The longest, scariest six weeks of my life are finally over. Phil finally is home from training and life around the “homestead” finally can progress! I know what you’re thinking, scary? Yes, I’m terrified of the dark and its pitch black out here.

I had sleepovers with my brother Tanner and his family often and lots of wine, horror flicks and sleepovers with Alajiah. Wine and horror flicks after the kids went to bed of course. The girls and I were kept busy with town activities and trips to Olympia, more often than we should have.

When we were home, we played with the baby chickens, ducks and bunny, watered our greenhouse plants, sunroom plants and mowed the grass. Needless to say, getting things done around the house with my crazy schedule, a needy (hardly lets me put her down) Daphne, a very rambunctious Harper and Riyan with all her extra activities are rather hard. It’s nice to have the “team” back together.

Back to Phil being home, I’ve never been more excited to have my husband back.

He instantly started working on a treehouse in the woods between our house and the driveway with the help of Ed, the girls and our nephew Liam. The man loves to build and the kids love to help. It was sweet to watch.

While I was in Olympia, I bought gnomes, solar flowers and mushroom stools. The stools will now live in the house because they are too cute to be outside. We are trying to find the right slide for the little girls to go from the treehouse to the ground and trying to find a safe-enough zip line from our porch to the treehouse because … why not? How cool would that be?

Our plants really have started to mature. My patty pan squash are going to make it this year, I just know it. If you have never had a patty pan squash, your life is just not complete. THEY ARE SO GOOD. Did I mention the first batch of seeds we planted died? I’m not sure what happened, I think it got too hot in the sunroom, so we opened some windows.

Anyway we had to replant everything after three weeks — ha ha! Second time’s a charm I guess.

We basically planted for the purpose of canning. We are going to have so much spaghetti sauce and salsa. The fruit trees are all blooming, the orchard is mowed and all we have to do now is till the rows. Last night Phil put all of our salad and some strawberries in an old wash sink on the porch; it’s pretty cute and by cute I mean practical. The water drains down to my climbing roses. It’s a win, win.

The day that we were getting ready to transfer our baby ducks to the chicken coop, we left them on the porch in a tote with no worries about it. The living room door was open and the dogs were out and about. All of a sudden the ducks started chirping like crazy.

Our neighbor’s dog, Chompers came on the porch and helped himself to a duck. We all ran after Chompers and finally he dropped the baby duck completely unharmed. Phil chased the duck around in circles for a couple minutes. All that frantic yelling was quickly followed by relief and laughter of watching my husband chase the baby duck.

Our rain barrel on our greenhouse fouled up so Phil picked out the necessary items to fix it along with another barrel for the chickens. Our bees will be ready to be picked up on Sunday so that means we need to get our bee houses put back together. That bear did a number on them. We get to drive from the Hood Canal area to Oil City Road with a box of bees. I’m can hardly wait. Our luck … a fender bender and everyone gets stung.