Just Mama and Daddy

Though I often wake early, it is rarely to the idyllic barn chores one might associate with the homestead life. When I wake is determined entirely by babes, as is much of my life these days. Mothering newborns is a surrendering of any and all preconceived notions of how my time ought to be spent.

The temperatures here in February are perplexing at best, especially for the fruit trees which are beginning to bud. The nectarine has beaten a path all of the way to flowering and Abram has carefully reported the number of blooms on a daily basis. (It was 20 yesterday.) The fate of that tree in the months to come one could never tell.

But its flowering and the seven new chicks chirping as we head to the chicken coop tell me that we should be planting seeds. Indeed, the boys have just finished sowing radishes of two varieties as part of today’s homeschool. Every year we say we need to be ready earlier; February should see us starting many flats and planting directly the most cold-hardy of fare. But I guess it isn’t time for that yet.

It was the same for the fence Stewart was building. It might be done come the second week of March, we postulated after a successful week or two of fence-clearing and T-post-pounding. But that was before a virus swept through the entire family, making that fence and those seeds seem a distant reality, reminding us of our own frailty. Yes, only through the bleary-eyed rocking of a sniffling newborn at 3 a.m. can you appreciate the five hours of sleep you were getting weeks earlier.

I believe in thinking things through and doing our duty and the benefits of hard work. But it is times like these that remind me that no homestead is built but through divine intervention. Fences must wait, we are told; gardens will hold. For now we are just Mama and Daddy to five sweet, sniffling souls.