As a culture we don’t like to talk about death. At least not any more. When someone loses someone close we don’t know what to say. Beyond sending flowers, a sympathy card and maybe sending some food over we don’t know what to say.

We have to read from psychologists that the best thing we can do is just sit with the person. That holding space for that person to process their loss for as long as they need to (even if that means years) is what we are suppose to do, that the best thing we can do is sit with them in the uncomfortableness of it all. And most of us are not brave enough to do that. We don’t know how, we haven’t had it modeled, it can take a lot of energy to just sit there and hold space.

My kids have been lucky so far. They have not lost anyone super close to them that was human. Not yet anyway. They have witnessed my husband and I saying goodbye to our grandparents and friends and the unexpected deaths that happen in life but that is all they have seen of human death.

They have had to say goodbye to 3 cats, some expected and most sudden. Since we have had farm animals since 2015 we have said goodbye to several ducks that were close favorites of my eldest. I have had to break the news while on vacation that her favorite duck died while she wasn’t home. And witness the violent ugly sobbing that followed.

But what amazed me is that after about 10 minutes of ugly sobbing she took a deep breath and moved on. She was okay. While she still talks about that duck and misses him, she was able to process his death and move on.

We have come down in the morning once to find a dead duck inside the duck house, and this past weekend the same thing happened to one of our pigs. In both cases we didn’t know it was going to happen and we had done all we could, but life doesn’t always work the way we want too and death is part of it.

We have not hidden this from our kids. We did not hide the truth, we talked about what we knew had happened or what we thought had happened, where we might have made mistakes, and how we think we could prevent it happening in the future. We have also talked about runts and ow sometimes they don’t survive as long as you would like them too, no matter what you do.

My younger two kids have been happy to help when it came time to harvest our meat birds and my 7 year old actually seems to like the process and the gallows humor that seems to come out when one is harvesting and butchering meat. This past weekend my hubby and I got to do our first pig, being somewhat unprepared but not wanting the meat to go to waste.

Not the most pleasant of jobs, but we have always been honest about death with the kids. Like fairy tales that can feel like they have very dark sides, life does too. My girls could see as much or as little of the process as they wanted and my 10 year old helped move the body to where we could deal with it and talked about how weird it felt as this pig had been alive the night before.

I don’t think any of my kids will end up in therapy over our homestead. Maybe they will as you can never know how another person is going to react and put things together in their mind. But they all really understand where their food comes from. And that to eat, things must die whether they are animal or plant. We can also help them reproduce and live again, but in the end for us to live other things must die.

It’s a hard truth that these days no one wants to talk about. And yet it is so important that we do. It is okay to shed tears when saying goodbye to a beloved pet, or just an animal that you raised to later go in your freezer. It is good to thank them for sharing their life with you. For even though we are not always perfect, and we do not have 50 years of farming experience, I know that every animal that has lived with us has had a better life than they would have had in the commercial meat industry.

And that is changing our little corner of the world.  

Do you have baby talk appear randomly in your house?

I mean it’s super cute and exciting when it is your actual baby doing it. The joy the first time they say dada or mama is unparallelled.

But by the time you have 12, 10, 7 and 5 year old, I really don’t want to hear baby talk.

Unless they are talking to one of the animals.

I suppose when they are talking to their stuffed animals or playing a game, it’s tolerable.

At least a little bit.

But when they are talking to me and asking for something, it is just, well, super annoying and irritating.

Yes it tells me that they are either wheedling or in need of some extra attention. That something is going on and they feel the need to regress at least for a few minutes.

But at the same token it just really pushes my buttons. It gets to sitting on my last nerve even faster than just regular whiny behavior. Or just general complaints. It is just so annoying!

Especially because more often than not, the baby talk arrives on days when I am doing something else. Days when I have a lot on my plate, when perhaps another sister is in need of more attention because well when it rains it pours right?

And then out pops the baby talk. I try and wait and see first, see if it is part of a game, or really a way for them to state their needs for extra attention and love. I try to take a deep breath or 3 to make sure that I am calm before responding, because I know it is going to hit my trigger points. I try to listen beyond the words and hear what other clues they are trying to tell me.

Maybe they are going through a growth spurt and are truly hungry and for some reason this is how they are going to ask for more food today?

Maybe they are still recovering from being sick the week before and just like me their brain isn’t firing on all cylinders yet and they truly are not running at 100%?

Maybe they had a bad social interaction a few minutes or days ago and this is how it is coming out?

Maybe they don’t have the skills yet to have things come out better, the words, the tools, the self awareness to know what they truly need?

Maybe they just need another cuddle. Lately I have found that all of my girls have really upped their cuddle needs and that they need far more cuddles than usual. I am unsure if this is because it is winter and they are just running cold or if it truly is just a time in their life where they need more cuddling.

Touch is not my dominate love language so when a lot of them need a lot of touch all at once by the end of the day I don’t want any one else to touch me. Especially if there has been a lot of squirming in all that touching. Sometimes I think I wear all this extra padding on my body because of all the squirming I am on the receiving end of and my body is just trying to protect itself from the inevitability of all these girls and their elbows. Of course that may be wishful thinking as well.

I don’t have the answers. I don’t know why baby talk shows up, and why it seems to go straight to a nerve point for me. I have a bit more tolerance for it than my hubby, who can’t even stand hearing it if it is part of a game, and I try to let that go at least for a little while.

But I do know that often it just needs a liberal helping of cuddles. Maybe some read aloud time and snuggling too. Occasionally just going outside really helps.

What about you? What do you do when baby talk shows up in your house?

I think maybe this is just another holiday for mom’s to compare themselves over. Like who sent the most perfect “handmade” valentine’s to school this year? Who made the best cupcakes/chocolate etc.

I actually try to avoid valentine’s day on social media because it is one of those gag worthy who has the better spouse kind of day. Almost like mother’s day because rarely is it children that are the driving force behind how you get treated that day.

For me personally I try to avoid the day completely. My kid’s don’t go to school and it’s not a big day for me and my hubby, as we try to make time for each other multiple times during the year, when we can’t manage to get weekly dates in (which only happen because we have a 12 year old who will babysit during the day and because we are usually running errands on said date).

This year I am thinking about sending a love note to each of my business clients as a thank you for letting me support them. That seems like a fun Valentine thing to do that is completely platonic and not at all really wrapped up in the commercialism of the day.

I suppose I should ask my kids if they want to do something for V day, before the day arrives and they ask me what we are doing and I’m like maybe heart shaped pancakes?

Because I need another holiday surrounded by sugar like I need extra holes in my head. And I get the archaeological reason behind holidays and sugar, and it means we actually survived the winter, but these days we have way too much sugar and I see my daughter’s acne blow up every time we have a sugar filled party.

So no, I don’t want to do that. But I do like practices of gratitude. Hence the idea of sending Valentines to my clients. To express my gratitude. I like to encourage that in my kids too. I am just not sure that Valentine’s is really the best way to do that.

My girls were at my friend’s house a few weeks ago and they were all making Valentine’s and hiding them throughout the house (I think the hiding had a lot to do with the game). My 7 year old made one for the 7 year old boy and said she loved him…. and embarrassment ensured when he read it aloud to the whole group of kids. At this age I know her “I love you” has to do with the fact that they are good friends who play together about once a week and he is almost like a brother to her. But she also knows enough to be worried about everyone else’s reaction when he read it aloud.

Sigh.

I wish her innocence could have lasted longer. You know like the belief in the tooth fairy.

So here we are. It’s February and that lovely day is happening on the 14th.  I am doing a big workshop that I have never done before so I guess some good is happening that day. But I could really do without the Hallmark drippy-ness. And all the candy in the stores. It seems like it has been going constantly since Halloween, candy, candy everywhere.

I haven’t even followed any of the links as to why conversation hearts aren’t available this year. I never liked them anyway.

We all get it. No matter how much we wash our hands, wash our kids hands, use chemicals to keep our house clean (or use vinegar or just try to make a pathway through our house) it always happens. And this is the time of year in the Northern Hemisphere it tends to happen. The tummy bug, the flu (though actually the real flu is about your lungs not your gastrointestinal track), the puking virus, the roto virus, whatever you call it is bound to hit your house at some point.

It came to visit us at the end of my 7 year old’s birthday. Her party had been canceled due to what was suppose to be two feet of snow (we got more like a foot) and we had stayed home. That night she and the sister she sleeps with woke me up puking. They both managed to miss the toilet. I forgot what a pain in the ass getting puke out of carpet was.

So I ended up sitting up most of the night with the girls. Rob had work the next morning, so I had the night shift. We watched the Great British Bake Off and then Extraordinary homes and I kept dozing between having to get up every half hour to empty the buckets they had puked into. Like clockwork every half hour even though they were down to just sipping water and their dinner was long gone in the upstairs carpet… they would puke and I would get up and empty their bowls. And then sit back down on the couch with them and doze off again.

I lasted until 4 am and then they were both asleep and hadn’t popped in a while so I snuck up to bed for a while. My hubby was working from home that day due to the snow so he took over and let me sleep until about 9:30. And then the tummy bug did what it loves to do, it tore through our house.

By Tuesday my hubby was up in bed with his own puke bowl, and my 12 year old was doing her best to help out because while I never puked or got diarrhea I was so exhausted and tired from looking after everyone else that I wasn’t much help. My 5 year old came down with it about the same time as her Dad and I was up with her the next night. By Wednesday when my hubby tried to go into work (and got sent home after half a day anyway) it was getting pretty bad and we were out of any kind of food my family would actually want to eat. We also live 15 minutes away from the closest grocery store of any size, my hubby did stop and buy bread and eggs at the local general store where everything is local and/or organic.

Late Wednesday my eldest finally succumbed losing her dinner on the carpet in the hall as well. I got up and cleaned that up but unfortunately she was on her own with the tv remote that night. She said she dozed off because she would wake up and it would be a new episode of whatever she was watching. I felt bad but hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since Saturday and was running on fumes.

I kept my girls home Thursday from normal Girl Scout activities because I didn’t want them sharing these lovely germs and by Friday night we all went to the grocery store together to resupply.

One of the things that this bout of the tummy virus reminded me was that I need to create a box that only gets open when we are sick and has the crackers, gluten free crackers, maybe some juice and ginger ale, packaged bone broth and other things you really want when you are sick. Because if I keep then in the general pantry then my family will find it and eat it all and it won’t be there when we need it.

So tell me what would you put in your food for when you are sick box? I would love some more ideas as I build this box. Also has the tummy bug hit your house yet?