Our week ~ July 1

I feel rather like this was our first week of summer vacation!  Our traveling is over for the time being, so I spent most of the week doing the things that I usually do the first week of summer vacation -- cleaning up and cleaning OUT!  Corners that have collected clutter, piles of stuff that have magically appeared and grown...all of the places neglected during the frantically-busy school year have gotten cleaned out and scrubbed off!  The kids don't understand my glee over these projects; they usually hide upstairs and play so that they don't get roped into helping :), but Mindy is my ever-faithful and very enthusiastic assistant.

Sunday afternoon, we got a surprise visit from our pastor and pastor's wife from our church in New York (the pastor who officiated at our wedding ceremony).  We had a wonderful afternoon of fellowship and catching up on each other's lives.

On Monday, Abigail got her new leg brace (aka AFO -- ankle/foot orthotic).  She got to choose the design (lavender with butterflies), so she was very excited to get the finished product!  This brace is more 'invasive' than the last one in the sense that it covers much more of her foot in an attempt to help correct the deformities developing due to her CP.  She is doing a great job wearing it faithfully, though (the pretty design and snazzy new sneakers help with that), and we haven't had any issues with rubbing or bruising, and it has already started to make a difference in the appearance of her foot.

While we were waiting at the orthotics office, we snapped a picture of her beautiful pumpkin smile!  She lost her two front teeth a couple of weeks ago.

Then we got silly and succumbed to the giggles!

We managed to sneak in a 'just us girls' visit to the fabric store while we were out. :)

Our blueberry bushes are producing...happiness is fresh blueberries from the backyard to put on my cereal in the morning!

Our weather has been rainy, rainy, and even rainier, but we didn't let that dampen our celebration of Independence Day.  We just brought the bikes inside to the living room, turned up a John Philip Sousa album, and decorated away to our heart's content.

The Lord cleared the skies just long enough for us to have our own little bike parade...

...complete with puddle-splashing, a fun side benefit of all of this rain! :)...

...and enjoy some sparklers (and grill our Hofmann hot dogs for supper, too!).

We ended the week by getting a load of mulch.  With a lot of elbow grease from my two guys and the usual faithful service by our beloved old van, 100 bags of mulch are ready to beautify our yard.  Now if only the rain will stop long enough for us to work outside...! :)

Since we've been home...

...we've been busy unpacking and settling in, catching up on medical appointments (David got his cast off!...and had a hearing check...Abigail got her new leg brace...and got an ear infection), and harvesting/canning/freezing food.

Banana pepper harvest

Sweet potato harvest

 First apple pie of the season (and apple butter bubbling away in the crockpot...I also made and froze a LOT of applesauce but forgot to take any pictures!)

 We've also been enjoying the summery rain.

 

 The cats are happy to have us home again...Mindy follows us all around the house with a very contented look on her face!

Colors of July

Foreword: I follow a blog called "Life Looms Large"...Sue's pictures are always so beautiful!  At first I felt a little lame reading it (because, you see, she was actually my mom's 'blog friend' first and it felt quite lame to copy my mother, as though I couldn't find my own friends). :)  Eventually I got over it and I thoroughly enjoy her blog and her inspiring photographs.  Each month she does a post called "Colors of [whatever the current month is]".  I finally got my act together to participate, so here we are...

Colors of July in northern Georgia

Most of the color is in my garden right now.

Sunflowers

 Zinnias...and a butterfly...and cosmos

 Serrano peppers

 Poblano peppers

 Sweet banana peppers

 Sweet potatoes...this picture doesn't do them justice.  Even though the leaves look chewed, the plants are healthy and the colors, variations of green with deep purple thrown in the mix, are so pleasing.

 I LOVE the spiral shape of the expired clematis

 A stray vinca flower that popped up

 This is a hot month in the South, and a lot of the colors start to fade a bit.  We're likely to have another surge of color when the nights cool off a bit in a month or so, and then our autumn colors will start in October or November.

Thanks for visiting!  Be sure to go here and see the July colors from other places far and away!

Summer garden

I have been so remiss in posting about our garden!  We have been harvesting cucumbers in abundance for over a month now...serrano peppers and sweet banana peppers are coming steadily...poblano peppers are coming along...tomatoes aren't doing wonderfully but we've had a few good ones...the kids' flowers are beautiful and attracting many butterflies...the sweet potatoes are going great-guns...I harvested the rest of the corn today...and the sunflowers are towering (one of them is at least twelve feet tall! I need to get a close-up picture of them sometime soon).  Here is a basket of today's produce (the cukes are hidden at the bottom).

One of the things that has always bothered me about the garden is how hard it is to mow and/or control the weeds up close to the fence.  Bruce recently tilled a swath around the perimeter for me and today I started laying a thick layer of newspaper and then Bruce hauled the mulch over for me to spread.  Doesn't it look tidy?  I've only gotten halfway around, but I started with the most-visible side so that I can smile every time I look out the window. :)

For dinner we enjoyed a marinated flank steak, baked potatoes, and fresh corn on the cob.  We raced the rain...but the rain won!  Doesn't Bruce look cute under Abigail's pink umbrella?!

Spring garden 2010

It's always a thrill when it's time to start the spring garden!  First the prep work to turn this into something tillable...

 This, my friends, is love!  The poppies I planted last year never came up...but they popped up this spring!  I didn't want to lose them, so Bruce took the time to dig them all up for me so I could transplant them to another area before he tilled the garden. :)

Besides the poppies, we also enjoyed a couple of other surprises when we started digging around in the garden this year.  None of the fall garden seeds I had planted actually took...or so we thought.  They must have come up after I quit watching for them, but we got some carrots!  There was also a bunch of catnip that came up again, too.  We saved one clump to plant in a pot on the deck for the cats and tilled the rest under for now.

A new tiller joined the team this year...the old one gave up the ghost and had to be replaced.  It operates differently than our old one did, and it took Bruce for a run a few times -- rather like an unruly Great Dane on a leash -- until he got it all figured out!  The rest of us had a great laugh or two while we watched!

 I just had to include this picture, too...David's stance is the spitting image of my dad's stance when watching someone else work!  It's so much fun to see these random family traits passed down to the next generation.

 Our very own garden fairy cavorted around in her big ole garden boots while the guys were doing the prep work.  She has come a long way from the infant who wailed if the breeze touched her, to the toddler who HATED being outside, to the little girl who screamed at heat, insects, and any number of things (real and imagined) whenever she was outdoors and begged to go inside, to the little-big girl who was entirely content and happy to be with us outside and to spend hours rolling in the grass and digging in the dirt!

 Due to our equipment issues, the weather, and our crazy schedules, we ended up prepping and planting on two weekday-evenings instead of our usual Saturday.  On the second night, we let both kids stay up to help with the planting.  It was really fun to see the growth in their maturity levels since last year; their attention spans, their interest, and the amount of helpful labor they actually contributed have all increased noticeably.  We're glad the garden is such a family-thing for us!

And here it is today...you can't see it in the picture yet, but all of the seedlings have poked through and are growing exponentially bigger every day...I can already imagine the wonderful produce that's on its way!  Watching this incredible process never ceases to amaze me!

Sweet...

...potatoes, that is!

Our harvest is in and plenteous...