July excursions behind us & August is here!

The "craziest month" in my year has arrived!  April and August are my busiest work times and they seem to coincide with two of the busiest months here at our homestead, especially August.  This year our beans will be later than usual and tomatoes are ripening slowly due to the cooler temperatures, so things will all "nicely" come to a head right around the final push of preparations for new student orientation at the end of August.  August is also a time for much celebrating, with the birthday of our eldest who turns 11 in 10 days - so a trip to the fair with the Tangly Woods crew and a birthday party/sleepover are in the plans for the month as well!  My saving grace as I look towards the next few weeks is anticipating my mom spending a week of it with us.  Things always go so much smoother with an extra set, particularly her extra set, of hands around!  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I've been hesitant to put any kind of "lice update" here since my last very premature and hopeful blog post. I think I was naively hoping, beyond hope, that we were through with those little buggers!  We were, almost!  But with lice "almost" is not good enough. Over the next 3-4 days we found one tiny louse on each of our heads.  It was enough to cause us to stay up to the wee hours of the morning multiple days in a row combing each other's hair and pulling out nits.  Jason and I have had multiple "date nights" after the kids are in bed, sitting in our closet examining each other's head with a fine tooth comb (literally).  Not our idea of a romantic date!  The good news is that we have been "bug free" for well over a week.  We are back to hanging our laundry outside in the fresh air and sunshine, and doing laundry at a more reasonable pace.  Our floors are still squeaky from the oils that have dripped on them, but washing floors is one of those things that keeps getting bumped off the to do list, in the interest of more pressing (and fun) tasks.  We are still checking for nits and are still finding what appear to be really wimpy, dark colored, flat egg casings here and there. Of course the fear is that one of those egg casings is not dead and will hatch, so hence the continued vigilance.  Re-infestation of head lice would radically alter the month of August, which is not what we are hoping for!

One of the reasons we are up late checking in the evenings is we can't bear to use all our good daylight time on it.  There is too much to engage in the outside world - produce to harvest and freeze, dry, can, or eat and lots of weeds to be pulled (way more than normal due to the abundance of rain).  By the time we get to August, I don't feel like I have the luxury of taking much time to experiment with food preservation, which is what I really want to be doing. Canning is what comes naturally (and freezing, but freezer space is already at a premium), but I'd like to get better at drying and fermenting.  I managed to take 5-6 huge squash last week and dry them in rounds and I'm a big fan.  First of all they take up so much less space and second of all they are tasty. When I next have a surplus of squash, I'll give it a try brushing them with a little olive oil and salting them and I think we'll have a great snack option!  In the midst of putting up food for later, we are also consuming vast quantities of delicious, colorful food.  Here is a sampling of one such meal - beets, cucumber dill salad, string beans and a squash, onion, garlic, saute with chicken pieces.  We recently pulled all our onions and shallots and had a hard time fitting them all in the garage.  I didn't get any pictures of that afternoon's fun since we were pretty much jogging to and from the patch and garage to get them pulled before the rain started.  As soon as Alida's wakes I hope to head outside and fill a few baskets with tomatoes, cucumbers, beans and whatever else there is to find. It's likely, with Alida along especially, that none of the raspberries will make it back into the house!

We've been gone from home 3 out of the last 4 weekends, which might be a bit part of why our week days feel so crammed full. In addition to our trip to the Benners, we made two trips to WV - one for an annual Music on the Mountain event and to drop of Kali and her cousin for the week and the second for a camping weekend with college friends and picking up Kali.  Both were well worth the trip, but leave us wishing that more gatherings happened after frost and before spring planting!  In between our travels we enjoyed a week with cousins around.  It's really special to see our girls forming relationships with their cousins now that carry them between visits.  There was lots of game playing, laughter, and running around outside.  The house feels quieter with just the four of us now.

This past weekend was our camping trip to Spruce Knob Lake.  We hadn't been camping since I was a day or two pregnant with Alida - so it had been awhile!  It was as it usually is for me - enough work getting ready that I wonder if it is worth it and then loving it once there and feeling like it goes way too fast.  Before we know it we are back home airing things out, laundering wet and dirty clothes and jumping back into the swing of things.  But the memories of cooking over the fire, talking with good friends, hiking around the lake, napping in the tent to the sound of rain pouring down, watching our kids enjoy each other, and taking in the beautiful views from the highest point in WV linger.