baby goats

Of our four goat babies, 2 nurse from their mother Rain, and 2 we have to bottle-feed. Our goat Windy births and cleans her babies and lets them nurse for a little bit, and then completely rejects them. (Supposedly she does this because she was bottle-fed herself.) So, we milk Windy, and then feed the babies her milk in a bottle. The first 2 weeks we fed them every 6 hours, and just yesterday (they are 2 weeks now) we cut back to feeding them 2 times a day. At this point they will start to eat grain and foliage as well as the milk. As troublesome as it was to get up at midnight to feed them, the bottle-fed babies are incredibly friendly because we are their surrogate parents. Every time we walk out of our house they run the the fence and start crying out. Lili puts on her boots and walks up there several times a day to see the babies and talk to them. Pretty much her conversation with them consists of her saying "Hi Goaties!" over and over...

Attempting to do some sketches/drawings for some new paintings with Seo on my lap. Challenging, but even the little bit that I was able to do was satisfying.
{I am testing out this 25% rag vellum paper that is acid free and non-yellowing, non-cracking. I am curious to see what it does when I use it with glue...}

missed times

*One of my best childhood friends, Caren, came to visit us for a few days. It didn't take Lili and her daughter (who is 2 years older) to start bickering like siblings, but they had plenty of goofy, fun times mixed in as well. Caren and I caught up over glasses of wine late at night, and played/parented the girls by day. These are photos from when we dragged the kids (three car seats in the back of the Subaru!) to the thrift store to try to find some clothes to fit my new postpartum body(friends are so good for that kind of thing.) Of course the fitting room with the harsh lights and honest mirror is rarely a feel-good place to be, but the girls brought some humor to it all. I had to break up their silliness once they started licking the mirror however.
It was sad to see them go back to New Hampshire...
*We had baby goats!!!

3 girls and 1 boy from our goats Windy and Rain.
We named the first two girls Crimson and Clover, and have yet to name the other girl.














*Easter in the neighborhood: all the neighborhood kids before the egg hunt.

After a sweet family time in the morning, we had an all day extravaganza under the hot sun with our neighborhood. The kids ate jelly beans and hard boiled eggs, and the adults started drinking cocktails at 10:30 in the morning. (We all took impromptu naps mid-afternoon)
We borrowed a meat smoker from a friend and smoked 6 chickens and a bunch of our pig meat all day long. We finished up our smokey dinner just as dusk set in. And then everyone carted their exhausted kids home to put them bed.


*It got hot and we started to make Popsicles again.






* Seo started to smile. You really have to work for it, but it might be the very best feeling in the world when your child smiles at you these first few times.





*It is far from being worked in, but I squeezed in a little more time to set up my new studio ♥ ♥ ♥

*And

of course

you

missed

a

lot

of

cuddle

monkey

time

too.

break

We are having some computer troubles this week, so I am having a forced blog break while the computer is being fixed. In the meantime you could scroll down my sidebar and check out all of the awesome art in my Etsy favorites. I hope you all had a springy and lovely Easter.photo courtesy of my friend Caren

unearthing.

Something very exciting has been stewing in my life the last few months that I have been hesitant to share until it actually happened. And this past week the final steps toward making it a reality have set into motion.

My big news is that I am getting my very own little studio!

I am moving in to our former bath-house where our composting toilet and our washing machine lived up until this week. We and the Carmona's both built indoor bathrooms to house our own personal composting toilets this past month, and David and Alex just moved our washing machine into the Carmona's new utility room. I started moving all of my tubs of untouched art supplies into the new space on Friday. It was exhilarating to open and unearth all of my treasures that have been packed away in storage. Some of them have been boxed up for years, and some only since I moved out of my temporary studio space I had last summer. We moved my art desk out of our crowded upstairs which also opened up a play area for Lili in our house. The bath-house (should I find a new name for it~ Esp. since ironically we never bathed in there???) is the cutest little building. It was the first thing David and Ema built when they moved onto this piece of land~ in fact it was the first thing either of them had EVER built. It is 8 feet by 8 feet, is full of windows, and has nice hardwood flooring.
So now my new studio is all messy and full of all of my supplies~ just waiting for me to set it all up pretty!

Here are some fun things I re found:

Oil paints:
A box of mica chips:
Printmaking stuff:
A bunch of old artwork and half written letters:Encaustic/wax supplies:
And wooden letter type:

{Also, Thank you all for your kind words on my last post. It is amazing to be feeling so up and down and stretched thin~ but simultaneously know that when I am on my *deathbed* these are the days I will cherish above all else. }

just in case it was seeming too picturesque.

misadventures.
#1.
The baby and I were upstairs last week and a funny, toxic smell wafted up. I called down to Alex who was cooking breakfast:
"Alex, there is a weird smell up here~ do you smell that?"
"No, I am just cooking bacon... Oh #@^(%%!#@! the heater is on fire!"
I peered over the railing to see flames leaping out of our propane heater and Alex pulling off the grate and hitting the fire with a towel. He quickly got the fire out, but the house was filled with tiny floating black specks and a terrible plastic smell. All that was left of the fire's culprit was a sticky pile of melted plastic at the bottom of the heater. It was a mess.
It turns out that Lili had slipped her plastic harmonica through the heater grate while it was not hot, and then the heater turned on~ setting the harmonica on fire.
oh dear.

#2.
Barf in the car seat.
Alex told me last week that he thinks my signing us up for the 9:15 Kindermusik class was possibly one of my biggest blunders in life. Even before the baby, it was a struggle to get Lili and myself out the door by 8:30 to make it in time... And now with the baby it is doubly, if not tripley, hard. This past Tuesday was one of my first solo town days with both kids. And we managed to make it out the door with just enough time to make it to Kindermusik (I really need to post about Lilikoi's awesome music class one of these days~ soon...). I was feeling pretty good about getting out of the house and feeling hopeful about the six stops/errands that the kids and I were were embarking upon that day (Kindermusik, 2 grocery stores, the P.O., the thrift store to find an Easter basket, and the library.)
But we live 12 miles down a VERY curvy, hairpin turney, type of road~ and just after we crossed over the Eastern Continental Divide, I heard a weird noise coming from the backseat. I looked in the rear view mirror just in time to see Lili throwing up everywhere.
I won't go into details, but I will say that it colored and effected the smell of the rest of the day. We forged on though, and successfully made it home in tact.
#3.
Yesterday was my sister's birthday, and we went to a lovely dinner party at her house. The second half of my day was wonderful, and the first half was trying. I don't know if I could call it a misadventures since nothing in particular happened, but I cried at the end of it.
Eliseo was fussy and wanting to be held every second. And Lili was especially needy and kept repeating "Hey Mama!?" over and over over. She would say "Hey Mama!?" and I would say "Yes, Lili?" or "What?" and she would reply "Hey Mama!?". On the fourth or fifth go round she would get to what she wanted to say. I counted her saying the word Mama over 30 times in a half hour period. Then the baby would be crying on top of Lili's questions~ and my head would be spinning. At the peak of my inability to deal Seo was crying and Lili was talking, and all of a sudden I hear this psssssssss noise. And Lili says "Mama! Mama, I am peeing!" (She has had a regression since Seo was born)
And I said "I know Lili. I know." And I closed my eyes, and bit my tongue, and heard the pee as it seeped through the floorboards and started dripping onto a pile of magazines downstairs...
Now that I am writing it down it sounds pretty lame that this brought me to tears ~ All I know is that I have been asked many times how life with two is going, and mostly my response has been "better than I thought i would be" but yesterday morning's response would have been "I am LOSING it." When I started to cry right along with Eliseo Lili came up right up to my face and said "Mama? You sad Mama?"
And I said "Yes, I feel sad. Mama's having a hard day."
Lili said "Oh..." very thoughtfully.
Then she got all up in my face, put her palms on my cheeks, and gave me a giant slobbery kiss and a great big hug.

one month

It is so hard to quantify a child's age emotionally. It is easy to say that Eliseo is a month old exactly today~ but is that a lot or a little? Of course it is a little, but he is already so embedded and important in our lives... and I feel a bit achy when I think about him already being 4 weeks old... so in those respects he feels so much older than one month.
And now Lili seems SO big, but I guarantee I will look back when she is a teenager on this time and she will seem so tiny. My mind could spin around this for a long time, but I am typing one handed (fussy baby in the other) and I definitely should go to bed.
Perhaps tomorrow I will be able to carve out some time to tell some adventure stories. ♥

a very happy Spring Equinox to you!

Hooray for Spring!!!

Well, I thought I might as well stay drinking decaf coffee like I have been the last six months... However, it only took one terrible nights sleep to completely undo that idea. Soooooo, welcome back coffee.

a little Lil time

another small February collage/painting

the new do

small February painting

happenings on a family day...

I am running a few days behind, but we had such a nice day on Sunday, and I managed to remember to take my camera out, that I wanted to share.
First off, it has been GORGEOUS out here. Warm, and sunny and spring-feeling.

The day started out with Alex getting up with Lili when she woke up at 5:30. So when Seo and I got up at 8:00 Alex went back to bed~ days off are so great like that...
When he re-woke up Alex made blueberry scones, and David and Ema came over for coffee and scones.After that we planned out what we wanted our garden to be like this year and made a seed order from the Fedco catalog. Eliseo had some gas and got a little back-rub from Auntie Ema. After it was resolved he promptly fell asleep.
While Alex was outside prepping a garden bed for peas, I decided to give Lilikoi a long overdue haircut. I bribed her with binky-time, and tried to work as fast as I could. It seems it is physically impossible for a two year old to stay still, and by the time I put the scissors down I was afraid that I had done some irrevocable damage. I drew her a bubble bath to clean away the itchy hair on her neck. (yes, she is still squeezing in the sink) And Seo got to dip his toes in too. Do you see Lili's toe nail polish? That was a special treat because she is a *big girl* now.
Surprisingly, her hair cut ended up looking really great~ I will have to take some pictures of it tomorrow.