goodness

in between the three-year-old meltdowns (dang it's pretty intense being three, and so I work very hard (not always successfully, of course) to find compassion instead of frustration in the most trying of moments) and the craziness of getting back to normal after being away for several days, and having papa pulled in so many directions because he finds it hard to say no, there is lots of goodness around.  there is, there is, there is.  such as:

*I bought myself tulips the other day.  they make me smile every time I see them.

*the wild violets are up, and it pleases Claire as much as it does me.  if not more so.  when she first spied them this weekend, she asked me eagerly "are these the ones we can eat?!"  ever since saying yes I am getting them served to me regularly by my little forager.

*she is always, always, always doing some kind of art these days.  when she isn't checking on the chickens (which to her seems to mean either giving them a treat of some kind or chasing them around the yard, a game that I don't really think they enjoy all that much) that is.  she is playing around with writing.  she's great at writing her name, and is now adding mama and papa, and strings of random letters.  she is also really digging flicka, ricka, dicka books.

*we are looking into the hows and whens of splitting our hive, and are quite thrilled about it.  they are thriving in there, it would seem.  and so I've got honey dreams, and at the same time I'm noticing the sugar maples here and there around town~ making a note of them in case we are able to handle a larger amount of sap this coming winter.  which is unlikely, but you never know.

*a new little bookshelf is bringing me joy because now the cookbooks are out of hiding and I have a place to stash my library books.

*the tomatoes are finally sprouting.  this time last year the starts were huge (in comparison) and so I've been fretting a tad.  but we're all good.  we had an actual winter this year, you know.  maybe not in terms of precipitation, but certainly in terms of temperature.  good thing that's coming to an end right about now too because there are literally just a handful of seasoned logs remaining in the woodshed.  our last few fires have been a mix of mostly seasoned wood with a bit of the more recently cut stuff thrown in.  but all in all, aside from our two trips away from home during colder weather when we set the thermostat to 55 so as to keep our pipes and cat happy, and putting the little desktop sized electric heater in her room some nights to take the chill off, if we were heating this winter it was all wood.  I feel pretty hardcore about that, you know.

*an honorable mention goes out to good coffee and the brett dennen pandora station as well

on a slightly different note, dear neighbor and I had a good conversation today about the pros and cons of reading other people's awesome blogs (you know the ones- they have seventeen kids and a farm and multiple thriving side businesses and somehow are able to make a quilt while baking bread and milking a cow) and getting on sites like pinterest.  pros being inspiration and such, cons being a creeping in feeling of overall less-than-greatness.  as in "look at all these things I should be making and doing and growing and seeing".  etc.  we ended up coming back to the main point of any conversation like that, which is that we are all just people.  doing what we love and trying to live life the way we feel drawn to.  a way we can feel good about.  we all have failures, we all have successes.  we are all in it.  and most of what we see out there on the good old interwebs are the highlights, not the lows.  must remember that.

we all have goodness.  goodness to give, goodness around us.  we just have to choose to focus on that, and not on the rest of it.