Thank you all for your concern over my poor nearly-drowned bees. However, it looks like everything is fine down at the hive. A couple of hot sunny days and the water is back down. It was a close call, and a lesson about our water table learned, but I certainly still have bees in the box!


I was checking on them this afternoon and saw a lot of activity down there. Probably more bees than I have ever seen outside at once. I'm not sure what they were up to. Some of the behavior I saw was a bit strange. There were at least six bees at the entrance fanning out pheromones. I'd never seen that before. Who were they trying to attract in? I didn't see any fighting at the gate, so I don't think they are being robbed. Well, I didn't see any chick-on-chick fighting any way. I did see one drone get beat out of the hive. He had a couple of workers on him kicking his but. But then the weirdest thing, they stopped and just left him alone on the door step. After that he walked in and out a couple of times like no big deal and eventually when in for good. I thought that was a bit strange. There he is on the door step. He's the fat guy with eyes that take up his whole head. 




I did see many bees coming in with pollen. That is a very encouraging sign because they bring the pollen in to make bee bread with to feed the larva. Larva means there are new bees on the way, and I think this hive is pretty small and could use the extra work force. That's why I closed the entrance down as small as I could. It gives them a smaller space and I know there are wax moths and small hive beetles about, so I need to give the girls an advantage against those pests. In fact, when I cleaned out the swarm's dead hive, I threw all of their mold comb into my trash. The next time I opened the lid a dozen or so wax moths flew out at my face. Ugh! 

Can you spot the bee with full pollen baskets? Wax moths aren't the only pest that wants in to the hive. It looks like a raccoon or something tried to topple the boxes to get at the sweet stuff inside. Check out the paw prints on the side of the hive. I hope this would-be burglar got driven off with a bunch of stings to the kisser. And stay out!  The exciting news is that tomorrow I will know what's going on inside of the hive as well as the outside. I know I've had this thing here over a week, and still haven't opened it up except to take the cover off and add a super! I won't lie I'm a little nervous too. Not really about the bees, but because I've never manipulated this type of hive before I'm scared to go in there and crush a bunch of bees. The last thing I need is ANOTHER dead queues. But, my mentor is coming by to go in there with me, help with the heavy lifting, and offer guidance. I am SO excited. As are the bees. Can't you tell by the look on their cute little faces?

The kids were supposed to be asleep. Smoochy and I were camped out on the playroom couch enjoying a night-time bowl of chocolate chip cookie dough. Suddenly I see a little movement out of the corner of my eye.

"Georgia..."

She steps out of the shadows with an impish little smile on the face.

"Hey, wha-wha-wha-wha-what are you guys having? Is that ice cream?"

"Yes Georgia, it is. You are supposed to be in bed."

"He-he-he-hey. Wheeeeeen I get a little taller (raises her hand up towards her head making the yea-high motion) I can sit on the couch and eat ice cream with you guys!"

I can help but smile. I want to laugh. I want to plunk her down on the couch and give her a HUGE bowl with sprinkles on top and sit and chat with her about whatever she wants to babble about. I can tell that Smoochy does too. But, it's after nine and he wisely, gently, and firmly sends her back to bed with promises of ice cream tomorrow. After another hug and kiss of course.

Last night when the house was being rocked by the strength of the second mighty midwestern thunderstorm of the week I was not thinking about my bees. I was thinking about my babies and how long it would take for Smoochy and I to scoop them from our bed and dash down to the basement if the sirens started. And though I dreamed vividly about seeing tornadoes swirl out our windows we all stayed safe in bed until morning. Well, if you consider 4:30 the morning rather than the night.


I didn't give the storm much more though until the sun started coming up. I looked out my window and my heart. stopped. beating.




This picture really fails to capture the essence of just how much water is out there. It is staggering. From my vantage point in the living room I thought the front entrance could be standing in water. So the kids and I threw on boots, I strapped Lola to my back and we ran out side to survey the damage.
















Um... I think the bees might be OK. I did see one or two fling around.  I'm just lucky the platform didn't slide all the way off the cinderblocks. But it may still be slipping.... This sucks.

When I was a child there was no food on Earth I loved more than pancakes. Hot stacks of syrup-covered heavenly pancakes! I requested them every year for my birthday dinner until I hit puberty. In fact, there are two things I remember about my fourth birthday: Being so excited I threw up, and that the menu that night featured pancakes.  Oh wait... I also vaguely remember the pink lace-ruffled dress I'm pretty sure was my favorite gift just after Strawberry Shortcake.


Anyway, I still have quite the fondness for pancakes. Imagine my good fortune that I have married a man who's specialty (after all things BBQed or smoked) is pancakes. For years he's been making me weekend pancake breakfasts. It all started back when I was pregnant with Normy, and therefor not too hung-over to enjoy weekend breakfast. I'll always remember feeling something like a big pregnant princess sitting down to a pile of his light fluffy pancakes.

Banana Princess Preggo Pancake circa 2006

Now that we have a whole mess of kids the weekend pancake breakfast is becoming quite the tradition. It is the signal that this is a day Dad doesn't have to go to work and that fun can be expected. Well, fun or yard work. We had been having our pancakes on Saturday, but these days he's working Sunday through Thursaday, so now Friday is our pancake day. And let me tell you, they are delicious. He started out with a Bisquick recipe but has adapted a new one based on the fact that we no longer buy Bisquick or even white flour. Instead we grind our own grain. In fact here's his recipe:


1 1/2 cup Buttermilk
1 egg
3 tablespoons melted butter
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
3 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt


Smoochy mixes all the dry ingredients together then whisks in the buttermilk followed by the melted butter, and the eggs last. He heats butter in his skillet before scooping in the mix. When the pancake is cooked on one side it is flipped to the opposite side. The pancakes come out thin and light with a little crispy edge. When they're done he flips them on to the kids' plates.

Stank-Eye 2006

Stank-Eye 2011 The other constant is how much love I taste in these pancakes.

The first hint of Fall is in the air. The wind has picked up a bit, the days seem a bit shorted, and there is an army of yellow school busses back on the streets. I love the fall, and I'm ready. We haven't had our A/C on in over a week. The kids and I have been outside as often as we can... the result is nothing short of miraculous. I don't think I ever feel as present with them as when we are outside mucking around. The rest of the time the to-do lists and schedules seem to get in my way. But out in our backwoods, it all seems to drop away leaving me to focus on the kids, not on what I have to cook for dinner, or what calls I need to return, or doctor's appointments to schedule, or dust bunnies that need to be attacked next, or, or , or...

Good morning! It's a bee-uti-ful day over here at my apiary! Yes folks, I am back in business! I didn't write about it because it just made me too sad to think much about, but my third colony of the season died while I was in NY visiting my Grandma. I knew they were queenless when I left, it's no surprise that the scorching July heat finished the remaining bees off. When I returned home the hive was empty except for moldy comb and at least one small hive beetle larva. Yuck. 


However, the universe provides, and this weekend I learned that there was a local 2nd-year beekeeper selling her bees and equipment on the cheap. After a succession of stings she was having stronger and stronger reactions, and thought it was best to quit while she was ahead and before anaphylactic shock... Her bummer is my good fortune, as I now have a fully established colony buzzing away in my back yard. Well, I hope they are buzzing.

The new hive! The queen has been christened Deborah, which as it turns out means honeybee in Hebrew.

Admittedly, the former owner didn't pay a ton of attention to these bees this year. They swarmed in June, she hasn't inspected them in over a month, and she never got around to adding the super (extra honey storage) that they probably needed at least two weeks ago. Whatever, the price was right and it is a new lease on life for my beekeeping adventure. Truth is I didn't do my do-diligence either. I didn't inspect the hive before making the purchase. Does buying used beekeeping equipment fly in the face of prudent beekeeping practices. Um, yea. However, I figured a few things:


Firstly, it was a good deal for all the equipment even without the bees.


Assuming that the hive has a laying queen, I would have bought them regardless of 90% of the possible problems the hive might have. (The only deal breaker would have been AFB- a rare & nasty disease that necessitates burning all the equipment infected.) Anything else I would have taken on and tried to remedy.


And lastly, inspecting stresses the hive, and I rationalized that moving them would be stressful enough. Throw in the fact that to go inspect the hive someone would have watched the kids and Smoochy and I had a busy weekend, and it just wasn't going to happen. Oh well. 


Part of me is pretty nervous to manipulate a Langstroth hive. (Which is what this new one is.) I've never even seen it done in person. My only experience is with top bar hives. But, I suppose if I just go slow and steady it will all be fine. What's the worst thing that could happen? Oh yea. I could drop and dump and entire box of bees, brood, and honey. And let me tell you, those boxes are HEAVY!




These bees have a different location on our property than their predecessors. For a variety of reasons, we choose a more open area by the pond. The benefits are obvious: More sunlight (hopefully), easier access, and visibility from the house (which is purely a factor in satisfaction). I can't keep my eyes off the hive this morning. I've set up camp by the living room window to watch the girls leave for work for the day. I hope they don't get lost in their new neighborhood. I've already been down there to check on them twice. At 7:00 a.m. there wasn't much going on. The sleepy-heads were still in bed, except for a few early risers getting their bearings. I expect I'll be popping down there often today just to watch them come and go. Perhaps I'll post picture updates as they settle in and go about their business. I bet you are as excited as I am faithful readers!!!

7 a.m.

8 a.m.

Here it is after a long Wednesday and I am reflecting on the what's building harmonies and what's going against the flow of our weekly rhythm. I've hit the same sticking point this week as I did last: There aren't enough hours in a day for it all! Inevitably, I skip the daily house-hold chore. So, this is the second week in a row the upstairs hasn't been vacuumed... but I guess in the grand scheme of things that's small potatoes compared what we have spent our time doing instead. Yesterday (Tuesday) is our day to play with friends, and since they were coming our house I had planned on doing the vacuuming before their arrival and before Lola went down for her morning nap. I had the Dyson out and ready to rock. But, first we had to walk down to our mail box with a letter before our early-morning postman made his rounds. We walked outside (Normy still in his PJs)...

Lola's first skinned knee

And never made it back to the house! What a beautiful cool morning! Before I knew it I had gone to grab waters (and another cup of coffee), to turn up the radio so we could hear it outside, and to find appropriate footwear for everyone. What an amazing morning!


The thing is, having already established a pretty solid routine when we deviate from the norm it is truly a treat... and doesn't rock the whole boat.


For example, all of our days have a very predictable flow. We have activities in the morning  followed by lunch. After lunch we pick up toys, visit the potty and read books. Each child then takes a nap or at least a little rest. While the kids sleep I clean the kitchen from breakfast and lunch and prep dinner as much as I can. Once everybody is awake again we have snack followed by play time, house cleaning, and maybe some coloring or a book on tape. When Daddy comes home we all come together to share some iced tea (no kidding it's iced tea these days) and more play-time and chatting (often while I fold clothes). We are working to add some dinner routines by having the kids help with the set-up and clearing of the table. After supper we segue pretty quickly into baths followed by books and then all three of them have lights out. Every day. Everyday for at least two years this is what we do. It is incredibly comforting in it's regularity.


If only I could just find a way to squeeze in a little more cleaning, gardening, yoga, phone calls with great friends, community service, sewing, running, blogging, knitting, girl's nights out, emailing, doll-making, and reading my life would be perfect! (I know: I'll have plenty of time for all those things later... Enjoying the babes while they're small is where it's at. It's cool. No worries, I'm content. I swear!) 

I want to cultivate a sense of rhythm in our family. I have been reading about the concept in this book, this book and this book. I have been seeing how powerful a force for good it can be on this blog, this blog, and this blog (among countless others.) The basic premise is that by simplifying and streamlining life you create predictable patterns that children (and adults) can anchor themselves to.  This provide some grounding and foundation for a joyful creative life to spring from. In practice it's simple. On Mondays we bake our bread, on Tuesday we visit friends, on Wednesday we see the speech therapist, and on Saturday Daddy makes pancakes! It also aligns the chores I do and the meals I serve each day. Mondays are "New Menu Monday", followed by "Taco Tuesdays", and "What's-On-Hand Pasta Wednesdays". 


I am really looking forward to a predictably clean and organized life. Monday the kids and I strip the beds and wash our lines. On Tuesdays I vacuum. On Wednesday I'll clean the bathrooms. It'll be a great system if I can stick with it because it takes a lot of the stress and guess work out of the week, while still giving us room to be flexible and infuse our days with variety. If I only have one big cleaning task a day, I can do it in the morning or afternoon depending on what other things crop up. It also guarantees my house will always maintain a base standard of cleanliness. Without this consistency everything tends to be a jumbled mess, and a mad-dash from one place to the next. Having an idea about what we will do, where we will go, and what we will eat helps us relax about the particulars live more in the moment.




I had tried a variation of this back when Georgia was a baby. I put a grease board in my kitchen with all my weekly tasks listed with their corresponding day. A month into the routine, it was ingrained in my brain and the grease board became a place to run a grocery list and weekly menu. Somehow, though I fell out of the practice and it feels like I'v been living in a cyclone ever since. It's time to take back our rhythmic life. Smoochy has been urging me to get organized for years. I finally mapped it all out two weekends ago on a long car drive and have been trying to implement ever since. Last week I allowed myself to get frantic when I got off schedule. Then I decided that defeated the whole purpose of trying to find calm and balance. So, I've been more forgiving of myself and remembered that it's a process, and will take some time to work the bugs out. 


Yesterday was Monday... which I have booked as a serious work day around the house. Between doing all the baking for the week (bread and granola) and washing and replacing all the bed linens I was busy. Let's just say my dogs were barking by the end of it all. But, getting all that accomplished felt pretty good and has enabled me to relax and enjoy today... our play-date day. Plus, the kids were amazingly involved with all the cooking and linen laundering. I tried not to dictate their participation, so they came and went as their interest waxed and wained. However, more often than not they enjoyed the chance to work along with me. The rest of the time Normy and Georgia played like maniacs, largely leaving me free to do what I needed to do. Hello, unstructured creative play! 5 and 3 are awesome ages! 




"New Menu" Monday featured a delicious chilled carrot ginger soup with garlic and lime. Well, I liked it. No one else did. However, since I I had a hunch it wouldn't go over well I made desert... which I NEVER do. We had a gingerbread cake topped with fresh strawberries. They forgave me for the soup and didn't even realize that desert was 100% whole wheat and had very little sugar in it. He he he he! 

Well, Lola liked her dinner anyway.

Liked it a lot!

Normy preferred cake

So did Georgia, but who can blame them?

I feel like we're off and running with something great. I'm going to try to spend the week blogging about the development of our little rhythms and routines. Mostly as a way for me to have a reference to see what worked and what didn't. I'm excited. 

I tell you what, a Nebraska Summer is a fabulously beautiful season filled with spectacular moments spent outside. Except in July. July is just too freaking hot. During June we only turned on the AC during the day (if at all), and opened the house up at night to enjoy the lovely 60 degree temps. But, July was a whole different story. We hardly ever went outside in July. Even the dark didn't offer a reprieve from the oppressive muggy heat. In my garden, what remained uneaten by the deer was scorched by the sun. A massive jungle of weeds grew up around our house. Nothing in the world could have enticed me outside to beat them back.

However, we suddenly find ourselves in August, and though it is still full-on summer, somehow there has been a slight, barely-preseptible shift in both attitudes and temperatures. We slept with the windows open last night listening to the racket of a millions bugs and frogs. Today Smoochy and I started fighting back against the over-growth to reclaim out property. He spent most of the afternoon with the weed-wacker. Meanwhile, I did some hand-pulling on the patio where a small forest had grown up in the cracks of the slate.

The results of our efforts allowed up to take advantage of the pleasantly hot late-afternoon with a family dip in the kiddy pool. The kids splashed and sprayed, while we sipped iced tea and some fancy "mocktail" I found the recipe for in a magazine. I was pretty excited about it, as it combined pureed watermelon, papaya, jalapeño, and lime juice. It was spicy-hot and delicious in my estimation. But, when Smoochy took his first slug of it he spit it back into the glass with shock (and distaste) despite my warning that it had bite. Not his thing. :-) Oh well.

Now we all find ourselves inside, dry, and a little tuckered out. Lola is taking 5:30 PM nap, which will surely come back to haunt me at 8:00 when I am wishing she'd go to bed. But, the ability to type with two hands is just so rare and enjoyable. Smoochy is surfing the web and the big kids are watching their Saturday allotment of television. Their pick: He-Man of course. ;-) Life is good. Now to go cook dinner. Any suggestions of light summer fare? At the rate I'm going it will probably be spicy watermelon/papaya juice and scrambled eggs. I'm loving this lazy summer's-here-to-stay night.

Totally worth the whole load of wet towels and bathing suits.

Theoretically speaking, I understand that if they are ever to learn how to feed themselves they have to be turned loose with a bowl of food and a spoon.



I also understand that if you allow children to entertain themselves buy making a mess while you clean some other mess you are walking across the street to get your ass kicked.

I get it.