It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

and the little children shall lead them...

19 kids from age 3 to 15, 6 adults and apple peels, chains, popcorn strings, cranberries on a thread ............just what you need to decorate a tree for the Old Stone House.

Geneva United Methodist Church has a Sunday School with 23 children that attend regularly. That is exciting news for a small town! Even more exciting, they volunteered to make the decorations and then decorate the trees for Christmas at the Old Stone House.

We told stories of what living in the house in the 1850's would have been like. They probably spent the first winter living in the basement. It's got a dirt floor, low ceiling and is cold. The kids have homes with finished basements and just imagining what that winter would have been like in the Old Stone House made them grateful for what they have.

We explained why the bed had ropes in it. Mattresses were material covers stuffed with straw, hay, feathers, whatever they could find and placed on top of the ropes that were woven into the bed frame. They may have changed the bedding only once or twice a year - and it probably had bugs in it. Then the ropes were tightened so the bed would not sag. The old saying "sleep tight and don't let the bedbugs bite" really meant something!

Our Historical Tour of Homes is this coming weekend, and we feel honored to have our local children involved in the process. Thank you Geneva!

Cleaning the Old Stone House

This week we are getting the Old Stone House ready for the Historical Tour of Homes.

That means cleaning it inside. Normally, a group of ten to twenty ladies from the Historical Society show up with buckets, rags, shop vacs and loads of energy. We usually clean it every spring when it's a little warmer. The bugs come in when it starts to get colder and die off in the winter. It's ready for a good cleaning by spring.

This year we had two days notice and three of us showed up. All with our heads covered, rags and buckets in hand. We also brought the new shop vac.
Jeff had a better idea. He proposed we use the Stihl leafblower and just blow out the bugs and dirt. NO NO NO!!!! We decided there were too many bugs! Instead, he used the industrial leaf blower (still a Stihl) to pick up the piles of bugs Keri and I swept. That worked very well.

Still, the Stihl wanted a better workout. Jeff was itching to try it out. And frankly, I wondered what would happen? There were still some bugs in the rugs. Dust everywhere (we re-pointed the exterior this fall and it created a ton of dust). What did we have to lose? Either way we had to clean it.

So we went ahead and did. (if you can't see the video below, try this link)