We're celebrating Thanksgiving today with sweet friends coming over for a turkey feast. We'll be gathering around our new dining table; a generous Christmas gift from Grandpa. It was recently completed by our incredibly talented friend Dan just in time to gather ten souls around and celebrate our abundance of gratitude.
Some things to give thanks for; a semi-surprise visit from said Grandpa last week. Semi because there was a miscommunication between Craig and me. Whoops! Still it was pretty funny to see him poke his nose through the front door unexpectedly and have him around to play in the last days of Indian Summer with.
And, thankfully, when the grandparents are in town Mama has licence to vamoose and play too! Grandpa watched the kids while I went on a eurythmy adventure with my fellow Waldorf homeschooling mama friend Erin. Eurythmy is a component of the Waldorf curriculum in schools so I have always been super curious about it. Here's an excerpt from wikki to explain some of it and it's relationship to learning:
The gestures in the eurythmist's movement repertoire relate to the sounds and rhythms of speech, to the tones and rhythms of music and to soul experiences, such as joy and sorrow. Once these fundamental repertoire elements are learned, they can be composed into free artistic expressions. The eurythmist also cultivates a feeling for the qualities of straight lines and curves, the directions of movement in space (forward, backward, up, down, left, right), contraction and expansion, and color.
It was an amazing experience. And half the fun was getting there. Almost an hour and a half combined in the car gabbing away about homeschooling and cow having.
And of course, today I celebrate how much we scored with sweet Daisy. She's been the perfect starter cow. It's been about a year since we welcomed her to our homestead. And Baby Meatballs seems to have inherited his mama's sweetness and gentle nature. He especially loves kids. If kids come to the fence he giddy ups to come over and give them kisses. We are truly blessed that our paths have crossed. And I want to share the feeling of abundance I have whenever I walk back to the house with a pail full of white nectar or see Craig screen their poop into our garden beds. So I'm so thrilled to announce I have recently discovered Heifer International and plan on donating a portion of my Simplicity Parenting work to them. I'll keep you posted on that plan. Meanwhile, you should check out their gift catalogue. What fun would it be to send someone a goat for Christmas? Think of the pun possibilities!
And speaking of cowboys, I'm thankful for this funky little invention affectionately known in this household as 'Run Bike' for all the snippets of cuteness it provides throughout the day and beyond.
What was your favourite part of the day, Kale? "Riding my run bike". What was your trickiest part of the day? "Wiping out on my run bike".
Every time. And the funny thing is he rarely wipes out but he always says that. Lucky he always wears his hand knit helmet.
Which brings us to knitting! I was thankful to finally have found the time to stock up my yarn shop with a few new handspuns, and even naming them after some of you (I'm talking to you Tangerine Meg, Wild Violets and Lil Muse Lily) but then a couple of someones, not pointing fingers, scooped up almost my entire shop's inventory whilst I slept! Not complaining but there's only one left. Poor lonely little Molly.
So much more to be thankful for but a beep tells me I have two pumpkin pies to pull out of the oven, a turkey to throw in and a quick vacuum of the place is called for before our friends arrive. Our collaborated efforts are going to bring the following to the new Tudors-sized dining table; turkey, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, made from scratch cranberry sauce, saucy broccoli, harvest buns, gravy, pumpkin pie... Ooof. My stomach hurts from just looking at that last sentence! Happy Thanksgiving sweet friends.