acreage marshmellow roast

Oops- been gone so long again... Our internet and phone were being weird before I left for Saskatoon, then we were gone a week and the last couple of days I've been trying to recover.  Life is settling a bit again, although Emora has a cold and the garden is going to need some attention. 

There is so much growing and I didn't know what all we had, so I bought groceries on the way home and now we are going to have to eat our way out of the fridge!  I can't even see what is in there.  But it is delicious fun to eat from our garden and the flavors are just totally amazing!  The carrots and tomatoes have tasted so much better than what we get in the stores and we have also learned that you can eat the tops of carrots, beets, kohl rabi... but they do take space, so I'm trying to freeze some things.  I came home to 6 cups of sour milk, so today I made up a double batch of waffles, a double batch of choc. chip muffins and choc. zuchini cake- which also had the benefit of using up zuchini ;)

Much to my delight- Janet and I were also invited to pick apples Friday at the McPherson's (Dominique's former teacher).  The kids are so excited and especially Ivan who loves work, wants to see his cousin Kellen and missed out on picking the apples last year.  We are looking forward to having pies and applesauce, apples for oatmeal and eating... so fun!  Harvests are cool.  We've gotten to share with our neighbors some also, so that gives us another chance to connect.

This was a new experience for the kids.  It was time to get the chickens in for the night at the Muirhead's, so the kids were invited to help.  Unfortunately- they didn't quite know how to do it and were much too rowdy!  I think Janet got a little anxious about their chick's mental health with all the kids running and shouting and shooing the chicks too aggressively (sorry Janet ;).  But once they were shown how to be gentle, they toned it down quite a bit and I don't think there were any casualties!  Ivan kept wondering where the little chicks were.  He had missed seeing them when they were small and now they are half grown.  It was a bit of a shift in our thinking to realize these were the same ones!

I haven't uploaded the pictures yet from Saskatoon, so you get old ones I had yet to post.  Maybe I'll work my way through them first and progress to the newer ones!

I've got a 1st grader so excited to start school, but I'm still going to enjoy some summer I hope.  I think we still have about 3 weeks until the first day back.  It'll be different than last year when Dominique was home every other day.  Now it'll just be me and Emora!  I'm not putting her in pre-K this year and not sure if I will next year.  We'll see.  But it'll be nice for us to get to bond again without the big kids in the midst of it all the time!