I've been reading through my archives and it's been such a trip. I'm so glad to have this record, and so in the spirit of my last post I sit down dutifully to hammer out the recent weeks - and blank. Nothing. Nada.

What do we spend our time doing? What do I spend my time doing?

I walk around and close doors that children leave open - I do that a lot.

I walk around and look for the children that left the doors open - because I lose them a lot. We live on fifty acres and there are so many places to get lost: are they at the treehouse? are they at Jacob's cabin? Are they at the burn pile? The other burn pile? Are they at the fishing shack, the goat garden, or the bamboo forest?

I would save myself a lot of time and anxiety if I could just keep track of them in the first place, but they disappear so quickly. And then I call to see if they're with Jacob.

That conversation might go like this:
ME: Do you have the kids?
JACOB: No, but they're fine.
ME: They can't be far because nobody has on shoes, Lucy June is in an oversized princess dress, and Roman is naked and carrying the cat.

Then I walk to my mom's to see if they're sneaking Lara bars from the pantry. Nope. Maybe they're in the shop playing restaurant and littering the concrete floor with lettuce? Nope. Turns out they rode their plastic toys to the mailbox and are returning empty handed because they already got the mail last time I lost them.

I'm grateful for all the wilderness at our fingertips, but a yard with a fence has its merits.

And tomorrow. We'll do it all again.

Overdue Update on the Country Life

Hello! I'll skip all the apologies for never blogging anymore and dive right into what life looked like here over the past few months.

Lucy June turned four in October and we gave her a kitten. We got the kitten from a shelter which was very strange for me. When I was growing up, cats or dogs would show up and we would beg our parents to let us keep them. Those animals would have lots of progeny that we would beg other parents to let their kids keep. But we got our kitten from a shelter because stray-ville seems less populated than it was in the 90s. Her tag said her name was "Tamale" - which is an awesome kitten name - so we kept it and call her Molly.

I am not a cat person. But I'm more of a cat person than I am a snake person, so the choice to bring a kitty into the clan was an easy one. Turns out, I love her. She purrs and purrs and does cute kitten-y things. Jacob was firm that she would be an outside cat, but then she started hurling herself against our bedroom at night and now we let her in sometimes.

The other day we found a mouse in the bottom of our trash can and so we put Molly in with the mouse and waited for her predatorial instincts to kick into gear. Nada. Twenty minutes later someone knocked over the trashcan and a terrified mouse scurried out, followed by an indifferent Molly.

At least she chases the chickens off the back porch.

And in chicken news: In December, I made the brilliant choice to raise three dozen meat chickens - our winters are mild enough that I figured it was as good a month as any. Then we had a string of some of the worst cold fronts since I was a kid. Keeping them alive was more challenging then I thought it would be, but they all survived. They're eight weeks old today and we plan to slaughter this weekend. So...come on over.

In September, Jacob built the kids a treehouse in a glorious old pecan that sits low in a water run-off into the creek. He didn't put a single hole in the tree which I find mostly admirable and slightly terrifying.

I sent the kids up there to color almost everyday before the weather got cold. It usually started well and ended with them dropping colored pencils through the gaps in the floorboards.

In November, the kids were playing in the treehouse - with a couple friends - and claimed they'd seen a coral snake. I didn't believe their story, but I grabbed a stick and started poking under the bush where they said it was. Jacob came out after me with a shovel and really started scraping at the leaf cover and...the kids weren't lying. It was remarkable how well that brightly colored snake had obscured itself. We looked at it for a long time after Jacob chopped it to bits. The first venomous snake I've ever seen out here.

So now we're going back to the cat shelter to pick out an Enchilada and maybe a Fajita - because no thank you.

In the early fall we were taking lots of evening walks around the property - Jacob cut a trail for us so it was manageable for the kids despite all the cactus and nettle and fire ants (#texasforever?) We'd pick wildflowers and look for tracks and listen for the squeaks of whistling ducks overhead. It was the best.

During one evening walk, the boys were down in the creek bottom when I heard some yelling and then up from the creek chugged this enormous pig. We're talking 400 pounds of black wild boar. It was exhilarating and terrifying and I pulled our two littlest towards me as the pig charged in and out of thickets in a wide ring around us and then out of sight.

We never had wild pigs here growing up - they can really overrun the place so nobody's happy about it - but my was it something to witness. The ground shook.

The pig story is already the stuff of legend. Romie mentioned it daily for weeks afterwards: The wild pig will not eat him. The wild pig can't come in our house because the wild pig don't has hands.

Jacob is trellising the vineyard this week and I will be doing some prep for our garden. My garden plan this year is to overcommit and MAYBE we'll get something more then okra.

So there you have it. And if you've hung in there for this entire post, then you should know about these Quick Reference Nature Guides (affiliate link) they routinely sell at grocery stores around here. A friend tipped me off and we love them. They're laminated and very sturdy, so the kids read them at breakfast and take them outside with us on walks. We have the bird, flower, butterfly, snakes, and track/scat guides. As soon as I see it at the grocery checkout I'll be nabbing the Central Texas Trees.

So that's my update. I'll try to check in sooner than later. You'll be wanting pictures of the chicken butchering.

Chickens, Books, Clothes

1)

First off: we have chickens. Buff Orpingtons. They all look exactly the same, which will probably be a comfort when they start dying.

2)
Jacob built me a cadillac of a coop that cost approximately three times more than we'd planned to spend. By the end we were both shaking our head at the ridiculousness of it, but I took comfort in the old economic wisdom: You can only have two out of the three: fast, quality, inexpensive.

So fast and quality it was, and now we have a coop. We just have to paint it. We're not sure if we should go really playful with the paint color or not. I'm inclined to paint it white, but we've painted a lot of things white in the last three years and maybe we should paint this...pink? Or barn red? Do a mural?

3)
We got the chickens from a breeder out near Luckenbach.

She had on thick rubber boots and the grisly edge of someone who lives alone in the hills with two donkeys and a bunch of poultry. She gave us the up down in our t-shirts and sandals and nordic offspring, but we were eager and we had cash, so she took us over to the chickens. In my memory she had a limp. But this is probably just a romantic exaggeration.

She had the jankiest of coop/pen operations - and made us feel like even bigger yuppies with our board and batten beauty smelling of sawdust back home.

She hadn't wanted to box the chickens up for us in the morning since we couldn't come and get them till the afternoon, so we got to put the "fun" in "free range" as Jacob Sr and Jake Jr chased down a dozen hens in 100+ degrees.

The breeder complimented Jacob on his chicken wrangling and we left with a dozen chickens which turned into a baker's dozen by the time we got home because it is very hard to count identical chickens.

4)
I've been wanting to homestead for so long, I cannot tell you how happy this all makes me. We have a bumper crop of okra, three hopeful watermelons, thirteen hens, and a rooster sired by "El Guapo" that the children quickly dubbed Mr. Guapito.

Dreams do come true.

5)
The kids are still acclimating to farm life. They visit the chickens in the morning. Then they ask to watch TV.


- 6 -
My book count is going up with the temperature, so here are some of the notables in case you need some recs. Sleeping Giants - futuristic science fiction - a fun, quick read. It was written as a series of interviews which I ended up liking more than I expected. I finally read A Man Called Ove which fell pretty flat for me even though I quite like curmudgeons and aspire to be one someday. I did enjoy Morton's The Secret Keeper - which was very engaging even if some of the plot points felt farfetched. Ann Patchett's State of Wonder was delightful. I thought it ended too abruptly, but I found it mesmerizing in a very Bel Canto way.

- 7 -
I bought some new clothes recently. This is blogworthy because even though I don't blog much, I shop even less. 90% of my wardrobe is a rotation of three tank tops and one pair of shorts (these),
because I'm lazy and stingy and indecisive. So consider this a cry for help.

I bought something called a "ruffle top" from Madewell. (It has since sold out, but it was like this one, just a little less...ruffly.) It was so cute online, but when I got it, my long torso struck again and my belly button waved the white flag.

I'm not anti-trend (hello homesteading!) but I also crashed when I tried the cold shoulder. I bought this top after Anna inspired me with her capsule wardrobe.

And...no matter how I tugged or shifted, I couldn't get it to sit right, so back it went.

In the end, this swing top from LOFT made the cut. It's about as bold as vanilla, but I love it. Also these huaraches which were the closest I could find to a pair I had when I was six and have thought about every summer since.

I still have some gift cards to get through, so maybe you'll get to hear even MORE about my shopping failures soon.

Have a super chill weekend!