The online Gentlewood Cottage, anyway.

I will no longer be posting here on WordPress. Instead – please come visit Gentlewood Cottage at my NEW location!

All the archives and links and all that fun stuff will be there, as well as a few new additions – and I’ll be working feverishly to polish up a few other new things, as well.

Please remember to update your RSS feed, if you use a blog reader!

Photo by – BrittneyBush

That’s what my grandma calls them – Seat Covers.

Pretty fancy seat covers, if you ask me.

Bum Genius 3.0, One-Size diapers if you want to be exact.

We’re going on two weeks of (nearly) exclusive cloth diaper use, and so far I really like them!

One thing that really made the whole project a bit easier is my hand-made flannel baby wipes.

Not having to sort out the disposable wipes from the washable diaper makes the changing of messy diapers just that much easier.

So far, using the cloth diapers has been no more trouble than the disposable diapers – but I’ll have to give a regular diaper report… if only because they’re so fun to photograph!

Dan built this rustic raised bed for my parents, and in exchange we will utilize another garden bed that is in another location on their property.

I thought that even though it is an unusual compilation of materials, it turned out to be quite nice, in a rustic sort of way. Just imagine strawberry plants spilling over the edges of those blocks…

And it’s a great way to make use of available resources!

Both of my brothers (the ones remaining at home) assisted in their own ways.

Zion regaled Dan with stories of his turkey hunts on the property, and Jacob…

He beautified the scene with dogwoods,

while watching for signs of good luck and a bountiful harvest to come

So, it’s a she, not a he – but photos of Sophie almost always make me think of this quote.

This is the view I grew up with. Minus Dan, of course. This is the valley that my parents bought when I was fifteen. All eighty-two acres are just as lovely.

When we moved there, the valley was filled with scrubby trees. We cleaned it out, dug a whole out of the hill, and put in our house. For the better part of a year, we lived in the shell of that house while we continued to work on it. We didn’t have running water or electricity at first.

We read books aloud to each other by lamplight in the winter evenings. We watched the fireflies as they filled the valley in the summer nights.

We hauled water up from a spring on the property and heated it on a wood burning stove. Dishes were washed by candelight. Showers were taken outside in a little solar heated shower, often at night, for privacy – not from neighbors because there aren’t any.

For a while, there were no windows on the main part of the house, but my siblings and I insisted on sleeping out there anyway. In the winter we heated stones on the wood stove, wrapped them in towels, and put them at the bottoms of our beds to keep our toes warm. In the summer, bats often joined us in our “bedroom” at night. We drifted off to sleep watching the fireflies glowing softly below us.

We loved ever minute of it! It was my parent’s dream come true… a piece of land, and a fairly self-sufficient home. We poured our sweat and blood into that land, and we love it. Those of us kids who have left home, look back on it with a fondness that we may never feel for any other piece of property. The siblings still at home may not feel that attachment, but that’s because they were still essentially babies while we were taming that bit of land.

Mom used every bit of daylight to plant her cottage garden in the front of the house, and for years she has nursed it along, and now it rivals many botanical gardens in it’s variety and beauty.

Dan and I sat on that very bench in my mom’s garden, under neath the fragrant blossoms of the crabapple tree and the sparkling canopy of stars, nearly every evening during the spring of our courtship. We watched the otherworldly dances of the fireflies that filled the valley below us. Many times since, we’ve commented that that valley must have the most amazing firefly display in the world. It’s incredible.