Tuesday: even warmer!

Such beautiful sunshine!

I'll let the photos do the talking today. With temperatures at 63F (17C), we've beat another record. There is no time to sit still and contemplate phrases that best describe the high points. Seize the day! Go out, go out!

After breakfast that is.






(Java: "Seize the day? I seize every day. I just don't lay eggs. I leave that to the others.")






Ed and I bike to vote (primaries today) and we stop at Paul's Cafe to purchase pickles. Like old times (both the biking, and Paul's, and pickles)!






Heading back to the farmette: the clouds of yesterday are no more! (The view is toward the farmette. You can spot our silo.)






Snowdrop, after school, enjoying a cheesy croissant (that gaga purchased at Paul's for her) outside, looking at the lake and trying to decide if it's ice or water. (She tells me: it's water, gaga. But I detect uncertainty.)






Seize the day!






On the playground, watching an older girl work the swings.






I walk home with her, but she wants to stay outside! Her mommy joins us for a walk to another park, where, predictably, Snowdrop runs toward the swings.











I say nap time! She says -- I have to cook dinner. I win.






Of course, I never really win. Snowdrop knows I'm a sucker for her smile and willing to work long and hard to help her find a way out of her pickles.

Which brings me around back to the pickles. Our best in the Midwest pickles are just a few miles up the road. Don't you think that it's fortuitous that Ed and I live so close to something so ridiculously silly that means so much to us? 

Monday warmth

What can I say... The weather is not only my topic, it's everyone's topic here in Wisconsin. It's the talk of the town, the subject du jour, the theme that overrides nearly every other.

So I start with my afternoon temperature reading: 62F (nearly 17C).

There are clouds, yes and there will be rain. Our muddy courtyard will surely have us sinking ankle deep in dirt. But who can complain?!

Breakfast.






After that I play catch up. If yesterday was about being with Snowdrop and then working in the yard, today I'm faced with the inevitable round of house chores.

When I pick up the little girl at school, she is like a broken record: I want to go in the stroller I want to go in the stroller... Please!

It's not raining yet. Off we go. Our usual route -- to the playground and this time, she is happy to climb and slide and do all those things that really tell me that she is back in good weather outdoor play mode.






(What am I going to tell her when it turns cold again in March? Because I know we have flipped months and we will pay a price for this luxurious trip into the balmy air more appropriate for southern Spain than for the upper Midwest right now.)


At the farmhouse, Snowdrop happily falls into her regular play routines. Me, I tease her. I think she knows it's a tease because I don't look serious. But I'm not sure.
You put out such nice cakes for your wild animals. But I'm going to eat them, one by one!
No, gaga, they're not for you!
Oh but they're so yummy looking. Yeah, I'm going to help myself to all of them!
Those are for the animals!






She laughs then and I know she gets the joke.






The three of us draw and this is always wonderful. Snowdrop gets one page, Ed and I get the other. There are always instructions from her: which color to use and what should emerge from our sketches.






She appears satisfied with the final product.






Later, much later, I get ready to drive her home. She pauses to chat with the cheepers, to ride ahah's shoulders...











... and then we are at her house where I linger, fascinated by her love of music: the Dancing Queen is playing and she runs to get her dancing circle (whaaat? it looks like a frying pan cover to me!)... And now she is exuberant and my time with her ends for me on this high note.






I drive home as the sun sets and the mist rolls in.





So this is like a regular day, isn't it? There are chores. There's a little girl laughing, drawing, there's Ed looking serious at breakfast, less so when he is playing with Snowdrop, there's music, there is the dancing.

And yet, it hardly feels regular. The February warmth! So unexpected! Gentle and kind. Generous and beautiful. Giving a respite from other realities as they unfold alongside the everyday.

Sunday, lovely Sunday

I'm getting spoiled. In my mind, the beautiful, sunny and warm weather is here to stay. We can work outside, there will never be another mosquito to bother us, the plants will emerge, every Sunday will be as beautiful as this one!

Is there a problem with being overly optimistic?

Snowdrop woke up a bit on the early side, but she was in grand spirits and she let me tidy myself up before I went in to attend to her.

Her terrific spirits continued until the hour her dad came to take her home (and I'm sure beyond that) and so I had a morning of gloriousness pouring at me from all sides. If you expect drama or disarray -- forget it. It was a clear sailing type of day.

My post will be in three parts: the first will have several Snowdrop vignettes from her morning at the farmette, the second will be about working the farmette land with Ed, and the third will be a ramble on... well, I'll let it speak for itself.


Part I A Joyous Dance


She is up! I mean really up! From bed to high chair and let's not let that hold her back, she is UP!






Set free, she goes straight for the colored pencils. We draw. Snowdrop always gives me a page in her sketch notebook and keeps its twin for herself.

I ask her what she would like me to sketch. She says: candy cane! Say what? okay... She continues: and Snowdrop sitting in high chair holding candy cane!

I do not know where she gets some of her ideas.







We're holding off on our "real breakfast" until Ed wakes up . When he appears, she is so happy! Ahah is up! Ahah is up! Hi ahah!






Before we even sit down to breakfast, she wants him to join us in dance.






A happy, happy dance.






Ahah, you dance!
He never, ever tells her no.






Finally, our breakfast together.






And then Ed rushes out while the ground is still partially hard from the night frost. He wants to use the mini loader before we have total mud out there.  And Snowdrop... well, she's hooked: she wants to watch him work the big machine.  She wants to be outside!






Yesterday: scary loud monster machine! Keep me away! Today: exciting machine pushed by ahah to grow the flower bed. Let me watch!






Back in the courtyard, Snowdrop and I deal with the pesky cheepers, who want so much more attention now that their free ranging habits have clicked in again.






In the farmhouse again. She wants to ride her balance bike. I want my bike hat! Snowdrop, you don't need it inside. But I want my bike hat! Ask nicely. Please!






But in the end she sheds it. It's in the way when she rides the bike over to the table where "treats" are waiting for a "drive up" tea party!






I'll leave you with that photo. It's so.... Snowdrop.


Part II Teamwork


Even before I moved to the farmette, Ed and I had learned to work side by side trying to make something of the farmette land. I was very amused when he said today -- why don't we just turn this whole place into a hobby farm instead of clinging to the idea that it's a house with a big yard?
Wait, you mean you haven't been thinking of it as a hobby farm up until now? We're hobbyists. We experiment with various aspects of farm life!

I suppose it's how you look at what we do. Me, I've thought all along that we come up with endless new ideas, some thought out, others -- rather random and not altogether well construed -- and we ride out the wave of a growing season and witness what comes of it. Sounds pretty "hobbyist," no?

Here we are in a time release photo, February 19th, in shorts. Hobby farmers extraordinaire! (Be sure to read this as it was intended: with humor. I know we are quite amateurish in all that we do here.)






After working the front bed, chipping it, leveling it, making it ready for spring planting, we walk back to the young orchard. We planted nearly two dozen fruit trees back there and it has been such a hands-on experiment for us to watch them grow! For two years, the trees were attacked by deer. Finally Ed set to work on building cages for them. The trees are growing now, despite the early years of damage. We are so thrilled with their "can do" attitude!

We spend a productive hour pruning the branches, hoping that doing this on a warm February day is a good rather than totally foolish thing.


Part III A Walk Before Sunset


I spent just about all my childhood summers in my grandparents' home in the deep Polish rural countryside. When I was little, I mostly played in the yard of course. But very quickly, I looked beyond the fenced yard. The river, the meadows, the forests -- they became my playground.

And not surprisingly, I was granted a lot of freedom early on. In the (American) suburbs, you need your parents and their car(s) to get you places. In the more remote villages of Poland, we had neither the paved roads nor the cars to get us places. We walked. A lot.

My sister and I often teamed up with other kids from adjacent homes to do an evening walk just before the sun reached its final dip to the west of us. These walks were so important to my adolescent sensibilities that I remember to this day the light, the quiet, the color, the peace that we felt then.

And so you wont be surprised that when today, as Ed finished up work with the rental loader machine and I walked the rural roads, I was reminded of that special light, not February light, but evening light, nearly sunset light, Polish light, familiar light that seeped in with that beautiful predusk quiet that I associate so much with the fields and meadows of Poland.

(Fields just to the east and north of us...)






(Nearly sunset...)





So goodnight, Sunday. Goodnight crazy warm weekend. So bold. So beautiful!

a Saturday like no other

I'm sure we're toppling records: the sun is strong, the air is still and so very warm! It's 62F (17C) right now and I honestly contemplate joining Ed in shedding pants in favor of shorts. It would have been a February 18th photo of the two of us for the ages.

But hey, maybe we can simply take pleasure in having a day that itself is surely for the ages? It's so grand to look out and think spring thoughts and to imagine it all to be just before you!

The day is made special, too, of course, because of Snowdrop's weekend visit. Oh, these are going to be familiar vignettes because they tell a story already documented here during previous visits.

She likes to help with the pancake preparation...






She loves to eat breakfast with the two of us...






And she loves that I bought her her very own honey bear.











It is also no surprise that I want Snowdrop to spend lots of time outside. That's a bit of a challenge. She is supremely focused on indoor play.

Perhaps she's apprehensive about the rumbling machine outside. We watch Ed through the window as he moves the monster back and forth over the flower bed. In the end, the desire to do stuff with him trumps and she finds her jacket and heads out.






We join Ed on the front flower bed. I show her the stubs of spent flowers and point to tags that often have a wee picture of the flower that will be growing there again. She loves these identifiers and would very much like to take them all back with her!






Oh, but Snowdrop, that's last year's stuff! (A valiant attempt to distract her from that project.) Look at all the new space we're creating for this year's plantings!





I'd like to believe she's impressed.


So yes, she does enjoy our outdoor moments, but the smile is never more heartfelt than when we come back inside and eat play foods that she dishes out for us.






Still, in the afternoon, I try to coax her out again.

No, gagie. I want to play in the farmhouse.

But but but little one, there's this!






I sweeten the deal: do you want to go to the sheep shed to visit ahah (who is spending a few hours working on a new and improved hatch release for the chicken coop)?
Yes!

She has lovely minutes in his big black chair (purchased a long time ago to entice me to spend more time visiting him) studying a listing of invasive species that are endangering Wisconsin flora...






... then, predictably, she lures us both to his kitchenette -- which boasts nothing much these days, but does offer a spectacular view of the fields to the north of us.






On our way back to the farmhouse, we have a spirited visit with the cheepers. You perhaps may recall that Snowdrop has very real conversations with them. She's having one in the photo below.






And there is one new game we like to play these days. It's "can you find the statues that ahah's mom made?" The bronze figurines are scattered throughout the yard. Last I counted there were nine and she knows them all. But counting them off is great fun and giving them names, too, adds to the pleasure of searching them out.






I'll end the outdoor adventure portion of this day with one remarkable find. I think Scotch, our brown hen, is equally astonished. Crocus leaves! Can you see them?






Evening. Pizza making! Now if that isn't a reliable farmhouse thing! (She's sampling the tomato sauce here.)






(Always so happy to get her share. Always mushrooms and garlic. Always with lots of cheese.)






We watch a little TV -- always a nature show. This one about the exquisite smartness of cows, monkeys, cormorants...





But perhaps this weekend must be recognized for Snowdrop's incredible love of stories. She tells them to her various stuffies, or her duplo characters. But she also loves to listen. Read her a good tale and she will love you for life. We must have gone through a hundred reading sessions today.

Night time. Ed asks -- you exhausted?
Sure, but in such a good way.
Goodnight.
Goodnight.