Joy Lane Happenings

I don’t know if it’s possible to be brave when you’re 9 months old, but it certainly feels that way. At Emma’s December Doctor’s appointment, we asked about a little head nod she kept doing, which we first noticed in a video of her saying, “Da Da.” Our doctor said it was probably nothing, but after consulting with another doctor, wanted us to have it checked out right away, just a few days before Christmas. They were concerned she was having seizures. After driving through a snowstorm for a consultation with a neurologist, we scheduled an EEG for the day...

Our woods project is done! I’ve been working on this for months in 30-45 minute installments with the girls while Katy was making lotion. 20 bags of garbage, scrap metal, rugs, rusty camping gear, and a discarded porch hauled out and three trees saved from invasive vines, but the real question was what to do with the big pieces of slate, granite, and hundreds of bricks we found all over our hill. From the beginning, we wanted it to be a “re-arrangement” with nothing new brought in (albeit $5 of landscape fabric), and for it to have a Rivendell feel...

Marriage is hard in this season. The other day I woke up at six, and Makayla, our five-year-old, was lying on the bed about a foot away staring at me (I wonder how long she was there??). I told her to go back to bed, and forty minutes later, I woke up again from Kelsey’s eye lashes against my eyelids. She’s three and doesn’t have Makayla’s sense of personal space. I opened my eyes, and her eyeballs were the only thing I could see, which is a an unsettling way to wake up. And so, it goes. Gone are the...

The lights shut off, and for the fifteenth time, everyone in the audience heard our indignant two-year-old exclaim, “Hey! I can’t see!” We were at Makayla’s ballet recital and her dance wasn’t until Act III. I’d woken up around five in the morning to setup the Portsmouth Farmers’ Market and was delighted that Ali, our intrepid employee, could take over for me so that I could attend. I picked up a bouquet of flowers (complete with asparagus, because Omniflora Farm bouquets are the coolest) and arrived at the school in time to meet Katy and carry in Emma, who was...

  “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” –J.F.K., Sept. 12, 1962     When Katy and I took on Joy Lane Farm, our first goal was to make it our...