About

:: September gorgeousness under Sheep Mountain::

6512 and growing is the story of growing a family (plus 7 chickens, thousands of honeybees, a large garden and a small orchard, while butchering an elk or two) at 6512 feet, our Colorado hometown elevation.

This is our family’s continuing story, one that started with a doll-sized baby and his life-saving oxygen tubes, and has evolved with a momentum I am running to keep up with. Someday Col and Rose will read their story and blush, or shrug and get back to whatever it was they were doing. Maybe they will wonder why I was compelled to record the details.

This is why.

My friend Amy, also a mother, made the observation that in pre-child life when an intense period of time occurred (travels, beginnings, a slice of life so poignant you could eat it), there was inevitably an end to that period, after which reflection and insight came rushing in like a toddler who’s just discovered running. In parenting there is no end (we hope most fervently), just more, of everything. Those fleeting gems like how at 4 years old Col called robins “red belly breast birds” (you’d think “robin” would be simpler) or how Rose at 2 explained that she can’t see out the tall window because she’s “too big” will collapse under the scaffolding of tomorrow’s story titled: how Col wore three dresses and ran around the garden begging to pull carrots. So, my efforts to slow the fast moving train long enough to see precisely how the morning sun glints off the sooty smokestack, is this blog.

Being able to share our stories helps free me from being buried by them, and reminds me that although it sometimes feels like life (and the chaos of children) is happening to me, really it’s just life happening.

This is the story of how Col and Rose kept me and Dan from climbing Sheep Mountain, but instead showed us the meadow voles scurrying around our campsite.

Thanks for reading.

xo

Rachel