Mom to a 12 year old...

As our newest little one flip flops around inside of me (my goodness she's an active little gal), my thoughts are also with our oldest daughter.  Among the many recent celebrations was her 12th birthday (am I really old enough to be her mom?).  Parenting has been the wildest ride of my life and, while it has its rough spots, the most exhilarating and transformative.  Over the past year or so, I have been thrilled to be in a front row seat watching and benefiting from the beautiful growth and maturation in our eldest.  She's just an absolute delight about 98% of the time (her worst moments seem to be when Alida pushes her buttons, to which I can fully relate!).  There are so many things I love about what I'm seeing in Kali, but I'll just name a few here that stand out to me on a daily basis (and things that sadly are in contrast to my own lived experience at the same age).  

I am thrilled to watch her continued love of learning and desire to engage the world around her fully and be an active participant in our homestead (she never wants to miss anything!). This translates into all sorts of wonderful traits, not the least of which is that she is so incredibly helpful.  Multiple times a day, she asks me if there is anything she can do to help.  Often there is and she happily heads off with the compost to empty, with a laundry basket to bring wash in, to get a knife to snip beans, or a story to read to Alida.  Only at times when I say I can't think of anything right at that moment (I clearly need to beef up my delegation skills) does she say she'll read a chapter of her book (but I should let her know if I think of anything).  What a kid!

I love her active mind and active body.  She is thinking constantly.  She'll ask for hard spelling words to test her abilities or algebra problems to do (so there I can relate as that was the one subject I'd do problems "just for fun" and not for the grade).  Regarding her active and healthy self, the other day she wanted to join me on a "nappy walk."  I well remember the times when I was disinclined from her coming along because she would get tired and slow me down. My goodness how times have changed. I could hardly keep up with her. Granted I'm moving more slowly and have grown out while she has grown up; her long legs had me huffing and puffing.  

I learn a lot by watching her relationship to food and her body.  She is not driven by the many external messages that plagued me from even earlier than 12.  She is such a model of a healthy approach to eating - she eats when she is hungry and stops when she is full.  She enjoys both the process of eating her food, but also being part of growing, harvesting and making it.  Yes, I'm more than a little bit impressed and at moments even slightly envious as I still feel like I have both some learning and unlearning to do on that front.  I'm grateful for her good modeling!

So now to the celebration! A few main highlights included family and some good friends for pizza pockets over the fire, watermelon seed spitting contests, a sleepover, a birthday breakfast and more game playing that we fit in most weeks let alone one day.  Before her birthday when I asked what she wanted, she couldn't think of anything in particular that she needed or wanted. But she could not contain her excitement when a new sewing machine from my folks showed up.  She and Mom put it to good use right away making a curtain for our bathroom sink.  

She seemed very happy for how her year of life was marked and got to enjoy a party on her actual birthday and the fun of looking forward to the yearly trip to the fair (haven't gotten to that post yet).  The attention did shift on the afternoon of her birthday to getting ready for the 10th celebration the following day.  Her birthday always also reminds of our transition to Fruit Farm Lane, which took place just days after her second birthday.  She has grown in so many incredible ways in this place.  We are still pretty much head over heels in love!

Bounty!

I believe that our gardens deserve a post 100% dedicated to them!  As I looked over pictures of the last number of years to pull together a 10th anniversary slideshow, I was only moderately surprised at how often we photograph our food.  I kind of knew it, but looking at folder after folder only confirmed my suspicions!  We do get a whole lot of satisfaction, entertainment, exercise, fulfillment and fabulous nutrition out of growing, harvesting and eating food from just steps outside our doors.  And, my goodness, does the flow of stuff coming in those doors keep us hopping at this time of year.

While I have been the main "author" of this family blog, Jason has worked on a few pieces for our website.  In addition to his extensive and interesting history with chickens, there are now reflections on spinach and onions at http://tanglywoods.com.  Check them out if interested...  I need not say more about either of those two crops, as he covered them more than adequately, but in general it seems worth noting that one of the aspects of what we do that we enjoy so much is being part of the full cycle of this food-growing thing!  At this time of year the back counter is full to overflowing with bowls of seeds from the best of what we are growing (watermelons, cantaloupes, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, dried beans, etc...).  And the shed and garage are taken over with bundles of drying seed heads or beans that need shelling or stomping and then threshing and winnowing.  It's a messy and somewhat time consuming process but for us it more than pays for itself.  We see the rewards in improved seeds and plants that are well suited to our particular environment.  And we, including our girls, get to be intricately involved in all the steps that it takes to grow our food here in this place.  It saves a little money to not buy seeds every year but that reason alone is likely not worth the effort (though my frugal tendencies would probably push us to do it even if that was the only factor)...  There are times that seed saving also feels just a bit like tithing.  It's not always easy to pull out the very best that we have grown and set it aside to commit it to the soil again for seed.  Some crops (like garlic and onions) are harder than others (you plant the whole thing so you don't get to eat any of it). Others are really fun - like our current, almost daily, watermelon or cantaloupe taste tests.  We get to eat the whole thing and then decide which specimens to save seed from.  

It's not that we never buy or acquire new seeds.  Each year, somewhere around January, the seed catalogs are just a bit too tantalizing with their photos and descriptions.  And we hit on winners sometimes.  We grew a new kind of cantaloupe this year and will be doing it again!  When we cut open and tasted the first one, it was definitely one of those "we couldn't have possibly grown this" moments. I still think it is funny that I have those moments - as if the "store-lopes" I've eaten over the years weren't also grown in the soil on someone's land.  But it still sometimes seems too good to be true that one of those little seeds bears such an amazing delicacy.  Jason, the guy who has often said cantaloupes taste something like dirty socks, even swooned over it (ok, maybe not quite, but almost...).

The rains have been good this year and we have had to irrigate so little compared to some previous years.  The popcorn is happy!  We are starting on some of our larger harvests now.  Jason just clipped and brought in all the pinto beans.  On the docket next is to dig potatoes.  And Jason noted at lunch today that Kali's spaghetti squash is looking close to ready (good timing since I can never seem to make a small batch of pasta sauce).  While the ground hogs took some nibbles out of our delicata squash, it seems that for now they are going elsewhere in search of food (after catching several, even cantaloupe and watermelon rinds are not securing any more for our freezer).  In addition to the larger harvests, about every other day is considered a "harvest day" (likely from now until about frost).   Currently on those days whoever does the rounds picks the following: okra (which we get in small amounts, chop and accumulate for gumbos this winter!), pole beans, bush beans (are now out as of yesterday and carrots/beets planted), red/white raspberries (they never made it to the freezer), black berries, trombone squash (I sometimes almost hope I won't find too many...), peppers, tomatoes (just starting to flood in - more salsa here we come tomorrow), cucumbers and melons (both are petering out rapidly).  The other regular harvests including mint teas, parsley, basil, oregano and other herbs for pesto making and tomato sauce and to add various dishes.  As we often say, we could never afford to eat like this if we didn't grow it ourselves.  Yum!

This time of year...

One of the most daunting things on my agenda for this weekend is to "catch up on the blog."  August is as it always is: FULL!  Kali always has a birthday. We are always in the middle of the food processing crunch.  It is always my busiest work month.  The unique features of this particular August are that I'm 7+ months pregnant and we decided to squeeze in a 10 year celebration of our time here on Fruit Farm Lane.  For the above reasons, I haven't taken even a few moments to update this space with the various mundane, exciting, new and routine things that have filled our days.  I hope to get to some of that between today and tomorrow, because come Monday we start orientation week and my full attention will turn towards working with our incoming cohort of graduate students and getting the semester off the ground.  In the meantime, I'm enjoying a few days at home.  I think I canned the last pickles and beans yesterday and the first of many rounds of tomatoes.  We are swimming in squash, so I'm working to incorporate it into every meal (breakfast was squash sauteed with eggs; lunch is pasta, meat and sauce with more squash than tomatoes; haven't come up with dinner yet!).

But before I get too sidetracked, the thing on my mind as I sat down to write was the ways that this time of year is often reminiscent of the time leading up to our daughter Nora's birth.  It was in the days leading up to new student orientation that we learned that I would need to go onto bed rest (where I remained until her birth in late October).  This year the memories feel a little closer at hand for a variety of reasons:  Alida is a similar age and size as Kali was at that time and is wearing many of the clothes Kali wore that year; I'm pregnant again and while this baby is already larger than Nora was at birth it still brings those memories back in a more distinct way; Jason and I's preparation for the 10th anniversary (both going through pictures and writing a reflection to share with those gathered) was marked with many memories of that year (in many ways I think of our 10 years here as the time before Nora and the time after).

A few months back, Dr. Noreen Crain (who worked with us closely during the last week of Nora's life and with whom we have stayed in touch over the years since) contacted us asking if we would be ok with her using Nora's story as part of a TedX talk she had been asked to give.  We enjoyed the back and forth we had with her then, as we do all our interactions with her.  It brings the beauty of that time with Nora to the forefront, as her care for Nora and us was so powerful and a part of making our grieving process easier and in the end something that was in many ways life giving and empowering for us.

Last evening Noreen sent us the link to her sharing and so that is part of where my heart and mind are today.  For those that wish to listen to her talk about her work in pediatric palliative care, and in that line of work her intersection with our family, here is the link: https://youtu.be/WrtKjjoSt40?si=V6uw-BLaMvZdoM3o 

And now things are breaking down on the home front (it's been a long week/month for this family and our kiddos have managed it all amazingly well overall!), so I better turn my attention to finishing up lunch. More later...

Back to home sweet home...

We survived and enjoyed two fun-filled weekends full of memory-making with family and are now home with no travel plans until one more WV stint at the end of September (assuming Spark cooperates with that plan!).

It was a bit of a push on all of our parts to get ready for both weekends away, but I think both times once we pulled out we were able to leave the homestead (and job list) behind and be present to the people and places we were in.

Jason and Kali worked in every free pocket of time to finish up the duck coop and, other than oiling (which can be done down the road a ways and without Jason's supervision), it is done!  In fact Jason and Kali headed out last evening to move two hens that are sitting on duck eggs to the new coop, and literally the moment they headed out I heard rain start pouring down. Before long I looked out and saw two head lamps bobbing up and down in the dark, as they ran toward the house.  So that is a task for tonight yet! If all goes as planned, the first clutch will hatch on the eve of Kali's 12th birthday.

The other major pre-trip accomplishment was getting all our onions pulled.  As I walked down to join the girls and Jason in the patch, I must say the scene was rather idyllic.  There were my three favorite people, happily pulling onions from the ground in the cool of the evening with chickens scratching around the recently disturbed soil.  It was a lovely site, and a fun family activity to join.

Most of our harvests are not as voluminous as the onion gathering, which filled many large baskets. But most days we enjoy harvesting a wide variety of delicious foods.  The other day at dinner we had fun counting the number of different things we brought inside from one of our gardens. We counted over 20: potatoes, parsley, dill, basil, garlic chives, onions, blackberries, wineberries, mulberries, lemon thyme, perennial onion, cucumbers, stinging nettles, raspberry leaf, mint tea, alfalfa, horseradish leaf, grape leaves, sweet potato greens, string beans, purple cabbage, green cabbage, cilantro.  If the gooseberries and cherry tomatoes had made it to the house (before entering our digestive track), we would have hit 25!  I guess one gooseberry did make it into the house sometime recently for Jason to take his artistic picture with gooseberry in hand!

Our first weekend was a trip to reconnect with Jason's family at the home place in Pennsburg.  As is often the case, it went super fast and there was still more catching up to do even as we pulled out to head south again.  But we also packed a lot of fun into a short amount of time. A definite highlight for our kiddos was an afternoon dip in the recently refurbished pool.  The pool had only recently been filled with water, so it was quite chilly (I think it took me - and Spark - about 45 minutes to fully adjust) and then it felt great!  I think Kali would have stayed in all day, but Alida was finally convinced to get out (her lips were a shade of lavender!). Unfortunately, as seems to often be the case at the Benner homestead, I was too occupied hanging out and didn't take many photos to share.  The memories will have to stand on their own!  Our next planned trip home will be at Thanksgiving with a 4-6 week old, assuming Spark is up for a 5 hour car trip (or we are all up for a 5 hour car trip with a small infant).

The weekend just ended was another whirlwind trip full of fun family times.  We worked even harder to get ready this time around, and left a day early to surprise my folks at a family gathering with Mom's siblings and some other family members.  The surprise worked, as Mom about fell out of the car coming in the driveway, not wanting to wait until Dad stopped the car to get out and greet us! We enjoyed times with both Mom's siblings and Dad's, as well as a smattering of cousins.  Again the time went so quickly but we came home with sweet memories of reconnecting.  Not surprisingly one of the highlights for the girls again included water. This time I shared the highlight!  Saturday we spent a good part of the day at Seneca Rocks.  All four of us made it to the top (not sure if it was a greater accomplishment for me or for Alida - we were both pretty worn out by the top but one of us was a lot more vocal about it than the other).  After a delicious picnic lunch we enjoyed cooling off in the river.  Kali is getting much better at swimming and made it across the river a few times with Jason. It was just too tempting and before long Alida and I joined them on the rocks along the other bank.  It felt very good to be weightless for a few minutes and this time it was Kali who initiated leaving the river due to chilliness. I had to be convinced to leave...  We started dreaming about a possible vacation week in the mountains next summer with Spark, so she could enjoy dipping her toes in the water.  Very cute and fun to think about!

We were packed in tight on our trip home yesterday - we had added two roosters and a cousin to the passengers aboard!  The roosters are settled into their new home and slated to be breeders next year.  And we are enjoying have my niece here with us for a few days before she and Kali head back to WV for their yearly visit with grandparents, and then a number of days later Alida will get to join Kali and another cousin in WV for a few days.  She is definitely not interested in missing any opportunity to be in WV at the Mountain House.  She even mentioned wanting to live there this past trip.  This trip included a lot more musings for Jason and I on the rides to and fro about the next capital project we are getting very interested in moving forward - a screened-in pavilion.  We'll see when it rises to the top and the resources (both time and money) are in enough abundance to make it a reality.

Just a moment of back tracking to share one of the most humorous moments of our trip.  I often find the messages found on removable-letter roadside signs (typically churches' signs) to be either poorly written, cutesy and not funny, or downright offensive.  Well, the Your Cabin Restaurant along route 33 W beat all!  On the way over I saw most of it, but could hardly believe I had read it correctly. On the way home we got the last two words of it and verified the rest of it: "Skinny people are easier to kidnap. Stay safe. Eat pie."  Really!?!?! Enough of a diversion...

Today the girls and Jason enjoyed an outing to the Luray Zoo to check on "our" goats (for the first time since dropping them off last fall) and a picnic lunch at a park (while I worked from home).  I was very relieved to get a text from Jason (when I got curious enough that I bugged him to find out), letting me know that in fact Oreo and Cookie Dough were still there and seemed to be thriving in their new habitat. Kali said seeing them made her miss them a little but not a lot.  I enjoyed seeing the pictures, but do not miss them at all!

Here at home the girls are visiting the game cabinet often, and it's fun to see them pulling out games we haven't played for awhile.  The Farming Game has had the most attention (in terms of hours), but we've all enjoyed a number of rounds of Gang of Four. If this entry is disjointed, it may just be the norm now or it may be that I'm trying to play Gang while typing!  And Alida, who had a 1/2 hour nap or less, is more or less completely loopy at this hour.  Thankfully Jason has her on his team or else this blog post would most likely be full of jibberish.

The girls helped prepare and eat a delicious summertime meal this evening.  Thanks to my aunt we had our first two eggplant and returned home to find our first handful of okra. This called for fried eggplant and okra!  The girls ground flour corn this afternoon to make crumbs for coating. The procedure involved dipping the veggie slices in beaten duck eggs and then a corn/flax meal mixture, then frying them in coconut oil.  There are no leftovers!  Alongside those delectable treats, we enjoyed corn on the cob, string beans, tomatoes, dilly cucumber salad and mint tea.  How satisfying!  The corn on the cob was a precursor to tomorrow's main activity - freezing corn!

A random assortment of things!

I don't have any one grand thing to report as I sit down to write this afternoon, but feel like I'm bursting with all sorts of little things about which I've found myself thinking, "I should document this on the blog."  So here I am, while Alida wraps up an afternoon nap and Kali is folding the three loads of laundry that the girls and I brought in earlier.  Alida continues to assert that she is not fond of naps, but continues to prove to all of us by about 1 or so p.m. on most days how very much she still benefits from them.  And we've worked out a pretty sweet "deal" in that if I only walk to the end of the road and back, she will try to fall asleep when we get to the end of the road.  She's some kid - some days she'll be jabbering, sitting up, and looking out (doing everything but trying to fall asleep). When we hit the corner she'll lay back, put her head to the side and it's the last thing I'll hear from here.  Kali is some kid too!  Often she'll read Alida some stories while I quickly clean up from lunch in order to get out on a walk with Alida before she completely unravels.  Then, as I'm heading out for my walk, she'll let me know that I can leave a list of things for her to do while I'm gone or while I'm napping if that would be helpful.  I'm honestly overwhelmed most days by her helpfulness - I would be getting far fewer "pick me up" naps without her help, that's for sure.  I feel so grateful not only for her help but for the fact that right now she is humming as she works. She genuinely seems to take pleasure in being part of the daily happenings of our life here.  She'll be clear when she wants a break to do a little reading or needs to weed her own garden, but multiple times a day I'm asked if there is anything she can do to help.

Alida also expresses interest in helping, but so far her interest doesn't often match her ability to actually be of great assistance.  She often proclaims what a help she is and will ask me time and again if I'm able to do a certain job faster with her.  Well, there is one job she will now actually be able to help with and make a dent in my load.  She has expressed a lot of enthusiasm for laundry - she doesn't like when she misses being my "clothespin girl."  A long time ago putting up a kids' laundry line was on our project list and then the inspiration for it waned and we took it off. It got re-added this past week and taken off again, but this time because the project got done.  We surprised Alida with it and were pleased with her response.  She will now have yet another way to contribute to Spark's care - hanging diapers!

We keep making strides at getting things ready for our newest little gal's arrival.  It may seem premature to some but yesterday marked 27 weeks and we are now less than 3 months away from her due date.  On the work front, I've been setting up times to meet with various persons who will be taking pieces of my job this fall in my absence.  I also received permission to do some "test days" of working from home and did that for the first time this week.  I have to say that I could get used to that!  Kali and Jason put in a full day on the duck coop project and Alida put in a full day being my side kick.  There were lots of little shards of papers and pieces of string around from her "artwork" by the end of the day, but she did super.  Everyone did, and I honestly felt more productive than I ever feel at the office. I already know that I like hanging out in pajama-like clothing for as much of the day as possible and that I have a strong preference for my home environment and being around the girls and Jason.  I was just surprised how easy it was to get into a groove and stay focused on some long term projects that I've had a hard time gearing up for in the office.  So I'll be doing that a few more times over the next few weeks until the craziness of August and final preparations for new student orientation hit.  My work craziness will coincide with tomatoes and green beans and cucumbers and corn and...  So it seems like now is a great time to sort baby things (as this is as much of a lull as we are going to come by before October!).  Alida can't stop talking about how cute Spark will be in her first Halloween costume - yes, we did in fact find among the passed along items a very sweet little jack-o-lantern sleeper.  It does make us all very eager to have her in our arms - and my goodness what a lot of arms are eager to hold her.  We got our last glimpse of her on Friday when we complied with the request that we come for a follow up so they could "finish" up the first ultrasound.  She hadn't been 100% cooperative in them being able to check everything off their list due to her position.  Since they promised not to charge us for the follow up we decided to go ahead, since we had to head that direction to pick up our new mattress anyway.  I will admit that I was also interested in them taking just one more look to make sure we didn't have a little guy on the way since I had been so sure.  Well I was so very surely wrong and we are most definitely welcoming another daughter!

There will be plenty of room in our bed for her, as long as we can muster the motivation and energy to fully transition Alida to her bedroom with Kali before October.  It's the first time we've owned a queen mattress in our life and it feels rather luxurious.  When we were setting it up, I was feeling doubtful about whose mattress this was going to end up being as two other little people seemed to be staking claims on it right away!  They do get some credit for helping with its transport - as we were all rather squished on the way home with mattresses in the trunk and pillows and covers in the front.  And I had supper stuff loaded all around me to dish out food to everyone on our way back over the mountain so we could stop off for a round of mini-golf before heading home.  It was the second "free Friday" activity the girls had really wanted to do as part of the summer reading program with the local library.  It was fun, and good it wasn't much more than 18 holes or Alida would likely have started to get even more creative with her hitting techniques.  She did get a hole in one without any assistance, which I think surprised her about as much as the rest of us.

But most of our time is not being spent hauling mattresses from Charlottesville, sitting in a waiting room for over an hour for an ultrasound or mini-golfing.  What we are doing a lot more of is taking part in the crazy abundance of summertime at Tangly Woods. On our way down the driveway to head out on a nappy walk, I shovel wineberries into Alida's mouth.  And with her slumbering and me trying to muster the energy to get her back up the driveway at the end, I pick a berry here and there for a little boost.  What variety I get to enjoy; sampling black raspberries, mulberries, wineberries, blackberries and red raspberries all on one little jaunt up the driveway.

Our cucumbers are in!  So far they haven't lasted more than a few hours as we are enjoying crunching them down raw and we've made our first cucumber dill salad of the year.  That is nothing new, but one of the ingredients was the results of my newest experiment.  I made my first batch of homemade mayonnaise and am hooked.  Could it be any simpler?  I used a wide mouth quart jar and put in eggs, oil, salt and lime juice, stuck my immersion blender down in and in less than a minute it was creamy and a light yellow color.  I followed a recipe perfectly for the first round and now will start playing around with it to tweak it to our tastes.  One more thing off the list of things we sometimes buy from the store!

Beets continue to be a big theme around here.  Today I peeled, grated and got 10 lbs of beets fermenting since we consumed the last of the first batch a few days back.  It's sitting next to the gallon of sauerkraut in the pantry that we just tasted and approved today and several jars of dill heads in vinegar waiting to be used!  Next on deck for lacto-fermenting around here will be pickles and hopefully soon after that green beans. We aren't intending to go cold turkey and stop all canning, but I do hope to diversify our preservation methods and begin experimenting more with methods that increase rather than decrease the nutrition of the food.  We have made one decision and that is that we hope to not can any green beans this year (pressure-canning that is - we won't go without canned dilly beans just yet!).  I did do one round of canned beets in the pressure canner and one round of pickled beets which I water bathed.  

Today at lunch we ate the very last of the beet greens for the year (other than the few that will come yet from Kali's garden) and also the very last winter squash!  I soaked lentils, amaranth and rice and made a stew with lots of fresh things from outside and a good number of canned goods.  In the end we had a steaming pot of deliciousness: meat broth, venison, tomatoes, salsa, oregano, basil, rosemary, purple onions, and garlic added to the previously mentioned items.  And it's a particularly nice dish in that all of us like it!  Though, at lunch today, it was hard for Alida to focus on her bowl of soup when at the other end of the table maple pudding with blueberries, raspberries, wineberries, and gooseberries awaited us!

It seems we hardly have the chance to get impatient with our plants or mourn the end of a particular food for the year.  One season comes to an end just as another starts in.  It's hard to be too upset by the end of black raspberries when wineberries come in on their heels.  I never seem to get enough peas, but fresh cucumbers are right up there and are doing just fine filling the void.  There is, however, one person that is feeling just a tad eager for some final ripening. It seems that Alida (who loves to win, as any who know her will attest to) is going to have the very first ripe tomato. She's been eyeing one of her yellow stupice for several days now and it is getting more yellow by the day.  I could listen to her say "yellow stupice" all day long, partly because it is cute and partly because I love how familiar our 4-year old is with various types of plants.  My guess is she'll be sinking her teeth into that particular specimen shortly.

As often happens, Alida is now up from her nap and my concentration is divided.  The girls are putting laundry away and Jason has finished up mowing and is working on processing the garlic.  The next thing on the agenda is to pull all our purple onions together.  Fun!  So I better get moving.  I'll end with one of the last pictures I took today. I was trying to get a picture of the hummingbird moth (we think that is what it is though it could also be a hummingbird hawk moth) that was enjoying flowers along the front walk. I only got two pictures before my camera battery died and I thought I had missed it on both. I was pleased to see it in flight on one of the two! 

So much for a June lull....

We often consider the end of June our best time to get away in the summer, as it seems to provide a bit of a break between the main spring crops and the summer garden starting up in earnest.  While a getaway vacation as a family would have been nice in some ways, we had already decided against it for both financial reasons (we are prioritizing good sleep for years on a new mattress over a vacation for a few days) and in order to save all my vacation time for after Spark arrives. I'm pretty thankful at this point that we don't have any long stints away, as it seems like that the "summer lull" may be a thing of the past with one crop kind of running right into the next, at least on an excellent berry year!
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!