Daybook Entry for 6/23/10

It's been a while since I've done one of these, soooo....

Outside my window.... It's HOT!!! Even in the mornings, which I didn't expect this early in the summer. This is pretty normal for August, but not June. I guess after such a cold winter we had it coming:) We did buy dd a new stock tank to swim in . She loves the water had been 'swimming' in an old cast iron bathtub that the in-laws had laying around, but she can't hardly move in it. So we moved her up in the 'pool' dept:) She is loving it and I have even gotten in there with her once. It had been a long time since I've swam in a stock tank!!!

I'm thinking....Well for a while after school was out I tried thinking as little as possible:) I haven't even looked through curriculum for next year yet even though I bought it 3 weeks ago. Usually I only wait about a week, if that, and am then digging through it all. Too much going on I guess, but I do feel as if I'm almost ready to tackle it. Really it's not very hard as all the lesson plans are done for me (THANK GOODNESS!!!) but I do like to have an idea what will be coming up and to loosely plan for at least the first couple weeks.

Out in the garden...It needs tilled, but the rows of veggies are mostly weeded (except the okra, still need to do that row), which is a HUGE improvement over the past few years:) We have tomatoes, lots of peppers, green beans and okra. Yes, a big scale down from what we've tried doing in the past (though the whole garden is planted, so while we didn't do the veriety that we've tried in the past, we have the same volume of plants:).

In the kitchen....I've been working on canning some, though not from our garden yet. My father-in-law loves to grow a big garden, though he and mil eat very little of it. Instead they seem to give most of it away. Works for me!!! So we've already gotten lots of peas (my dd loves to shell peas:), green beans, cucumbers, onions and potatoes:) And I didn't have to plant, weed or pick a single bit of it, LOL. We ate peas until we were sick of them, so I have 3 batches in the freezer. We're not sick of the green beans yet, but I had too many to use, so I've canned 5 quarts of them and have more in the fridge that we need to use tonight.

I'm also back to working on GF cooking. It's too hot to work on baking very much, so I'm thinking of playing with flatbreads. I started looking for recipies and it's kind of fun to find that each area of our world has their own verson of a flatbread. There is the popular pancakes (which I made this morning) and tortillas which I am most familar with. And I've had pita bread before, though very rarely. So those are a few that I might try, but I also want to look into chapita, naan, paratha etc, of India and see if any of these will work for me too:) Pizza crust and focaccia are also considered flat breads, but I have to stick to those without yeast and as I said, I also don't want to turn on the over if possible:0)

Creativity this week....Mostly working on things with dd. 4-H county fair is coming up pretty soon and she has several projects that need working on:) She wants to take 4 entries for Foods, 4 entries for Arts and Crafts, 4 entries for Photography, and 4-5 entries for Gardening/Plant Science. HMMM, we better get busy:)

My reading indulgences....I have a couple books that I'm reading through, one quickly and one a bit slower. The slower one is 'One Million Arrows' by Julie Ferwerda and is about how to raise our children to live their lives for GOD. It's been good so far, just a little slower of a read for me as I want to absorb it instead of just skimming. The other book is 'Boys Without Names' by Kashmira Sheth. It is about a family in India that has to move to the big city, looses the father and then out of desperation the oldest boy goes looking for work only to be sold into slavery. It is really good and though not a true story, it is based on what really goes on there everyday. I started this 300+ pg book yesterday and am 2/3rds of the way done with it:) That is why I won't do a post about how my house looks now, cause I've been busy with other things:) hehehe

Okay, I've made this long enough now, so I better go and actually work on my mess of a house;)

Animal update

Thought I would give an update on our animals around here:) Here is the only kitten that survived the first round of kitty litters (round #2 is soon to come). We had 4 born (2 different momma cats) but one momma wouldn't take care of her's so we didn't get very many this spring. My dd brought this one inside to me as I was cleaning out this table, so I stuck him in there and he really seemed to like it:) We gave him this 'seal' toy which he really likes, you have to keep your fingers back or he'll get them too:)
Here is a couple pics of our boys. I'm not sure how this happened, but a couple weeks ago my dd was playing outside and called us out to see this. Seems like he was playing with the bucket and got it stuck on his head, LOL. Took my dh a while before the bull calf let him get close enough to pull it off it's head:) It was pretty funny as the calf was rubbing the bucket all over the ground trying to get it off:) The other guys didn't seemed bothered by it at all. hehehe

We also got rid of our chickens. It was kind of sad as we really liked having them here, but they were pulling up our garden and as they kept eating things they shouldn't, we weren't eating their eggs anymore either (we gave the eggs to the cats). Next time we will pen them in, hopefully 'chicken tractor' style so they can still eat naturally but not be so 'free' ranged. This will help us to know where the eggs are too, instead of having a year long easter egg hunt:)

Next week I hope to post an update to our garden. Since dh is doing a good deal of it this year, it is weed free enough to post pics:)