Home Sweet Homestead

I've been away from home a lot lately. Twenty out of the last twenty-four days, to be exact. But the four days I got to spend at the house with my husband and my little girl were heaven. I had nothing to do but focus on the family and the farm. In the midst of a hectic schedule, it was a mini-vacation. T. left EV in the safety of the in-laws' warm house and came to pick me up in the four-wheel-drive farm truck, in the middle of one of the many snowfalls to blanket the country this topsy-turvy winter. It was an adventurous drive home on un-plowed back roads... and it was breathtakingly beautiful.

I spent a great deal of my time at home—as much as I could, in fact—soaking up T. and EV... T. and I actually went out on a date night for the first time since we moved to Oak Hill! And playing with EV never gets old. She is seventeen months old today (Happy sort-of Birthday, baby!) and is a little fireball. She's incredibly communicative even with her very (very, very) limited vocabulary, and understands just about everything you say to her. She got to experience her first post-infancy snow while I was home. We replaced the Little Red Wagon with the sled and pulled her around the farm every chance we got. We bundled her up and, as usual, took her chicken checkin' with us every morning and down to the in-laws for hot chocolate and Wii entertainment. (Yes, even the back-to-the-land, homestead-crazy eco-farmers have a weakness for the Wii. T. and J. are both wicked at bowling. I'm passable at golf.)

Our night out involved a Japanese steak house and (finally) a chance to see the movie Avatar, followed by desert at Chili's (not our first choice, but it was the only place open at 10:00. We are nothing if not middle-path ecotists. To date, my favorite descriptions of the movie are “Ferngully on Acid” and “Dances With Wolves meets Smurfs”. There are some anthropological issues with the film, to be sure. But overall, in my personal opinion, it's a masterpiece. Avatar fuses some very forward-thinking pop-cultural ideals with the pinnacle of cutting-edge entertainment technology. In the midst of an era of war movies and comic-book-to-screen crazes, there's a revolutionary undercurrent to the film. The Green movement is fighting back. With a Grade-A budget.