We've been spending, on average, a few hours every other day picking a combination of mulberries, black raspberries, white raspberries, red raspberries, blueberries and now wineberries. We are having fun trying out new jam combinations and this year made a black raspberry mulberry combo that is just those two ingredients and a one ingredient blueberry syrup (in both cases no sugar or pectin and they are both fabulous!). We have a number of jam enthusiasts in our family so we have run out of jam jars twice now and we keep telling ourselves that we need to stop making jam. But then I watch as we down a pint or so in a 24 hour period and I figure it will get used over the winter months!
I chopped up the last sugar snap pea vines today and am currently munching on the very last handful of peas. Now we eagerly await green beans, cucumbers, trombone squash, tomatoes and peppers. We've had an abundance of rain so it seems like we could almost sit out in the garden and watch things grow - though we aren't exactly sitting still for long periods of time most days. Jason has been busy collecting seeds of various kinds in the brief periods of dry weather we have had of late. The beets have been a wonderful crop and the main one we are eating from currently. We are enjoying fermented grated beets, pureed beets in brownies, beet greens with eggs or in a red lentil soup (that is what is simmering for supper), grated beet chick pea patties with dill yogurt sauce, red beet eggs, roasted beets, etc... There is no doubt we are eating very seasonally and right now beets are in season!
We are celebrating the culmination of a number of major projects. We continue to enjoy our bathroom every day! The girls and I have taken a shower all together on more than one occasion and we all fit just fine (even with the 4th gal making a larger bump on my front all the time). Showers are all of a sudden more attractive to Alida who can stand on the bench and be above the spray. We are also having fun setting up the changing table and diapering supplies in that space and even have the little clown mobile hung and ready for action! This past week Jason also finished up the renovation of our old pop up camper and has pulled it to its first location. It is just waiting now for some birds to inhabit it. 
While it would be nice to be able to announce that all housing for animals on our place is now complete, but that would be far from true. Alida keeps talking about getting a cow and I keep dreaming of a pig. But Jason and Kali are the realistic ones and are working together, whenever they have a chance, on a new duck coop. They designed it together and now are executing their plan. If it gets done in time and we still have broody hens, we might do one more hatch of the year (Kali's got fertile duck eggs all ready to go and some of us think it would be pretty cute to see a hen raising some ducklings around here!). 
It was during a building stint while I was at work that the following interaction between Kali and Alida took place. Alida said, "Thank you, Kali, for helping me, for helping me learn how." Kali replied, "For helping you learn how to fill in the post hole?" Alida corrected her, "No, for helping me learn how to be a big sister!" Spark is one lucky gal to have these two big sisters so eagerly anticipating her entrance into our family! We took off for part of the afternoon and evening the other day to go bowling with the girls (using their free passes from the summer reading program) and then out to eat at the Indian American cafe where we poured over baby name books while waiting for our food and then while it digested. While there would have been advantages to having a name all packaged and ready to go (as we had for a boy), it's been fun to include the girls in the naming process. Alida has wisely encouraged us not to name the baby "mud" or "dirt." We will take that advice, but not necessarily some of her other name suggestions. In the restaurant, she was mostly looking at her surroundings so things like "fan" came up. Anytime Kali gives Alida a hard time for her silly suggestions, we remind her that it was she who came up with some interesting names in the past for her little sisters ("moyvy" and "moyage" are two of our favorites)!
And, finally, I should mention that the onion racks that Jason built for drying are being put to good use already and are proving to be just perfect not only for onions but for garlic and shallots. We'll hopefully process and remove the garlic and shallots in the next week or so to make way for the big onion harvest just around the corner. It's lovely to not be trying to think about what kinds of accommodations we need to set up for the onions to spread them out in the garage as we have attempted the past few years with only moderate success. We know the three season room is not the final resting place for these drying racks, which has (unfortunately for the length of our project list) only spurred on the conversations about our hoped for screened in pavilion. Not for this year!
The conversations between Jason and I definitely continue about what we might choose not to do in order to ease the pressure we often feel (putting two things on our to do list for every one we cross off). It would probably be easier to buckle down and make some hard decisions if the feelings lingered long enough to make us do just that. Yesterday I felt more overwhelmed. Today I feel overwhelmed too, but more at the incredible beauty that surrounds us and the privilege I have to be steeped in it on a daily basis and what a gift it is for our girls to be part of it too. Walking around our property for close to two hours this morning scouting out berries with Alida was a highlight of my week! 
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