Catching up before life changes drastically...

I sat down to put up some pictures from the eventful weekend here and realized I've got some serious catching up to do in this space. But I don't want to devote much time to it because it's my last evening before starting back at work first thing tomorrow morning! So here's a whole bunch of pictures of life lately, with a minimal amount of commentary. I'm playing Rook with Terah and Alida while posting this, so there's a limit to my focus at present.

Our meals start to get really colorful at this time of year. This time it was Alida who got inspired to photograph her food!

For the first time this year, we got a swim in at our friend's pool (and the girls got to also visit the library and enjoy ice cream cones all on the same day).

Lots of chillaxing happening! Alida made some real progress on learning to float. Speaking of chillaxing, I came across this scene one day recently.

We are in the thick of green bean season and Kali's tower building has commenced once again. In addition to those skills, she recently tried out being a hairstylist on Alida. I liked "the do" so much, I asked if she would give me one too (and then Terah wanted one too). I was trying to order the rest of my birth doula books while she did it, not realizing I would have to turn my head every which way throughout!

In the kitchen, Kali made for all of us the cucumber curry she first made in Pittsburgh. As I typed this, Alida said, "Don't remind me...it was not good." I beg to differ!

We are eating so amazingly well these days! Having multiple cooks sharing their talents and creativity is wonderful. We enjoyed another round of spring rolls recently, thanks to Tala - it's now a family favorite.

We are harvesting things now on our M/W/S schedule and those days are thus pretty full with food processing of various kinds - whether that's freezing beans, fermenting beans or cucumbers, making pickles, whipping up some fresh pesto, chopping lots of veggies for fresh eating, making jam, freezing okra, etc... Tomatoes are just getting rolling so this coming week might include our first batch of salsa (just in time for Kali's bday!). I did our first round of tomato shallot sauce to go over sautéed squash - all the shallots are harvested and looks like there will be lots of "first use..." (ones that need to be used rapidly because they won't hold up in storage). We are excited about the sweet peppers coming along AND the long row of Serranos - we'll be making lots of hot sauce this year... We've got carrots and beets to pull as we want them. Probably better make sure they are holding up ok, but I've hardly had a chance to do more than the keep up with what has to be harvested every few days.

We've been struggling with how to manage our rain barrel. Our goldfish of many years finally died recently, and we think the rats living in the gutters might have something to do with it (their poop getting washed into the barrel and then using up all the oxygen in its decomposition). We tried minnows and they didn't make it. Now we have a frog that seems to be doing ok but it doesn't eat the mosquito larvae (though it must be eating many of the adults since there aren't many in there and the larvae supply seems lowish as well). We then tried another goldfish and two Rosie Reds. None survived to the next morning. Sigh. We are open to ideas! 

Our chickens are doing better than our fish. We are all done hatching, but still have some little ones running around with mamas. And some of the first chicks from this year have just started laying so we are enjoying new cute pullet eggs!

Among the summer harvests is always a pretty large chicken butchering and we had quite the team. Jason, Kali and Terah did the selecting the day before and on the day of we had 30 birds to butcher. Never before have we gotten through that many birds in a morning! Thanks to my dad doing much of the plucking and Tala, with Alida for some of the time, doing the gutting, it didn't end up being nearly as long a day. Terah enjoyed another feather festival!

The butchering coincided with a weekend visit from family. Ethan, Kathy and boys hadn't been down since before Covid so it was lovely to be together in person for a bit. The first day we were distracted by the butchering, but got to meander around together and visit a bit more the second morning. The girls also went over to Blake's to get in on some more slip and sliding!

Speaking of special visits, we got to enjoy another short but sweet visit from a dear friend recently. It went too fast, but we got in a lot of fun and connection time in the moments we had together. The phone calls and virtual times are helpful when distance separates, but the hug was such a gift!

Ok, time for a family meeting and ice cream sundaes (the wedding blog will have to wait - one of the perks of hosting it was a major haul of leftover Smiley's ice cream).

In closing, here's two signs of our kids growing up:

Kali has clearly outgrown one of her favorite outfits. And Alida has also outgrown it. And now Terah is done with it as well. On to Ivy it goes, but this one had to be photographed!

And Terah has decided that she puts herself to sleep at night. I'm still getting used to her saying, "I'm going to bed now" and climbing in and singing herself to sleep. The first night I figured it would be a one time thing and I just laid in our bed listening to her sweet little voice singing the lullabies she has heard so often over the years until her voice trailed off and all was quiet. But she's more or less stuck with it.

Two final pictures just because. I've caught some morning skies recently because, well, we've been burning the candle at both ends! And I took time to walk around a bit more slowly one day to notice all the blooming things.