The last several weeks have been a whirlwind. I’ve been keeping pretty mum about the wedding prep — head down, eyes on the goal — but lots is going on. Just to give you a general idea, here are some photos…
My adrenal glands have taken quite the beating. Every few days (minutes?) my stress levels spike, I erupt in shrieks and/or tears, things get done, I calm down, and then — maybe a week (or a few hours) later — the whole cycle repeats itself. My poor body. My poor family.
For the most part, I think the preparations for this weekend are pretty much where they should be. Supplies have been ordered, tools and help sourced, lists made, fires lit under butts (my husband’s, specifically). For so long, I’ve been actively thinking and anticipating and working and planning and now — NOW — things are really starting to move.
It feels like this event is an enormous merry-go-round that, up until recently, was a cluster of smaller merry-go-rounds. For weeks, I was plugging away at my tasks — my merry-go-round: the reception meal — pushing it, trudging alongside it, pulling at it, yelling at other people (my husband, specifically) to help. Every now and then I let go long enough to help someone else push their project, or I’d just stay put and yell instructions. Gradually, more and more people began trotting alongside the spinning rides and grabbing hold of the rungs until, just this last weekend, we reached the tipping point: all the little merry-go-rounds finally gathered enough momentum, whipping themselves into such a whirling frenzy, that — POOF — they crashed into one single enormous, glorious, dizzying merry-go-round. Now events are moving so fast the wedding has a life of its own and I can finally stand back and just watch it go.
Just kidding! I still have loads to do — but! The wedding does feel weirdly manageable. I occasionally get twinges of panic but I’m pretty sure that’s just my over-active alarm system testing to make sure I’m alive.
It’s strange (though perhaps perfectly normal): Now that things are mostly in order, emotionally I’m spiralling. Moods, tempers, tears, joy, sadness, pride, panic — it’s running the gamut. All in one weekend — the same day, actually — my oldest child is graduating from college and getting married. I’m gaining another daughter. We get to meet my son’s other family (and they us). Then the next day, we’re having a huge party filled with incredible friends and family. It’s a lot to take in.
When my older daughter left home (town/the state/the entire South), my younger son inherited her room. We let him set it up as he wanted; our only requirement was that he couldn’t block the natural light or block the access to the attic (a pull-down staircase in the ceiling).
According to me, the room is pretty much a wreck, full of his on-going projects, way too much furniture, dust dinos, and lots of discarded clothing, but he loves it, so that’s cool.
He spends long hours up there, reading in bed, working on projects, and listening to the radio.
The child is a thrift store fanatic. Every now and then he calls up his grandmother to see if he can ride along next time she goes thrifting, and one afternoon they spent upwards of three whole hours there. The bulk of his spending money gets eaten by that place, and he’s forever hauling home boxes piled high with found treasures: computer monitors and loads of books, watches (they all broke) and movies, HDMI cords, a VCR player.
count the monitors
He loves technology. He has two computers — one is an old desktop from his uncle and the other is a laptop without a screen, which he is attempting to make useable via one of his thrift store monitors and the HDMI cord. He’s teaching himself coding and how to use the drawing programs.
Speaking of technology, for the older three kids we had a firm no-tech rule until age 16, at which point they were allowed to get a phone, computer, gmail account, etc. All the kids fudged the rule a bit, in one way or another, but for our younger son, we’ve all but thrown it out the window entirely BECAUSE, unlike the other three who were (are) to varying degrees into social media, this kid is head-over-heels with the tech part of it: the programming and problem solving. His approach to it feels different — smartphones don’t tug at him (he says he plans to get a flip phone when he turns 16), and he’s all about the cool cords and ports and all that boring junk — so have at it, I say.
He’s growing his hair out, says he wants to wear it in a ponytail.
I’m fine with long hair, but the in-between stage, the hair-in-the-eyes sloppy bit, makes me nuts. I tell him to tie it up in a little sprout of a ponytail on the top of his head, or wear a bandana, or style it, something, anything. I even bought him mousse and have become his personal stylist whenever he has to go out. Blown out, his hair reminds me of Steve Harrington in Stranger Things.
Kiddo is a chatterbox. Usually it’s just loud commentary about EVERYTHING, but occasionally he pops out with something so quirky I actually write it down. Like, “I don’t think I have the right wrists to be a watch model. My wrists are flimsy pieces of bone.” Or, “Should I start a malady fund?”
He loves shrimp and recently splurged on a whole bag of it at Costco, which then prompted him to announce, “I’m going to start saving up five dollars a month for shrimp and then at the end of the year I’ll buy a ten-pound bag.”
“A primitive selfie.”
He is incorrigibly, insatiably, obnoxiously curious. He loves to research, and is forever running downstairs to tell me about some new concept he just figured out (and that I don’t care about), and he fires questions at a such a rapid clip it often feels like a verbal assault. For example — and this is only one very small example — one afternoon when the two of us were driving into town, he said, “What’s cliché?” I, feeling uncharacteristically generous, gave a lengthy, thoughtful explanation complete with examples. When I finished talking, he, without missing a beat, said, “Now. What’s communism?”
Multiple times a day, I find myself shouting at him to just PLEASE be quiet for a minute. On rides to town, I’ll often forbid him from speaking for a certain distance just so I can have a moment with my thoughts. Or, at the supper table, we tell him he can’t talk for five minutes.
Oddly, he’s amazingly upbeat about getting yelled at all the time. He always was a sunny kid.
He adores Radio Lab and NPR and is wildly hooked on The Moth Podcast. He loves YouTuber Mark Rober and Idiots at Work and Twisted Sifter. Lately, he’s been absorbed in the Jurassic Park books (he kept calling it “Jurastic” Park), Bloody Jack Adventure books, The Final Six, The Inheritance Cycle series. He loves Christmas carols, knows a bunch of Ray Steven’s songs verbatim, and for awhile he subsisted entirely on the Aladdin soundtrack. With my husband and me, he’s watching Alone on Netflix. He’s my British Baking Show buddy, and I’m watching Schitt’s Creek (again) with him. He’s seen all seven of the live-action Spiderman movies, and he’s watched Spiderman Homecoming about five times. He can hold his own in almost any Marvel movie conversation.
He likes to dream up improvements to the milking shed — summary: he wants to build a barn and is designing a 3D structure on Sketch Up — and he’s saving money for a bike, college, a car, the barn, a soldering station, and he has a fund for wind and solar power, as well as tools. He has dreams of buying a 150,000-watt windmill.
His big physical presence (he’s six foot three and still growing fast) combined with his cheery disposition and disregard of personal space often makes us edgy. He is forbidden from eating in the living room because he often spills. (He disagrees with this, says he spills one in twenty times. And I disagree with that.) His room is cluttered with empty popcorn and cereal bowls and hot chocolate mugs. Whenever I have any leftover goodies — recently, chocolate cake, apple strudel, coffee cake — he swoops in and saves the day.
We’re forever having to repeat ourselves to him because he’s a) lost in his thought, b) has headphones in. He’s stridently conscientious, and exhaustingly particular about the absolute literal truth, and I can guarantee he’s going to read this and then correct every single thing I didn’t get just absolutely correct.
We scaled the garden way back this year— the family is shrinking— but we still processed a good amount of food, mostly from produce that we sourced via local farmers and orchards.
My younger daughter worked a partial season at the produce farm so once again we had plenty of fresh produce — lettuce, cucumbers, radishes, onions, heirloom tomatoes, garlic, spinach, kale, etc — over the spring and summer. (She refused to bring home the extra eggplants, though, the stinker.)
Much of our freezer space has been used for beef. At the end of last year, we sent our three steers to slaughter. My husband hauled the beef home from the processors — an entire ton of it — in the van. A bunch of it went to friends and family, and the rest got stashed in our freezers (we have five, though all of them aren’t always in operation). Having all this grass-fed beef— steaks! burgers! ground beef! roasts! ribs!— is a luxury that still boggles my mind.
By far, this year’s biggest food project has been our family milk cow. It’s been a raging success (says I), and I hope that our non-farmery family can work out a way to keep a family milk cow because I love, love, love cheesemaking.
he only hand milked in the beginning; now he uses an electric milker
Stats:
Rhubarb, frozen: not recorded but I know I put some in the freezer
Strawberries: 1 quart, sliced and sugared; 5 pints of freezer jam, 2 half-pints
Applesauce, Lodi (3 bushels): 55 quarts
Apricots (1 bushel): 8 quarts, canned; 9 pints and 2 half pints cook jam
Wineberries, frozen: 5 quarts
Blackberries, from our neighbors’ farm, frozen: 11 quarts
Cheeses: 44 aged cheeses (and counting), plus many, many soft cheeses, yogurts, etc.
Notes: *I’m pretty sure there was a lot more frozen strawberries (and jam), almost all from the strawberries that my parents gave to us— I think I forgot to record it. Strawberry jam is a family favorite, so I must remember to make lots more of it next year.
*We got lots of “old” food from Magpie — grilled chicken, soups, breads, etc — that we’ve squirreled away in the freezer.
*My younger son has taken over the chickens. I buy eggs from him, three dollars a dozen. Right now, production is low. I keep encouraging him to put a light in the coop, but he hasn’t done it yet.
*Our corn crop didn’t produce much, so we ordered from local farmers and had a corn processing day with my family. Next year, I want to make sure to freeze some of the corn in pint bags, not quarts, since a quart of corn is generally too much for us.
*We also bought several 25-pound bags of potatoes from those same farmers, as well as a smaller bag of sweet potatoes.
*The beans were terrible, once again. Either do a fall crop, or skip them all together. It’s early December and we only have 1 bag left.
*The nectarines were already going bad when we picked them up from the orchard (this has happened other years), so too much of the fruit went to waste.
*I thought we weren’t going to find Lodi apples, but last minute I sourced them at a different orchard. We’ve been plowing through the sauce. My younger son eats a crazy-huge amount.
*Tomatoes were decent, but not great, so I bought a couple boxes from a farm stand. Next summer we’ll need to do salsa.
*We still had plenty of pesto torte, pesto, zucchini relish, and frozen peppers. Next year I’ll need to do more.
*We got our fall baking and eating apples — Fuji’s the family fave — from a local orchard, and from an orchard in PA.
*We’ve ordered 100 pounds of popcorn from a farm in PA — it’s still drying, but should be ready for pickup soon.
