When life gives you strawberries

So the local grocery store was selling strawberries at .79$ a box this week. I love strawberries, the kids love strawberries, and even more, I love cheap fruit. I bought a dozen boxes. This seemed like a lot, but we also love jam, so after gorging ourselves on fresh ones, I made what was left into some delicious strawberry, vanilla bean spread. But it only made three jars, and something in the back of my mind kept nagging me that I wouldn't be finding .79$ strawberries again any time soon. I checked the store flier, and it was the final day of the sale. Panic! Steve had the van and wouldn't be home until after they closed! I gave him a call and asked him, if it wouldn't be too much trouble, to swing by the store on his way home and grab a few more boxes. No big deal of course, but if he had the time you know. He came home an hour later, with this.



I was a little dumbfounded. I mean, 24 lbs of produce!!! This in addition to the twelve I had already purchased. And produce that rots perhaps more quickly than any other. Well, it was a challenge I accepted gladly.

This is a picture of my kitchen early this morning.



I called it 'still life with strawberries'.

This was my kitchen a few hours later.



It seemed to ask "Is it really worth it?".

This is my kitchen currently.



It says to me- "Fifteen jars of jam, 2 gallon bags of frozen berries for smoothies, 1 lovely bottle of strawberry syrup, a large pan of 'fruit leather', the remnants of some tasty strawberry lemonade we made for lunch, not to mention four pounds of fruit remaining to enjoy. I think you could say it was worth it."

Anybody got some shortcake? I'll bring the berries.

Tornado distraction

We are having tornado warnings again today. Those things never used to phase me until last April and the bad storms we had. Now I jump every time the wind blows the door shut, and I try not to think about the fact that we have no basement in this house. So, to distract myself, I will blog a bit in between staring at the weather channel.

I thought I should make some mention of my baby turning one last week- well almost two weeks ago now. I tried to get a good photo shoot of him for the occasion, but he is so wiggly that they are kind of blurry.





He took his first wobbly steps on leap day, but still much prefers crawling. That is sooner than all of his brothers by about five months. I guess he has a lot of keeping up to do.





Happy birthday sweet boy!

I have also not mentioned the fact that we just returned from the craziest road trip on record. We went to Florida with my sister, her hubby and all of our kids (ten in all) in one fifteen passenger van. I am trying to decide if I want to write up all the details on that. Needless to say it was an adventure, but I can't believe how much fun we had, even with all the chaos. If I don't get around to posting, here are some pictures from my sister's blog. http://8dawsons.blogspot.com/


I am already starting to dig up the yard for this year's garden. I can't believe it is time to think about planting again. We had such a mild winter that some of our plants are still going out there- swiss chard, cilantro and strawberries all winter long! How weird is that? I think our front yard is secretly a greenhouse.

Well, I think the warnings are over for a while- so I can breath a bit. Call me crazy, but it's just a little unnerving when your weather service is telling you that severe, tornado- spawning thunderstorms are imminent in your area. I think it's something about the word severe, or maybe imminent, or it could just be the phrase tornado-spawning that's getting to me. Who knows.

Utter Disaster....

..... is what happens when mommy finally catches up on Downton Abbey.




Not to mention the baby feels free to graze on crayon-laden carpets.

Thank goodness Season Two is over. Now back to life.

Muck Raking

I swept my kitchen on Saturday, y'all.



As in Saturday 48 hours ago, not Saturday 10 days ago. I've been thinking I will leave the pile there and maybe it will make an impression on the boys. They will see it and become so overwhelmed with remorse that they will promise never to make a mess again. Good idea? No, you're probably right. They would shuffle right through it unawares, and what doesn't get kicked back to where it was a few moments before, would probably end up in the baby's mouth.

Do you ever let something like a pile of dirt shape your thinking for an hour or two? Suddenly it mirrors all the things in your life that are unfinished, thankless, needing to be done again tomorrow. It signifies all the frustrations you have during the day with your naughty little boys who peel all the onion papers off 10 lbs of onions, shred the cotton off dozens of q-tips, stick stickers all over the furniture, and wipe boogers all over the walls. (sorry to be graphic, but it is cold season around here.)

Have you ever seen the movie Amelie, where the guy she wants to meet is late, and within 30 seconds, she has concocted a dreadful history in her head about what might have happened to him? I think he ended up in her imagination as an exiled sheep-herder in Afghanistan or something. My imagination went a little wild with that dirt pile tonight, and suddenly all the little problems and difficulties in my life became a looming mountain- perhaps in Afghanistan somewhere- who knows.
I knew in the back of my mind all of the reasons why I should be thankful for that pile, for the little onion-peeling hands that more often than not fill my life with gladness. But sometimes I have to remind myself not to be like the man in Pilgrims Progress who spent his days bent over, raking muck, while the joys of earth and heaven went by unheeded around him.
I really didn't mean to pontificate like this over my nightly sweepings, but jotting it all down on 'paper' helps ground me back in reality. And perhaps tomorrow I will joyfully help create the snowstorm made out of q-tip heads and wipe the runny noses before grubby fingers beat me to it. Just so long as they leave the onions alone.

Where there's a will.....

"Mommy, will you peel my orange for me?"

"Not right now Etienne, mommy's busy. And you know how to do it yourself."

"Yes, but I always squirt juice in my eye when I do it."

"Well, give me a minute and I can help you."

Apparently a minute was more than he could stand waiting for his orange, because I found him engaged in peeling it a short while later- with protection.




You can imagine the pride I felt in seeing this child of mine improvise a squirt shield out of my clear plastic quilting ruler. I raced for my camera to capture such an innovative moment. Move over Thomas Edison, here comes my boy.

Ah, the irony

"But mom, I dropped my ball in the mud and just needed to get it clean!"

(I also love that he avoided both door mats but nailed the bath mat and used the toilet to step on instead of the footstool right in front of him.)

January Miscellany

So January went where? Still looking for it. And still trying to remember what we did with it. Oh yes, we did do a few things. I think it was mostly gearing up for the great project- the great work to begin on our huge unfinished house that I haven't blogged about for a few years now because just thinking about it made me a little bit crazy. If you got our Christmas letter, you remember that we received some funds to recommence work on our house. So we have been attempting to begin, but so far it feels like we are spinning our wheels a bit. After several days of cleaning up and organizing and prepping to replace all the wire that was stolen a year or so back, we were broken into again. Thankfully, there was no new wire up yet to steal, but we have had to focus on amping up the security on the house since it is obviously being watched. This may or may not include moving our rottweiler over there, just to introduce him to the neighborhood you know. It definitely includes a fence and security system that will allow us to alert the authorities should someone attempt to break in again.
Another thing we did in order to help simplify our lives was to take James out of school. We debated a lot as to whether or not this would help minimize craziness, but so far we feel we have made the right decision. And James is loving homeschool. Since he is such a fan of filling out papers and getting all his work done right away, it leaves very little for me to do except, of course, put stars on things.



Since we've been slow to get going on the big house, and since it has been the rainiest January that I can ever remember here, I've been a little stir crazy. So I started a few projects. One of those was to attempt a rudimentary mastery of french pastry- again. Many times over the past ten years of life with my pastry-loving husband, I have tried to attain that elusive, ethereal, epitome of baking- the croissant. But after so many failed attempts, I gave it all up in despair. I mean, who can stand all that butter going to waste? But after an inspiring blog post at my new favorite food blog, Annie's Eats, and a sigh of longing from my husband, I tried again. And this time- success! Well, at least the beginnings of success. I was so excited that I made a triple batch of dough (please don't ask me how much butter was contained therein) and froze it in sheets, like the puff pastry you can buy in boxes at the store. I've been playing around with it, and this morning we enjoyed pain-au-chocolat with strawberries. Not bad for a Friday morning.




I also started (and finished) a baby quilt. I love making quilts, but starting a big one always takes over my whole house and my life. So I content myself with baby ones. My mother is an incredible seamstress and makes beautiful quilts for all her grand babies, but that means all the nephews and nieces on my side of the family are taken care of, bedding-wise. So I started making them for the nephews and nieces on Steve's side of the family. It's a nice gift to send since it is lightweight and unbreakable and sometimes needs to be sent as far away as the Indian Ocean. This one is only going as far as the north coast of France for my sister-in-law's third child- a girl.



I delight in making girly things, and I obviously don't get the chance very often.





It turned out to be sort of reversible too, since when I outlined the individual flowers on the front, they are traced on the back too. And I love how the green edging turned out.



Anyways, this kind of thing helps me whenever I get the urge to sigh for frilly dresses and flowery decor, or to repine because the only sewing I do for my boys is patching the knees of tattered jeans.

So I guess that was January. How was yours?