Teresa joins us at the table

Teresa has begun eating solids all of a sudden this past week. We realized she was finally ready when we discovered her eating various bits of things off the floor – pancake, eggs, lettuce. Not what I would have picked for her first meals, but with the fifth baby one doesn’t have the [...]

High Altitude Bread

I made my first batch of wheat bread here yesterday. I had first looked online to see what the effects of high altitude would be on yeast-bread baking, and mostly what I found was that it would rise faster than usual. Doesn’t sound like a bad thing, although bread that rises too fast [...]

Bumblebees

So “they” have been saying in the news lately that the bees seem to be dying off, and nobody has yet figured out why. I’m afraid we’ve been contributing to this die-off in a small way since we’ve moved here – but only towards the invasive ones. Bumblebees have been invading our house, [...]

Wyoming Plague?

So, most of us are sick–again.  Four weeks after the last time.  This seems really strange, after we spent two years in Florida, and never got sick there.  Well, I think the kids had a mild cold once.  We never had a big family illness.  Now we’ve gotten hit hard twice in the first month [...]

Headlines of the day

Stocking Up For Winter:

Based on the size of the trailer J. used to haul it, it looks like about half a cord of wood.
Discovery of the Day:

These are a few bushes in our backyard with berries that have been getting ripe over the last few weeks.  The kids have been begging to know if they [...]

Plans? What plans?

So I thought we would spend this week getting onto a routine…yeah, pretty funny.  Why do I make these plans?
Turns out the real plan for the day was for me to tote around a sick baby.   A feverish, throwing-up baby.   On the bright side, Teresa has remained irrepressibly cheerful through it all.  Just a little [...]

Summer Class Begins

Today was J’s first day of teaching a summer grad class on the Synoptic Gospels. As is typical of summer classes, it will be short (three weeks) but intense.
This would make a logical point for us to begin some homeschooling, and I had originally intended to do that. Instead I have discovered that [...]

Good water at last

Back in Milwaukee we used a Brita water pitcher to filter our tap water, then we spent our two years in Florida buying bottled water, since our water was from a well that was not very clean, and we weren’t sure that the Brita filters would be enough to make it safe to drink. [...]

Dry climate woes

I just checked the weather reports, and right at this minute the temperature here is actually the same as the temperature down in Naples; the difference is that here the humidity is 15%, and in Naples it is 93%.  Our two years in Florida were happily free of all dry skin issues for the kids, [...]

My son is a shark

Sharks have a double row of teeth; David has a double row of teeth; therefore…oh wait, I guess that’s a second figure double affirmative, so maybe it doesn’t work. So much for that idea.
He really does have a double row of teeth, though. Fortunately, having talked to a few people, and researched the issue, [...]