Watch our little bundle of love as she grows through the years.

Went to Woodstock on Friday night to go to their 3rd Friday contra dance. Woodstock Vermont is where my family on vacation back when i was like 12 drove through on our way from my dad’s parents in Massena to my mom’s mom in Boston. We fell in love with the town because it was surrounded by mountains to ski and it had a pool in the town center where we could swim. My dad would finish up his 2 year family practice program in Toledo Ohio and we would move out here…Never happened but now I am here with a family. A bit surprised we did not drive through here when we were cruising the state in ’08 looking for a place to live. Alas it is no longer our kind of town. It’s one of those towns like Stow that caters to the out of state tourist 2nd home fancy ski town kind of town.  a downtown of 200 year old buildings restored into a shopping mall.

The dance was in a stone hall built in 1866 next to the Ottauquechee river. For a measly $8 you got potato leek soup and bread, a family dance, dessert and a contra dance. It was a small dance, lots of eager kids, a great caller and fun dances which is not always the case with family dances. Ambiana danced with me as her partner for 3 dances. My love a dance brought forth and dancing with me. We came to this dance also because our friend Brenda from Worcester now lives in Woodstock and we met them at the dance & spent the night with her and her man, Jim and  3 year old Kaiden. Jim was gone early Saturday but we hung out wit Brenda and Kaiden and the cozy trailer-cabin and talked story and played.

On Sunday i snowshoed up to Eagle Ledge and the land and did some dreaming about the homesteading we are going to do be doing upon it. Scoped out where the parking spaces would be and the bridge, Stamped out in the snow, the footprint of the long house and the main house, picked a place for the outhouse and the compost on the slope above the cabin and marked in my mind all the dead pines that need to come down. Seems that there is a spring at the base of the slope to the south of the cabin that could be our water source. February is pack up the trailer month, March is move it into the cabin month and April is Arizona and onto our land month.

Ben called me last night and said he and his gal want to get some land near us, homestead and raise a family near ours.

My dad and mom are both suffering from circulatory issues and infections in the feet. Sad that in creating such a large family they live apart and alone. Mother will soon no longer be able to live unassisted and the elephant in the family is where is she going to end up? We are in no position to offer her a home for at least 2 years as we are moving off the grid into an inaccessible ramshackle cabin while we build our home.

When Ambiana was the age Jakobi is now she looked around the dinner table at us then pointed to colleen and said ‘ma ma’, pointed at me and said ‘da da’, at Gaelen and said ‘ga ga’ and placing her finger on her chest proclaimed herself ‘ya ya’. I mention this because Jakobi is now referring to herself as ‘bobi’ (rhymes with go bee).

she loves to have a book read to her, her favorite: hop on pop & new hat old hat.

I meanwhile am reading Kenneth Robert’s ‘Oliver Wiswell’, an historical fiction account of the American revolution from the American loyalist point of view.  who knew that Samuel Adams was the Sarah Palin of his day…did you?