Christmas Greetings from the Farm

It’s Christmas Eve at the farm on Willow Road. Those of you who have followed these posts over the years know what a marvelous pause the farm is in the life of our family. Time seems to get so compressed in the weeks before Christmas and all of the preparations and engagements that compel us […]

Day #225 – Why I Clicked…

Editor’s note: Many of you have enjoyed my Pic of the Day for quite a few years now. I’m starting something new to select certain images and give a little more backstory on why I chose to share it. Let’s see how this goes! I hope you enjoy it… Day #225/365: The corn crop, leaves […]

Christmas Greetings from the Farm

It’s Christmas Eve at the farm on Willow Road, and the tired December sun has given up its fight to burn through the cloud cover. The dreariness of the day makes the sky almost indistinguishable from the snow covered fields were it not for the trees along the fence line. From a distance, everything has […]

Every Day is WDsD

My Facebook feed has been blowing up over the past 24 hours with all kinds of videos, images and well wishes from our community. It started last night with a video from a family that has been walking alongside us – then a text message from the principal of Julia’s school telling all of the […]

Christmas Greetings from the Farm

It’s Christmas Eve at the farm on Willow Road; and like a large part of the Midwest, we’re experiencing an unexpected heat wave. With the last several days of unseasonable warmth, I’m pretty sure the newly planted wheat crop doesn’t know what to do. After a blustery night of rain, the clouds broke and the […]

Christmas Greetings from the Farm

It’s Christmas Eve at the farm on Willow Road. We’ve had some unseasonably warm weather here over the last few days with a lot of rain and mist on the fields – fallow except for those planted with winter wheat. We saw our neighbor Jim Laramie earlier, who stopped by with the most amazing homemade […]

World Down Syndrome Day ~ One More Voice

Four World Down Syndrome Days have passed in my daughter’s life, and this will be the third one I’ve written about. I missed the first one because it was only a couple of months after her heart surgery when we were still taking in how marvelously normal things were becoming. A lot has happened since […]

Christmas Greetings from the Farm

It’s Christmas Eve at the farm on Willow Road. The temperature barely got above 20 degrees today, but a strong sun melted off the dusting of snow we got last night and its reflection off the white and fallow fields made it hard to look outside today. But now the light has mellowed and the […]

A Pre-Thanksgiving Giving of Thanks

We’re coming into the season where we all take an intentional look back at the year and our lives and practice the life-giving discipline of gratitude. Many of you have been following our little family’s adventure faithfully for over three years now, so let me say right at the outset that we are very, very […]

An Open Letter to Julia on Her First Day of Preschool

Editor’s note: As strange as this might seem, Julia’s formal educational career starts today at the three year old preschool class at our local elementary school. I’ve been anticipating and dreading this day for the entire summer, especially in the light of the wrangling we have been in with the special education department of our […]