Quick(ish) thoughts from today. CC doesn’t officially start back up until Monday. The older boys have physics, logic, literature and a whole ton of stuff that’s due on Monday, but the younger boys finish their math and reading fast and don’t have anything big to do. So today I gave them the Baker Creek seed catalog and told them they could circle three things they wanted to grow. I highly recommend it as a fun kid project. It’s like the toy catalogs of yore, but you can eat the toys and the kids (hopefully) learn a lot in the process. Of course Will chose strawberry watermelons, and Robbie chose some weird French pumpkin so who knows if those finicky things will actually grow in Ozarks where we have rocks instead of soil. I had intended to put down another layer of old rotten hay in the garden, but fertilizer prices and the haying season were straight out of Pharoah’s nightmare last year, so I’m pretty sure everyone is feeding anything and everything to livestock this winter.
Thanks to my sister and brother-in-law, we’re completely sucked in to all things Medieval England right now. They got us hooked on a (heavily edited) show about King Alfred, and so now the boys are stealing my leather and Jim’s plywood, making shields and shouting things like “I am Robert, son of James!”. I knew their old fashioned names were going to come in handy someday. It’s perfect because Medieval history is our focus this year and the dinner table, toothbrushing and all the times in between are filled with worries of Wessex and Northumbria and whether or not the Vikings will attack. (spoiler alert: they always do).
We suffered an attack from a border raid too. Only in this case it wasn’t the Danes, but a giant orange piece of machinery owned by the county. Normally it stays within its boundaries and trims the overhanging branches on the road, but this time it veered a little off course, ventured onto Ramsey land and annihilated our fence. We have a T-post completely decapitated in the prime of its life, and a mess of broken barbed wire tangled on the ground. I’m assuming no reparations will be forthcoming. We’ll just add it to the giant list of things to do.
Sometimes I wish there were Lego instructions on how to homestead instead of a thousand different small (and large) decisions to make. At least we still have a porch and rocking chairs, that seems to be the key to old fashioned Ozark living…all I need is a pipe?