First frost, two teens, public school defended, other shocking points of interest

This year our first frost took me by surprise. Everything in the garden turned out okay, tucked in under manure and coffee grounds and maple leaves, thanks to my amazing team (of child labor, a-hem). I do have to remember to wrap the resurrected fig tree though, before temperatures dip much lower at night.

When last year's hard winter apparently killed my fig tree I shed a wee tear (sobbed like a baby). When it sprouted anew late in the summer I rejoiced! And then when I accidentally hacked it off with the weedeater I cried again while all of my children and my husband assured me it would grow back, which it obligingly DID. That tree deserves better but it has me; it's put down roots and we've been through a lot together.

Similarly my Meyer lemon is blooming with incredible vigor. I painstakingly pollinated it via paintbrush (say that ten times fast) because although the book says "hardy to 17 degrees," the ghosts of my three prior Meyers decline to testify. The fig would live inside too if only the farmhouse weren't, you know, a pair of tiny former logging camp cabins cleverly joined with hand milled fir planks and lumberjack artistry to make a home for seven.

Despite the trials of the tropical plants, the rest of us are settling in to a routine. Three years at the "new" little farm. Three years of watching the light weave patterns through the forest, watching leaves clog the stone culverts, watching the horses figure out the zoo-worthy fencing in order to break into the pond. Three years of making hay and driving to dance. That about sums it up.

I think we just started our sixth year of having school at home. I don't write very much about "homeschool." Polarizing issues paralyze the blog writer in me. And recently I came to understand, again, how damaging any sort of label can be. Homeschooler. Gifted. Special needs. But I get ahead of myself.

We jumped into the deep end of teaching our children at home without a philosophy beyond what we knew of ourselves as parents and what we knew of our individual children's needs. For three years after Madeleine, Sarah and Grace were sitting at the kitchen table (and couch and car) with their books I still volunteered in the community school and my husband still chaired a committee dedicated to helping our tiny rural school survive. And then when we moved away from that area our love of community and our belief in the power of education didn't fade away. Of course not.

 Members of my family and so many people I deeply respect work in public education. Our nation is so lucky, fortunate, ridiculously blessed to have access to free school. I hope we, corporately, don't take that for granted. You know what else we are lucky to have? Choices.

 My children are amazing. Ask anyone. They are also beautiful, and sensitive, and gifted, and different. A couple of them might do fine or even exceptionally well in traditional brick-and-mortar school. One of them would likely spend more time in the hospital than in the classroom. Hospital, "resource room" and school nurse in rotation? Or home? Which would you choose, if you could? And then, when you were choosing, would you reflect on how privileged you were to be able to have that time with each of your little people? Watching them change and grow is one of my miracles. Being present for them is a gift to me.

And we know families whose choices to teach their children at home are as different from ours as night from day. Perhaps they have strong political or religious beliefs and are passionate about remaining separate from the world. Perhaps they have very exacting academic standards and are dedicated to high achievement. Their home might be too remote and the commute too taxing. The list goes on and it even includes those who think young people shouldn't spend time with the opposite gender outside of parental chaperoning.

We don't have school at home for any of those reasons. And our reasons have evolved as these years have passed. What started as a medical necessity and an academic convenience (one of our children was so far ahead of her grade level that the school ran out of ideas/patience/books and threw up its administrative/educational hands, leaving her to "help" in class (read: "be tortured by the bigger, tougher children from 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.") (and then note my double parenthetical statement and feel sorry for the twisting logical meanderings of me, again)) morphed into a lifestyle of joy in learning together.

Theatre and dance are so consuming for our older girls; having flexible school hours allows them to read and write and learn on their own schedules. The time to form ideas and act upon them is a gift. The time to take a trail ride after school and before rehearsal is a gift. Time, it passes, and the spending of it is a lesson too. Or can be.

Somebody is going to say we are not even a true "homeschool" family because some of our children are enrolled in public, virtual charter schools that allow us to choose and design our own curricula. Somebody is going to believe it's less-than, or selling out. I respect that opinion too but I have to say I am grateful for the option, choice, the gift of time. I'm grateful that my children will be able to choose universities, or not, and that their choices won't be limited by mine.

It's a dance and not a ballet. We all waltz this way, parents. We make the most careful choices we are able to make and we thank God for the blessings we have and can share.

*just a note: I wrote this in November and have been immersed in all of that living-spending-time-learning stuff since. I still think about polarizing issues and have cold sweats over controversy or the whiff of it. I still love you if your children are in public school or private school or hacking school from the internet. I especially love you if you read this far.

And they danced

The girls finished nine months of six-day-a-week dance classes with this thing called a recital.

I cried through nearly the entire thing.

From the second row the click of the Nikon shutter
punctuated their steps.

Madeleine was in ten different pieces.

Sarah and Maddy both had their first pointe performance.

Hip hop was a surprise favorite.

Tap was a crowd pleaser.

I love this stuff.

And I try not to count the recitals we have left

stretching before us in beauty.

(When classically trained ballet dancers

go hip hop it will surprise you.)

 Grace was a bookish ballerina.

Considering carefully a year of quiet work.

Laura was a ballet diamond in the cutest deck of cards.

And a teddy bear tap dancer.

Grace also got jazzy.

We have a vocal recital before summer starts in earnest.

Then a few dance intensives and a couple of theatre camps

and a lot of backyard camping.

A wedding.

Swimming in the creek.

Playing with the ponies.

Summer.

It's a coffee table book

Today I felt that need to look for beauty -- does that happen to you? --
and where better to turn than my photo files of this past month? 

(Well. I could have gone outside, but weeds are lurking there, creeping ever closer to farm domination.)

And one of my other favorite diversions is to drive over that-there bridge on my way to town and back.

Alas it is under construction until September.

September!

So photo journal it is.

 The barnyard is stomped-down packed mud, the hay field is sodden but gloriously tall and green. 

The pond is finally fenced off from horse and/or sheep invasion and just a little prettier already.

Mr. Suite planted some trees.
The skunk cabbage and cattails (such lovely names!) grow unmolested.

A grey heron rests there between fishing trips to the river. 

A pair of Mallard ducks made a nest immediately after the fence went up but are gone now.

I hope they come back.

Frogs and toads of the green and noisy variety make music we can hear all the way to the house.
The flowerbeds and garden beds are overrun with chickweed, crabgrass and clover. 

I'm going with it on the theory that nature knows what to do with itself.

We pick lettuce and peas from the beds and a little grass sneaks its way in the salad.

Most is edible.

 Fiddler on the Roof, a sold-out run. 

Maddy had "Fiddler prom" backstage with friends
while other high school friends rode in a limousine
to dance that was decidedly not Russian nor Jewish.

Sarah sang Matchmaker.
And Anatevka was weepingly beautiful.

 Pinocchio, a sold-out run.

Grace was the prettiest puppet I have ever seen. Or sewn.

Sarah wore blue hair and a beautiful gown to convince Pinocchio

becoming a real boy takes bravery and honesty.

 On top of the hill, a neighbor's barn less used than ours, with a view to Blue Mountain.

I would let you think I hiked up there but it is very, very high. So I drove.

 Salvador got his hair cut after Easter.
The barber was smoking a cigarette so we went to the salon.

I explained the haircut preferences:
scissor cut, whitewall around the ears, side part, 

you know, LEAVE THE CURLS.

And the stylist pulled out her clippers and buzzed his hair right off faster than I could gasp.

"This is better," she declared.

Okay.

 The forest wants to take over my back yard. See those weeds of which I speak?
When we bought this place I loved the back yard's "shabby" fence
and asked Mr. Suite to leave it a while.

Its time has probably come.

The creek flows through the trees back there
and it is good to have a little barrier
so we don't worry about Charlie swimming away.

 Fencing off the pond was a family affair.

Mr. Suite has been engineering a lot of hours.

The development and building trade is picking back up.

We are catching up.

 Madeleine was given a lovely vintage dotted swiss dress.

Great-grandma remarked "it looks just like a dress from the 1940s."

It is!

The lawnmower was broken. 

Too many trips to the river pulling inner tubes and children in its trailer perhaps.

We replaced it but not before the horses had lawn duty.

 What can a girl say about columbines? They self sow and are a favorite.

 I only took a dozen pictures at Easter and each one is a testament to ...

something about the difficulty of herding cats.

And every time I see one of these posed sillinesses

I hear the Beatles singing "All Together Now"
and that makes me giggle.

If I were not the parent of teens now I'd say
I'm just grateful no one is picking his or her nose.

You can, however, see a bit of Salvador's hair pre-buzz-cut.

So there's that.

I feel better after that chatty update. 

Is it just me or do you too sometimes need to
focus on your beauty to press a reset button on gratitude?

I'm also participating in #100happydays. Don't let the hashtag stop you.

I don't understand hashtags either!

But I do understand happy.

Blessings from farmsuite.
I hope you are surrounded and lifted up by joy.

Now We Are Six, Laura Edition

A romanticized view of winter storms, but it's my view

Did you imagine yourself in The Long Winter with the Ingalls family?

And then when you grew up did you search
(ever so anachronistically, on the interwebs)
for a small coffee grinder, powered by hand,

the kind that Ma and the girls used for wheat --
the seed wheat for next year
 that became, painstakingly, flour
and then bread for the coldest days?

Did you imagine running a rope line to the barn for safety's sake?

In case a whiteout kept Pa from seeing the house?

 Did you read by gas lamp or firelight
and sigh with the thrill of the word:
blizzard
?

A snow day or two can bring that out in me.

The Suite family is busy with school this January.
Our last snowstorm is reduced
to these photos and the murky piles of ice
in mall parking lots.
The big yellow bus traverses our road twice a day again.
The horse trough no longer steams in a sigh of relative warmth.
But we still read by candlelight for fun.
Little House Seven Miles from Small Town
...that's us...

Backup. No, back up.

 I don't write here very often or very regularly but every once in a while I remember the days -- do any of you? -- when I wrote many times a week. When my teens were small and I made a lot of doll clothes and organic purees. Thanks to the "you may also enjoy" feature that I somehow managed to add to the blog I sometimes see a baby picture of a toothless Laura, who is now 5 years old and reading, writing, running (our lives) or a paragraph or two about how Grace, now 9 and a pianist, seamstress and outdoor enthusiast, loved to play "finger family" and had named all of her digits and assigned them specific personalities and habits. Being the middle child in a family of five must make for a creative kid.

 When I blogreminisce like that I get a little frisson of panic, you know? Not just the passing of the years but the sheer volume of digital/electronic/interwebby family history I document here and notsomuch in a physical scrapbook.

For instance, Salvador,turning 3 this week, was photographed in the palm of his daddy's hand just days home from the hospital. Now he is a member of the hay crew. Well, with crayons and a hot dog in the tow vehicle. But still. (B)logged here.

 Our relationships with dear neighbors at the church-home of my heart, blogged here. Our ups and downs with barrel racing, horses, free range children, penned-up chickens, lonely ewe lambs and dearly departed Golden Retrievers. Blogged here.

 Might I take a side road, just a minor detour, to introduce to you Harold and Linda, our neighbors at the new FarmSuite homestead? He is 86 and still making hay. She is "in her 70s" and still riding along. (Blogworthy.)

My girls' theatrical and dance escapades, all chronicled in photos and a minimum of whining about the price of gas and the late hours of rehearsal.

                                      
When considering the massive volume of valuable-to-me farmy and not-so-farmy Suite family history I today undertook the BLOG BACKUP. Dun-dun-dunnnnnn.

It was a three-click procedure that didn't preserve the photos within the posts. But still. Have you backed up your blog lately? I bet your children and your vegetables and your life -- all growing. And if any of y'all or your tech-savvy friends know how to back up the blog without losing the photos, would you be so kind as to share that information with me?

Because I blogged here about backing up a horse trailer and I might need to refer to that one day.

In non-technical news, the garden is ENORMOUS. We are eating salads every day, twice a day, and watching the corn and beans grow before our eyes. I am excited about the coming tomato harvest (almost afraid to say it, just a little superstitious) and have set up a canning kitchen on the back patio since our new cooktop is glass. The hay is in and it was a somewhat disappointing bale count compared to last year. We are very grateful to be able to make our own hay but it does look like we'll be buying some to supplement this year as a springtime drought kept the grass from growing.

Feels like being a farmer.

Madeleine and Sarah are halfway through a three-week break from ballet and they walk around the house on demi-pointe all day to keep their, what, feet flexible? balance intact? I dunno. We are looking forward to a drama camp and some dance camps and a lot of swimming in the river this summer. Also a lot of garden produce.

I hope your June is blessed and, backing up a bit, that you make time to back up your blog.