small wonders

We've been keeping busy over here- gardening,  jumping on the hay bales (and, in the case of two little boys, watching the tractor work with great excitement!), picking and preserving strawberries - after two visits to our friends U-pick we have picked 80 lbs for our winter stores. We are freezing and drying them this year but I haven't made any jam yet, as we find we use most of our berries for smoothies or a quick stovetop fruit sauce or as dried treats. There are currently still 50 lbs of berries in the fridge to deal with though, so jam might still happen!


We have the chickens in a much larger pen this year and they are so happy in there and their egg quality went up substantially. The grass is getting really long though, and we have discovered that they have been laying in the grass, which makes those eggs awfully hard to find- though I can't blame them, those lush green nests do look pretty appealing! Our landmates put their llamas in the pen for a few days to get the grass down a bit, hopefully we'll be able to find our eggs again soon.


We have lots of projects on the go right now, we are aiming to get all our pathways done in the garden, as they are totally overgrown and we are starting to get a slug problem. We are going to put down landscape fabric and sawdust and hope that takes care of the weeds for a good long while. And of course there is the ongoing weeding and mowing and watering and compost shoveling and thistle pulling and chicken chasing (and last night's mission to clip wings to keep them in and away from the neighbourhood dogs,)  and water system priming (poor Perry was at that a bunch this week-) and cooking and food preserving and just general fun and work around the homestead. I have also been obsessing about sorting the house and getting rid of stuff and trying to get things more organized. It is very satisfying hauling out all the bags and boxes to the thrift store and starting to see my home under all the clutter (though there is still a long way to go- I say for anyone who happens to drop by and expect a tidy home- it is rather chaotic right now, but there is an end in sight.). Phew. I need to do this to imagine being able to spend a winter in this little house living and parenting and homeschooling. 


And there has been that too- the home school planning, which has been going really well, I have a basic outline for the year and the first two blocks fleshed out, and Ari and I are both really excited about the start of the year. We will start the year with a Language Arts block (Enki uses a similar block system to Waldorf,) introducing the consonants through stories from around the world, and then the 2nd block will be a Math block, introducing the numbers similarly. Ari seems really ready for this kind of work and I love the Enki curriculum so  very much. There is such richness in it, and I think it is going to be a great fit for him. And Dori will be along for the ride too, of course, so I am making sure there are some places in the day that are for him, some special storybooks and school supplies too- since he is a "pre-kindergartener" after all!   

We ate our first ripe tomatoes from the greenhouse with breakfast. I thought I had lost most of my plants in a windstorm earlier in the summer, but thankfully most of them have come back, though I did have to replant the cucumbers. We don't have the greenhouse space to grow all the tomatoes we need, but we enjoy every ripe gem we get!


I hope you are all summer-ish and happy where you are friends.