Category Archives: Family

Stories about the characters in my life

Colors of the season

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On the podcast this week I visit with both my daughters on what it means to be a cowgirl and how it went at their first rodeo. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.

This morning the new calves were frolicking, bucking and kicking up their wobbly legs outside my window as the sun began to rise magenta pink on the cusp of the hill. The grass is neon green and I thought then that those colors of the morning sky and that green and the shine of the black on the backs of those calves were all my favorite colors.

This week Rosie, my youngest, graduates from preschool. They give her a little graduation cap and everything. She’ll wear her new dress and sing songs she’s been practicing for a month alongside her cousin. A few days ago my sister and I took our five-year-olds to kindergarten orientation. As the our daughters held hands and skipped around the school behind the teachers at the front of the line, brave and excited together, my sister, who is five years younger than me, whispered, “Did you ever think we would have kids going to school at the same time?”

“No,” I replied. “I guess this is how it was always supposed to be.”

This season change from white to brown to bright is following this little season change in my life. We will play through the summer and then both of my daughters will be in school—a kindergartener and a second grader. If my husband and I would have come into parenthood without ten years of heartbreak and loss, we would be long past this elementary school part, with a teenager practicing to take the drivers test. Our kids would be babysitting my little sister’s kids if we had control of the timing of any of it. If we wouldn’t have suffered loss after loss…

And you couldn’t have convinced me at the time that it would all work out the way it has. The heartbreak of infertility and miscarriage is a weight that sometimes pulls the heaviest when you’re trying your best to stay positive. There were years I gave up on the idea of parenthood entirely. There were years the pain made me avoid the subject.

Yesterday my sister, husband and I took all the girls (aged three, five, five and seven just so you can get the complete picture here) to practice riding horses and to get ready for their first little rodeo in town at the end of the week. The older girls were working on navigating their horses around the barrel pattern. With old horses fresh off of a lazy winter that know the grain bucket’s at the barn, it takes a bit of coaxing and skill to get them to take these little bodies on their backs seriously. It can be frustrating for a perfectionist like my seven-year-old and she wasn’t handling it well. And I haven’t read a parenting book that addresses the specific issue of teaching your kids to be calm and patient on the back of an old, stubborn horse, and so I wasn’t handling it well either.

An animal will test all the things that need testing in you, and so after we put horses away and loaded up to go home, I turned to my daughter and reminded her that she’s a cowgirl. And then out of my mouth came a list for her, a little guideline that I thought my rule-follower could appreciate:

A cowgirl is kind. A cowgirl encourages others. A cowgirl stays calm in tough situations. A cowgirl doesn’t give up. A cowgirl tries her best.

We both repeated it. And then so did Rosie.

And I don’t know exactly what I’m trying to say here except I wanted to acknowledge that there are many ways a life can turn out, even if it isn’t the way you planned it. And I can’t say it would be better or it would be worse because the ‘what ifs’ don’t have answers. But I do know that all the mistakes and lessons and heartbreaks and little victories live inside you. And they’re there for you to tap into when you need them. And maybe that’s how you show gratitude for the things you thought might break you, or maybe that’s simply the definition of gratitude itself.

And maybe my favorite color is the color of every sunrise, in every season, reminding us of another chance at a new day.

Stuck Season

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This week on the podcast we talk stuck stories and I share a rough cut of a song from the new album. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.


I don’t know what comes over us when the snow melts and forms spontaneous rushing rivers in the barnyard, in the ditches, and through the trees, but I will tell you it’s not exclusive to the kids. I heard my neighbor’s grown man son took his kayak out the other day to see where the water would take him and I was immediately jealous that I hadn’t thought of it.

Yes, the first day the weather hit above 50 degrees my daughters were out chasing the runoff in their shorts and rubber boots and skinny white legs. And I was following right behind on the same mission, only in long pants because I have learned some lessons in my advanced age.

Like no matter your careful intentions on this mission, you will always wind up with the entire creek over the tops of your boots. Not a soul can help it after months and months in a deep freeze. We always go a bit too far.

And it seems the same goes with the mud. It could be. Or it could be hereditary, or it could be that I just really wanted to get closer to the first new calf of the season on our way home from celebrating Easter in town with my husband’s family. Turns out the sight of a cute calf makes you forget that just 24 hours ago that little mud puddle was a snow bank. Turns out off-roading in a SUV/Grocery Getter on the first warm day of the year with two kids and everything the Easter bunny could fit in the back is a dumb idea. I sunk into mud half up my tires immediately. It was only by pure willpower and utter embarrassment at the thought of having to call my brother-in-law to pull me out that I was able to maneuver out of that sticky situation. I counted that as a bullet dodged and moved on with my life.

The next few days were warmer yet, like 70 degrees! We hadn’t seen this since the Middle Ages! My little sister called to see if we wanted to go walk the creek bottoms and float sticks, even though our darling daughters were plumb happy with the little rivers forming puddles and running in the ditches in our yards. But the responsible adults in this relationship, that was not going to cut it. With one whiff of melting snow my sister and I were transported to our childhood, knowing the window of opportunity for this sort of dramatic landscape change around here is fleeting.

My husband was busy digging out things that had been lost in the snow banks for months and so I told him that we were going to load the girls in the pickup and head for the creek. He suggested we take the side-by-side instead so we wouldn’t get stuck. I ignored him.

And so off we went to find the creek as big as it’s ever been, rushing and flowing and cutting through ice and snow along its edges, melting and forming a new river right before our eyes. This was no stick-floating situation, we should have brought the kayak! We stood on its edges a while with our daughters, mesmerized. The we pulled them some good walking sticks and I held the big girls’ hands while we waded in a bit along it’s edges, until, inevitably, Edie got two boots full of ice cold creek and we hauled them back through the snow bank and up to the pickup to make our way back home.

It’s here my husband showed up with the four-wheeler. I dumped a gallon of water out of our daughter’s boots and we loaded our soggy selves into the pickup. From the driver’s seat I told my dearly beloved that we were heading home, put it four-wheel drive and crept toward my fate. In the rear view mirror I saw my husband on that ATV quietly watching to see how I was going to turn this big ‘ol pickup around on a skinny scoria trail surrounded by snow banks and mud and icy puddles.

And I could go into the step-by-step details here, but I think you’ve predicted it. Not only did I get stuck, I nearly landed the whole pickup in the creek. I did a number that not even my husband could undo. And the man, he didn’t even say, “I told you so” when I profusely apologized. He just poked his head in the window and replied, “We all gotta learn our lessons our own way.”

And then my sister called my brother-in-law to come with the towrope.

Oh, Happy Spring! If you need me I’ll be ignoring logic and the mud in my entryway. 

Prairie People Hit the Beach

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Do you know what it takes to get out of the great white north in March?

Ask anyone who tried it the past couple weeks of spring break and they will tell you it was an act of God. Some of them never made it out.

Listen to the podcast here, or wherever you get your podcasts!

We were the lucky ones (cue dramatic music). Because for some reason our tactic of driving more north to Canada to catch a flight to Mexico actually worked. I mean, the flight was delayed ten hours, but the promise a 100 degree temperature change and unlimited access to tequila kept our spirits up. And also, not one soul left behind in North Dakota will tolerate any complaints about a March trip to Mexico in the middle of the blizzard, so I wouldn’t dare. Didn’t even want to send a picture of me blinding the country with my neon winter white ranch kid legs blazing in the sun. My plan was to just slip quietly away with my husband and my sunscreen and giant hat to pretend for a week that the only care we have in the world is how many more chips and guacamole we could possibly eat before it was time to eat an actual meal.

Traded our wool caps for vacation hats

I turn 40 this year. My husband had his turn in September. Mexico with friends was a gift we gave ourselves for making it this far. And now I’m scheming on what excuse I can come up with to do the same thing next year. Although maybe the only excuse a person needs to get away from it all is that, in the end, it makes you more tolerable to the people who have to live with you.

I will also take a moment here to plead my case for a week’s paid vacation in a tropical place for every person who has had to endure this forty-five month North Dakota winter. I don’t know who is going to pay for it, but I’m sure we can work it out in a bake sale or something…

So that’s where we’ve been, my husband and I. We left our kids behind with the in-laws to do things kids do with grandparents—bake cookies, eat cookies, bake cupcakes, eat cupcakes, snuggle, watch movies, swim in the big community pool and, apparently, partake in major shopping sprees. When they Facetimed us to model their new outfits, with a margarita in my hand and my feet in the pool it was hard to tell among us who was having more fun–and I threw my body down a 98 foot waterslide. In hindsight, the waterslide was a terrible idea, but I’ll never admit it, not to my kids anyway.

Oh, vacation life! Where nobody knows you except the yahoos you brought with you and so somehow you can convince yourself that you are the person who thinks 98-foot waterslides are fun and not just an un-prescribed enema/neti pot treatment.

In Mexico, it could not be clearer that the lot of us were northern folk. With one half of our crew of 14 residing in Canada and the other from North Dakota, our combined complexions lounging in the pool could likely be seen from space. And if that didn’t give it away, one of us puking on the 20-minute ferry ride to the island probably did. We are prairie people. The only waves we have up here are made of grain.

But in Mexico, we’re different. In Mexico, I scuba dive.

Yup. Just give me a 20-minute lesson on land and I’m expert enough to put my face underwater and not panic. And by not panicking I mean managing only to do the one thing required of me to not die while scuba diving and that is to breathe. Need me to actually swim, or push that button that releases air to send me up or down, or look at fish or pose for a picture or not float to the surface and need to be pulled back down? Can’t do it. Working on breathing here.

Oh, if just breathing were the only task. That’s the power of vacation mode.

If you need me I’m back home now, eating noodle soup, re-acclimating to my natural habitat and making plans for the bake sale.

When ranch kids hit the big town

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Rosie and Edie on the set of “Don’t let the pigeon ride the bus”

We’re back at the ranch after week in Mexico and I’m working on getting acclimated to my natural habitat. The shock of 85 degrees to -4 has yet to wear out, even though I’ve eaten knoephla soup for supper two days in a row. Oh, how quickly I can become a beach person.

Anyway, because of our hiatus, I’m a little behind on sharing the weekly column and podcast. Chad and I plan to sit down and record a bit tonight.

The weekend before we left on vacation we took the girls to the big town across the state to visit friends and take them to a theater production. I don’t know why I decided this was something we had to do, but it turned out it was something we had to do. Sometimes you just need to make plans to break out of the ordinary routine and give your kids some new experiences. Especially on the edge of an eternal winter.

Anyway, this column is a reflection on what it means to take our little ranch girls to the big town. Turns out it’s a lot of time on the escalator.

The dangers of taking the country kid to town

We spent last weekend in the big town. I decided to make a singing trip a family trip all the way across the state, which happened to be right on the heels of one major winter storm and at the helm of another because it’s March and that’s what March does up north. And the cows aren’t having calves yet, so we took the chance to get away.

Also, lately the girls have been asking when we can go to the beach, and the closest we can get right now is meeting friends at a hotel pool in Fargo where there was 47 feet of snow piling up outside and more promised for Sunday.

And they were thrilled about it. Truly. Isn’t that the best thing about kids? It takes such simple efforts to make them happy. A promise of ice cream. Pizza for supper. A quarter in the gumball machine. Going up and down the escalator 55 times.

Seriously. I think the level of excitement about the escalator is the reddest of flags when identifying a rural/country kid in the big town. We also rode the store’s Ferris Wheel, but the escalator won in popularity. Rosie rode it so many times that her big sister Edie started to be seriously concerned about the rules. Could she get kicked out for shenanigans like this? Are you allowed to go up and then immediately down? Is there a limit on escalator rides? Does she know she’s starting to get embarrassing?

So went all of Edie’s 7-year-old concerns about her little sister’s lack of decorum in public. It’s like the big sister took a trip to civilization and realized that, perhaps, her little sister wasn’t equipped for these types of outings considering she wasn’t yet civilized herself.

So we took them to the roller-skating rink. Because etiquette goes out the window when you’re fighting for your life with eight tiny wheels strapped to your feet. And in case you’re wondering, country kids don’t know how to roller-skate due to the lack of available paved surfaces.

My kids took to the wood floor with all the confidence and grace of baby zoo giraffes on a frozen lake while their professional Rollerblading town friend and my husband spent the majority of the two-hour rink time holding hands and elbows and dragging our daughters back up on their wobbly, wheeled feet.

Which reminded me of the only time I ever roller-skated in my life down at my cousins’ ranch on the South Dakota border. Between the four of us, we had one pair of real, leather roller-skates with the orange wheels. They were at least four sizes too big, but it didn’t matter. We would take turns, two at a time, gliding around in circles on one skate on the small slab of concrete outside of their garage, skinning our bare knees there as we developed confidence entirely too quickly for the make-shift sport.

Needless to say, I didn’t step foot in a roller-skate that day. At this age, I have to seriously consider the repercussions of breaking a hip.

But my girls? After two Slurpies, three pieces of pizza, and five games of skee ball on the way out the door, they deemed themselves experts and have decided they’d like to live in Fargo now. Where they have roller rinks.

And Target.

Oh, yeah, Edie decided she’d really just like to live in Target, and now I’m wondering how I’ve failed as a ranch mom, because surely now they’re going to leave me for the big cities with roller rinks and escalators, and I’m going to have to follow them and live in an RV in the local KOA to have a proper relationship with my grandkids.

Anyyywaaayyy …

My activity of choice for the weekend was less physical and more theater.

Edie’s been reading “The Pigeon Series” books by Mo Willems, and my cousin (the one with the roller-skates) just happened to be directing the play “Don’t Let the Pigeon Ride the Bus” that weekend. So we went, and it was adorable, and now Edie wants to live in Target and be an actress, and Rosie is so brave she goes down hotel pool waterslides backwards and headfirst even though Edie tells her it’s explicitly, most likely against the rules, and so now they’re both surely going to leave me for the warmer weather and waterslides in LA.

But first we had to get back to the ranch, which was completely impossible on Sunday because when you live in North Dakota, you shouldn’t go anywhere but Jamaica in March. And so we were forced to spend one more evening in the oasis of the hotel pool. As I drove us white-knuckled back west for five hours on icy and drifty roads, I wondered if maybe my girls were on to something. I mean, escalators are pretty fun.

But then, so are baby calves.

See you at the beach.

The dangerous life of a handyman’s wife

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On the podcast I pop in quick to give an update as we get ready to go on vacation!

I am the wife of a handyman.  Because of him we live by the mantra: “If you want something done and still want to be able to afford to buy Cheerios, we do it ourselves.” I came to terms with this concept early in our marriage when we were young and naïve and took on the complete strip-down of a shag carpet, hot-tub-in-the-living-room remodel that brought a 1974 Brady Bunch house up to the times of hardwood flooring and no hot tubs in the living room. Seven thousand hours of staining and varnishing and stripping and sheet rocking, a few dozen arguments and one head stuck in a ladder later I began to fully understand what it truly meant. Wife of a handyman=this is your life, forever and ever amen.

Here we are, ten years ago when the shell of our house arrived. So young. So naive.

Fast-forward twelve years and here we are, proving that I was right. We’re still working on our house. Because just when it starts looking like it’s going to be finished, I come up with an idea for an addition or a remodel. I guess that’s what happens when your tool-belt-wearing man can make anything happen, you start to feel empowered with your vision.

Anyway, lately he’s been empowering me by requesting I help him put rocks on the new fireplace in our new living room, to which I say: it could be worse. I could be trembling on an eight-foot ladder on top of ten-foot high homemade scaffolding with my arms above my head because we decided that 20-foot ceilings were a good idea without considering that one of us is deathly afraid of heights.

Plummeting to a bone-crushing, bloody, mangled death is what I pictured every time I walked across that homemade scaffolding, boards creaking in my attempt to bring a nail-gun to my dearly beloved who thought positioning his ladder on the tippy-toe edge of the ledge, standing at the very top rung and then leaning out into the abyss of death that is now our living room was an acceptable risk to take in the name of homebuilding. The urge to scream “screw the board, save yourselves!” and run to lay on solid ground is a hereditary condition spawned from my prairie dwelling ancestors who passed up the terrifying mountains to come live in houses with one floor, low ceilings and basements.

My dad has the condition too, and so that’s why this memory of recruiting him to help install a wooden beam on our tall ceiling is etched in my brain. I suggested calling the National Guard, but my husband just told me to go get my dad. And the task I approached him with was one straight out of his nightmares: Stand on this tall ladder on this shaky scaffolding and hold this 15 foot beam up to the top of the 20 foot ceiling while my husband climbs and dangles and runs and jumps and back flips with nail-gun in hand to get the thing to hold.

My job? Same thing, only with trembling, holding my breath and throwing up a bit of my morning eggs.

And so there we stood, my dad and I, conjuring up worst-case scenarios as Ninja Bob Villa went from one near death position to the next. Dad told me not to watch as my husband stretched his ladder across the stairway and stood with nothing but a thin board between him and a fifteen-foot fall.

So I didn’t watch. And neither did Dad.

I remember us working hard to hold it together. The two of us only hollering “be careful up there!” and “don’t fall!” like fifty-five times during the course of fifteen minutes. But just as we thought we were out of the woods, everybody’s head in tact, my husband climbed down from the ladder and put his hands on his hips.

“Looks good,” he said.

“YES! IT DOES. GOOD WORK,” shrieked Dad and I.

“I just need to nail one more spot,” my husband said scratching his head. “I wonder how the hell I’m going to get to it?”

We followed his eyes to where they rested on a piece of the beam that towered past the edge of the scaffolding, too high for a regular ladder, un-reachable unless you had wings.

Dad used our best material to try and convince my husband that a nail in that particular location was not necessary. We suggested putting more nails in other places to make up for it. But my husband wouldn’t have it and before we knew it he had his ladder on the ledge of the scaffolding, his feet on the top rung, his back bent at a 90-degree angle out over the staircase with a nail gun in his hand reaching for the ceiling.

And that’s where we both lost it.

I whimpered and squeezed back tears as I white knuckled the ladder. And while I was saying fifty prayers to Jesus, Dad threw down his tools and grabbed on to his son-in-law’s belt buckle as my husband leaned further back over the abyss.

“Son, if you fall it would be sure death,” my dad declared.

“And if either of you tell anyone that I grabbed your belt, I’ll kill you both…”

So there’s that story. Now if you need me, I’ll be hiding from both my husband and my dad.

Stay handy!
Jessie

Notes from the road and the top of the hill

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Well, I made it home for Elko on Sunday after a 17 hour straight drive. Turns out it takes a couple days to recover your sleep equilibrium after a trip like that. It also takes a few days to come back around to the real world after an experience like the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. It was such an honor to be a part of it.

Click here to read an interview with myself and poets Yvonne Hollenbeck and Patricia Frolander about opening up the festival with our “Welcome to Elko Town” Show in the Elko Daily News.

This week’s podcast I sit down with my husband and rehash all the highlights of the trip while he patiently listens, covered in sheet rock dust from holding down the home construction project and keeping the kids alive while I was away. I am lucky to be able to be gone, and even more lucky to have place like this, and people like him, to come home to.

So that’s what the column is about. Finding refuge and grounding in my walks through the hills, where I’m most inspired. Most lonesome. Most nostalgic. Most myself.

Photo by Sweet Light Photography, Charlie Ekburg

From the top of the hill
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Listen to this week’s column here or on Spotify, Google or Apple Podcasts

Sometimes, when the day is coming to a slow close and my head is spinning — with worry and lists, schedules and as the dishes sit waiting on the table, the kids playing in the yard, desperately needing a bath — I slip on my boots and head out the door.

I’m usually not gone long, and my husband has grown accustomed to this behavior, understanding it’s not a storm out, or a give up, or a frustrated stomp, but a ritual that I need to put a flush in my cheeks and make sure I’m still alive out here where the trucks kick up dust on the pink road and the barn cats quietly wait in the rafters of the old buildings for a mouse to scatter by.

I tell him I need to go walking and he knows which trail I’ll take, down through the barnyard, past the water tank and up the face of the gumbo hill, the one that lets you look back at the corrals where the yard light glows, the one that gives you the perfect view of the barn’s silhouette, tall and dark against a sky that is putting on its last show of the night as it runs out of light.

It’s a ritual that needs timing, because that sun, once it decides, goes quickly to the other side of the world.

Sometimes if I get out early enough, I head a little further east to check out how the light hits the buttes in my favorite pasture, making the hills look gold, purple and so far away. Sometimes I just keep walking until dark. Sometimes the evening finds me sitting on a rock or pacing in the middle of the ancient teepee rings that still leave their mark on the flat spot on the hill. I like to stand there and imagine a world with no buildings and no lights on the horizon. I examine the fire ring, close my eyes and think about sleeping under the leather of a teepee, covered in the skins of the animals, under a sky that promised rain and wind and snow and a sunrise every morning.

The same sky that promises me these things, but cannot promise anything else.

I think of these people, the ones who arranged these rocks, hunted these coulees, and watched the horizons and I am humbled by the mystery of the ticking thing we call time.

And I wonder what they called it.

Because I take to those hills and look back at my home — the sections of our fences that have been washed away by the melting snow, the old barn that needs to be torn down, the threshing machine looking ancient and ominous in the shade of the hill — I’m reminded that time takes its toll on this land the same way it puts lines around the corners of my eyes, and there is not one thing man can make to stop it.

This understanding is neither comforting nor nostalgic. It just is. Time builds roads and oil wells, new houses and fences and bigger power lines stretching across a landscape. Time grows the trees, erodes the creek banks, crumbles the hills with the weight of the snow, puts blooms on the flowers and withers them away just the same.

I climb that hill, look back at that farmstead and remember those kids we used to be, running through the haystacks and searching the barn for lost kittens. I climb to that hill and I remember my grandmother in her shorts and tank top, exposing her brown skin while she worked in the garden. I remember my first ride on a horse by myself, getting bucked off near the old shop, hunting for Easter eggs with the neighbor girls in the gumbo hills behind my grandmother’s house, branding cattle in the round pen.

From the top of the hill, I could still be ten years old and my grandmother could be digging up potatoes. From the top of the hill, my cousins could be hiding in the hay bales and my dad could be waiting on the side of the barn to jump out and scare them, sending them running and laughing and screaming. From the top of the hill, the neighbor girls could be pulling up in their dad’s pickup, dressed in pastels and rain boots, ready to hunt for eggs. From the top of the hill, you don’t notice all the work that needs to be done on the fences, the water tanks, roof of the shop and the crumbling barn.

From the top of the hill, that yard light is still glowing the same color it was when I would come in from an evening chasing cattle with my dad or catching frogs with my cousins to a yard filled with the smell of my grandmother’s cooking.

From the top of the hill, the only thing certain to change is the sky and everything else is forever.

Cream noodles and how we connect here

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If you like food and cooking and some talk about making music, this week’s Podcast episode is for you. Listen here or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

 Have you ever had cream noodles?

Well, it is what it says it is, only add potatoes and onions fried up in boiling butter. Then hand-make some thick noodles and add heavy whipping cream and there you have it. Cream. Noodles.

These are the things we eat in January, Lord save us. Carb filled white things with cream and butter, give or take a potato or some chicken, add a side of sausage and save the consequences for later. And if we’re not eating it, we’re planning for the next excuse of a celebration and a reason to cook it up.

I hope we all have dishes like these, little indulgences and reminders of our childhood in our mothers’ or grandmothers’ kitchens. Cream noodles is that for my husband. His mom was raised by her grandmother in the middle of the state who still spoke German in the house and taught her granddaughter the subtle art of adding the milk to the egg so that it measures out properly with the flour.  Turns out there’s a fine line between a noodle and a dumpling and I may have never known any of this if I hadn’t started dating her son.

I wouldn’t have known about homemade cream peas either, and how well they go with mashed potatoes and pork chops, and thereby I would have been missing out on another winter meal staple that puts my husband front and center in the kitchen with me following behind as his cheerleader and potato peeler. It would have been a small tragedy.

The important role that food plays in the foundation of our lives is no big revelation here. It’s been studied and milled over, the poetry and music about it has been written. But the fact that one of my mom’s favorite dishes is now my husband’s cream noodles, so much so that he made them for on her birthday, is a sweet little unexpected connection that the two of them share.  And my husband, he takes the task seriously. If he gets in a bind or has a question it’s a great excuse to call his own mother. And it’s even more fun for him to call her after a successful meal. I don’t know how many times they’ve gone over the stories attached to these heritage dishes, or the subtle ways they’ve gone wrong or right over the years. I doesn’t matter. It’s a countless point of connection and it’s special.

Last month, before Christmas, my husband took the girls to his parent’s place for a baking day and on the agenda was kuchen, a German heritage custard filled dessert. They made up pans and pans of it to give away and store in the freezer for company or for a special occasion. Last weekend, I took one out of the freezer when our pastor came for a visit and let me tell you, having that dessert on the ready gave me an unjustified sense of ranch wife confidence that I needed in that moment. Now, it’s confidence I didn’t earn, but it helped balance the amount of shame-filled panic power cleaning and I did in preparation for his visit.

Maybe someday this Scandinavian-bred girl will learn the art of making kuchen the way I learned the art of making knoephla, but these days I’m just appreciating the fact that my daughters are interested in being involved in what is going on in the kitchen.

The other night my seven-year-old took a bite of her hot dish and declared, again for the fiftieth time in two days, that she wanted orange chicken for supper tomorrow. Because six months ago we had lunch at a Chinese food restaurant in the mall food court in the big town and she’s been searching for that high ever since.

Now if we lived in that big town this request would be a simple one to fill, but our nearest Chinese food restaurant is 60 miles away and that’s a little far for delivery. So, because she hasn’t let up, my quest to recreate her orange chicken experience starts today. I’m telling you now, I’m not equipped, but I guess that’s what the Internet’s for. I’m aiming for minimal disappointment. I’ll let you know how it goes.

If all else fails, we have a good excuse to make cream noodles.

Snowed in

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Happy winter! It’s official now, on December 22nd. I’m writing this in the middle of another no-school, all the roads are closed, the wind is whipping 40 MPH snow day.

And I wrote the column during the last snow day. December has had it’s way with us. So Chad and I had plenty of time between tractor thawing and snow blowing to sit down and visit a bit about windchill and frozen equipment, digging out and and staying home, Christmas traditions and finding gratitude where you can. Even Edie pops in for a snow day report. Then stick around to hear both she and little sister Rosie sing their favorite Christmas song this year. 

Merry Christmas. Thank you for following along this year and sharing your stories with us. Sending you love, gratitude for the year behind us and hope for the year ahead.

Listen to the podcast here or on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

The magic season

Oh wow it’s magical around here. Two young kids waking up each morning smack dab in the middle of the Christmas season to see what shenanigans the little felt elf got into this time will make it that way. So will 4 to 8 inches of heavy snow and a promise of at least 40 mph gusts to make it nice and blinding, just like the North Pole.

Yes, we’re smack dab in the middle of the Christmas countdown. As I write this almost every road in the state is closed and so we’re in a good ‘ol fashioned snow day, except with laptops and virtual learning. And depending on your experience with Google classroom, the whole magic of the snow day experience can go either way.

And so can waking up at 3 am realizing that you forgot to move that enchanting felt elf. In which case you can either embrace that you are the magic or you can use your favorite cuss words as you squinty slipper shuffle down the steps to move the elf from the bathroom perch to the fridge between the ketchup and the soy sauce, wrapped up in an old dish towel for dramatic effect.

I’d say the magic is in remembering to move it at all. Bonus for a clever idea.

It’s worth it in the morning though. My kids are in that special spot of childhood where they still believe, and finding their elf in a toilet paper hammock is about as thrilling as it gets. Although the concept of Jesus and Santa both watching you gets a bit confusing for the five-year-old, especially when the felt elf becomes a part of the felt nativity scene. (Hey, I’m running out of ideas here.)

But it’s not just the Christmas season and the elf-drawing-faces-on-our-bananas- with-a-Sharpie that’s bringing this magic, it’s the kids themselves. They just have it beaming out of their curious eyes, skipping with them to meet their friends at school and almost knocking the Christmas tree over with each of the thousands of cartwheels they’re throwing in the living room.

The lineup of performances and celebration helps too. Last week my girls ran a regular rock star schedule and I happily (and with a supply of Motrin and coffee) played the role of their tour bus driver, stylist, caterer, and personal assistant. We had a first grade Christmas program on Tuesday, a pre-school Christmas Caroling experience on Friday morning and a dress rehearsal for a cheer performance on Friday afternoon. They gave it their all in their cheer recital Saturday afternoon and then we hosted Rosie’s five-year-old swimming birthday party on Saturday night. Then we wrapped it all up with my personal favorite, the Church nativity play on Sunday morning. The girls dressed as angels and they both had lines that we’ve been practicing all month. And we got to dress in our best and watch as Edie the Angel inched all the wise men and poor little Joseph out of the way so she could do the actions to the song front and center like she was born to do.

Man, wasn’t it just yesterday that she was baby Jesus who had a blowout mid-manger scene?

Maybe we all secretly wished for this snow day to slow it down for a minute so that we might sit on our cozy chair, our kids still in their jammies and watch a Christmas movie while procrastinating trying to figure out how to log-in to their Chrome books.

I’m rambling a little I know. I sat down this morning with the idea that I would write down a few lessons I’ve learned from this season of the year and of this middle-aged-mid-parenting life. But all I want to do is write down these little things I don’t want to fade from my memory: my daughters’ red tights and sparkly holiday shoes. Their morning bed head and crumpled Christmas PJs. The mess of graham cracker gingerbread houses and h alf-drunk holiday cups of hot chocolate taking over my kitchen table and singing Edie’s favorite Christmas song at the top of our lungs on the car ride to school. And even that silly elf that wakes me up and reminds me that these are the days. These are the exhausting, adorable, hilarious, snuggle-clad, sugar cookie filled days, frosted in sketchy weather with holiday sprinkles on top.

In case you forgot to remember. In case you’ve never forgotten.

Anyway, I got a little off task here, but here’s one lesson I really wanted to pass along: Tie the tree to the wall. Fishing string works great. Do it even if no one’s doing cartwheels in your living room. Trust me.

And whatever phase you’re in this Christmas, may you do your best to find peace where you are, even if it’s 3 am and you’re barely awake dressing a felt elf in Barbie clothes…

This is five

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It’s a snow day at the ranch and all the roads in ND are closed. So while all the kids were in the house, I sat down to chat with my little sister, Alex, about parenting five year olds and trying to replicate the magic Christmases we had as kids. There are interruptions, per usual, I talk about Rosie and her packrat tendencies and Alex shares a story about how she and an egg went to town.

Listen to the podcast here, on Apple Podcasts, Google Play or Spotify.

Happy snow day moms and dads! Don’t forget to move that elf.

This is Five

Rosie, my youngest daughter, turned five at the beginning of the month. If you’re wondering what five is like, if it’s been a while since you had a five-year-old living under your roof, or have been five yourself, then I’m here today to paint a picture.

And that picture begins with all of the things that could be hiding under a five-year-old’s pillow. Because I, myself, just had a recent revelation a few nights back when our household was conducting one of our middle-of-the-night bed shuffling rituals, the one where Rosie wakes up and climbs the stairs with her blankie at 2 am and then climbs up on our bed and then climbs up on my head to finish her good night’s sleep. And despite contradicting viewpoints on a mother’s need for personal space, I do admit that I like mine, especially at 2 am. So I made my way down to her big empty bed only to discover that it wasn’t as empty as I assumed. I slid my arm under the pillow to snuggle in and was greeted with a half-eaten bag of goldfish crackers, a Santa squishy ball, five rolls of Smarties candies, a tiny notebook, an ice-pop wrapper, a bouncy ball, a tiny doll shoe and a partridge in a pear tree.

And so it was 2:04 am on a random Tuesday night in December when I discovered my youngest daughter is a pack rat. A sneaky one.

And that not all five-year-olds are created equally.

I mean, I could leave a bag full of chocolate in the middle of the kitchen table, within reach and sniffing distance of my oldest daughter, and she wouldn’t dare make a move without first being granted permission. And chocolate is her absolute favorite thing in the entire world. But so are rules. She’s the firstborn and her universe can only run on order.

And so I’ve been moving through parenting both daughters naively and blissfully thinking that sort of discipline and obedience must be a package deal.  But it turns out the second one is sneaky, thriving on flying under the radar, letting the older one take the spotlight until her comedy routine is honed and she can steal the show. As a middle child myself, I should have known.

Anyway, today I offered to help her make her bed and the darling assured me that she had it under control, which just turned out to be a ploy to get me off her trail while she tried to figure out what to do with the sticky stash of pillowcase Sweet Tarts she’d been hoarding. I didn’t even know we had Sweet Tarts and so this is what I’m saying.

I took the child with me grocery shopping yesterday and we had the cart overflowing with what I was hoping would be at least a week or two of meals and snacks. And while I busied myself bagging up the vegetables and cereal at the end of the conveyer belt, Rosie took my distraction as an opportunity to try a new strategy. 

Among the string cheese and tortilla shells, Rosie got one of those Kinder Joy Egg things that is conveniently placed at small-child-eye-level, the kind with the candy and a tiny plastic toy, past me and through the grocery clerk. By the time I found it, I’d already paid for it.

“Rosie!” I exclaimed. “Did you put this candy in with our groceries without asking?”

“Yeah,” she replied, not phased in the least. “I didn’t ask because I knew you’d say no.”

“I would have said no,” I told her.

And then she told me, “But now you paid for it, so I might as well eat it.”

I was so baffled by her antics that I plowed my cart full of groceries right into the Christmas tree by the door on our way out, which apparently has now become a part of her core memory, because she’s reminded me and anyone within ear shot of it at least a dozen times already.

So that’s five.

Oh, and also, tonight at supper she told me she has a crush. He’s a cowboy and he’s cool and he ropes and she’s a cowgirl so what’s the deal?

The deal is, send prayers.

Happy Birthday sweet Rosie. We love every little thing about you.   

The magic of childhood

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On the podcast Chad and I reminisce about some of the most magical times of our childhoods after Edie’s birthday reminded us of how exciting the little things can be when we’re young. Then I confesses some of my most embarrassing moments in the recent weeks while Chad cringes in the corner and questions his life decisions. Then stay tuned for a sweet little interview with the birthday girl!

When’s the last time you’ve been so completely excited about something that you couldn’t sleep? Like, not nerves, but the kind of happy anticipation that makes it impossible to switch your mind off. Body wiggling, so completely pumped that you wanted to close your eyes and skip days to get the thing that you could not wait for?

It’s been a while for me. I didn’t think so. If you were to ask me this question a couple months ago I’m sure I would have been able to come up with an answer to an event or activity or vacation or something that had me energized in recent years, but then last week happened and now I’m convinced that adult excited can’t hold a candle to almost-7-year-old on the night before her first sleep-over birthday party ever excited.

That kind of kid energy, it’s palpable, and for the last couple weeks we have been in a countdown to the big birthday party. With each passing day, my daughter, she leveled up, until the last two nights before the party we were left with the kind of emotion that the little darling could hardly manage. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry and she certainly wasn’t going to fall asleep without checking and double checking her mother’s work, popping up out of what I thought was a dead sleep multiple times to ask me things like “Did you get the cupcakes?” “Did you call the other mommies and tell them to tell the teachers we’re picking my friends up after school?” “Do you think we should go to the pool first or just come home to play?” And then, “I’m so excited I might cry.” And then she did a little and so did I, wondering if either one of us was going to get any sleep and suddenly nervous that I was going to somehow screw something up (I mean, she has such little faith!)

So now I’ve concluded that probably the last time I’ve ever been that excited was when I was eight or nine and I was decorating our kitchen with homemade construction paper cutouts of fish and seaweed and blue and yellow streamers and planning the water balloon fight my friends and I were going to have when they came over to celebrate. And then I got a brand new bike to boot and I was over the moon.

Or the Christmas Eve night when I was right in the sweet spot of childhood and also my neighbor asked me to babysit a tiny baby goat for the holiday weekend named Filipe. And I had that goat in a box by my bed and a lit up cedar branch of a Christmas tree in my room that kept falling over with the weight of all the ornaments and lights because the little coffee can stuffed with wet newspaper didn’t stand a chance and I was anticipating the beanbag chair I’d asked for and Santa delivered…that was something. That was a memory.

And it was simple as that. A tiny baby goat in diapers and a beanbag chair on Christmas morning.

And then there was our wedding, of course. I was absolutely excited about that one, but big days like that as an adult get complicated a bit with grown-up expectations and responsibility. So much of it is in our hands then. But kids? Kids keep it simple. It’s all about the play. It’s all in their heart.

And so I hosted my first ever 7-year-old birthday party sleepover as a mom. And, to Edie’s relief, I remembered the school pickup protocol and I remembered the cupcakes. We got her the toy on her wish-list and we had tacos and did all of the things—dress-up, nail painting, charades, dance party, played house, Barbies, crafts, movie, popcorn and staying up too late. (I even let them use glitter because I’m wild and crazy and one of the girls called me fun and so it is worth sweeping it off the floor for the rest of my life.)

When we finally had to bring her friends back to their parents, I apologized to the mommies for the sugar rush and late bedtime and the glitter ornament I packed up in their bags. One of the moms even thanked me for the purple and green hair chalk in her daughter’s blonde hair. She said it was perfect for their family pictures that afternoon, but I’m not sure she meant it. I told her she’s just lucky I didn’t send a kitten home as a party favor. That was a real option…

Anyway, I asked Edie if her birthday party was everything she hoped it would be and she said she wished it lasted longer and so I took that as a yes. And I’m taking her as my inspiration going into this holiday season to strip off a few layers of adulthood-induced stress and channel that good old-fashioned childhood energy.

Anyone have a baby goat that needs babysitting?