I love fall!

Fall leaves are a great backdrop to pictures!


Rhinebeck, NY

What a great weekend was had by all. We really needed to get away from the craziness around here. We drove over to mom D's Friday night when Tim got home from work. Friday was an insane day for me because I had to get Patchy to the groom, and do all of the shopping for Connor and Aidan for the big wedding next weekend. I got them some really cute duds and they are going to look so cute...of course, when don't they? I do have to alter a couple of things and I'm trying to figure out when I'm going to squeeze that in this week.

The main purpose of our trip over to NY was to go to the Sheep and Wool Festival. About 4 years ago when we lived in Poughkeepsie, my parents came up for a week to visit and this was something that was going on when they were here, and I had suggested going because I didn't really know what it was. I was brand new to knitting and thought to myself, "Self, there might be yarn there". No one really wanted to go, so for four years I've pined to go. This year we went.

The day started out very cold. It was 40 something out and windy. When we got there, there weren't that many people there. It was nice to walk around. We watched the sheepdog trials for a little bit, but our little (or big) buns were frozen to the metal bleachers so we didn't stay there for very long. The kids found some carnival rides that they wanted to do. I was horrified to find out the tickets were 2.50 each for each ride. They didn't ride very much. Aidan and Tim went on a huge slide. You know, the one where you climb all the way to the top and sit on a burlap bag and fly down. Aidan's face was hilarious when he got to the bottom. His eyes were so wide and he looked like he was terrified, but when he stood up he exclaimed he wanted to go again. He didn't. Connor and Aidan then went on a big bouncy thing. I don't know why they love these things so much. They did this at Knoebels too. They take their shoes off and just jump and bounce in this huge thing that it blown up. They must have bounced for five minutes. I finally pulled them off of it when there were too many kids on it and I was waiting for one of them to crack their heads on another child.

I would say the highlight of the day for the kids and I was the Mad Science show. We saw both shows that were put on. We sat on the floor right in front and both of the kids got picked at different times to be assistant scientists. The guy that did the show was really good with kids and made it a lot of fun.

Aidan assisting with a dry ice experiment.


Connor had a shot at helping too. He did a great job!

So, you go to a sheep and wool festival in hopes to look at yarn. By the time we were done with the shows and lunch and the kid's rides, I was itching to look at some yarn. It was damn near impossible. There were so many people that had shown up for the afternoon that we got through one "barn" and I gave up. There were so many people looking at the stalls that we were getting pushed around. I don't like being in large crowds and the kids were getting tired so I didn't get any yarn. Boo. Oh well, I still have my blanket and Tim's scarf that I'm working on. I'll finish at least one of those projects before I start another one. I am thinking that I want to make another pair of socks next.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the festival got too crowded. We stopped and got a big bag of warm kettle corn. I have never seen popcorn that big and fluffy. I wonder what kind of kernels they used. The bag was so warm and the popcorn was so unbelievably delicious that I pondered paying ten dollars on Sunday to go back in and get another bag. We took our bag of popcorn and stopped back by the dog trials and sat for a few. It was really interesting to watch these workhorse dogs. They were so fast and they could understand what their trainer was telling them to do by different whistles. I felt bad for the sheep because they had all been shorn and were running around in the cold with no wool. After watching for a bit, we head back to mom's. Aidan had been begging for the hot tub all day so that is what he did. The rest of us fell in front of the fireplace and tried to warm up.


some cold sheep waiting to be moved by their dog

oh yeah, there were candy apples too

I have a picture of Tim right after we got married that looks almost exactly like this one of Connor. Creepy!

Nothing like a hot tub when it's 40 something out.

I think one of the other coolest things about the festival was recognizing other Obama supporteres. I had my "Obama Mama" pin on my hoodie. Thanks to Rita for my pin. I love it!! I wore it proudly. I caught people looking at it. One lady had a pin on that I noticed while we were looking at the freezing lemurs. She saw my pin and then whispered to her friend, "She has an Obama Mama pin on." The mad scientist guy kept calling me Obama mama when he was working with the kids to get their pearls out of their oysters. One lady walked by me and gave me a thumbs up and I saw she had an Obama pin on too. I actually saw a lot of Obama wear there. Hats, pins, shirts. It was so nice to feel the Obama love. It was so cute when we ran into Hannafords to get Kool Ade and stuff for poppers. There was a little old lady bagging my groceries and she asked what my pin meant. I said I'm a mama who supports Barack Obama. She said I was a good girl and said that NY was pretty much a democratic state and that he's got NY. I then told her that I was from PA, and she told me how great that was, and that we really needed to win PA. I told her that we were working very hard to do that. It was a funny exchange though.

This brings us to Sunday. Tim has been bemoaning the fact that we ran out of our picked apples in a week, and that the store bought apples here suck. I had mentioned that we should try and see if there were any apples left on the trees. I had serious doubts. I mean it is the end of October. I was wrong. About 7 minutes from mom's house we found an orchard that we didn't even know existed. Well, mom found it, but it was a very successful trip. The orchard had just opened up a section of trees and the trees were FULL! We got Fujis and Galas and Golden Delicious and some Empires. We have so many apples now, and they are so tasty. We were very excited to find this place. After picking apples we went back to the house to watch the Bills game, or so we thought. For whatever reason the game was blocked out on CBS. We ended up listening to the game off the computer while watching the plays on nfl.com. The Bills won and are now 5 and 1. Tim and I have been married for almost 10 years and never have the Bills done so well. I really hope they can get to playoffs. I think it's hoping too much that they'll win superbowl, but I guess stranger things have happened.

Gobs of Gala apples.

This is the road back to the orchard. Both Tim and I said we wanted to live there.

We got home around 7 last night and basically everything that was in our trunk is now on our kitchen floor. I have my work cut out for me today. I have to unpack, do laundry, do school with the kids (although I've got their schedules into block schedules now and I think that will be easier), I have to sweep and wash the floors, and start altering kid's clothes. I guess that means I should get my butt off this computer and get busy. We have three days home and then we go to Olean for four days for dad B's wedding. We are all excited for that.

I am hoping to get back to regular posting after the election. All of my free time has been going to that and I"m looking forward to getting back to enjoying fall. Fall is my fave!!

One of Ed's birdhouses. I'm sure the birds have headed south for now.

Patchy enjoys the fall weather too. He's going to spend a week with Grandma. We miss him already but know that he's having the time of his life chasing leaves and going on long walks with Grandma.

Testing.

I'm still here.  Buried in life.  I did want to test out my new camera.  

Let's proceed with test.

I should have a good post after next weekend.  We are going over to Mom D's house to go to the  Sheep and Wool festival.  Reports are that fall foliage should be around peak when we are there.  It is supposed to be cooler too.  I hope the kid's colds are done by then.

Flowers and Dogs

Yup, it's still really busy around here. I'm happy to report that it seems we are finally starting to gel in our school routine. I'm not spending 8 to 9 hours a day on it. That makes all of us a little bit happier.

I actually had a chance to wander outside for a while yesterday. Mostly forced by my kids. Their neighborhood friend came over and they played outside for two hours. I thought I should take advantage of that time and survey my sorely neglected gardens. They seem to be winding down. We have four heads of cabbage that are ready to pick and four more that are still getting big. I picked a butternut squash and I saw three more growing back there. The tomato plants are still covered with tomatoes. The green peppers have turned red on the plant. The flowers seem to be doing pretty well. The big bush that was towering over the other plants in the back of the patio garden has exploded with dainty little purple flowers. They resemble asters, but the plant is much bigger than the other asters we planted. My gerber daisies keep popping out beautiful blooms. I love the little curly pieces around the center of the bloom.

butternut squash


more tomatoes


gerber daisy


Purple explosion

Patchy and Mylie had a good little wrestle while we were out there. They are such good doggie buddies. They are always ready to start a freindly little wrestle. It's so funny too because they will go at it like crazy and then they will both, at the same time, call a time out to rest and pant...and then they go back at it again. I made the mistake of once letting them wrestle after I had just cut the grass and Patchy's soft white fur turned green. It was kind of funny.

Patchy does this all the time...he somehow jumps over Mylie.

Mylie showed him who the boss is though.

So, that brings us to this weekend. The wee ones are all a-twitter with what we are doing tomorrow. We are meeting grandma, Ed and Melissa at Knoebels. We've never been there. It's fairly close to where we live, but have never made the trek. They have been doing a countdown all week and beside themselves or tomorrow to come. Then everyone is coming back here to spend the night. Sunday, extended family leaves and Tim will be driving down to Richmond for an all day interview. We're not sure if we are going to take the job even if it's offered. No one is really excited about moving. I think we are going to gamble on the chance of him being picked up by the new company in December. I hope when we come to December we aren't regretting our decision. We've done some research on Richmond and it doesn't look like a place we want to move to. I guess we'll play the wait and see game. I'm getting pretty good at that game.

I hope everyone has a great weekend. I'm sure I'll be taking a bunch of pictures tomorrow at the park, so I might even get another post in over the weekend. I feel like I've been neglecting my little blog here, but I have to keep priorities straight, and school comes first.

I'm still here.

Uh oh.  I haven't been around here lately.  Honestly, I haven't had the time.  I'm going to have to figure out how to squeeze out an extra hour here and there to take pictures and post.  

The garden looks like it's starting to wind down a little bit.  We have a lot of tomatoes on the plants and I saw that one of our buttenut squash is almost ready to pick.  That's good because in one of the recipes I'm making this week, I'll need it.  

School started and we are still trying to settle into a good routine.  I am finding it easiest to work with Aidan first and spend a couple of hours with him and his lessons and then work with Connor.  I tried a couple of days to try and work with them both at the same time and it didn't work. Connor would be trying to work on his work and would get distracted listening to Aidan and I and then I would be working with Connor on something and Aidan would be badgering me to help him.  So I've split them up and it seems to be working better.  

Connor's work load has tripled since last year.  He's in a gifted program this year and is a year ahead in math.  He has gone from cutsie little elementary workbooks to full fledged textbooks.  He's gone from figuring out multi choice answers to having to write 25 answers down in a notebook for eath math lesson.  His reading work is insane.  He has 20 new advanced spelling words each week. He has a very intense writing program and the reading work is very advanced.  He's not having a problem with the reading and comprehension.  He's far ahead of his grade level.  What he has a problem with is writing.  He hates it.   Yesterday on his science test he asked if he could just tell me the answers instead of writing it out.  I think he gets frustrated because I've drilled it into him that I want neat handwriting and now he's editing his writing while he's doing it.  He'll write a letter, and get frustrated and erase it and say "that's not good enough" and then do it over again.  So, on the one hand, I'm happy that he recognizes that he can do better, but on the other hand I don't want him to obsess about it to the point where he doesn't want to do it at all (which is where I think we are right now).  I'm pondering letting him write a little less neatly on things that I'm grading and on things he has to send to his teacher he has to have it perfect.  I don't know about this though.  I want him to do his best all the time.  It's going to be interesting trying to figure this out and hopefully I won't mess Connor up in the meantime.  

The other interesting thing I'm finding is that Aidan has a completely different way of learning than Connor does.  Connor does not like the sit down/listen/write way of learning.  He is much more into the go and do and figure things out.  Kinesthetic.   I try to let him do a lot of his work on the white board and let him look things up on the internet to find answers.   Aidan, on the other hand is very happy and content to sit with a worksheet and learn this way.  When I had him get up and do different kind of movements last week to show him different body parts and how they moved, he freaked out.  He didn't want to do it.   It's so interesting to see the difference between the two boys.  Both of them are insanely smart and it's fun to see them grow.

I should be getting started with Aidan's school here now so I'm going to sign off.  I hope I have a little bit of time over the weekend to update our gardens.   I might have to change the name of my blog as the season changes.  Maybe it should just be "Busy Bee's Notes".  I hope everyone has a great day/week.

Weekend in photos.

*WARNING--PHOTO HEAVY POST*

There, you were warned. We had such a nice weekend considering that Tim was laid out on a couch the entire time. We picked some apples, and lazed around the house. I got a couple more squares knitted for my blankie. I took a lot of pictures. That about sums it up. We got home yesterday afternoon and today I'm just trying to catch up with everything. On top of that, it was the official first day of school. Let's just say that I have a headache and we'll leave it at that for now.

So, now, in no particular order are pictures from our weekend in NY. Well, I'll try and put them in some sort of order I suppose.

Mom's gardens and flowers:

A huge patch of Brown Eyed Susans.

Delphinium

These are the impatiens that I long for. She has these giant mounds of impatiens that always look so full and vibrant. Mine are puny in comparison. My impatiens get absolutely no sun and I wonder if that is part of my problem, although I always thought they had to have shade. Next year I will try again.

Zinnias that she grew from seed. I am so doing zinnias next year. They are such a happy colorful little flower.

Mom D's garden beds. She has a ton of things producing daily now. I'm jealous because she has pumpkins and watermelons growing.

Ok, so I'm sure this wasn't meant to be part of their garden/yard, but this mushroom was huge. When I was a kid I always like to pretend that little fairies lived under them. Sometimes I still imagine that.

The kids:

Connor aka Phil Tony (I'm not sure where that name came from) and his little brother.


Yes, Aidan was aiming at me when he threw the ball and yes he hit the ball...and me.

Aidan under the biggest sunflower I think I've ever seen.

Trips to the farms:

Said sunflower Aidan was under. This thing was as big as my head. I was surprised the squirrels hadn't tackled it to the ground yet.


We picked some blueberries. These were the sweetest blueberries ever. So tasty. A good part of them went into Lemon Blueberry Muffins/cupcakes that Melissa (I think) made.

And these are one of the main reasons we treked over to NY. This is the third year we have gone to the same apple farm. It's about a 30 minute drive from mom's but so worth it. The farm is Love's Apple Farm. First we had to stop and get the obligatory cider donut and small cup of apple cider. Then we headed out to the petting zoo part and the kids were trampled by some feisty goats. Then Ed stayed with the kids at the playground area while I went and picked apples with mom and Amy and Melissa. Well, Melissa picked peaches, but we got the apples. It took me three trees until I found those beauties. Gala apples. They are so sweet and crispy. I filled up a 1/2 bushel bag off of one tree. Amy filled up half of the other 1/2 bushel bag and they only cost me 11 dollars. When I get apples in the store, I get four apples for almost 5 dollars. I hope when we go back next month for the sheep and wool festival there will be a few apples left on the trees.

End of the day:

Oh yeah, smores by the fire. It was a nice cool evening and the kids wanted a fire. Ed made a nice little fire for us and Tim managed to hobble out and roast a couple of marshmallows with us.


And last, but not least, Patchy!


Running free.

After all the running he flopped down in the grass and rested. It's funny because at mom's house he knows to stay on property and he runs free and loves it. At home, he takes off out of the yard as fast as he can. Of course, mom has a lot and I mean a LOT more property than we do. Patchy loves going to grandmas!

So, that was our weekend. I'm not sure how much blogging I will get done this week as we try and settle into a school routine again. Then again, I might escape to Blog Land and spend more time here than I have. I hope everyone has a great week!

Busy week

Last week was a crazy week and frankly, I'm glad it's over. We helped Nancy host a house party on Wednesday and it was a smashing success, if I may say so myself. We held it outside and I would guess around 20 people came. Tim fired up the grill and grilled some amazing ribs and Nancy and I had made a bunch of quick little side dishes. The weather was PERFECT. We dragged a TV out onto the patio and watched Joe Biden and Bill Clinton give their speeches. It was so neat to be sitting out in our garden with friends and enjoying nature while we watched history in the making.

But then all hell broke loose with Connor. He has been on an insulin pump for a year and a half and up until Thursday have not had any accidents with it. I guess we were due and accident. Instead of the fast acting Novolog being put into his pump, the long acting Lantus was put in. I couldn't figure out why his sugars kept going up and up even though I was bolusing his pump. Tim called from work and suggested I check the insulin bottle and make sure it hadn't expired. It hadn't....it was just the wrong one. So after a call to his doctor we knew what we had to do. By the end of the day we had control of his sugars and his ketones were headed down. It was a long, stressful day but it made me realize that we can't get complacent about his diabetes. He's such a good kid and he's been so easy to take care of considering he's had diabetes now for almost 5 years (diagnosed at 3)...but we have gotten into such a routine that it wasn't noticed that the bottle was different. It has made us realize that we need to still pay attention to what we are doing as if he were still newly diagnosed.

That brings us to this weekend. There was some confusion as to what we were going to do this Labor day weekend. Our original plan was to head over to NY and go apple picking but then we weren't sure if Tim's sister was coming into town and then his mom and stepdad would head over to our place. So yesterday morning when I got up I figured we would have a bunch of family coming over. Mom D called and said that plans had changed again and that we were in fact going to come over there, we just had to wait for his sister to roll in from Pittsburgh. I'm a pretty easy going person. I was fine with the change in plans and was able to get everything done yesterday before we left home, but it was made harder by the fact that Tim put his back out on Friday wrestling with the kids. The poor guy can't hardly stand up straight and has to kind of walk sideways because it hurts to lift his leg straight. He had to endure a 3 hour drive over to NY with a car full of kids, a sibling and a dog. Every pothole (and there are a lot where we live) made him wince in pain. As I'm writing this, he's still sleeping and I hope he feels a little bit better today so that we can go pick us some apples. Thankfully, when we rolled in here at 8 pm last night, mom and Ed and Amy had made an amazing dinner and it was all ready for us. I eased a growing headache with a couple of Screwdrivers and was sound asleep by 9:30. I'm itching to get outside and take some pictures of mom D's gardens. She has so many gorgeous flowers out there that I'm in awe.

I'll leave everyone with a couple of pictures of our flowers before I head out and take some new pictures.

Foxglove. I really didn't think this plant was going to produce any more flowers, but it has proved me wrong. It's beautiful!

Gerber Daisy. Again, I thought my two daisy plants were done for. I was wrong. I think this ranks up there with the Gazania as my favorite flower.

I think we'll be having cabbage rolls in the next week or two. The four savoy cabbage (although they don't look very much like savoy) are getting really big. I'm getting really excited!!

I hope everyone has a great Labor Day weekend. I plan on it. We'll be home Monday night and then I start school with the kids on Tuesday. I'm starting to freak out about trying to work the schedule to get both of them taught at the same time, but I'm sure after a couple of weeks, we'll have it down to a science.

Tragedy.

I'm still here. I've been missing because I have way too much to do. I'm not even sure where to start today. I suppose I will start with the tragedy and then work backwards over the last few days. It looks like Nancy has saved our little family of four from certain death. Thank you Nancy!! And it was all by accident. She came over Saturday while Tim and I were in the middle of making tomato sauce and canning them. She saw that we had put zucchini in the sauce and told us that we had to pressure can them to kill the bacteria. I didn't even think of that. I thought that because the sauce was filled with a lot of tomatoes that it would be fine. No. Even though we blended the zucchini and garlic and peppers into tiny little bits it was not enough. So, we have 6 pints of tomato sauce that we canned a couple of weeks ago that have to go down the drain. I was really bummed at first. But I'm chalking it up to a lesson now. I would rather learn my lesson and lose 6 pints of sauce than lose my family to botulism. I ended up with 5 pints of tomato sauce on Saturday that we are now going to freeze and hope that will be ok. Saturday's sauce was insanely yummy chalk full of garlic and zucchini. We are going to have one of the pints tonight and then I've got four pints ready to freeze.

death in a jar

hopefully safe sauce

We made the sauce on Saturday because we ended up with a lot of tomatoes again. Aidan and I were out in the gardens first thing in the morning and picked a bunch. Aidan is so cute. Whenever he sees a red tomato he exclaims, "Look, it's the most beautiful tomato ever" and then he picks it.

Aidan approves of this tomato.

Saturday's harvest

tomatoes we had gathered during the week

So, as you can see we had a lot of tomatoes. We made the 5 pints of sauce and I made a huge batch of salsa. I didn't get a picture of the salsa because the boys ate it too quickly. I still have quite a few tomatoes left and I'm going to make a mega batch of salsa for tomorrow nights party.

Hmmm, what else? We had fun at the baseball game. We had great seat and our team won. Although we didn't stay for the whole game. We stayed through the 6th inning. It was getting late and we have an issue in our car where the interior lights don't turn off for some reason. I noticed it last week when we were leaving the fair. The computer in the car said the door was ajar and even though I got out and opened and closed each door twice it still kept the lights on inside like a door was open. It was difficult driving in the dark with interior lights on. Stupid car.

Aidan wanted his picture taken with the field behind him. This made his head look really big!

It was a beautiful night out and I'm glad I brought a sweatshirt. It got chilly when the sun went down.

That is about all we've got going on this week. It's a busy week. We are helping Nancy host a party tomorrow night and then I think, but I'm not sure, we are going to NY this weekend to pick apples. If we don't go, we'll be sitting on Debbie's back porch under blankies sipping some cocoa. The boys have been wanting to do this all summer and our weather continues to cool off. It was 48 this morning when we got up. Connor ran out quickly this morning to say hi to Mylie and was shocked at how cold it felt. I love it!

Just a couple more pictures and then I'm done.

I love this rose bush. I can see it out my kitchen window and they really are that bright pink. They are gorgeous and make me smile when I see them.

I'm about to break into this for breakfast. Mom D brought this little gem over from her garden. I tried to plant watermelon seeds this year but none of them sprouted. I will try again next year. Thanks mom for the melon. The boys and I are going to enjoy it now.

I hope everyone has a great day!