7 Mar
It’s been ridiculously warm and (often) sunny here, considering that it’s still early March. The kids are loving it.
Mary’s getting some definite tricycle skills.
Wesley’s been checking out the plants.
These flowers have been hornswoggled. (Mary took this picture.)
Here, Wesley shows his close relationship to aunt Melissa and aunt Cherie:
Why is his face always so dirty?
And one bonus pic of Mary snuggling with Conor:
8 Feb
Okay, so “tomorrow” was a little optimistic. But here are some more! After the first stint in Denver, we drove to El Paso for Christmas festivities.
Mary lined up her stocking contents and sampled the applesauce from her stocking while we were waiting for Grandma Sandy to arrive.
Then we decorated the table so that it would be ready for Grandma Sandy. Mary made place cards:
Wesley was very ready to get started eating.
We made bread!
Wesley and Grandpa Mike spent a lot of time working on a puzzle.
Mary and Grandma had a snuggle.
So…remaining Denver pictures to follow!
3 Feb
I just realized I never posted ANY of the pictures from our Christmas-New Year travels! I’m a bad blogger.
We flew into Denver and stayed a day or so before heading down to El Paso. Here are a few pics from that leg of the journey.
Mary and Molly enjoying Molly’s crazy collection of art supplies:
Wesley used Riley’s bulldozer. Riley provided helpful advice and instruction.
It snowed the night we arrived, so the next day, the kids went out to play. (Snow is fairly novel for my kids: we’ve gotten huge amounts sometimes here, but they weren’t old enough to remember it.)
Cousins in the snow!
Girls
Boys
Later, Wesley was a “Santa porcupine with a lightsaber.”
I’ll post some more tomorrow. I can’t believe I forgot to put these up!
17 Jan
We’ve had a few nice days recently (although yesterday was still cold!), so I’ve gotten a few photos of the kids outside, running and playing and generally being wholesome.
Wesley, wearing Batman cape, Spiderman shoes, and Star Wars shirt (he is everyone’s target market):
Mary in her princess crown–they have basically been wearing the crown and cape since Halloween (not always on the same kid–sometimes they trade):
Yesterday, we went to the park. Wesley got very brave on the climbing things:
And, for that matter, so did Mary.
Mary is looking very adult.
Her ears got cold.
Wesley asked me to come through and play.
He wandered around, looking at squirrels.
Mary was sad when it was almost time to leave.
She shouted, “Wesley! There are monsters! RUN!”
15 Jan
So, as you may recall, Mary got a camera for Christmas. So far, her favorite subject–bar none–is her “yucky pumpkins” from Halloween.
We put them in the garden so that the kids could watch them break down into compost. (We have a compost heap, but we figured they’d actually be able to watch the process with the pumpkins.) Mary has taken pictures of them off and on and now she’s delighted that they’re “almost dirt!”
November 19: “Ooh, they’re really getting yucky.”
November 23: “These look almost the same. But a little more yucky.”
November 26: “They’re squishing down like balloons with the air out!”
December 1: “Parts of these aren’t orange anymore.”
January 12: “They’re ALMOST DIRT!”
Anyway, I just wanted to make sure that Mom knew Mary was putting her Christmas gift to good use–ha. She has taken other photos too, but these are her favorites.
1 Sep
It is really hard for me to believe that Mary is five.
I feel like she was a baby just a few minutes ago. But I also can’t really remember what it was like before she arrived, either.
She is opinionated, funny, stubborn, affectionate, tempestuous, independent.
In other words–she’s five.
17 Aug
So, between our garden tomatoes and the fantastic deal on canning tomatoes at the local farm market, we had a lot of them to can. I decided to make one batch of spaghetti sauce, because I made some a couple of summers ago and it was fantastic. It’s a ton of work for a small amount of product, but I think it’s worth it. Mary agreed to help.
We got our tomatoes ready for peeling and coring, then Mary helped me by handing them to me so that I could drop them in the boiling water and then into the ice water. She was fascinated.
We got everything into the pot…then we waited. For a long time. Our house got very steamy. And the stove got very dirty from spattered tomato sauce.
Mary volunteered to taste it for me.
Here’s the recipe I used, in case you’re curious–it’s a combination of a bunch of different recipes. It’s very meat-heavy, though. If you like it more tomatoey, I’d cut the meat in half.
Spaghetti Sauce
1/4 cup chopped bacon.
4-5 onions, chopped.
2 pounds ground beef.
5 cloves garlic.
8 pounds peeled, cored, chopped Roma tomatoes. (This is the weight after they’re prepared; it was about 12-13 pounds to buy. I’d probably aim for 9-10 pounds if I were using regular tomatoes, because they’re more juice and less flesh.)
1/2 bottle of wine (I used red).
Leaves from three stems of basil.
Cook the bacon and onions until the onions start to soften. Add the beef and garlic and cook until browned. Drain off any grease. Add the tomatoes, wine, and basil. Cook until sauce reduces to about 1/3 its original volume (usually a couple of hours). This freezes well.
6 Aug
…or as normal as it gets here. David, Nina, and the kids departed on Wednesday; Mary and Wesley are slowly coming back to their ordinary routine.
We had a lot of fun during this visit.
A little family history:
They ate all of the tomatoes in the “free produce” pile.
They played.
Then we took a little walk. Don’t they look pastoral?
Then we went out and ate crabs! The visiting contingent assured us that they didn’t mind eating them two days in a row.
The next day, we had a crab feast at our house!
Jack pulled Mary around in the wagon until she looked like this:
Wesley had a joyous afternoon with the John Deere ATV.
Mary imitated a garden fairy.
Molly swung.
On the last day, we went to see the airplanes:
Wesley was floored.
Doesn’t Mary look old these days?
We also had a lovely day at the beach, but there are no pics because I couldn’t figure out how to take a camera and not ruin it. It was great, though. We got there in the early afternoon, swam and played, went to lunch when a thunderstorm blew up, and then went back after the storm to swim and play some more. The kids loved it. Mary was fearless and learned how to jump when a wave came in, and even Wesley got brave enough to let us carry him out to get his feet wet and to play in the little pool that Jack dug near the shore.
It was a really nice visit. I can’t believe how big my niece and nephews are! We miss them.
29 Jul
The cousins have landed and the kids are having a great time.
Wesley–who needs a haircut, as his current hair is sort of Stooge-like:
Nina relishing the regional specialties:
Lots of baseball was played:
Wesley is totally Riley’s minion:
Molly brought along her quilt (which I made for her before she was born) and insisted on posing with it. I can’t believe it’s still in one piece.
18 Jul
It’s not here quite yet. We’re still in the stage of eating most of the tomatoes right off the vine–because there aren’t that many, and it’s still sort of a surprise to see one underneath the foliage that’s actually REALLY ready and totally red. But…they’re on their way.
We have some beautiful Costuluto Genovese tomatoes (the lobed ones); some round-as-a-ball Rutgers tomatoes; some unnamed sort of beefsteak tomato that came from a plastic baggie marked, cryptically, “tomato ???”; and a mix of Super Sweet 100 and Yellow Marble cherry tomatoes.
The Yellow Marble tomatoes are my favorite plant of all time. We planted them one year. All of the other tomatoes succumbed to late blight, but the Yellow Marble ones never showed the slightest sign of a problem. Then they happily reseeded themselves all over the garden, and now they pop up every year in weird places all over the garden plot. I never pull a plant that looks like it might someday become a tomato, so we have them in with everything. They’re very tasty, too, and gorgeous. They’re an heirloom variety and not that easy to get (I just got lucky the year that I ordered them from Heirloom Acres), but if you do get your hands on some, plant them everywhere.
Some of the plants are totally out of hand. I’ve been tying them up over and over, adding stakes, adding string…and they just keep getting heavier and heavier and tipping over.
I turned this batch of tomatoes into this Bloody Mary tomato salad from Smitten Kitchen. It was awesome. I did not make the skirt steak but I bet it’d be great. (I rely way too much on Smitten Kitchen. We had this lentil-and-sweet potato curry last week–I would never have believed I could like lentils that much.)
I planted some orange cosmos this year, because I have enjoyed our pink cosmos so much (even though I don’t like pink). They’re in bloom now and they’re lovely. I can’t believe this color exists in nature, but here it is. I hope this variety seeds itself and comes back every year, like the pink ones. I am a very lazy gardener and I like things that plant themselves.
Mary helped me pick and arrange some flowers for the house. Pink. (Sigh.)
Wesley helped by giving himself a snack while I picked and tied up tomatoes.
greenepiece 