Oh My!- The Apples Are In & the Squash is Ready!

Early one morning this week, we woke, got dressed and headed to pick up a couple friends and headed to an orchard.

This orchard is on public land and is a free, with hope in our hearts, we headed out to see.

Then we were there- a big old house (one of my dream houses) and a little clutch of giant pine trees where owls live and fields and an orchard.

We walked through the owl woods to the orchard and began to pick the apples and pears until we had well over 100lbs.

There were several times where the children stood on each other's shoulders like a circus act just to reach some cluster of delicious apples. Of course, with one pick a torrent of ripe apples would rain down on our heads and laughing and running we'd chase and collect them.

It was pure joy.

Then it was back through the owl woods where we collected a dozen owl pellets to dissect later and home.

Along the way we stopped at a local farm and grabbed up 30 squash - a mix of acorn, spaghetti and delicata and headed home to start working.

The children were blissful.

Huzzah! Huzzah!

Every year as summer puts out one last effort and autumn sneaks in to steal her thunder- we cut up sheets, sew them into over dresses and chemises and we head south for a renaissance fair.

The children run barefoot through the sudden village hundreds of years old and check back with us, giant turkey legs in their hands, blue glass bottles of homemade sarsaparilla tied to their belts and feet so dirty they look like hobbits.

It is magical. We are part of a booth with fiber works (of course) so I sit and spin and knit and felt and then we head off to watch the jousting, sitting on a grassy slope and rooting for our chosen knight or just walk through the village, basket in the crook of the elbow.

We return home dirty and tired but happy and full of history of one of the remarkable pasts that the human species has to draw from.......

"I love me"

As part of our homeschool organizing, we picked up some used binders to hold things together in addition to our main lesson books, etc. It didn't take long for the children to discover that they could draw pictures and insert them into the front and back of each binder personalizing each one. They got right down to it.

Later, after we had played with math, I was putting the binders away and discovered this written on the back of my youngest's binder.

I almost cried to see those words, plain and clear in a declaration of self-love, -- in all places on the back of her binder.

Tomatoes, tomatoes everywhere

It is officially tomato season and everyone is snacking in the garden- even the dog has discovered the bounty and carefully picks ripe tomatoes and eats them straight off the vine.

The greenhouse is in the process of being moved and has therefore been taken down temporarily.

And so, one evening recently my oldest daughter and I went and harvested the sweet tiny

tomatoes.

We washed them.

We sliced them in half.

We placed them on the dehydrator racks and we dehydrated them.

They are like crisp candy tomatoes- unbelievably delicious!!

What gifts this earth provides!!

Finding the time to live the life you love and blog?

the light over our dining table

This is a tricky one for me, as I sit here, I know I am burning the polenta and wondering what things I can be doing with my children.

Blogging is fun- but it's more than that, it's a little bit of "hey, check out this idea" and a little bit of "the funniest things happen when" and it is also a delight to just be writing about life- truly. And yet, taking the time to be on the computer has a certain push-pull to it.

I find myself fighting the urge to throw the computer away (which would be a silly thing to do considering all the things that I rely on the computer for-- including some serious homeschool information) but still- there is that balance that I seek.

I see photos on Facebook pages and blogs of families off in woods, on the beach, in the world and I am misty eyed about how fantastic that is and then I realize that at some point they left that piece of paradise for just a little while to post about it in whatever venue they use and I wonder how they work that. I get lost in that. I find myself lost for days and weeks in the world of children and home and marriage and friendship and then I worry and worry that I have forgotten all the wonderful things I could share on this blog about projects or recipes or what have you. Finding balance, always seeking to find balance.......

I was encouraged to blog by friends who called to find out what we were up to quite often and would ask what we had been doing recently? What magic was afoot in Noisy Cottage? So, I will continue to strive to find the balance and blog but, sometimes, I get so lost in the every day moments of life that I forget that there is a such thing as a computer or the internet........