studying

Just a few snapshots of Mason and Emma studying the wildflowers.  Several bouquets have graced our kitchen table. 

A great way to spend a summer afternoon.

three

 Happy Birthday sweet Emma girl! 

It's hard to believe you are three years old.  You spent all of yesterday enjoying your last day of being two.  You kept saying things like "This is my last nap when I'm two."  "This is my last dinner when I'm two."  "This is my last bath when I'm two."  Cutie.

 You are so full of joy and energy.  You feel your emotions strongly.  You are stubborn and independent and sweet and cuddly.  You enjoy the smallest moments, exclaiming "This is SO awesome" in your bright, cheery voice.  You can also throw the tantrum of all tantrums. 

You are so verbal.  You start talking the moment you wake up and don't stop until you fall asleep.  You have a huge vocabulary and usually talk with your hands flailing wildly and a huge array of expressions.  You talk in complete sentences, ask lots of questions, and make up stories and songs.  You love to sing and dance and have some serious moves. 

We can count on you to eat most anything.  You love to help cook in the kitchen and we make a great mess every time.  You stir, pour, select the eggs, and measure the ingredients. 

You have a wonderful imagination and are often playing with your baby or cooking if you are playing by yourself.  When you play with Mason it's usually hunting, camping, moving, offices, or having a picnic.  I'm pretty sure you have no clue what princesses or fairies are all about. 

You amaze us with all you are learned this year. You can zip your jacket and put your own mittens on.  You can write a handful of letters and recognize your name and other words that have an 'E' or 'M'.  You can count to 20 consistently and often times even higher.  You love to help around the house, especially if it involves going outside to help daddy.  You unload the dishwasher, set the table, and put clothes away. 

You are our little entertainer, but only when we're home.  You are shy and clingy around other people and new places.  You can brighten any room with your funny antics, once you warm up.

We love you.  You add such joy and blessings to our family. 

xoxo,
Mommy

play

It's so fun to watch and listen to these two play together.  Most recently you can find them playing camping, office, or hunting.  The first two require getting out lots and lots of toys and setting up "camp" or the "office."  When playing office there is usually a lot of work to be done.  This requires crayons, stamps, markers, tape, cardboard, and paper.  Hunting usually requires lots of animals and Emma's kitchen utensils to "take all the meat." 

Either way, listening to their imaginations run wild never gets old.

helper

It's cold and snowy here. 

So thankful for my carrying-in-the-wood little helper!

favorites

The two favorites of the moment...Cow for Mason (always has been the #1 choice) and Karly-Baby for Emma.

It's a good thing these two can make me laugh when I'm about to lose my mind.

Most recent reason:

I'm working on a difficult knitting project that I planned on giving away this Christmas, but I wasn't even half way done with it when that time came around.  Sooo, last night I decide to pull it out and work on it.  I find my way into the pattern and realize I have three needles, so I throw one back into my knitting bag.  I do a couple rows and realize my tension is way off from the last time I worked on it.  I keep going.  After a few more rows I'm a little shocked at the difference in the gauge.  I show Ryan. We laugh about how pregnancy must really affect your knitting tension.  I keep going.  I'm not at all happy with how it looks, but I keep going trying to make it tighter until my eyes fall out and I go to sleep. 

Today at naptime I pull it out again.  I'm looking at it trying to figure out how to make it tighter.  I look at the pattern again.  I see something about size 3 needles.  I look at the huge needles in my project.  They're size 9.  Yes, size 9!  It all starts to become clear.  Both my size 3 and size 9 needles are green.  Apparently I pulled out my project and knit the first row onto a green size 9 needle.  That's about when I realized that I had 3 needles, so I kept the two that matched (the 9s) and threw the size 3 into my bag.  Funny right? Yeah, maybe if I wasn't doing things like this all the time.  It's a small miracle that I finish any knitting projects:)

snow day

It snowed all weekend and today we woke up to this.  Actually I woke up at 5:30 as usual and about 30 seconds later I got the call from our school district that school was cancelled.  Awesome!  I crawled right back in bed.  

So today will be spent at home and will probably be a repeat of yesterday: 

We're loving an extra day at home.  It makes for a very short week, with just school tomorrow.  I should probably grade papers and clean the house.  But we're busy playing the piano, throwing snowballs, drinking hot cocoa, and baking bread.  Is it too early to start Christmas cookies?

tomato herbed pizza crust

It's no joke that we like our pizza around here.  We usually  have it about once a week.  We love just about anything and everything on it too.  The kids mostly beg for olives.  We have a new crust that we really like now too.  Just substitute half of the water in your favorite pizza dough recipe with tomato sauce.  Then chop up some fresh herbs and knead them into the dough.  We used basil and parsley in this one. 

My little helper:

oh, hello.

Well, somehow October came and went and I hardly even turned the computer on...let alone do this blog thing.  We've been plenty busy with other things around here and fall sort of seemed to slip by. 

 

This has been one crazy start to the school year.  Learning several new curriculums, gaining six new students in seven weeks and mentoring a new teacher has kept me on my toes.  Parent-teacher conferences are now behind me and the stack of papers to grade is slowing decreasing as I finally get into a routine.

 

The garden and greenhouse supplied us with plenty of food to keep us busy.  We canned 25 pints of green beans and turned ten gallons of cabbage into sauerkraut.  We had our first frost weeks ago and have had a couple snow storms as well.    

 

 We dug up all the potatoes.  This is all the fingerlings, most of the purple vikings, and about a third of the sangres (the red ones).  They are delicious.  We figure we got about 90 pounds total.  They keep finding their way into soups, stews, and breakfast potatoes.   We ended up with lots of tomatoes too.  We pulled all the green ones before the greenhouse had a frost and made a lovely green tomato pie. 

 After we opened up the garden for the chickens, we also found a few other visitors. 

 Last weekend we spent Saturday with Grammie and Grandpa down at their property.  The boys got the rest of the siding on the bunkhouse.  Brats and sauerkraut were on the menu for lunch! It was a crisp fall day...beautiful all around.

 That pretty much brings us to this morning.  All costumed up and ready for the preschool party.  Mason was a superhero and Emma was a cowgirl. 

These cuties sure help keep it all in perspective. 

Tomorrow brings November.  I'm looking forward to a new month, maybe not such a whirlwind.  We're spending the day butchering our older flock of chickens and cleaning out the coop.  Time to fill the freezer once again.  So much to be thankful for!

wordless wednesday ~ sorting

August

I was a little hesitant to turn the calendar page this morning.  Is it really August already?  That means school is just around the corner...both for me and Mason.  He's getting excited about preschool.  Although the keeps reminding me that as soon as he turns 7, he will get to be in my class. 

 

 

We went camping a few weekends ago.  Lots of exploring, marshmallows, flowers, potty-training in the woods, rain, and laughs.  Not a lot of sleep.  Oh, and Daisy decided to find herself a porcupine.  Luckily it was little and we had pliers. 

 

 We're still hoping for another camping trip or two in the near future. 

On Tuesday we spent the evening fishing with Karly.  I'm really not sure what we're going to do when she leaves for college.  We're trying not to think about that yet.  I love these fishing pictures.  We didn't catch anything, but we sure had fun playing in the water.

 

Lovin' these last weeks of summer!

beets and peas

Just a little peek at what's been coming out of our greenhouse.  Mason and Emma love to pick the peas.  Mason usually picks them off the vine and Emma is our resident pea-sheller, even though more make it into her mouth than the bowl.  The peas are going straight into the freezer.  

 

This was our first harvest of beets.  We've been enjoying the greens in our salads too. 

 We used some of them for beet rolls from a book I had gotten from the library.  Total fail.  The chickens enjoyed them. 

 We used some more in quinoa beet pancakes, which were really good.  Ryan and I liked them better than the kids, but they did eat a few each. 

The rest of the beets we just roasted with balsamic vinegar and had with dinner a couple nights.  The kids love them this way.  As Mason would say, "We are just chowing down on these!"

We're ready to pick the rest of them in the greenhouse.  We're probably going to pickle them and can them.  We planted a ton of beets in our garden and they are just now sprouting.  They took longer than everything else.  We're crossing our fingers that we don't have an early frost. 

In other greenhouse news: the tomato plants are flowering, we have more salad greens than we know what to do with, and the basil is calling out to be made into a couple batches of pesto.