Loving Life

Yesterday was my birthday and I had a great day celebrating. I had meant to be a good blogger and document my day for your viewing pleasure. I started off pretty good. Aaron took me out for breakfast. I love our breakfast dates. The day starts off on such a good note and my happiness just continues throughout the day. And look! I took a picture of us together! Aren't we cute? And look! I took another picture of us! Then I tucked my camera in my purse so I could take pictures of the rest of my day. Miss Keilah and I drove over to my dear mother's house and picked her up to have a fun day in town together. The only things we had planned were getting a grill for me (I guess I could consider it a birthday gift since I purchased it on my birthday - in actuality, it's just that we found a good deal on one and wanted to get it while we were in town). Anyway, besides getting the grill, we were going to have a trip to Costco along with eating some lunch. So I drove us to Co...

Yes, ladies, I have learned a very valuable secret that I will now share with you. An answer to the big question of how to get your husband to willingly volunteer to do chores. You have to plan in advance for a few weeks to get this to work. Here's the secret: deprive him of meat. Serve meal after meal of food grown in your garden - you can use small bits of meat to flavor your food if you need to so he doesn't die, but don't give him big chunks of meat. He will enjoy eating the garden produce and find it a fun challenge to see just how many different ways zucchini can be prepared, along with green beans and tomatoes and broccoli and kohlrabi and peppers and cabbage and beets and kale and... you get the point. So after at least two weeks or ideally more of eating this way, decide that it's been a long time since meat has entered your diet in any significant fashion and get out a roast from the freezer and cook it. Let the delicious aroma of slow roasted meat with a ro...

 If we are standing near the stairs, Keilah will climb them. Thankfully, she's still not ready to wander the house much if she can't see Mom or Dad nearby. But when I'm in the kitchen (which is frequently) and she's on the loose, I have to be ready to grab her off the stairs as she is quite the good stair climber Unfortunately, she's also a distracted stair climber. If she happens to see you behind her, she'll excitedly turn around to see you and smile, bounce up and down a few times and then tumble down. (Note Aaron's head in the corner ready to catch her a second after this picture was taken when she got too excited and fell)  Then, once she's at the top of the stairs and sees something below her that she'd like to eat, she'll turn around and head down the stairs head first to get to that object. This picture is not her coming up the stairs, but heading straight down them. That's me in the back holding onto her legs as she tried ...

Two of my favorite girls went to school this morning! Ana started 5th and Abby is now in 2nd grade. They decided to be twins today since everyone at school calls them by the wrong name. They thought they'd help them out in the confusion. The twin look was complete with matching hair styles.  I love these two goofballs.  I don't know how many pictures I took where they were being silly. The first picture was the only normal one I got. They kept looking at each other or smiling all funky. Oh well. That's life with these two girlies.  Abby wanted a picture with Keilah too. Keilah was happy to oblige even though she hadn't yet changed out of her jammies. Then they happily trotted off to school. Ana was feeling nervous this morning, but she'll be happy once she gets home and I can't wait to hear them regale me with their adventures of the day.  David started school today too, but I didn't take a picture of him. Oops. The house felt much quiet...

We've entered the time of year that is kind of hard for me on many levels. It's always really busy at back to school time. Tomorrow is the first day of school for the girls and for David. The girls will be going back to public school for at least one more year - I'm not ready to handle teaching three at home with a cute little baby who runs around and gets into everything. David is continuing his homeschooling career as a big 8th grader now. I may be ready for homeschooling more next year and told the girls that it is an open conversation among us. I want them to have some say in what they do, but also know my own limits. So thankfully, I had only one person to plan out the year for this year. I got that done last week finally. I think part of my annual struggle at the time of year has to do with all that I place upon myself as "the Ideal". No one else puts it upon me. I have a bit of a perfectionistic streak for myself. I don't feel this way about other peop...

Even though I haven't blogged for awhile, I've still been taking pictures. Yea for me! Here are a few of my favorites from the past month. Aaron prefers soft serve ice cream to regular hard ice cream. Sometimes he passes on eating hard ice cream. I don't understand that. I've taken to calling him an ice cream hater since in my book, if you don't want any form of ice cream, you must be an ice cream hater. It always brings about such hilarity in the family. So one night while we were all enjoying our small dishes of ice cream and I was calling Aaron an ice cream hater, Ana made him this hat to wear while he ate his ice cream. Here's a close up of it. It cracked me up. I love the arrows pointing down. Keilah is now a big girl and likes to stand. Here she is earlier on in her standing up days. Playing with the straps in her car seat brings such delight. We took a family vacation at the end of July. We headed south with our final destination being St. Lo...

We have a lovely peach tree. It's about four years old since we planted it. In the past, the most I've had were about a dozen or two peaches for the entire year. Not this year. This year, we are having the most bounteous year ever with peaches. My tree was completely loaded. There are peaches everywhere in my house. Here's my kitchen counter. Here's the bench in the dining room. Not pictured are the peaches covering my washer and dryer. They are amazing. They are the best peaches I have ever eaten. And there are still piles on my tree! I've currently made two batches of freezer jam, six pies (we have shared some), canned a bunch of them, frozen some of them, I've given them away to many different people, we each eat at least two or more each day, and my house is still covered in peaches! I'll be canning more of them again today to make room in my house so I can hopefully finished picking them off my tree. We had a guessing contest in our family ...

Yesterday, a teenager began living in my house. I liked him an awful lot before he was a teenager. I'm pretty sure I'll like him even more now that he's officially old. I love how he adores his baby sister and asks to hold her and play with her. Here he is tickling her and enjoying her squeals of delight. We measured him yesterday as we do on every birthday, and he is now almost 5'10" - long past Mom's height. We had to measure Dad then and put his mark on the wall so David knows what he's shooting for next. Only a bit over 5 inches to go! He slowed down on his growth spurt and only grew 4.5 inches last year, compared to the 5.5 inches he grew the previous year. I shudder to think of him trying on his winter clothes this year and having to find things that fit him once again. I try to buy as minimally as possible and get everything second hand as they rarely last a season before he's outgrown it all.  David is a rock in our family. He's ...