Last weekend my dad drove up to spend a day with us. My stepmom wasn’t able to join him because there was family that needed her close to home that day. We celebrated Bracken’s birthday again and Bracken was excited to get some time with Grandpa. My dad not only brought us a load of firewood in the back of his truck, but also in his trailer. We couldn’t thank him enough. First my mom came to visit and despite being tired and jet-lagged from travelling, helped us inside the house. Then the next weekend my dad came and despite being super swamped at work, not to mention having a farm to run, helped us outside. We needed the help and were grateful for it, I certainly appreciate having such generous parents. Sometimes this homestead feels like more than Jeff and I can manage just the two of us, with a business to run as well, and as the years pass we learn to humbly accept help when it’s offered and say thank you, rather than refuse it.

After we unloaded all the firewood and stacked it in the woodshed, my dad and Jeff went to the bottom of our driveway to split all that alder wood from the trees that had fallen. They brought it up in the truck and unloaded it to cure for firewood next winter. As if that wasn’t enough, my dad helped us get a bed ready for planting garlic. We had clear skies that day and it felt good to wrap up some projects outdoors that we’d been wanting to get done. Being able to haul all that alder wood up in my dad’s truck (and trailer) saved so much time. It would have taken quite a few trips to bring all that wood up in our little Subaru!

Bracken was also saving a special project to do with Grandpa. For his birthday, he got a box of geodes from his aunt and uncle. That gift made me laugh because of the story behind it. When my sister and I were little, we had rock collections and we were always looking for cool rocks to add to them. Then we found out about geodes. We thought geodes were magical. They became the holy grail of rocks for us. However, we didn’t know how to identify geodes from the outside and thought a geode could look like any rock at all, so we started taking a hammer and busting open rock after rock we found, just to see if there would be a geode inside. (I remember getting in trouble at our babysitter’s house because we destroyed some of her landscaping rocks.)

No matter how many rocks proved not to be geodes, we never seemed to give up hope that maybe the next rock would have those sparkly crystals inside and would be a geode at last! Oh, I love that innocent childhood hope we carried, so sure the next one would be our treasure. Those childhood memories about our obsession with geodes is what made me laugh so much when the container of geodes came for Bracken’s birthday. There were some safety goggles inside (my sister and I never used those, probably a good idea.) Bracken loved smashing the geodes open with a hammer. And Grandpa Bob got to break one open before he hit the road. It was late in the day and starting to get dark, but I took pictures nonetheless because it needed to be captured, especially to share with my sister. Bracken wasn’t ready to let Grandpa go, he had endless ideas of things for them to do together (including building a pond.)

Grandpas and geodes… always entertaining!