The Days of Days

(This blog post title comes to you courtesy of Gideon.)

We organized a last-minute Labor Day barbecue at our house with the Brown grandparents, the Poulson grandparents, and Amy's family. We had a lot of fun getting together. It was beautiful weather.

We finally finished processing the apples this week. All told we made about 4 gallons of applesauce, 4 gallons of apple chips, a bevy of beautiful apple muffins, and also a pitcher of apple cider.

Unfortunately, the weather got hot again toward the end of the week. Alison tried to take the kids outside when they got rowdy, and we were melting with the heat and couldn't stay out long. Friday was our first day of Nature Group for this year, and the kids were a little grumpy with the hot weather, so it wasn't the perfect first day. Still, we made it fairly close to on time and participated in all the activities, so that was good. We also really appreciated the random bits of rain that fell during the day, and the heavier rain after nature group ended. We love rain! The kids had a great time playing in it.

On Saturday we picked a sizable amount of grapes. So far we have made over three gallons of grape juice, though we ran out of jars to can them into, so we have just have the excess sitting in the refrigerator. 

We were also given vegetables: tons of swiss chard, many eggplants, tons of tomatoes, some squash, a bunch of brussels sprouts... We're making tomato and eggplant pasta sauce tonight, and we're planning tempura another night to use up the rest of the eggplants and the brussels sprouts, but we need more swiss chard recipes. Alison used to work really hard to incorporate leafy greens in our diet, but she hasn't been doing that for years, so we've forgotten how to do it.

We also got to pick tons of peaches! Yum!

Mike also went to Home Depot and got light bulbs and other things. We found a set of three bike locks in the clearance section, but it didn't have a price. We took it up to the front and asked the price, but the system couldn't scan it. The cashier called over a manager, who said that they were supposed to be off the shelf and not being sold. She said, "I'll just have to charge you one cent." Well! We were certainly happy with that. So we now have our bikes chained up to our new bike rack. We can start replacing the ones that were stolen now that our setup has improved.

Boo is talking so much now. Her sentences are getting longer and she says more and more words. This week every time we pulled into the neighborhood she started whining and saying, "No baby house! Grandma house!" And as we were discussing writing that in the blog post just now, Boo heard us and packed up her dolls and said, "OK, go Grandma house!" When Mike told her no, she whined. He said, "I love you." She responded, "No love me so much." She's so cute.

Now Boo and Gideon are wrestling and saying to each other, "Ga ga goo goo." I have no idea what's up with that, but it's cute.