In a movie only a Grandmother could finish, here lies the Olsen kids in 2012.  Tell me with these sights, sounds, you couldn't pretend you were at the beach.  Better yet...ALONE at the beach.

If this shore was 58.6 miles from your home, how often would you go?

This Mother's Day found me content and very blessed. I couldn't help contrasting from a year before:

• Baby coming out of NICU
• Whooping cough in my kids schools
• Me hiding from the world and Whooping Cough (in Idaho)
• Plus a deep underlying stress about paying an intensive care bill without insurance. 

This year I have 4 healthy beautiful kids, no hospitals, not even hospital bills! The Mister of the House made me a---what 6? egg omelet with cheese and ham. There were flowers, cards, earrings, back rubs, and texts and messages from family and friends in general celebrating Mothers! There was also intermittent gun shots coming from the backyard throughout the day.

  Come children! Let's practice your songs you will sing during church today... (I'm now the Primary Music Lady...aahh!)
 {Background: Crank. Crank. POP!}



Oh Rainbow Girl. You are such a gooood back-rubber. Thank you!
{Backbround: Crank. Crank. POP!}


  You see, I'm not the only mom feeling relief this spring.  Remember this gal?

She proved to be the ultimate symbol of Mother's Day.

But her nest wasn't fully hatched.  So her outdoor escort was short-lived as she rushed back to sit on the eggs still left.  We went about our business, and then:

The Mister was doing chores and saw a Magpie pecking the baby duckling and flinging it in the air!

Peck! Peck! Fling!

So that was met with our pellet gun and a:
{Crank. Crank.  POP!}

And wouldn't you know those damn magpies won.

So I thought of my Mother's Day last year, the stress and worry, and this year feeling blessed and holy.  And my heart yearned for Mothers dealing with loss this year: be it an empty nest, a cancer scare (Wendy? Prayers for you!), or a teenage punk not giving away free kisses anymore.

Thankfully, for now, I have none of these worries.  But the Olsen's are thinking of all the mothers that do (Wendy? Prayers for you!) and are crankin' our pellet guns in your honor.

** The biggest irony of our Muscovy Duck Saga is that with my new music calling in church, I came across this song that came through the children's magazine back in 1979.  It's called "Don't Kill the Birds" and I laughed and thought about how these are different times.   Or are they?

So in honor of what makes me a mother, here's a quick update on the mutts:




Leif is showing tell-tale signs of being a boy.  Ninjago Lego's, Spiderman, and Star Wars.  I found this little gem on my phone recently and thought it was adorable.

 Don't hit your brother!

Soccer!  He's doing so good and The Mister is having fun living vicariously through his son.

Isaac never stops talking.  Even while I was brushing his teeth, he was yak yak yakking away.  And yet, he will shrivel up and die before getting up and talking in front of an audience.


And Gideon can swallow a......fly? cat? dog? horse?  That's quite the gape going on old lady.

Even though we had a brown/gray Christmas- there has still been a winter hibernation going on. Nursing the boy has been good for hibernation, but bad for my hygiene and sense of accomplishment.

This week I attempted to stretch and yawn out of my cave. I must have an aversion to stupid rip-apart valentines that are just commercials for Nickelodeon and are just a paper trail harvest for a tiny piece of candy.

Small pile of candy on the left. Huge stack of impersonal, never-read valentine garbage on the right.

This past Monday, seven (Count them seven!), friends and neighbors that don't live in my house saw me:
*Bed-Headed
*shuffling in my nightgown
*viewing my very personal and triumphant competition with The Mister of the House as to who could get the hairiest legs (that would be me) as my nightgown stops about the middle of my shins.

On Sunday, I was literally on my back with insane lower lumbar spasms initiated by an early morning sneeze in the shower (lame right?). It's now Friday, and I'm up and going again (although very gingerly and with the aid of copious amounts of muscle relaxants).

One of my first acts performed after getting a back that could bend was to shave my legs. Today marks the ability to sit in a chair. I'm celebrating by updating this here blog.



I wanted to give a waning garden tour, even though I failed to get pictures of the garden in it's full glory. I can't believe it's harvest time already. Here's the baby steps we made in the garden this year.

Remember this dead patch in the spring?


We edged it with railroad ties, had some composted manure hauled in, and planted this.


This was our big heirloom year. I'm going to have to admit that I might be on the fence about some of this. Mostly because we ate approximately two ears of corn from our garden. I'm not sure if it was because of spring-time medical trauma, an insane wet and snowy spring/summer, or the fact that our corn was planted too late, but it wasn't a huge success in the corn department.

I did have a pretty garden though. I transplanted my teepee right in the middle, seeded a winding cosmos path to the teepee, and gave it privacy on three sides with the corn. On the south edge I planted heirloom zucchini, spaghetti squash, pumpkin, and peppers.



I thought it was a little ironic that I had pretty foliage but NO FLOWERS as of the first day of school. But now with half the plants zinged from frost, the cosmos is high and proud. I love to wind down the path and find an invitation to sit Pocahontas-style in the teepee.



Here's the view from both angles. As a weed barrier, and bug deterrent, I seeded marigolds all around the border. The pops of orange have been a delight this autumn (mostly because that's practically when they showed up too...I guess snow on Memorial Day will do that to you).

Here's that cute baby. He's six months old! He's like a cancer patient all hairless and pale. Isn't he adorable? He is off the charts for his heighth BTW.



Around the edge of the teepee we planted pole beans. About 3/4 of the way around I ran out of our heirloom seeds, so I pulled out leftover pole beans from last year. This is when I really started to wonder (and I have yet to fully research) about hybrid seeds, as they clearly outperformed the heirloom in terms of germination and growth. GMO seeds - lame! Heirloom - necessary and very cool. Hybrid - not sure if I'm going to categorize that in the lame department just yet.

I threw carrot seeds inside the teepee and treated it like groundcover. I wanted it to keep weeds out, and thought that perhaps it would be alright and keep rooting into that dirt even if the kids were playing in the teepee.



This kid is at the stage where he puts everything in his mouth! Ah I just love him!

Chomp. Chomp. Who me? What? Yes stupid goat. I'm staring at you! Our goats got out of the fenced area and went to town eating our...orchard! Out of 9 fruit trees, about 7 were chomped to bits! Damn goats.


Our Mellow Wood Pond experiment this year was Muscovy Ducks. Last year we had a ton of fun with the trout, but that pond dried up lickety split and we didn't have a fishing party before it happened.

The Mister of the House researched Muscovy Ducks and how they are AMAZING bug eaters. Love mosquito larvae and start munching it when their still little ducklings. What with flooding of the rivers and a HUGE mosquito year forecast, I was prepared to get eaten alive. But these ducks (we have 7) really did a great job. The mosquitoes were not bad in our yard or the pond. Plus look how gorgeous they are!



Baby has a drool rash, and older brother has a window in his mouth!



Happy Harvest everyone!

This summer while the chickens snuck into the garden,



and Rainbow Girl and I milked Betty the Goat,



on the milk stand built by The Mister of the House,

where if you kept a watchful eye you would catch frequent summer accidents averted by toddlers-with-initiative;


and even wobbly-headed newborns became bright-eyed infants before your very eyes (although you're not quite sure how),



...well while all of this happened at The Olsen's over this summer, the flowers bloomed and dangled pollen like candy-bait for kids.



Except pollen isn't bait for kids, just bees. And boy did they work!

Out of two hives we set up this spring, we harvested just ONE this week. The other hive swarmed, and we lost the majority of that hive (plus their delicious honey). But how could we be too sad when we pulled in this harvest?

Have a looksie!



We borrowed this honey extractor from a like-minded neighbor. What a blessing to have like-minded neighbors! The Mister of the House donned his special bee jacket, smoked the bees a bit so they would be nice, and pulled out 7 panels of honeycomb.

After shaving the tips off the combs, we placed the panels into this extractor and cranked the heck out of it!



I pulled some nylons off from my fungus-ridden feet and put them over the valve at the bottom of the extractor.



Those were clean, Gomer. What're you thinking?! But see all the waxy crappy that comes out with it? We used clean new stockings to serve as a filter.

We didn't have the specialty bee cutting knife, so for a second we worried that our cuts were so sloppy we would be wasting too much honey. So we set up more filtering over bowls, just to be prudent.

From 2011.FARM PICS

I think people used to chew this wax back in the olden days, which was probably a healthy alternative to chewing tobacco. Look how much there is! In the future we may try to make some candles or chapstick or something, but for now, it was enough of a sticky mess just to process the honey.

We had TWO pitchers that we hoped we could fill with the honey. Here's us happily filling our second pitcher. The progression of the slow but steady fill went like this:



so in the end we filled THREE pitchers full of honey, plus some here and there in extra bowls. All in all, we pulled out about 30 POUNDS of honey! Isn't it absolutely GORGEOUS?



The next morning we put out the sticky spent panels by the hives, and the bees went to work pulling in the wax and leftover gooey. What good little bees.



I totally facebook-bragged about this haul and heard all sorts of ego-inflating comments. In reality, this is truly the work of The Mister of the House. He is an AMAZING farmer guy. I am his biggest cheerleader! Love you dude.

How can school shoot a hole through summer's official tide while still being in the 90's outside? I'm still thinking of garden ideas, feeling like I just had a baby and it's still spring. Does this time-space formula get worse with each passing year? So, in order to maintain the chaos of information I am needing to record for my own sake and that of my family, I'll just pull up some snippets of our fleeting (now gone) summer. I'd say it has been a good one!

Here's my pasty-white children at Easter time getting ready for festivities at Grandma Cozy's. I was then homebound hiding from the world with a newborn, but as you will see in the next picture, the mutts did actually go out in the sun--and kid #1 and kid #3 turned delicious chocolate. Yum!



See! Chocolate.



More Chocolate. And wifebeater. With stains. And a buzz. The Mister cut his curls, which was tragedy #5 this summer.



Here with our two adorable Vanillas with their Chocolate Siblings. We finally blessed that baby boy when he was a ripe and chubby four months old!



Give it to me ladies. Aaaaawwwwwwwww....{sigh}.

Okay wait. This was end of summer. Let's go back. Remember pasty-white but still turning green Easter pic at the top? This was Memorial Day this year (AFTER Easter)!



Can you blame me for STILL thinking of garden ideas? The garden had a late start this year, what with all that rain, snow, and tragedy #1 and all.



Brrrr!



Here's a peek at the annual work party in the backyard (June I think?). I was still hiding a little, but you can see our garden boxes from last year, as well as a big DEAD rectangle where we tore up some more grass for MORE garden. I kept telling The Mister when he was having garden dreams last winter: "Ummm, you know I'm going to have a newborn right?".

But then we went to intensive care without insurance (more on that later) and decided: "Let's just try to grow more food and save some money."



I did manage to can some apricot jam. Gorgeous right?



Here's some old friends. As it would happen, we all had babies within about a month apart. We had some good lunch dates where a million kids were running around. I love these ladies!



We checked on the bees early in the spring. The honey was clear and sweet.



We pulled out this section of free-floating hive. Look closely and you can see the detailed architectural perfection. Each comb is staggered on the opposite side, so that it doesn't collapse as easy. Seriously amazing.

Oh, and one of our hives went AWOL and flew away. Lame!



I tried to be better about weeding this year, but my garden got most of my attention. At least the daughter and the neighbor girls harvested a beautiful flower pizza before all weeds went loose.





See the inner tubes. What with this wet spring, Mellow Wood Pond has been enjoying a full season to the point of neighbor kids coming to float around in the backyard. I have no problems as long as NOBODY DRINKS THE WATER.



Bake sales and cleaning the office with me this summer means Rainbow Girl earned $54 this summer. I, on the other hand, ate inventory and am getting fat{ter}.

yay :(



Aaahhh....




Legos! We are going nuts over them throughout this whole house.



Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday the water comes on and there's a good chance that Isaac will be found with his little buddy "No-one" = Owen.



And lastly, two years in a row the renowned local opera company has had a show featuring this guy. It's so cliche of what some seriously out of touch theatre man thinks will swoon the ladies right? I can hear every gay man's heart breaking a mile away when I see it. Ha ha!

With the anxiety of A) getting this pregnancy over; and B) seeing this gestating kid and whether or not your DNA lapped The Mister's in the gene pool, means that you can get sidetracked from the actual moment of things. The state of your family unit.

Right now, I have two little boys that are just over 2 years apart (a pregnancy milestone for me, but pretty standard for most Mormon Mommies). They share bunk beds, they play, wrestle, and are Jedis and Spidermen together. Older brother sounds out words and little brother copies and exclaims that he can read too!



Here's evidence of some father-son weakness. Dad played soccer as a kid. He takes older brother to buy soccer clothes because he is finally old enough to play on a city team. Dad decides to purchase two of everything (including shoes!) so these two little boys can practice together in the backyard. Little brother can't even sign up for another two years, but daddio is making sure Team Olsen is covered for now.

When yet another little brother shows up ANY DAY NOW! *hint* there will still be matching uniforms to giggle into, kicks back and forth, and the sharing of deep slumbering breaths from the other bunk.

But how about when older brother is 16 and middle brother is a crummy 14? Will 14 be buddies with new baby brother (who would be 11)? And will older brother feel the transition and get his feelings hurt (because he is my cautious and sensitive kid)? Will the bunks end up being for the two youngest boys down the road to solidify the new union? Or will baby brother always share a room with oldest sweetest sister?

When I hold this new baby can I finally admit that The Buddha Baby is growing up? Will he despise the loss of his cherished title, or will the satisfaction of being on Team Olsen suffice him instead (since baby just sits there and sleeps)?

This is the evolution of childhood, of families, and of motherhood (as you manage new sibling alliances and/or try to restore lost ones). This is the evolution that is felt in the bones, not viewed through a microscope.

Does this mean I think this kid will come into our home and be a hell-raiser and disrupt the family unity we have? Well, of course not!

But change is in the air.

The trees are starting to turn colors.

And my autumn is so beautiful right now.

With February nearly to a close, I had to document a couple things I actually accomplished, instead of just talked about or thought about.

Remember my kissing pictures series? Basically I am horrible at printing and framing pictures on my wall. I didn't have hardly any pictures of family, and wanted my kids to know who was who. So I decided I would take a picture of every auntie and uncle in our family to frame.
Catch one: they had to be kissing
Catch two: Black and white to try to look pretty

I decided I needed to do this back in 2007! This is why this is not a crafting blog people. It's now 2011 and I just finished my collages for family A (my side) and family O (his side)



Ta-da! Nothing major but a big accomplishment for me. Now I just need to finish the collage for our family (me, Mister, kiddos). Hopefully it won't take me another 4 years but anything is possible.

And lastly: I think Vanilla Wafer has asked if we could make a snowman for a solid 5 months. Sometimes it's too easy to put kids off...especially when you say "Okay buddy, there's a big storm coming in 2 days and then we'll build one" and said storm brings rain not snow. So this time we pounced on our recent snowstorm like a puma! A puma I tell you! And we built this guy after church last Sunday.



Too bad some punk teenage kids (I think) whacked his head off the same night we built him.

Grrrrrr!