The Trivial Pursuit of Happiness

Things have been hard lately. The pit has been lurking for a while, following me around corners, cutting off my path, growing and growing until I felt like I was on a island in the center, unable to jump across to solid ground. So, it shouldn’t have been a surprise when I stumbled into it this last week, and hit bottom with a dull thud.

I saw this picture of the sink hole in Guatemala a few weeks ago, and thought “Oh yes, I know you.” If you look closely, you’ll see me at the bottom, tugging on the rope.

It’s hard for me to use this space to describe how this feels. I’m not sure if it’s because writing it here makes it more ‘real’ or because I expect my children to read this all some day, as a sort of babybook of their early years. But the truth is, I’m not okay. I’m angry, I’m anxious, I’m suffocating under the weight of the guilt of not being enough. A bad day here or there has slowly shifted to a good day here or there, and I don’t want to feel like this. I wrote before that I wouldn’t waste another year of our lives denying that depression had found me, so I’m not. I’m trying to own it, make peace with it, and find a way to crawl out of it.

I’m grabbing the rope. Let’s hope it is tied to something solid at the top.

We live about 30 minutes from a great growing community called Greenbluff. The girls and I have picked cherries, apples, strawberries, and pumpkins in the past, but this year I want to not only pick the fruit, but also learn to can it, because I think I am Laura Ingalls apparently.  Since it’s strawberry season, some friends and I decided to head up last Friday and pick as many as we could while wrangling 10 children. Despite the strawberry festival starting on Saturday, and calling farms on Thursday to double-check they would be open, we got out there Friday morning to closed signs.

Luckily good company saved the day, as always.

We ended up having a picnic and letting the kids conquer a playstructure for a few hours, which actually sounds like what we do every week during the summer, just closer to home.

Despite coming home empty handed, I was still determined to can something, so I hit up a sale at a local supermarket and put my minions to work cutting up berries.

For the first time, Ella was an actual help in the kitchen. I’m a fan of letting kids cook, but I’ve become accustomed to the girls eating more than they contribute (ahem, Alice). As long as they don’t add their half eaten bites to the big bowl, I let them munch. This time, Ella cut the berries up as fast as I could hull them, and only snuck a few irresistible bites (I did too). I am looking forward to her help in the kitchen.

Becky didn’t help much with the jam, but she did catch and eat this skunk. Thanks Becky!

This is the first jam I’ve made, and I’m honestly surprised how easy it was. Hot and sticky: yes; stressful: no. I used 5 lbs of strawberries, and ended up with 10 8oz jars of jelly, in about an hour. Amazingly all the cans sealed, despite my fussing with them during the resting period. The girls and I tried the jam this morning, and while it is sweeter than I prefer, the girls didn’t complain.  Wednesday is supposed to be cooler, so maybe we’ll try peach this time.

The chicken coop is finally complete.

After looking through 29,752 plans for chicken coops, Tom and Mike started their patented “Let’s just start building and see what happens” technique, which somehow always ends up working. It helps that Mike was a contractor for 20 years, but still, I’m always impressed when their efforts pay off, despite the entirety of their building plans being sketched on an old piece of plywood.

One of the goals with the coop was to build a decent looking full size sturdy coop for less than $250. Even $250 made me cringe, until we started looking at how much it was to buy a coop, and reading other’s estimates on the cost of building their own.

To keep the cost low, we made sure to spend our money where it counted, and repurposed or salvaged most of the other materials. We bought new lumber and siding from our local lumber yard, where the price was significantly lower than Home Depot. We bought the window, latches, can lights and various small materials at the Habitat for Humanity store. The screen was our biggest expense, so we priced it at a few places and found that the prices varied quite a bit. We also already had quite a bit of lumber hanging around, as well as insulation and laminate scraps. The door was saved from when we replaced our front door a few months ago.  I’m not counting the dirt we bought to level the ground (to prevent water pooling inthe coop) but that’s because we needed to level the area to keep the garage dry anyway.

There is a door on the back for easy cleaning, and another on the side which is the egg door. The chicken door and ramp is on the front, and has already been modified a bit. (Tom widened the ramp, put on a self closing sliding door, and even a little deck for the silly birds.) The roof keeps the whole lot dry, and even has a gutter to collect rain water (which has been overflowing this year). There are vents in the top, as well as on the back.

The chickens seem pretty happy so far, and the kids are thrilled to finally be able to go in and play with them. Even Alice, who screams and tries to climb up my leg when she sees small dogs is giddy with the idea of touching the chickens. I keep waiting for one of them to get a beak to the eye, but so far the chickens are willing to put up with their prodding.

Tom’s pretty proud of himself, and I am too. Last year this space was a 8 ft tall compost pile, afterall. I have all kinds of plans to make it pretty (painting, planting, etc) but honestly, that will probably not happen soon, since I’ve been trying to finish painting the playhouse for two months now. We came in right on budget, which means we’re about $300 into this egg adventure, when you count the chickens, feed and bedding. The chickens are 8 weeks old today (Happy Two Month Birthday chickens!) so we still have a while before they start producing. It will be a few years before we’ve recouped our investment, but I’m not even sure if that is one of our goals any more. There’s something to this backyard Homestead thing we’ve started. I’m excited to see where it takes us.

Two sets of vintage encyclopedias for $5.

I bought these on impulse, mostly for the illustrations, but also because I remember spending hours and hours reading through our set of encyclopedias a a kid, and how many arguments were settled by yelling “Get the “U” encyclopedia, and I’ll show you you are wrong!” (Really, Utah? A seagull for your state bird? SEAgull? You can’t blame me for not believing that one.)

I didn’t really expect the girls to notice them, but everytime I turn around someone has pulled one (or all) of them off the shelf, turning pages one by one. I’d pay a lot more than $5 for that kind of quiet, anyday.

(1918 Edition)

(1946 edition)

Today was Tom and I’s third wedding anniversary, which we celebrated with wine and food.

We left the big girls with grandma, and Becky was kind enough to sleep through most of dinner (and charmed the waitresses after she woke up and cooed at the candle for a half hour).

As a surprise I finally converted our wedding video over to a playable format, and we watched it for the first time. We put off a wedding for a long time, because we thought it was trivial: just a day and a paper that we didn’t need to prove anything. We were that cheesy couple that knew right away that we were in it for the long haul, so the idea of spending a lot of money on a single day to prove it to others made us cringe. When people found out we were expecting Ella, they asked. When we bought a house together, they asked. When we made big investments, they asked. When we learned we were expecting Alice, they asked. So, tired of explaining why we weren’t married yet, we decided to throw a backyard wedding the same weekend as our college graduation. Watching it today I remember how thrilled I was to stand up with my friends and family and celebrate my life with his man, who makes me smile every single day.  It wasn’t the happiest day of my life, or the day that changed everything – that was a day in the fall, when I said “yes” to a much simpler question  - but it was perfectly us.

Wedding 6/17/07 from Ivy mae on Vimeo.

(Horrible quality, and the audio didn’t come through, but it’s 10pm and two glasses of wine makes me too lazy to redo it, so maybe next year I’ll figure it out.)

Two weeks in, and so far I’ve only killed four things. And guys, things are actually growing.

Look! Broccoli!

Beans! I love the one on the left breaking through.

Tomato flowers! (Also a dead tomato plant int he background. Oops.)

Watermelons, sunflower, teepee, potatoes.

And just because I enjoy .gifs, click each thumbnail to see each bed’s growth so far.

Bed one

Bed two

Bed three

Come over, we’ll have a dance party.

Post inspired by the lovely Chelsea, and her own mix.

Playing hide and go seek at the park.

Chance, you win. Alice is officially your clone.

Alice is still not convinced that is not a picture of her.

Waking up to this little girl curled up next to me, smiling in her sleep.

Rebecca Joy joy joy, joy of my heart.