Making Home – Little House on the Fairy Hill

The First of the Sunflowers

It’s August. While everything is still green and lovely, the prolonged stretches between rains mean that slowly that is changing although we did get a soaking, all-day rain a couple of days ago.

Last week we brought home eggplants and tomatoes from our farm share, along with the greens that have been so prevalent until now. We are officially moving into late summer.
We also brought home 5 gorgeous sunflowers picked by my lovely daughter. I love sunflowers – they are so magical.

We are having waves of heat interspersed with cooler days, with temperature swings of 50s and low 60s overnight to ramping up to the mid-90s occasionally. It’s been an odd summer, but aren’t they all now? One day it was so hot we could barely move, the next I had to change into sweatpants because it was downright chilly.

As weird as it is, we’re enjoying it.

We’re enjoying summer food, too – last Friday night it was too hot to cook so we made a salad and a charcuterie board. Detailed meal plans that make sure we have hot, home-cooked food during the school year begin to degrade at the beginning of summer, and by this point in time we are full-on winging it. The kids can spend extended days at their Dad’s, mealtimes become focused around when they woke up. For my daughter, now 16, this is likely her last summer of idleness before jobs and college prep consume her time. She’s bored now, actually, so that may come sooner than later.

The world seems to be descending into a kind of darkness we haven’t seen in a long time – Gazans are literally starving, the world’s efforts to make a whole people disappear. The war in Ukraine lingers with uncertain (or possibly terribly certain) outcomes ahead, and our own country has built a secret police that takes people away in broad daylight from their homes, cars and gardens. Cuts to food programs have a horribleness I can’t understand – in the wealthiest country in the world, in the wealthiest point in history, it’s shameful.

It has oddly reversed roles for Eli and I – normally I’m the political one but the more things worse, the more he monitors, his protection instincts firing on all cylinders, while I want to close in the walls of our sanctuary here at Sithean, just to keep us all safe. Which, of course, I can’t, that requires engagement.

And I do delight in our sanctuary while I worry. Sitting on the porch watching dragonflies and bees just doing their thing is one of my favorite weekend afternoon activities.

We’re just a couple weeks away from breaking ground in our endless efforts to make our dreams and reality the same for this place. It’s happening, and it’s going to be amazing. But a lot of stress to get there, for sure. Once we break ground, we’re off to 30-week odyssey that includes about 10 or 12 of those weeks without a kitchen. So we’re eating down the pantry and freezers as quickly as I can, as we have about 8 weeks left until we convert to grill, instant pot, rice cooker, air fryer and crockpot. I’m content we’ll figure it all out.

Mostly. I am stressed about it too, but the only way out is through.

Last week we added a second storage space down the road – we think we’ll need 3 by the time this is all said and done, but one thing at a time.. We’re just about done picking everything other than paint colors, with my daughter’s bathroom still the one room that’s forming up. If all goes well, we’ll close and pull the permits this coming week, and start in mid-August.

Our weekends are buried in preparation, planning, sketching every room and every floor. It’s very much fun and also mentally tiring, but in the end our art project of a home will come to life. And we’re ready, after all the long years of hoping, planning and thinking, it’s here.

Last weekend we finally took a day off and rested from the house planning We took the kids to the movies. It’s some of the last expensive fun we’ll have for a while.

And as we eat down the pantry and the freezers, I imagine meals will get more creative, but that will be fun.

So what are we eating this week?

Use up: lettuce, mangoes, peaches, cucumbers

Monday: Dinner out, a small celebration

Tuesday: Just Eli and I, so we made Jose Pizarro’s zucchini gazpacho – pretty good, I added ½ an onion. Liked it, probably won’t make it again. https://www.theguardian.com/food/2025/jul/08/courgette-almond-gazpacho-recipe-jose-pizarro

Wednesday: Garlic chicken, rice pilaf, salad

Thursday: Chicken Kebabs, rice, roasted broccoli

Friday: Just E and I, so bowl food

Saturday: Just E and I, tbd
Sunday: E’s enchiladas, refried beans, salad, mango and regular salsa

Monday: Chili & macaroni salad

I expect it to be a delicious week, busy in preparation, but also one of the last few of quiet before the transformation begins. Happy August!

Reimagining Sithean Part 1: The Economics

Mama Turkey Protecting Her Babies Outside Our Kitchen Window – June 2025

Many of you know I work in the mortgage industry, but I don’t really get involved with the originations side. That said, I have been a customer multiple times, but never in this way.

In order to renovate and add on to Sithean, we had to borrow money. A good bit actually. And to do that, after evaluating all of the options, we went for a construction loan. Heartbreakingly, we are giving up our 2.25% mortgage that was almost halfway paid off to do it, but it’s worth it in the long haul.

Sithean as it exists today is 1794 square feet, but very chopped up, with few closets, old windows, and very little, if any, insulation. It’s been moved twice, so there are old cut off chimneys in the basement, half of which is dirt and bedrock – one thing about Massachusetts, rocks are inevitable, and large shelves of stone part of the challenge to digging basements.

We’ve been putting money into the house since I moved in, and more since Eli joined us in 2019, but it quickly became clear that we were dropping pebbles in a Grand Canyon of needs. And as our family grew and the kids got older, we needed space, and if we intend to age in place, which we do, the existing configuration made that highly impractical, if not impossible. And we have nowhere for guests, children who rebound home, or any other scenario I see as reasonably likely in the future.

We spent years, and lots of money with a local architect and just never got to a point where we had a design that worked. We parted ways, frustrated, poorer, but much wiser and took from it the lesson that we needed to be better advocates for ourselves out of the gate, and we have. We had ceded control to the ‘experts’ but the experts aren’t us, and they don’t have to live here.

So that’s lesson #1, and if you ever do decide to renovate, make sure that you don’t get your needs lost in anyone else’s ideas.

We were so at a loss on where to go next after that we even put the house on the market after that, but circumstances and love of this place overrode the idea of leaving, and so here we have stayed. We belong here, that’s clear to us. But renovating and adding on continued to elude us because of the cost. No matter how hard we saved up, escalating costs for renovations and high interest rates outpaced us.

Finally we hit a point where renovating has become a real possibility. It’s going to cost far more than we ever dreamed, and we’ll still have some finish work to do ourselves – more on those projects later – but in the end we’ll have a home with space, storage, modern heating and cooling, the kitchen we’ve been designing for years, and a wall of doors to the backyard from our new Great Room.

We’ve finalized the budget with our builder, put deposits down with them and the kitchen cabinetry people, and started holding slabs of stone for countertops. It took a while to get to a budget that was manageable for us and got us most of the things we prioritized, so long that we lost a rate lock with the bank. But this time, getting it right is our priority, and figuring out a way to do it is job one.

One thing that shocked even us was the sheer amount of money, in cash, that is required of you in a construction loan. Plan for all the initial deposits to be you, to have a 10% reserve (although equity is sometimes permissible) of the full cost of construction, that every light fixture and piece of cabinet hardware was us we knew, but not so many other of the costs – if we wanted something we found on Etsy, our kitchen backsplash for example – it was on us. All the appliances. And so on.

Even with borrowing most of the money, our table stakes will end up being well into 6 figures.

And, I reiterate, we are borrowing most of the cost to boot.

Somewhere along the line the construction and renovation business has become a high net worth game, and the average homeowner is locked out of anything over and above either a % of their equity, or smaller dollar home repair loans, or signing on to a builder special.

Which I find interesting, because the median age of the US housing inventory is 40 years old, with half of the homes being built before 1980, and 35% built before 1970. The average age of a US home is between 42 and 51 years old, according to Statista, a statistics gathering site.

That means the houses are old, and in need of upgrades, serious ones.

And I’m not talking about marble bathtubs. I’m talking about heating, cooling, insulating, sealing out rodents, and ensuring that roofs and stoves and other items are up to code, of which we have learned, is based on 2015 standards, so it’s already 10 years old.

But who can afford to do something like what we are? Not a lot of people. And who can afford even to bring their house up to standard? Even less. It’s hard to tell how many people are considered ‘cost-burdened’ by their mortgage, but the statistics say it’s a lot, and here’s what I observe anecdotally in my area. Since 2020, a conservative estimate says that housing prices in Essex County, MA where I live have risen over 42%. That means a house that was $400k in 2020 is now $568k. But in practice, at least in my area, it’s quite a bit more than that. Our home alone has increased in value by a whopping 60%.

I would not be shocked to learn that a huge chunk of Massachusetts homeowners under the age of 50 would be considered house poor. Overall in the US, it’s estimated that 27.4% of homeowners are cost-burdened but in April of this year the data suggested well over 34% of Massachusetts homeowners are cost-burdened. That’s over ⅓ of every household in the state I live in that has an overwhelming mortgage or rent payment.

So back to the aging home inventory – if you can’t afford to tap your home equity because of the payments, assuming you didn’t buy near the height of the market and really have any equity at all, and you don’t have the cash that is required to start a construction loan…you can’t do much.

Add to that for those of us who already owned our homes the increased value has given us a great deal of equity, but the corresponding rises in taxes has done a fair bit to offset that on a monthly basis. Insurance rates are higher too, relating to both value and the volume of natural disasters that are occuring on an annual basis. Just in our own situation, since I refinanced in 2021, my monthly escrow payments have driven my house payment up over $1000 per month without making a single capital improvement.

No, that’s not a joke.

Add all those things together, and you start to notice things – even amongst the pristinely maintained houses of upper middle class and wealthier communities, you start to see things like houses that need a paint job, or roofs that have a lot of wear, or fence sections that need to be replaced just sitting empty or leaning over or drooping porches. You still see renovations and builds, but you also start to see that cars are just a little older than they used to be too.

Because all that extra tax, insurance and inflation money comes from somewhere. And even amongst the well-heeled, the weeds are starting to show. Don’t get me started on what that means for everyone else while we’re hacking away at the limited social safety net that exists here in the US.

So the economics of the housing market – especially for an armchair economist like myself are pretty fascinating, and it really is the rise in overall wealth that is keeping a lot of things moving, which is kind of worrisome in itself. Because that too, raises the price, and the bar for the rest of us.

For example, our builder, who is pretty chill, initially told us that we should plan on $90k per bathroom.

Hard no.

But what that comment tells us in simple terms is that those who are building are spending that kind of cash. Those numbers don’t just come out of nowhere. And I would guess that the sheer amount of money required just to come to the table deters quite a lot of people.
Not enough for the system to change yet though.

It is fascinating, and I’m going to keep coming back to the economics of this. Because I think we’re teetering on the edge of something breaking pretty hard. Which makes it intimidating to take this on, but we’ve waited and waited and saved and planned and it’s just time. So we’re taking deep breaths and taking the plunge.

Somewhere around late April of next year, the vast majority of the work should be done. And in some cases, our work will be just beginning.

A Hazy Shade of the Future

It’s lovely here, all green and lush with everything in bloom. Which is due to the near-endless rain this spring. Actually it’s raining again as I write this, I think the 13th Saturday in a row. And it’s only just started warming up – it has been cold too. But summer is starting to roll in despite itself, and maybe that means that the chill is waning.

Sithean in the spring is a wonder to behold. Everything seems to bloom all at once, and stark and mud becomes pink and white and flowering and it’s hard to believe that anything will go wrong.

I mean, as long as I don’t read any news.

I’ve been gone a while, not because I lost interest in blogging but because I’ve just had so much going on in real life there’s been no time or room to write. I’ve been doing my best just to stay afloat, to keep the house clean, groceries bought, food cooked, laundry done, and kids where they need to be. Some of that is burnout. I’ve never been so tired in my life other than when my kids were sleepless babies, but this time the tired was me unable to think one more thought, remember what I was trying to accomplish, or figure out what I was supposed to make for dinner.

On that last, a combination of instant pot, helpful husband who makes great meals and a lot fewer ‘recipe’ meals and a lot more of ‘here’s these things I put in a pot that are cooked’ meals. Generally these were things i wouldn’t advertise on my blog as being meals, per se, but it’s normal mom stuff. A carb, a protein, a sauce or thing to hold it together, some vegetables.

No one starved although my son did grow so, so tall and is still growing.

But as the garden springs back to life, so do I. Or at least, I’m trying, the burnout seems to be waning, although it’s not completely gone. I’m still not totally on point yet, but I’m going to fake it til I make it.

After nearly 9 months of winding down a business line, which was both an experience I wouldn’t trade and really, really challenging and emotionally exhausting, I finally was able to start a new job, a new thing, and be back to building things.

We are all healthy, and we are finally moving forward with our renovation and addition – we’re still in the planning stage, but we think we’ll be able to break ground in late July. It’s likely over the next year that this blog focuses more on our renovation and addition, because that will be the thing that will take up all of our time and money.

So, so much more money than I had hoped, but we finally aren’t waiting any more, just rolling the dice. It’s a terrifying leap off of a cliff, but I also think it’s more than time. While we’re not getting everything we wanted, we are getting most of it, and it’s exciting. Also exhausting to look at infinity variations of design, but that’s exciting too, make no mistake.

It’s been an eventful 6 months, and it looks to be a more eventful 2025 and 2026, but that’s ok. May specifically gets filled with kid activities, shows and performances, and lots of end-of-year related items. Early summer, where we are now, with everyone having finished school yesterday, and me being surprisingly emotional as my son graduated from elementary school and I realized that chapter of our lives was done. The next few weeks are filled with chilling out, camp and this year, for my daughter her first overseas trip sans parents with a leadership organization for 10 days. We’re nervous, it’s coming fast, but we’re excited for her too.

And we’re excited for us.

November Stockpile

About 5 minutes after I published my last post, our schedule changed. I had managed to prep the refried beans and made some hard boiled eggs, but I didn’t get to the cookies, and we punted on the Onion Pakoda, as badly as I wanted them, because we ran out of steam, substituting some samosa from the freezer instead.

And then the kids schedule changed around as well as their Dad had to delay time with them. The good news is that we were able to shift our plans and still cook in. Well. One night we caved and bought pizza dough and cheese because we had no plan whatsoever, but we managed otherwise.

I wrote last time about spending an astounding amount on food this month. Every November, our food spending skyrockets. My total for the last post was $805, but if I subtract the non-food items, it was more like $645. But then it went a higher still. Our Walden Local Meat share was delivered, we project to spend about $18 on milk for the rest of the month (a little over a gallon a week is what we use most of the time), we’ll need a few more groceries – and then there’s the Thanksgiving cheese.

All in, our current tab was $939, and I expect to close the month out over $1500.

Zoinks. Not going to lie, that gives me the shakes.

But. Reasons.

First – a disclaimer. We are blessed as heck and able to invest in our bellies, not everyone is. My endless gratitude for our ability to stock up every November.

Second – a disclaimer. This is food we will eat for quite some time, not just this month. But the deals are now, so into the pantry and freezer it goes.

Also, this includes some more expensive event food. I’m on for a bunch of items for a 30+ person Thanksgiving dinner. And at this time next week, we’ll have every piece of our Christmas dinner other than greens and potatoes. Turkey, cranberries, stuffing, you name it – in the cabinets or the freezer, because we are having a turkey dinner, and the time to buy that stuff is now.

I do not shop like this all the time.

For the first 3 months of each year Eli and I cut back pretty hard – pantry eat down, and only buying what we need for the week. I expect my grocery bill for January-March, including our meat share, to run $1800 or less for the 3 months, or an average of $600/month, loaded towards the back. I will caveat that by saying we may pre-pay for our Walden Local share this year, which affords us a discount overall, which would be $1800 up front. That’s a full year, and it would reduce our meat bill by over $600 for the year.

Third – a disclaimer. I didn’t do a great job of tracking our costs or using things up in 2024. We started 2024 with Eli gravely ill, me juggling work, kids, house and animals and we ended it with me juggling the equivalent of 2.5 full time jobs as the division I work in got sold, and I have been overseeing the transition, a 537-person team, and my day job. Add to that our house and 2 busy kids, family, friends, the fact that both our refrigerator in the house and the one in the garage died this year and had to be replaced, and I feel lucky this year to have a handle on anything.

Despite that, we’ve done better this year on food management than in several of the past years.

In 2025, I’m going to track my food costs by category rather than overall to see if that helps get our costs down. We’ll have a few savings, in that it’s our neighbor’s turn to pay for the summer CSA ($675 annually spread over 2 families and 20 weeks, which works out to $16.88 per family per week for tons of produce and flowers). For example, I put the dog’s food and treats in our grocery budget right now, but not chicken feed or bunny food and treats. So I’ll carve that out.

I also want to know what we really spend and use.

We have reason to believe that we’ll finally be renovating in 2025, which we’ve postponed for 4 years because of a) a pandemic b) a monstrous tax bill from closing down my business that blew a hole in all of our plans for almost 2 years and c) some real job instability on my part and that meant I would much rather postpone than be in a bad financial position.

That means that we’ll need to eat down literally everything in the house, something that makes my ‘a stocked pantry is an emergency fund you can eat‘ wiring get a little anxious. So planning our grocery bill for next year is a little wonky in that I know we’ll spend less, I’m just not sure exactly how it’s going to play out. I literally hate running out of food, but I’m going to have to learn to live with it.

Oddly, eating things down initially puts more stuff in the freezer than it takes out. An example is those refried beans I made last week. While it did get rid of 2 mason jars of dried beans on the counter and give me 5+ meals worth of refried beans, it added them to the freezer, which got much more full as a result. Similarly, I periodically batch roast, skin and freeze acorn and butternut squashes so they don’t go bad, but that too is freezer space.

So, with all that said, why November for a stockpile?
1. Our winter share typically has 4 pickups starting in November and the volumes are pretty high for veggies. Some of the items last until early spring. Also, while this year we got our farm stock up in late September, most years we go around now. So we are inundated with winter veggies such as squashes, sweet potatoes, beets, carrots and onions.
2. Food prices are often rock bottom for the holidays. This is the time to buy sugar, flour, and other baking ingredients. I buy stuffing mix and other Christmas turkey dinner accompaniments now, because the discount won’t be as good in December when I need these things.
3. I’m a squirrel. There’s something about November that makes me want to tuck food into cabinets like nobody’s business

So we go into the winter like the pioneers of old, with a larder stocked with all the things, and then eat it down. Unlike them, if I run out of wine or coffee, or II lack something, I can go get it. I live in the country but there’s really good sushi about 1.5 miles away. Deprived, we are not.

But then it’s time to eat it all, and eating things down through the winter feels good. I delight in it, actually. It’s fun to work our way through that 50-lb bag of onions. It’s fun to meal plan starting with ‘Ok, so what do we have?‘. It’s marvelous to pull pesto out of the freezer to top our homemade pizza, and smell summer, knowing it will come again.

Some people shop and cook weekly and that really works for them, or even shopping and cooking more often. Others cook once and eat all week. We’ve tried both methods, and neither works really well for us – we just are always on the move, and because of that, having a very stocked house helps.

As the day wound down, I had prepped bulgogi for the freezer, made a double batch of turkey meatballs for Monday’s, our Sunday dinner, and taken the mushrooms I didn’t use and sliced and sauteed them. Once that was done I popped them in the freezer for later use.

A note about those sauteed mushrooms. I used to never use up mushrooms fast enough and ended up composting one too many of them. Then I started buying frozen sauteed mushrooms because I didn’t want to waste any fresh ones, but there are some recipes that previously frozen or dried mushrooms won’t work for. Then one day I was looking at some unused mushrooms and had an aha moment. Now this is how I deal with excess mushrooms.

So what are we eating this week?

Use up: cantaloupe, strawberries, beets, a random rutabaga I have, salad veggies
Lunches: LEFTOVERS, baby. All the way.

Sunday: Instant Pot Beef Bourguignon, a house favorite, warm naan, and salad with lettuce that miraculously came with our winter share. I almost left out the potatoes, but at the last minute I remembered. Whoops.

Note how I cleverly crammed the potatoes in the over-full pot.

Monday: Spaghetti and turkey meatballs, homemade bread, roasted broccoli

Tuesday: Kids are with their Dad, Eli and I have what we affectionately refer to as Bowl Food, usually a piece of salmon over a salad, or couscous, or cauliflower rice with some veggies mixed in. I love, love bowl food.

Wednesday: We have a lot of Thanksgiving food prep, so Eli will cook something simple. Could be as simple as Trader Joe’s Orange Chicken and rice, we’ll see.

Thursday: Thanksgiving. ALL the foods. All of them.

Friday: Recovery from all the foods, the kids are with Dad and Eli and I often go out on a date rather than cook. Possibly my pants still fit me, possibly not.

Saturday: Roasted beets and maybe bowl food again. Or soup.

Sunday: Chicken Souvlaki Bowls and probably I’ll start baking cookies. I bake a lot of cookies in December.

And then it will be Monday again. And so it goes.

Flexibility: My Secret Weapon

(For meal planning and life in general)

It is rare that our meal plans work out exactly the way we plan it. As the kids get older, their preferences for whether they spend the night with their Dad or Eli and I play out differently, and we are, and have always been pretty easygoing about the co-parent schedule. Life happens. No one feels like cooking what we planned or we run out of time.

I have learned over the years not to view meal plan changes as failures of my planning skills. They are simply a part of the mix – we end up needing to use something up, we have less or more people at the table than we though we would. Or something. The ability to be flexible is really, really important, as important as having the meal plan itself.

So when we got to Friday the 2nd week of February with chicken broth for chicken soup with rice in the crockpot, pizza dough cold-proofing, and the kids deciding that they wanted to hang with Dad for the weekend, in no small part due to a game they wanted to play there, I mixed it up. We postponed the soup and pizza to busier nights with kids and I pulled out my list of recipes.

Pizza dough and broth both freeze well.

We had skipped our meat share delivery in January for our planned pantry and freezer eat-down that never happened because life did, so when it showed up early in February, we were still bursting at the gills. And honestly when I take something out these days, I seem to put something in – this alone week I added butternut squash and sauteed mushrooms to the freezer, despite removing meats for meals – so it’s still pretty full!

I took out a pound of chicken and decided we should try a modified version of Crispy Chicken Ceasar Salad – modified because I neither had anchovy paste nor cabbage, but I did have a bag of slaw mix and lots of kale. I also added a whole avocado and some fresh basil to the dressing, because I could. And we didn’t have any bread so I toasted walnuts instead, with a little oil and Everything Bagel seasoning. I substituted fish sauce for anchovy paste at a ratio of 1:1.

It was honestly one of the best dinners I’ve made in a while. And listen, while it was not super frugal, it was decently frugal - because you slice the chicken breasts really thin, I got 8 cutlets of varying sizes out of it. The slaw mix was $3.49, the kale $1.40 (I used half a bunch and massaged it with a little olive oil and lemon juice to make it more tender, next time I would use the full bunch at $2.79) and the chicken was the splurge at $8/lb for our meat share. Call the dressing ingredients $3.50 and we’re talking about $16.39 for a meal we could not stop eating and left us with a teensy bit of salad, some more dressing, and 2 small chicken cutlets left over. I used all things I had.

But did I go get more slaw mix so we could eat it again? Yes, yes I did.

So what are we eating?

Use Up: avocados, sweet potatoes, squash, eggs

Lunches: Tuna Salad, Leftovers

Earlier this month:
Sunday: Baked Sage Chicken Meatballs with Parmesan Orzo. Except with ground turkey, and using mostly dried herbs rather than fresh because that’s what we had. Recommended by Ross Yoder over at Buzzfeed, who also recommends that amazing Chicken Ceasar I was raving about. I really like most of the things he recommends.

I really like meatball dishes, and I especially like it when I can make a double batch and freeze them for later. Which is precisely what I did. I’ll be honest. Good, but not to so good we’re rushing to have it again

Monday: Chicken soup with rice and popovers, the inevitable gift of the roaster chicken we had the prior week.

Tuesday: Just Eli and I, so salmon, roasted sweet potatoes and sauteed spinach with garlic, olive oil and salt.

Wednesday – Valentine’s Day: I found fresh heart-shaped ravioli and heart-shaped macarons at Costco, and what can I say, I’m a sucker. I made a meat sauce and a salad to go with.

Note: I used to be somewhat cynical about Valentine’s Day, but then Covid happened and now I am all in for all the celebrating. Go ahead, make up a holiday, we’ll celebrate it here.

Thursday: Thursdays my daughter had her riding lesson, and then usually spends the night with her Dad. Since it’s just Eli, our son and I, we went for super duper simple, Trader Joe’s Orange Chicken, Dumplings, Edamame and Rice. Total prep time – 5 to 7 nanoseconds. Especially good because Thursday was the stop between 2 celebrations/major dinners that week.

Friday: My daughter’s birthday, we got Sushi for dinner and had cheesecake

Saturday: The kids were with us last weekend, so I went heavily to their preferences. On Saturday we had the crispy chicken Ceasar again, but I made butter noodles and some sliced veggies for my son.

Sunday: Beef Bulgogi that I had marinated and frozen earlier, rice, roasted broccoli

This week

Saturday: My son had a friend over, and we had Instant Pot Beef Bourguignon, a house favorite (it’s even better as leftovers the next day), and popovers with some sliced cukes, tomatoes and avocados. While I don’t make this recipe often, as it’s not a very frugal meal to make, it’s really good, and one of the more-requested winter meals.

Sunday:

Breakfast was our favorite pancakes, bacon and strawberries

Chicken Souvlaki Bowls with Garlic Fries only I’ll use both sweet potatoes and potatoes. And I’m going to make this salad for Monday night so I peeled, cubed and roasted some butternut squash in preparation.
I’ll roast some broccoli to go with tonight’s dinner, since we have lots. I made tzatziki as well.
To help with meal prep, I’ll make some barbeque sauce, pickled onions, and maybe some kind of sweet for my son’s lunches.

I started prepping food and the meal plan and realized that the grocery delivery folks had brought me split chicken breasts instead of the boneless skinless variety. I had an emergency stash of boneless skinless chicken tenders that I had been saving for a larger meal – Costco packages being enormous – and took those out to thaw, and changed up my menu. As I also peeled and seeded the butternut squash for Monday’s salad I realized I was only going to need a little less than half, so I sliced the rest and put it in the freezer.

Why do I do so much cooking on the weekend? Because if we didn’t, we wouldn’t have lunches, snacks or sweets.

Monday: Mondays are busy – the kids go back to school after vacation, my daughter has her skating lesson, and there’s not a lot of time to cook. I had been planning sliders, but instead we’ll have have Chicken and Rice Circa 1975 with the split chicken breasts, the Ina Garten salad referenced above and sliced avocado and cukes.

Tuesday: it’s just Eli and I we’ll make Lentil Sausage soup with leftover homemade bread. Leftovers keep me fed during the work day for a few days, after the beef stew and leftover chicken run out.

Wednesday: Another busy day here, but we have some pizza dough in the freezer, so BBQ chicken pizza and cheese pizza in the oven. I reserved a couple of chicken tenders from Sunday’s meal to go on the pizza.

Thursday: Salmon bowls over the last of the Fregola pasta (this stuff is not super frugal but it’s so good) with spinach and whatever other veggies we have.

Friday: the kids will likely go to their Dad’s, so Eli and I will try Crispy Black Bean Tacos with some guacamole

Saturday: If no kids again, we’ll make a Massaman Curry Stir Fry over cauliflower rice. Usually we use chicken, but we might switch to shrimp, since i have some in the freezer and we’ll have had a lot of chicken this week.

Sunday: the kids will come home again, and we’ll make homemade bolognese and have a pasta dinner. And we’ll prep something for Monday.

Do I think we’ll hit every meal I plan? Nope. But that’s ok. We’ll adapt.

Autumn Colors

Somehow more than 2 years have passed since my brother-in-law died. I still can’t quite wrap my head around a world without him in it, but the grief is different than when it was fresh. Tempered, not as overpowering, but still a weight in my chest cavity. Still a hole, even if not as overt. Every time we go to the cemetary or pass it while driving, it’s still just wrong that he’s there, and not home with this family.

I guess that never changes when you lose someone too soon.

This past week brought fresh grief, when a colleague and friend lost her adult son to lung cancer, and Eli and I grieved with her at the wake and funeral. Never a smoker, he somehow got one of the worst cancers you can get.

I’m almost done with business travel for 2023 – one more trip, and I’ll be grounded for the following 60 days, something I’m thankful about. Business travel is a pro and a con – we definitely use the airline miles, hotel points and rental car free days I accrue for our vacations, and those definitely lower costs for us, but the time away from home is hard to get back. And honestly, it’s pretty tiring.

Home feels extra wonderful right now. Last week on Saturday it poured, and other than some housework, and my oldest helping at the school play, we really didn’t have anything pressing to do. A roaster chicken went in the crockpot to become chicken soup for dinner, we had all the components for popovers to go with it and there was a bunch of salad stuff to use up.

Rare are the days not full of demands on our time so we were reveling in the idea that we could just do very little.

Our CSA came to an end past week, and next week the Winter Share starts up. We decided to do one more stockpile for the winter, and had done that a week ago, with everything from a lot of rice to dried black beans, several blocks of tofu – tofu freezes well, so we toss it in the freezer and Eli often makes us crispy tofu bites in the air fryer, and so on. Butter, shredded cheese – all straight into the freezer for later use. We also did a bit of holiday shopping while we were at Costco and made sure we had frozen dumplings in the freezer in quantity – we love to make our own, but these are comfort food for the kids.

All that’s left now is our stock up of onions, sweet potatoes and squashes in Upstate NY next month, and then we’ll be eating down our stockpile other than buying for holiday dinners and the small amounts of groceries we’ll need each week – milk, fruit, things we run out of.

*Eli with 2 of the giant squashes we grew*

The garden is still producing, at least for a few more days. We harvested several giant squashes as well as a colander full of Tomatillos – our first hard freeze is due on Wednesday night, so I’ll be picking the last of everything today and tomorrow.

So what are we eating?

Last week’s Menu

Use up: Ricotta cheese, very ripe avocados, lots of potatoes and apples

Saturday: Chicken soup with rice, popovers, and a salad using the last head of lettuce from our CSA this year.

To the salad I added some cherry tomatoes that were on the reduced rack at Market Basket, our local independent grocery store but still good ($0.68 is the best price ever for a pint of tomatoes after the growing season ends), toasted pumpkin seeds, chopped up baby cukes that were nearing the end of their days and needed using, a cut up half of an apple my son didn’t finish slices from yesterday and I stored in the fridge, avocado, a sprinkle of parmesan, and a simple dressing of salt, pepper, lemon juice and olive oil. Best salad ever. And it used up a lemon that was ready to go.

Pro tip: Once you have juiced the lemon, use the halves to scrub out your sinks. It’s a natural cleaner/disinfectant and it makes everything smell wonderful.

Sunday: We had leftovers for lunch as the ravioli lasagna from Friday night needed to get eaten up. Dinner was intended to be homemade Ramen with shaved steak and slivered veggies in creamy miso broth but my son made himself spicy ramen for lunch, so instead I made Creamy Miso Pasta with the shaved steak, the last of the scallions, and I roasted some brussels sprouts to go with. It was not super popular – Eli and I liked it, but the kids were not fans.

*Lemon Blueberry Ricotta Bread – Photo by Eli 5 Stone*

I also made Snickerdoodles and a several loaves of Lemon Blueberry Ricotta Bread in an effort to use up the excessive amount of leftover ricotta we had, some summer blueberries in the freezer, and the last remaining lemon. And because it was niece and goddaughter’s 18th birthday, and my parents earlier this week and in just a few days. After a round of birthday drop offs of gifts and baked goods, I returned home to make dinner for my crew.

Monday: Monday I ate a bit of leftover chicken for breakfast with some cut up honeydew melon and a few of the leftover brussels sprouts. I packed a sandwich and some homemade cookies, fruit and goldfish for my son

Tuesday: I uh…know Eli made something. I just forget what it was and I forgot to write it down.

Wednesday: Eli made salmon with sliced tomatoes and avocado and an amazing carrot soup with homemade croutons.

Thursday: I had dinner out with my sister, a rare treat, and Eli and my son ate a frozen pizza (although they did heat it!)

Friday: I made rice, homemade pot stickers and roasted broccoli. My oldest had a riding event, so dinner had to be made before we left at 5:30, but I ate when we got home.

Saturday: It was a full day of chores and Eli and I managed to squeak in the last canoe ride of the season due to the warm weather. The temperature is going to drop so we tried to take advantage. Then we took our son to the Trunk or Treat Halloween event in town, dropped him at Dad’s and tried a new-to-us restaurant in nearby Newburyport, MA.

This Week’s Menu:
Use up: Spinach, brussels sprouts, kiwi fruit and strawberries

Sunday: Breaded fish and crab cakes, slaw with apples and scallions in it, Sweet Potato and Kale Salad, tater tots from the freezer. The target for the first couple of days of the week is always to have lunch leftovers for a few days.

I also started bread dough, made more Salsa Verde, made chocolate chip cookies – the treat for the week – and prepared Parmesan crusted chicken for Monday dinner. A few of the crusted chicken tenders went into the freezer to be healthier fast-food options, and a few of the cookies as well, something I’m trying out to see if it works.

Monday: That chicken that we made on Sunday is the main course, just quickly reheated with the fresh-baked No Knead Bread that will have been rising since Sunday morning. With that is salad. I deliberately didn’t buy bread this week so I can also use it for my son’s ham sandwich lunches. For us, lunches are leftovers.

Tuesday: Halloween Dinner in a hurry – spaghetti with green food coloring added to the water and meatballs with bean ‘eyes’, garlic bread and sauteed spinach, with a sliced cucumber for my son, who doesn’t like spinach.

Wednesday: Tired day dinner of Trader Joe’s Orange Chicken, rice in the rice cooker (one of my all-time favorite & most used kitchen appliances), dumplings and whatever veggies we need to use up. We have some Shishito peppers to roast with olive oil and salt, and we’ll probably do something else to go with.

Thursday: My daughter has her riding lesson, Eli will make dinner and we’ll all collapse early.

Friday: Our first winter share pick up. My ex has a new job, so the schedule with the kids is in flux. If we have them, roasted veggies and Chicken Leg Quarters Circa 1975 over rice, if not, probably fish tacos with the fish cooked in the air fryer.

Saturday: The reverse of whatever we ate on Friday. Roasted veggies usually last us a couple of days.

Sunday: I’ll be preparing for a work trip, so the target will be simple and something that leaves leftovers. I’m thinking Crockpot Chicken and Dumplings.

And that will bring us to almost the middle of November, which hardly seems possible.

Morning Meal Prep

I was up before dawn on my son’s 11th birthday, something I often am, regardless of birthdays or not. This time was different though, because after 3 weeks of straight work travel followed by nearly a week lost to a bout of Covid, I felt like I was finally re-entering my life fully after having been gone for a while.

Literally and figuratively – not just the travel, but then 5 days of isolation from my family upon my return. My closet got organized as a result, and surfaces cleaned off once I started feeling better, but the absence was hard.

So as soon as i could I started throwing myself back into family life. And just in time, too.

I’m a huge believer in prepping food early in the morning, and prepping food for the week. We had already made batches of clam chowder and chili this week, which keeps us in lunches for quite some time.

We had a busy birthday day of celebrating ahead, and timing was going to be everything. The first thing I did was try to do as much prep as possible. Dinner was a cheese board, Instant Pot Beef Bourguignon, our favorite homemade Bread, salad and ChocolateChocolateChocolate Cake, a specialty of the house (this is chocolate cake mix, chocolate pudding mix and chocolate chips, I’ll share the complete recipe soon – for years it was a most-requested dessert in our family). But in the interim, my husband and I were chaperoning a pack of newly-minted 11 year olds to the mall to run amuk (within reason, of course) to test their independence. We would then turn around, come home, and he would oversee shepherding of the kids home while I prepped for dinner.

So I got up, made bread dough, fished the dried laundry out of the dryer for folding, and set to making sheet pan eggs for homemade breakfast sandwiches.

Sheet Pan Eggs:
15 eggs
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup shredded cheese
Salt and Pepper to taste

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F

Prep the sheet pan:
Oil the sheet pan and lay either parchment or foil on it and oil that, to ensure nothing sticks.

Make the eggs:
Stir together milk, eggs and seasoning until well combined. Pour into the prepared sheet pan (I use a jelly roll pan with high sides).

If you want to add some sauteed veggies or spinach, you can. Top with cheese and bake for about 15 minutes until set. Let it cool a minute and slice into squares.
I toasted buttered english muffins with a slice of Canadian bacon each (that I had left over from making homemade clam chowder a couple days earlier) and made homemade breakfast sandwiches. We ended up with 8, plus some extra slices of egg mixture. I served one each to my husband and my son, and froze the remaining sandwiches for easy breakfasts later.

Once the bread dough was prepped and rising and the cake was baked and cooling, I cut up the 2 pounds of strawberries that were on sale this week – a nice break from apples for a bit – I find they get consumed faster if i slice them up.

I also rinsed and cut up mushrooms for dinner, because we were going to be a bit tight for meal prep time when we got home. I had some extra, so I sliced those and sauteed them for a few minutes before freezing them for a future meal. I’m really trying not to waste food, and this is a great way to have just enough mushrooms ready and waiting for use.

At 8:41 the cake was cooling, the mushrooms in the freezer and fridge respectively, the bread dough was rising, the sandwiches in the freezer as well, and the remaining strawberries were chilling in a container in the fridge.

So why get up and prep? It’s a sanity and a money saver. These are meals ready to go. It used up the last of the store-bought eggs (I had also hardboiled some) as our newer chickens are finally laying. The old ladies in the coop are inconsistent, so we’ve had to buy eggs again, and we eat a lot of eggs. It means there’s a few less things we need to do when we get home from our busy day.

The 3-day weekend means I get an extra prep and chores day too, which is great, because I’m behind after getting sick. I’ll go into this week feeling good about our menu and what I’ve done to ensure we’re eating a healthy, varied diet even throughout the busiest of days. It’s the only thing that offsets ‘I’m too tired to cook‘.

And this isn’t just for family-havers. I remember an evening when my husband and I took the RV north to go hiking, and having all our meals prepped and just waiting to eat meant that we didn’t even consider eating out, we just excitedly got back, warmed the food in the oven, lit some candles, and felt lucky as heck to be where we were.

Food prep and meal plans are abundance. I hope your week feels as abundant as mine.

Summer Arrives

Summer has arrived in all it’s glory. The world is green everywhere, the grass grows faster than we can manage, and we are about to step into a world of slower mornings, no book bags, and summer traditions. Sithean is lovely in June – everything is lush and green and magical. The peonies are just about finished, and the irises and day lilies should start to bloom soon. The back yard is a sea of Queen Ann’s Lace, and it is lovely.

The last week of school is about to kick off – a very short week, with everyone home by noon on Thursday. It’s also finally clearing after weeks of what seems like near-endless rain on weekends and warming up.

I got the rest of the garden planted this morning. This year’s garden is smaller than most, with only about half of the garden spaces planted. The rest we’ll spend the summer cleaning up, replacing the old brick and adding compost to get it ready for next year. The garlic is thriving, and it looks like we’ll have a good-sized harvest this year.

I stockpiled groceries this week for the first time in a while, mostly just to kick off summer. We are working pretty hard at making sure we meal plan and limit our grocery spending, but sometimes the things we start to run out of things that we eat all the time, and it’s just easier – and over the long haul, cheaper – to do a big shop. Add to that our CSA kicked off on Friday, and we’re a little buried in food. Which is fine with me, but requires effort and meal planning.

Eli had a health scare, and while he’s recovering, it’s also meant we’ve stuck close to home, other than finally venturing out for dinner last night in nearby Salem. That’s put us (mostly me) in the kitchen a lot, which is fine but gets a little hectic towards the end of each week, when I’m working and trying to squeak meal preparation in early morning. Our meals have gotten simpler, and that’s ok – also par for the course as we head into summer.

Our meal plan for this week mostly reflects the weather and our very full larder. We have a few waffles I froze last weekend to get us through Monday morning breakfast for the kids. I’ll warm them up and serve with strawberries and maybe scrambled eggs. My younger child only requires lunch for school 3 more days this week, so we’re winging it a little – I certainly am not buying lunch meat this week. Lunches will be leftovers across the board for the adults.

Sunday: Even though it’s quite warm, we’re making our second-ever batch of Ravioli Lasagna. Round raviolis were on sale a while back for buy-one-get-one-free, and the first attempt at this dish, based on some recipes but mostly just my own ‘winged it’ version, was devoured by the kids, always a good sign.

I made my favorite bread recipe as well as a salad to go with it. Homemade bread is so easy and tastes so good.

In preparation for the week I marinated some chicken leg quarters for grilling tomorrow – we’ll grill those along with some of our plethora of potatoes sliced up and seasoned and cut up veggies or make a salad along with leftover bread and probably some tzatziki to go with the marinated chicken – I used the basic marinade from this recipe.

Monday: Grilled chicken leg quarters, bread, salad and sliced veggies, tzatziki

Tuesday: Eli will cook, which usually involves picking a protein, and we have a ton of different options, since our Walden Local meat delivery came last week.

Wednesday: Salmon bowls are Eli and my most frequently-eaten meal when the kids aren’t here – pan-fried seasoned salmon over couscous with lots of veggies mixed in. This week we have fresh basil, spinach, onions, broccoli rabe and some cherry tomatoes to blister and add in. Today I tried an experiment – Basil Pesto with Pecans because I had no pine nuts or walnuts, but I do have plenty of pecans to use up. The recipe needed a little work. I added more olive oil, a tablespoon of lemon juice and a full teaspoon of salt. It’s definitely got a different flavor from walnuts or pine nuts, but it’s good. That said, when I run out of pecans, I don’t think I’m going to rush to make it again. It’s good – just not as good as other options.

I’ll add that to the top of the salmon, and to the sauteed vegetables in couscous for a delicious 15 minute prep dinner. If I get really motivated I’ll top it with burrata.

Thursday: We’re going to give One Skillet Chicken with Tzatziki and Orzo a try, likely with some broccoli on the side.

Friday-Sunday the kids and I will be away, returning Monday morning. Eli will eat whatever he feels like.

Monday: is Juneteenth, so we’ll likely do something very picnic-y, sit outside, and enjoy the magic that is Sithean.

I hope you all have a wonderful, magical June.

Murphy’s Law

Memorial Day weekend has come to a close, and with it two 4-day weekends in a row off for me. The garden is partially planted, I got runs and walks in, and the kids rooms are super clean. We’ve also had some massive quakes in our life – the adoption we expected isn’t happening, and we’re shutting the doors for a bit, as heartbreaking as that is. And some health issues in our home have made things more complex, short term though they seem to be.

It’s been an eventful couple of years here at Sithean, and I’m a little tired of the persistent upheaval. A little boring would be nice for a while.

Also so my feet hurt.

Despite that, everything is green and in bloom, the baby chicks have grown into energetic teenagers, the yards of compost are being spread, ever so slowly, on the desperately nutrient-poor soil in the yard. In other words, even on our worst days, it’s pretty damn good here.

Even on our first days here, which were more challenging than I can describe, we found beauty and hope. And 2 very different guides to help us through it all.

Today I took my son to his pediatric rheumatologist for the 2nd time in a month. My son has polyarticulate psoriatic juvenile arthritis, although it is currently probably maybe in remission. Polyarticulate = multiple joints and psoriatic = amongst other things, a gratitude from me that it’s not rheumatoid, which attacks the organs and sometimes sight. It’s an immune disorder that came on on suddenly, shortly after his 4th birthday after a fall that had impact on his right knee. From there it spread from one joint to another, until a few weeks later he could barely walk, just as we were preparing a 1500 mile move to here.

Right after we got there, we found his doctor, and it felt like a small miracle when Dr. L asked what part of South Florida we had moved from, and we learned he had grown up literal blocks from where we had lived. For over 6 years he’s carefully managed my son’s disease, even shepherding it to remission, for however a short time. In our life, Dr. L is nothing short of a rock star. When we showed up in his exam room my son was on steroids, miserable and because he was 4, frustrated and unable to process what he was going through or what he needed. Dr. L gave us a road map and hope that it could be managed.

Today when we showed up to check on the knee, it was supposed to be another doctor. Dr. L was booked. But in he walked. “I am his doctor, I’m the one who sees him, that’s always the plan” was his explanation. In other words, this is my patient, and I’m invested. Finding Dr. L was one of the early signs that we had made the right decision to move here.

While Dr. L gave us a path to a future without crippling pain, there was one other….person..that gave us what we needed when we got here, cold, a little lost, not sure of our next steps, and with a budget so tight you could hear it squeak with both of our kids trying to find their way. My son, especially was having a tough time. Oldest at least was returning to friends and the familiar. He had left everything he knew for this place, having been too small to remember it from before we had left.

But in walked Murphy.

Murphy, who for the short 5 months he lived after we arrived, became his best friend.

Murphy lived next door with our neighbors, who also became friends and anchors. Murphy was their dog. And Murphy and my son became fast friends. Murphy would come looking for him each morning and the two would go off, as boys and dogs do, roaming around our yard and his. Without equivocation, I can say that he and Murphy loved one another. When he announced that Murphy was his best friend, I was hardly surprised.

If ever there was a dog that was almost human, Murphy was it.

Murphy died right before the first Easter after we came here, just as every day we discovered new green things and flowers on our property, just as the white lilacs started to bloom. He had already raised a little boy who was then a teenager and now a man, next door, and my son was his last little boy. He did his job, giving my son something constant to hold on to. Their joy was something to behold, it really was. I always knew he was safe out wandering with Murphy.

I’m not a dog person. But this was quite a dog.

The last couple of years have been kind of stressful. I’m trying to learn to step back, to breathe, to invest in ensuring that we have time to enjoy our place in the world, to work in the garden, to fulfill the promise of sanctuary this place has always had for me, and somehow it got lost in all the work and things that needed to be done and things that weren’t getting done. I’m trying to step back and remember why we came here, to this forever place, this drafty old gorgeous, closet-less spot and why we stayed, enduring a giant pine tree falling on the house, every year refining the garden we built, and appreciating the love that came to live here when Eli did, filling an empty spot we didn’t even know we had.

And part of that memory is paying homage to what makes home the nicest word there is, the place that bring us joy, safety and hope. We can’t go back to the start, and I don’t think I would if I could. But I have to remember what makes this place magic, and it’s not just the flowers and the sunsets. As I step back and breathe and appreciate my life just as it is, I am grateful every day to live here and share life with my family.

Here’s to you, Dr. L.

And here’s to Murphy. Thank you.

Staying in the Moment

I want to start this post with a celebration. No, not of adoption or spring or anything, but for the first time in approximately…5 years there isn’t a giant pile of laundry obscuring the end of my bed. Now, I want to stress here that the pile has shifted over time in size and scope and of course it’s always clean – there’s another location in the basement for the dirty stuff – and we do tend to be dressed fairly often, so I definitely keep folding stuff and putting it away.

But it has always been there, an omnipresent stack of cloth that has to be shifted and stacked ever-so-carefully so as not to fall on the floor when it’s bedtime.

When we put the house on the market briefly last summer, I might have hid the pile in the closet, so it appeared as though there was no laundry pile, but in fact there still was. The laundry pile is always there, like an immobile clutter stalker, greeting me every time I walk into the bedroom. Since the bedroom is also my office (that tiny 4×38″ – approximately, I think it’s really 36.5″ – area has a different kind of omnipresent clutter) I walk by the giant pile of laundry dozens of times every day.

It stares back at me, daring me to think I could clear it. I avert my gaze and keep walking to heat my tea.

But since we’re deep in preparing for children, and while I really don’t think a 4 or 7 year old is going to judge me but their social worker, current foster families who want to stay connected and all other the people who are starting to want to visit and meet our fabulous new family members, and presumably also enjoy seeing the not-so-new ones, might, I decided to make it go away.

I should note that this anticipation of judgement has also got me bleaching grout and contemplating if we have just enough time to paint every single wall in the house so it looks fresh and pretty.

Eli says we don’t have time, but I don’t think he’s being fair – he could do it in his copious free time if he really wanted to. Did I mention he doesn’t have any free time?

Just ignore that point – not pertinent.

But the laundry pile. It meant turning the accidentally bleached black t-shirt that I had to secretly replace for my oldest child into rags, actually putting outgrown kid clothes into labeled bins and transporting them to the attic (or an attic-adjacent location with good intentions of getting them to their final destination soon) and actually folding fitted sheets, which no one on earth except my ex-husband actually knows how to fold flat.

And NO, I emphatically didn’t stay friendly with him so that I could occasionally implore him to fold my fitted sheets, although I freely admit I’ve wondered if that’s over the line to ask a few times. He stresses that I could learn if I just took the time, but clearly that’s not the right solution.

In any case, for a brief, shining moment, the foot of the bed is almost laundry free – almost because of the giant pile of unmatched socks that still linger on the bench that sits in front of the foot of the bed. These too, morph and evolve, but there’s always a really spectacular number of unmatched socks. If it wasn’t so annoying it would be impressive.

“Are you ready? You must be so excited!” says people. “Huh, I say. I had forgotten that the end of the bed matched the headboard. I mean I sort of knew, but it’s been so long, you see...”

I think they are talking about kids, but I’m busy being mesmerized by the clean spot in the house I’ve made. It’s also distracting me from other things that are far, far weightier like how in the world I’m going to parent 4 kids, work full time, garden, run, manage the house, find time to occasionally lob a kiss at my husband and remember that friends and family need me too. Oh, and also we have to feed everyone. 2-3 times a day, every day.

“Totally excited.” I murmer. And while truly, I am, I am also worried.

You see, I’ve done this before, well, not really – but I had babies and neither one slept for a year and I was so tired I forgot to pay bills and the exhaustion was so bad I would go to the store for bread and come home with no bread and 14 kinds of cheese because it was just so exciting to be alone for a little while even though there were almost certainly other people in the grocery store, I would think.

I don’t know, I don’t remember.

And your life gets down to the minute. Will I make it through this hour, to bedtime, to Friday. But the difference this time, accounting for the extra complexity of caring for kids, integrating our family with them here, dealing with their traumas and losses, keeping our eye on the ball with the older, biological kids to make sure that they are okay too, and do this while juggling housework, laundry, meal-making, groceries, yard work and work work.

And that’s where truly living in the moment has to come in. In order to make it all happen, it’s really fine to break life down into 15 minute chunks where maybe some laundry gets folded (but please not at the very clean foot of my bed kthx) or dinner gets prepared, at least in some part, or you get that thing that’s overdue at work finally completed. I used to write down the 6 things I was going to do each day, often only getting to 3-4, but writing them down does indicate that there’s a strong likelihood you will get to them.

Eventually.

And that’s going to be our lives for a little bit. And with that comes the other piece – acceptance. This is a phase. It’s a phase where there’s too much to do and not enough time, but it’s also our last round of littles, and Eli’s first true round of them, so we need to be present and enjoy it. Is it all going to be enjoyable? Ohhellzno. But some of it is going to be really, really fun. The next 2 weeks while we drive 60+ miles each way for transition visits and upend everyone’s schedule and I cram in 2 more work trips, not so much.

But after that there’s a little downtime. Just enough to go to the playground and come home and eat string cheese with a very small little person who just needs somewhere to belong. The laundry can wait.