Monday, November 06, 2017

Monday Journal Entry




November 1, 2017

It’s Wednesday morning and we are in Staunton.  We hope to leave for Laurel Fork this afternoon when Analia is finished with her dance lessons. We are taking Analia with us for the rest of the week since Alissa has a presentation in Washington DC to attend this weekend.  I have looked forward to having her with us there and doing some fun things one on one with her.  However, she and I both (as well as Mike and the rest of the family) are all struggling with viral infections.  The whole family has come down with congestion, sore throats, runny noses and low-grade fevers.  In addition, some of the family is struggling with a stomach virus that is hanging on.  I didn’t have the kids last night like I normally do on Tuesday evenings because they did not have classes at James Madison University and Alissa was home.  However, instead of doing anything on my list of things to accomplish while in Staunton, I was in bed with a fever.  I did make it out to the barn yesterday morning to assist the farrier with pedicures for the two miniature horses and after she left, I cleaned up a bit in the barn yard in anticipation of winter that will be here before we know it.  I spent several hours out there and then came inside and swept and mopped the downstairs.  Other than getting supper for everyone, I just slept the rest of the day waking long enough to realize I still had a fever and then going back to sleep. 

Monday I kept Analia and Rory.  The twins were scheduled to come as well but I let Kristin know that we were sick so that she had the option of keeping them away if she didn’t want them exposed to the germs.  She chose to keep them home and now I am glad she did.  Hopefully they will not be exposed anywhere else and be able to avoid this particular virus.  Watching the kids, picking up the house, doing laundry and fixing supper were about all I managed to accomplish on Monday.  I was disappointed that we were not feeling well and that the twins were unable to come because it was to be their “last day”.  I have been watching them since they were infants starting out with three days one week and four days the next.  Over time, we have cut back and they started going to preschool three days a week and their other grandma’s house one day a week which left us only with Mondays.  We knew that when they started to school next fall, our babysitting days would be finished for the twins but things have changed for their family with Kristin’s recent resignation at her job and she will be staying home with the kids now until they begin school in the fall.  Their family is going through a lot of transition as their daddy finishes up his college degree in December.  They are looking to move when he finds a new job.  I am not going to pretend that keeping three infants, babies, toddlers and then preschoolers exactly the same age (making it as if I were keeping triplets) has been easy.  It has been challenging and many days I have finished by wondering if I could even continue without assistance.  I knew though that I would always be glad that I did it and that I had the time with the children while they were so small.  I am very thankful and this time of transition for all of us is bittersweet.  Mondays will be a little bit easier on me having only two instead of four to keep, but as the twins and their family move on in a different direction, we will miss so much of their lives, and for that, I am sad. 

November 4, 2017

It has been a long week.  Mike and I are rarely truly sick.  I think in the 13 years that we have been together, we may have been to the doctor two or three times a piece to get antibiotics.  We usually average a “bad” cold once every two or three years, and while we both have bouts with digestive issues due to “eating the wrong things”, a stomach virus is even more rare for us.  But, this is our winter to get it all I guess.  The whole family has been hit pretty hard with first the stomach virus that lingers and/or returns and then a nasty cold/sinus infection with lingering congestion and fevers.  I limped through the first of the week with the kids and then we took Analia and headed south on Wednesday.  Our time this week at our South West Virginia home has been spent mostly just trying to have the energy to hold our heads up and go through the basic routine of the day, especially Wednesday and Thursday.  Yesterday we felt a little better, Mike and I both getting past the fevers.  Analia is really congested but seems to feel pretty well now, her only real difficulty being the residual cough that wakes her up throughout the night.  As a result, we have not made any great accomplishments with the tasks at hand at our property.  I have spent a good bit of time trying to read books aloud to Analia with a voice that fades away after the first two pages thus resorting to squeaks or whispers to finish the task.  Analia doesn’t mind.  She loves books.  I have a pile of Little Golden Books here that she has never read and she would sit for hours reading them if I could manage to keep going.  I also have some vintage playschool wooden blocks (the kind that are in various shapes with no paint, just the basic color of the wood).  She has had more fun building with those blocks.  She has played with them so much, that I have not made her even pick them up at night.  It has just been an ongoing building project.  We did finally venture out to get a few groceries on Thursday afternoon, although we must have been a sight.  I grabbed a box of Kleenex and opened it before getting to the check out and we loaded up on decongestants.  Friday we took a drive about 30 minutes away to pay our bill for some of the lumber and supplies we had gotten on credit for the barn.  We stopped along the way at a little place that had antiques, uniques and collectibles for sale.  The lady was really nice.  It was just a little shed type building next to her house that she had turned into an overflow for her collections and she didn’t seem to care whether she sold anything or not.  She was so kind to Analia and told her how she really liked her glasses and then she gave her a small “toy” that was actually some kind of “Redneck” Christmas gag gift type item with a reindeer that had a roll of toilet paper on its antlers and sings a song about not forgetting to flush the toilet.  No matter, Analia thought it was great and played the thing nonstop in the car on the way home.  We also went to the post office to check on the situation with our mail.  Like most everything else here in rural Virginia, it has taken great effort just to try to get on the mail route.  I have made multiple trips to the post office.  There’s a really nice young lady that runs the post office and it is only open a few hours each day in the mornings.  She knows me when I walk in the door and she looked at me yesterday and said “I know what’s going on” but after pushing the issue and not letting her off the hook (which I did very kindly but firmly) she finally realized that they had been holding our mail and that our mail was coming to their post office and not another as she had been insisting.  (Our home is close enough to the dividing line that we had to fill out paperwork to request that the mail route be extended to take us in.  Evidently, no one has received mail at this address for so many years, that the home was no longer on the route and now requires the post master to sign off on the paperwork in order for us to be put back on the rural route.  Both the mail carrier and the lady in the post office are insisting that they have never delivered mail to our house, but we have in face received mail in our box previously though nothing recently.  After they found the mail that was being held at the post office, it was evident that the mail WAS coming to their post office and the only explanation she could come up with for the few pieces that had made their way to our rural box was that the weekend carrier must have delivered them not knowing that they were not allowed to deliver mail to us until the post master signs off on the extension papers.)  I just have to laugh even though it’s frustrating and go pick up the mail at the post office (now that we know where it is) until we can finally get through the paperwork to add us to the rural mail route.  I’m sure that paper is sitting on someone’s desk somewhere because it should have been approved months ago.  Given a choice, I will take slipping through the cracks in rural Virginia over the somewhat more efficient but congested areas of our state. 

There was a lot done to the barn this week while we were away and Mike is pleased with the quality of the work.  What has been done looks really good.  The men ran out of materials and the allotted time that Mike had agreed for them to work had lapsed.  We have one side with a track for sliding doors that will allow the cattle to enter the shed portion that has to be upgraded.  We are not sure exactly what is to be done there.  Mike doesn’t want the expense of having to take down the tracking, remove all the metal, replace it with board and batting, reinstall the tracking and install new sliding doors.  I have not said much, but, I would like it to be done right so the whole barn is finished and looks good.  At this point, we have so many other areas to concentrate on that we will just wait it out and see what we decide for that back section on the shed that attaches to the barn.  On the other side of the barn is an area that was not previously enclosed that was used as a loading area and is also where the four, large stall entrances are located. The men did the structural improvements to that area but ran out of boards to enclose it.  That is something that Mike can finish with time and material.  We are still trying to get someone to patch and paint the existing roof or replace it.  It really doesn’t look like that is going to happen before winter sets in.  We just can’t get anyone to follow through.  We have a lot of clean up and restoration to do inside the barn as well, but we can work on that during the winter.  We didn’t get much done in the barn area this week with our all being so sick.  Analia and I went out one day when the weather was really nice and picked up some of the ends and pieces that the workers had cut and thrown down.  We put the “trash” pieces on the brush pile and stacked the pieces that could be salvaged for other uses.  Analia was so cute to watch.  She was very eager to work and you could tell she felt very accomplished at being able to be a part of the process. 

One evening, one of our neighbors stopped by and even though Mike told her we were sick and probably very contagious, she opted to come inside and visit anyway.  She had gotten produce from the roadside honor system we had set up earlier in the year and said she was so happy that we were here.  She was very nice, a transplant from Maryland, but has lived here over 30 years.  She said she had family in the area and was at a point where she needed a change and ended up making this her home.  There are few people that I feel immediately comfortable with, but I felt relaxed with this woman.  I’m guessing she is probably seven to ten years older than me, but not one to try to conceal her age and obviously being accustomed to work and honest living, she may not be as old as I think she is.  After we talked just a few minutes, I found out that she worked with the breeding program for a large dairy that is now out of business.   I figured I would be here for a long time and not be able to find anyone who could artificially inseminate my cows for me (as I don’t intend to keep a bull once we move the cows to our SW Virginia property).  This lady lives five minutes from me and enjoys breeding cattle and seems like she would be happy to work with us.  I also found out that she had spent some time on horseback in portions of Montana where I lived and spent time hiking.  Talk came around to bears and she told us that just this year she had a momma bear rip the screen door off their house to get inside the porch.  She assumes it was because she had left some peppermint candy there and perhaps the bear smelled it.  She said they have not had any trouble with the bear since.  We talked about my bear encounters in Alaska and I told her about the time that we were out camping and I had the sensation of large animal sniffing around the outside of the tent as we slept.  ( I have always described it as the feeling of waking to a dog sniffing the top of your head but realizing it was something much bigger and the only thing separating me from that animal was a vinyl tent.)  Later during the day, while we were out in the boat fishing, a large bear came into camp and tore it up.  We immediately set to move camp only to have the bear return before we were finished tearing everything down.  There was a standoff between the two men in our party who both had weapons but the bear finally moved on down the path long enough for us to get the rest of our things and get out of there.  If I only hadn’t felt so bad I would have enjoyed visiting a lot more as my first impression of the neighbor is that we will get along just fine and share a lot of the same interests.

November 5, 2017

Rain moved in yesterday and there wasn’t anything we could do outside on the barn or grounds.  Analia had been asking us to go to an auction.  She remembers going to the Shenandoah Valley Produce Auctions with us previous summers and we did not take her this past summer.  (Mike went a couple of times, but I never attended this year since we were not buying or selling our own produce this past season on a grand scale.)  Analia was just a very small baby when we began taking her to the produce auction.  We told her that this would be different but she didn’t really know what to expect.  I took along some snacks for her and she entertained herself pretty well for a while but did grow bored before it was over.  She didn’t understand the concept of bidding and no matter how I tried to explain it, couldn’t get it through her head that you couldn’t just pick something up and pay a set price for it and walk out the door.  There was a large pony swing that she really liked made out of rubber (looked like a version of a tire swing) and Mike bid on that and got it for her.  When we returned to the house, someone had put a large, pictorial book about horses inside the screen door.  There was no note or explanation but I assumed it was the lady who had stopped by and visited the other day.  When she found out that Analia liked horses, she had told us about owning horses and about some of her experiences with horses.   I sat down for a bit with Analia to look at the book and then I told her she needed to play by herself while I picked up the house.  We had not slept well the previous night but had fallen back to sleep, making us late to leave for the auction.  I had left the house in a mess and wanted to pick it up.  There was a lot more book reading and block building before the night was over.  Alissa texted me and said that Rory was very discontent and crying a lot.  She is cutting more teeth and still has the nasty congestion.  She is also working hard with developmental advancements which I am convinced makes a child cranky.  She will be eight months old on the 22nd.  She has said “Momma and DaDa” for a while now but has added “bye bye” to her vocabulary in the last two days.  She has been pulling up and standing for a while now, and most recently balancing alone.  Alissa said she took several steps yesterday.  Alissa was also seven months old when she took her first steps and at nine months of age was walking anywhere she wanted to walk.  I think Rory wants to “get up and go” so badly that it makes her frustrated and cranky sometimes.  When she does accomplish a goal, she is so funny as she will smile and laugh at herself.  Alissa said she is exhausted because Rory has cried so much and been so discontented.  I told her that’s the way it is for me every Monday and Tuesday when I watch the girls.  I just wear myself out trying to keep Rory content but she is not a content baby at all.  My theory is that she is always pushing for the next developmental step, goal oriented, and mentally active.  Alissa was the same way, a very discontented baby who stopped crying so much when she learned to walk, taking her first steps also at seven months.  I am hoping once the teeth are through and she has her legs under her, Rory will be content for longer periods of time.

November 6, 2017

We got back to Staunton early enough that Analia could spend time with her parents knowing they would both be working and away from home on Monday.  The reunion between Rory and Analia after four days apart was just precious.  Rory immediately reached out for Analia and couldn’t contain her excitement at being with her big sissy again.  I helped Mike price some items for a new booth at a new venue for our antiques and vintage items.  He is not very happy that he will have to set up the booth by himself.  The place is closed on Tuesday and Wednesday and those are the only two days I am available to help since I have the kids for 9 hours on Monday.  I told him we could take the kids or he could watch them and I would do it, but I don’t think he thought too much of that idea and will probably try it himself.  Alissa had stripped the sheets from our bed, knowing we had been so sick and wanting to make sure everything was clean.  I put the sheets back on the bed and put the few things we had brought back from SW Virginia with us away in our room.  After calling grandma and washing my face, I settled in with a mountain of paperwork from the Antique Mall to sort, record and send to our partner. 

We have a lot to get done this week before we head back to SW Virginia.