Thanks for your patience, friends, while I got my life back in order.

The car has been replaced, the computer has been replaced, the basement is dry, and slowly but surely we're finding our center and getting caught up once more.

Thank goodness.

I'm all kinds of grateful.

When the weekend arrived the sun was shining and it was unseasonably warm here in Wisconsin. (Don't let Lupine's short sleeves, bare legs, and flip flops fool you. She's a Wisconsinite, so 50 F means summer to her!)

We hit the ground running with something that felt like spring fever in February.

So! Many! Projects!

There was deep cleaning of the house to begin, one teenager's bedroom to rearrange, and lots and lots of sunshine to soak in.

So outside we went. To tap maples and box elders and sit by the fire cooking sap and casting off one knitting project after another. (And yes, Pete was knitting too, working on a hat for me.) It was good therapy for my heart to go to bed each night with the smell of maple sap and woodsmoke in my hair and one less project in my knitting basket.

The kids too relished the sunshine – and the abundance of sap to drink up - hot, cold, carbonated, or right out of the bucket. (The Driftless Big Gulp.)

And because that wasn't quite enough to fill our weekend, on Sunday we borrowed a chicken plucker and butchered our extra roosters (there had been some bloody battles lately), a few ducks, and two naughty hens who had been pecking eggs each day in the chicken coop. 

We've never butchered a mature hen before and it was fascinating to see the partially developed eggs inside. Each bird had dozens of yolk sacks and one shell-less egg that would have been laid this morning.

It doesn't take much to turn farm chores into a biology homeschooling class!

And I'm greeting Monday with enthusiasm for the week to come to get caught up at LuSa - now that I have a way to get there and a computer to work from.

Expect to see a lot more of me around here, too. I've missed you.

Love,
Rachel