We have a teenager in our house!

How much excitement can one household contain in a given month - baby starts walking and the oldest daughter turns 13. Kali is currently feeding bites of applesauce (one of Terah's current favorite foods) to her to attempt to keep her out of my hair. Now Terah has come over to the futon where Alida has applesauce and is begging for her to share. She doesn't want to miss out on anything!

I'll mostly let photos do the trick on this post because at this hour of the day Terah is not easily distracted from her desire for mama! So we'll save reporting on the produce coming in by the bushel-fulls these days and the antics of our kiddos for another post. And while I'm posting about celebrating another year of life for Kali, we are also thinking a lot about Jason's grandma who died last evening (it's been hard to find moments for reflecting on that - the kiddos are making concentrating on even this simple post rather challenging).

We had a wonderful fun celebration with Kali the eve of her birthday. A beautiful rainbow crossed the sky, and the rain was limited to a few sprinkles. Jason and I both felt rather crazy running to and fro hosting, but Kali seemed to feel loved and celebrated, which was the whole point of it. We had just shy of 20 of us gathered around the outdoor fire making pizza pockets, roasting corn, eating s'mores and gabbing.

Two friends slept over and joined us for a birthday breakfast of buckwheat waffles and pancakes, eggs, applesauce and chicken sausage. We all approved of her birthday dinner that evening too, where we outdid ourselves with homemade mint chocolate ice cream. Oh my, was it delicious! And that was after a meal of fried eggplant (Kali had requested a trip to the farmer’s market for eggplant of her birthday – she got a coupon for the farmer’s market but her friends gave her a bag of eggplant for a present).

The celebrations continued with our annual trek to the Rockingham County fair. Terah was pretty fascinated by it all. I was thrilled that the fair had a new addition of a little portable nursing/changing room that was air conditioned. It made a huge difference in our evening! We were joined by Jonas and Emily (who is exactly as pregnant this year as I was at the fair last year – her due date is on Terah’s first birthday). Fun to think of them having a little munchkin with us next year. Alida had grown enough that she wasn't turned away from the bumper cars two years in a row!

 Ok, that's as far as I can get for today! Tomorrow commences orientation week with my work so it will be awhile before I resurface in this space most likely. I've made it through August for many years in a row now, so I expect this to be no different. But it's quite a ride!