest to see if human kindness and goodwill still exist.  Each day, no matter which part of the globe he finds himself in, he relies on the kindness of strangers to give him a place to sleep for the night and a meal.   He sometimes needs mechanical help with his bike that he cannot pay for, and he often needs directions.  He literally approaches strangers on the streets and asks them if they will put him up for the night, but he also talks and connects with people throughout the day.  Many times foreigners won't take him into their homes, but they will give him personal tours of the area, buy him something to eat and sit with him, and tell him their stories.  He does encounter genuine acts of kindness everywhere he goes, and each day is a new adventure.

After watching several episodes, my children and I definitely noticed a trend: the poorest people were most often the ones who agreed to put him up for the night.  The most remarkable example was of a homeless man in Pittsburgh who said that he couldn't invite him into his house because he was homeless, but Leon was welcome to rest at his little corner on the street with him and his friend.  This man had been homeless for a year, after he and his wife separated.  He gave Logothetis blankets to sleep on, what little food he had to eat, and even a spare set of clothes.  He literally gave him everything he had.  This touched the adventurer so much that he surprised the homeless man by buying him a house and enrolling him in an educational program that enabled him to become a chef.  He is now creating meals for the elderly.

And that is the interesting twist to this show.  Logothetis not only has these numerous adventures as he travels the globe and seeks kindness and hospitality from strangers, but he also gives back to those who are the most generous---and usually the most needy.  He experiences firsthand the most extreme poverty in India, and yet that is also where he repeatedly experiences extreme generosity.  People are willing to sleep on the floor and go without eating in order to provide him with a bed and food.  When he is allowed to spend the night in an orphanage, he is given precious bottled water to drink while the residents themselves drink unsafe tapped water that often makes them sick.  He is so touched by that, that he and his crew offer to purchase two water purifiers for the orphanage so that all the children have a right to clean water on a daily basis.  These unexpected acts of kindness on his part touches and greatly impacts the lives of those less fortunate people who were willing to treat him with kindness by providing him with food and shelter for one night.  And so the ripple effect occurs as kindness begets more kindness.

Just watching each twenty minute episode sparked heartfelt conversations in our family as we have been inspired to find our own ways to extend kindness to others throughout our days.  What a wonderful way to enter this Lenten season.  I know our family members often feel it's such a glum time of sacrificing something for forty days, but we can see in this series that sacrifice with love and kindness enriches our own lives more than we can anticipate.  That by giving of ourselves willingly and cheerfully, we receive so much more in return.

And that makes this show so worthwhile.

 

Amazon 

If you don't have access to Netflix, he also wrote a book by the same title that can be found on Amazon.

Is This Really February?

 

I know Punxsutawney Phil forecasted six more weeks of winter, but surely he was mistaken.  For most of this week, we've got temps near 70 degrees here in the Alleghenies.  One of our school groups planned an outing many weeks ago for families to go tubing at a nearby ski resort.  Our children had been looking forward to it for days, but when we arrived, it was a balmy 66 degrees on the slopes.  I didn't know whether to bring them t-shirts to change into or the traditional snowsuits and sledding gear.  We settled on something in between, but I did see a few teens skiing and snowboarding in shorts and tank tops.

 

I didn't participate in the tubing, but stood on the sidelines enjoying the unseasonable warmth and tried to get pictures with my phone because I forgot my new camera.

 

My youngest is afraid to go on water slides, so I wasn't sure she would participate, but she was the first member of our family to grab a tube and get in line.

 

And she loved it.  It was safer than sledding at our house since you didn't have to worry about hitting a fence, a tree, or going over a ravine at the bottom.

 

Initially they all went down one by one, but they soon learned it was more fun to link together and make a train.

 

The only problem was that our youngest son was usually at the front of their train, and when they came to a stop, he got flung out of the tube and rolled several times in the mud.

 

And that mud at the bottom just got worse as the evening wore on.  By the time we decided to call it a night and go into the lodge to eat dinner, everyone's backsides were covered in it.  Our smallest son was literally coated in mud from his neck to his toes.  I had them strip out of their outerwear in the parking lot and did my best to wrap up those clothes in a manner that wouldn't totally wreck the back of our SUV, but it was just one big mess.  I'm doing heavy duty laundry today and cleaning the inside of our vehicle, unfortunately.  We seriously looked like country bumpkin hillbillies at the resort next to the clean, mud-free skiers and snowboarders who enjoyed completely snow-covered slopes all the way to the bottom. But the kiddos had fun and would do it again in a heartbeat.

 

Meanwhile, back at the farmhouse, our pets and livestock have also been loving this spring-like weather.

 

Our lambs and goat kids are running and hopping all over the place.  Their favorite activity is to jump on the back of our large lone ram and ride him around the pasture.  They've even worn bare a patch of wool on his back where they like to sit.  He doesn't seem to mind as he goes about the business of eating any green grass he can find.  I have got to get out in the pasture with a chair and my camera when I have some free time to videotape it.

I hope all of you are getting some of this warm weather too.  Have a great weekend, Everyone! 

My Guardian Angel Story

Photo by PawPaw

I recently read somewhere that sometimes we just have to be thankful for what didn't happen in our lives, and I began to remember the number of near tragedies and catastrophes that almost occurred in my life.  Even though I didn't grow up being told that I had a guardian angel, we had a popular print in our house of an angel watching over two small children as they cross a broken down bridge.  Our sons now have that same painting hanging in their bedroom, and our family prays the guardian angel prayer throughout the week.  There's one particular incident that stands out in my life that has been coming back to me lately for some reason, and it solidified my belief that there are celestial beings at work in our lives.  

Over a decade ago, when we lived in the southeastern U.S., I dropped off my husband and our four oldest children at a local bookstore while I went to a nearby shopping center with our third daughter who was a baby at the time.  I don't remember what I was buying or even the name of the store I was leaving, but my arms were full of shopping bags, my purse, a diaper bag, and our infant daughter as I walked through the parking lot toward our minivan.  Everything kind of happened all at once, but as I was opening the passenger door of the van and placing our daughter in her carseat, a young man suddenly appeared around the front of our vehicle.  He stood right next to me and nervously asked if I had the time.  He was shifting his weight back and forth, looking around, and also eyeing my belongings.  I don't remember what I said, or if I even had on a watch, but I remember the feeling I got in the pit of my stomach and the goosebumps that prickled on my skin.  With our baby in the van but not yet strapped in, and my arms still holding some of our stuff, I was vulnerable.  I couldn't leave and walk away, nor could I quickly get inside our van and lock the doors.  He was close enough to grab me or any of my things, but then out of nowhere, a large beat-up, rusty van pulled up into the parking space on the other side of us.  The stranger beside me paused and watched as one by one each member of the large family got out of that van and began walking behind us toward the store.  There were lots of them.  Children and parents and teenagers and grandparents and aunts and uncles.  They got out and took their time, talking to one another and very gradually making their way past the rear window of my van.  I don't know exactly what I was thinking or planning to do, but I was aware that this entourage was causing the stranger beside me to back up away from me a bit.  From my peripheral vision, I could see him looking more and more nervous as he looked from them to me.  Instinctively, I hurried up and strapped in our daughter and tossed our bags into the front seat while keeping my keys in my hand.  At all times I was aware of this man's presence, but mostly what I remember was how amazed I was that people just kept coming out of the van beside me and walking slowly past us to the store.  And somehow I knew that this extremely large family was giving me time.  I slid the door closed and walked around the front of my van to avoid walking past the stranger who was still hanging out right next to us.  I tried my best not to look nervous or afraid, but inside my coat I was sweating and shaking.  I got in my minivan and locked the doors.  At that moment, the last of those family members crossed the parking lot, and the strange man walked towards a red car parked in front of me.  He got in, and I noticed for the first time that there was a woman in the driver's side waiting for him.  She was sitting directly across from me, but she was hunched down, and she wouldn't lift her head to look up at me.  I never saw her face.  I put the keys in the ignition and got out of that parking lot as the whole event replayed in my head and I tried to make sense of it.  Mostly, I just remember whispering "Thank you, God.  Thank you, God."  When I got to the bookstore with our baby and found my husband, it was then that I allowed myself to feel all the emotions of fear and anxiety and near-panic that I kept at bay a few minutes earlier.

My husband and I had no doubts that the stranger in the parking lot had ill intentions where I was concerned.  I don't know why it never occurred to me to report the incident.  I think I was just so grateful to get out of there that I hadn't looked at their license plate or even studied the man well enough to describe his appearance very well.  What struck me the most as I reflected on it later was how peculiar that so many people could have gotten out of that van beside me.  They just kept coming and coming and coming, this seemingly never-ending entourage of passengers who loudly made their way past us, taking their time and not paying any attention to us whatsoever.  But I knew that they were placed there at exactly the right time that day by my guardian angel, and maybe my daughter's too. 

I wish there was a way to let those people know what their presence in a parking lot did for me that day.  Perhaps they saved a life.  Maybe they kept someone from committing a felony and destroying someone's future.  Who knows the ripple effect that family caused that day?  But I am grateful for them and for guardian angels who work behind the scenes of our lives.

Blog Post #200!

 

As my children are playing outside and preparing to go for a bike ride with their dad on this 70 degree afternoon in February, I just realized that I am about to post for the 200th time.  Coincidentally, post #100 was published last year on Feb. 21, and I commemorated it by sharing my top 5 viewed posts of that first year of blogging.  I thought I would do the same today, except I won't include the "Popular Posts" already featured on the sidebar.  So aside from those, below are the other top 5 posts of the past year, from blog posts 100-199.  If you missed reading them the first time, just click on the link and you can see them now.

 

Taking a Break: The Real Reason 

I wrote this post last March when I was feeling rather discouraged about my perceived slow growth of this blog.  I had recently installed Google Analytics and was checking my stats and comparing myself to other way more experienced, way more popular bloggers.    I was actually seriously considering throwing in the towel, but I'm so glad I didn't.  I am grateful to all you readers and fellow bloggers who sent me words of encouragement and have continued to faithfully read my posts.  I feel a little embarrassed that I might have sounded rather whiny in that post, and I'm happy to report that I've cut back on comparisons as I go about just "running my race."

 

10 Fun Snacks for Children 

Creating delicious meals for my family and friends is one of my favorite things to do, especially if I'm not rushed.  Making fun, quirky snacks that the kids delight in is also a favorite past time of mine.  Some of these ideas came from Pinterest, some from cookbooks, and most were adapted by me based on what I had in the house.  I think the general consensus amongst the littles in our family was that  the yogurt pops were the best.

 

Why You Never Sell a Goat to a Frat Boy 

There are many stories I can tell about the adventures we've had while living in this farmhouse.  The story of the little goat that spent the night with some fraternity brothers is certainly one of the more memorable ones.  We learned a lesson that night about selling livestock, and fortunately, the goat wasn't hurt and the story has a happy ending.

 

Feeling Mama Pride & Teary Eyed 

Sometimes I'm really surprised by the views that certain posts get.  This one was my emotional ramblings of the pride I felt watching our daughter run a final cross-country meet of the season.  I witnessed her walking part of that 5K and almost giving up, but then I saw her reach down inside and pull out a surge of energy that propelled her across the finish line to beat her personal record.  And I was flooded with the love and emotions that a mother feels as she watches her child struggle and suffer and nearly quit, but then she overcomes and achieves her goal.  It's nerve-wracking.  It's gut-wrenching.  But it's one of the most satisfying parts of being a parent.

 

15 Things Every Preppy Farmhouse Should Have 

Interestingly enough, while I've been composing this current post, the one I just published last Wednesday jumped into this list.  It's full of items on Amazon that I would love to have in our farmhouse, and that I suspect many of you readers would love to have too.  If you click on the pictures or the blue Amazon links, they'll take you directly to the merchandise for sale.  I wasn't sure how I felt about finally running ads or promoting affiliate links.  Frankly, I was a bit afraid it would drive away some readers.  But here it is finishing out my list of the most popular posts of this past year.  To see the 8 posts that were at the very top of the list, just look on the sidebar of this blog.

In conclusion, thank you all for sticking with me through the past year of another 100 posts.  I truly enjoy blogging, more than I ever dreamed I would.  And I absolutely love seeing the numbers of you viewers from all over the world increasing monthly.  Thanks especially to those of you who take a few minutes to leave a comment here and on social media.  It is a pleasure to get to know each and every one of you.

After showing you the photo at the top of my kiddos outside in shorts this afternoon, I'll close with one I took just 10 days ago.  It's hard to believe these were both taken in the same month.