My Family Loves It

I go through lazy stay at home phases and I figure thats good, we save gas and aren’t running around so much! This week I went to a pregnancy visit with my midwife on Monday (all is well, I’m almost 23 weeks and feeling good) and then Tuesday we met some friends for a few hours at a park near our house. I canceled plans for Wednesday and just stayed home with the kids and spent 2 1/2 hrs in the pool and some time weeding the garden (oops I had intended to clean the house a bit but didn’t!) and the rest of the week I think we’ll finish off lazily too. Jamie will turn 2 on Saturday and we’ll have a cake and give her a few presents and then go see the fireworks. I’m looking forward to a nice mainly “stay at home” weekend to end this quiet week!

Henrietta is our only chicken that seems to enjoy being picked up by the kids and that is full grown and laying eggs. She makes these cute little eggs about 2 out of 3 days.  I just saved up 8 eggs to hardboil yesterday. We had quite a few that I let the kids collect and Jamie ended up breaking so it took awhile to get enough. I feel like the kids can be pretty picky about what they eat but so far they all like to crack, peel and eat hardboiled eggs. I can’t wait until the chicks start laying this fall!

John ALWAYS has some project going and this time its a big one! He has been working hard every day after work and weekends to build our pool deck and its starting to come along very nicely. The curved angle around the pool and figuring out just how we wanted things were the big things and now he can go crazy decking and building the railings. We are really looking forward to the upcoming 3 day weekend so he can get a lot done. It will be so nice to get to the pool from the deck and I know the kids will soon be running and jumping into the pool. All 3 kids have been having fun playing on the work in progress though so they’re already happy. Ben and Jamie will have their birthday party on the 12th and the deck should be usable if not all done by then. Once this is done John is under strict orders NOT to start any more projects until further notice, like well AFTER I’ve had this baby and we are adapted to being a family of 6! He can take down some dead trees and finish up some small projects that he already started but thats it. I’ll definitely have to watch myself also so that I don’t think up any new “ideas” for him to do.

I almost forgot to post today for the Unplugged Project and when I saw her post I decided to copy her fairy garden idea a bit instead of just writing about our garden. My boys are not really the fairy type but they have recently been watching the Smurfs so I got out my old Smurf figures and we made a Smurf garden. When I was a kid my friend and I used to play outside with our Smurfs and make things out of twigs and rocks for them. Today we planted some mint I was rooting, the grass head Ben had grown at school and some tiny daisy plants I was planning on potting. The boys were busy on the porch for a long time and made pebble paths and then got a planter of marigolds to expand into. Our regular garden isn’t so exciting (not yet anyway since we have nothing to pick from it this early). We planted some sunflowers, squash, cilantro, gourds, carrots, radishes, cucumbers and tomatoes. I don’t know if we will get all those things though, things seem to be growing slowly but hopefully I am wrong. Its a weedy garden this summer, I didn’t add all of my leaf mulch since I started so many seeds and that let the weeds sprout too (I think next summer I’ll do things differently). I’ll post more once we start picking. Below the boys are protecting the garden from Henrietta (she likes to dig in it for bugs but she digs up plants too).

Does anyone here use twitter?  I’ve been hearing about it for a long time on the podcasts I listen to, but never tried.  I finally broke down and signed up, but didn’t bother going back to check the feeds I was following.  Today, while upgrading to Firefox 3 (awesome!) I discovered TwitterFox, a Firefox plugin for following and posting on Twitter.  Works great, but now the question is…who to follow?  I added a few of the tech podcasters I listen to and the feeds are pretty interesting so far.  Do you have any recommendations?

For those less geeky than me, twitter is like text messaging on the internet.  The idea is to tell your followers what you’re doing in 140 letters or less.  People in the tech industry are using it pretty heavily.  For more information check out the Twitter FAQ.

Yesterday I took the kids to the Dr, I was thinking that they were getting a little virus but I was also worried Jamie had an ear infection (she was touching her ears a lot). Turns out it is Coxsackie virus and Jamie and Ben both have a lot of sores in their mouths. This explains the temps and the crankiness the last few days! Poor kids. Ethan had a temp earlier in the week but our Dr doesn’t think he had the virus yet because his throat is clear, so we’ll have to see what happens with him. I think I’ll be giving the kids a lot of ice cream until they are better. The boys had this 2 years ago and it lasted so long (over 2 weeks I believe) that our Dr was afraid it was Kawasaki virus and they both had to have EKGs (apparently its a similar virus that lasts longer and can cause heart problems). Luckily it was just Coxsackie but it better not last that long this time.

We have been very lucky that our robins came back and our 2nd batch of chicks were born on Father’s Day. I haven’t even blogged about it until today and only took pictures once! We enjoy them every time we are in the dining room though and they are unfortunately starting to look close to being ready to leave the nest. I really hope we get them next year too.

I have had too much good stuff to post about to keep up lately! I never wrote about the great weekend we had and its already Wednesday! Saturday was the boys’ last t-ball of the season and it was a gorgeous day.

I love that they are close enough in age that some years they will be on the same team for sports BUT sometimes they can get a little wound up together. We went straight to the air show after and saw a lot of cool planes. Ben decided he is going to be a “helicopter driver” we he grows up (he had just wanted to be a dad prior to this). He also wants me to buy him a real helicopter when he is big and I said yes (since he is just 3 and won’t really remember?). We did buy him a toy helicopter and he got to sit in a real helicopter twice.

Ever since last Fall Ben has been asking to make “strawberry Damn” (he has recently learned its really jam) so yesterday I took him and Jamie strawberry picking while Ethan (who didn’t want to go) played at my mom’s house. Since I’m 5 months pregnant with 3 little kids I was sort of glad to just take 2 kids with me and they were both EXCELLENT!!! I knew Ben would be good because he has been fruit picking a ton of times and was on a mission but I was a bit worried that Jamie would get out of hand. She listened and held her own bucket and only picked ripe berries AND stayed on the paths. I was so proud! They ate a lot of berries too but I got a large sand bucket full and I combined the kids’ into a smaller pail. We will probably go picking at least once more but I hope to go more than that since this supply will go towards our jam production instead of eating them. I think we will make the jam today and hopefully our first attempt at it will turn out well. Ben is already talking about making blueberry jam which I have made before with great results, so I can’t wait for blueberry season next.

* Jam update: Well the jam making did not go nearly as smoothly as the berry picking did! I had thought I’d set the water tables up on the porch for the kids to play at while I prepped the jars and I was hoping Ethan and Jamie would still be playing with them while Ben and I did the jam BUT instead they all finished early and came in wild. Ben was more interested in eating the berries than smooshing them with the potato masher but that was okay. What I’m really grumpy about is that when it was time to pour the jam into the jars I poured it on my left hand and burned it (nothing terrible but enough to HURT) and then after the 5 minutes of keeping the jars inverted they do not seem to have sealed properly. I had no trouble with this method when I had made the blueberry jam so I’m not sure where I went wrong. The good part is that the jam itself turned out well and there are worse things than having to eat 8 cups worth of jam in a hurry.

Updated update: I checked back later and 3 of the 5 jars did seal so I’m happy now! Ben, Jamie and I tried one of the unsealed jars and it was good on toast.