My Garden

This was our first year planting a garden and even though I have a million things to post about right now to catch up I just couldn't go another day with out journaling how much I love my garden. I took these pictures about a month ago when everything was starting to bloom. This was our first tomato we picked and my first squash blossom.

Now I have tomatoes and squash coming out of my ears. As well as cucumbers, spinach & corn. It has been so wonderful to cook with our vegetables and everyone is loving eating it and eating so much healthier. Yesterday I got home from Florida about 4:30 in the afternoon and then we rushed off to a 6:00 p.m. t-ball game for Joey. By the time we got home at 7:00 I had to come up with dinner quick. Scott marinated some chicken and grilled it while I cooked up some squash and sliced some tomatoes and we ate it with the chicken. It was so yummy and healthy.

Tonight we had grilled pork chops and ate some of our corn-on-the-cob and squash and spinach. Not real big fans of the spinach but it was ok. The other project I tackled today was canning some of our tomatoes. When I got home from Florida there was about 30 tomatoes on my kitchen window sill and my mother-in-law said she had about the same amount. So today I stewed them up and then bottled them. I only got 6 quart jars but better than let them go to waste.

It took me most of the day to do the tomatoes so after I cleaned up and started making dinner Jan shows up with a flat of 16 packages of tomatoes that her sister brought to her that needed canned. UGH! and YEAH! Ugh because I'd just spent all day doing it and have lots of work to catch up on tomorrow but yeah for food storage. I decided I had to do them tonight. So after dinner was cleaned up and kids getting ready for bed about 8:00 I started in on the second batch.

I didn't stew these but just diced them and water-bathed them. Scott felt sorry for me I think because he came and helped me and Jackson even helped some too. So now it's 11:30 and I just put in the last batch. I got one pint jar per packages so 16 pints of tomatoes. Not bad. One more hour and I can go to bed and probably dream about tomatoes!

first squash blossom

first tomato we picked next to the cute pot Jackson painted for me and gave me for Mother's Day.

Memorial Day

For the second year in-a-row we decided to head down to play in the river for a day in May with the Knights. We've decided to make it a tradition since we had such a good time last year. However, next time maybe we ought to make sure the river is not still dammed up for construction. There was very little water and it was icky and green. The kids still had fun playing in it and catching baby frogs. There were tons of them.

Jackson's favorite part is driving the quad

Three musketeers

Love this picture

catching baby frogs

Gracie was thrilled to be there

Joey so proud of all his frogs. Don't look too closely. One might be dead.

FHE at the Bowling Alley

A few weeks ago we went with the Knights to the Bowling Alley for FHE. We all had such a fun time. The kids love bowling and would love to do it again and again. Gracie could take it or leave it. She had to sit in her seat or be held and she just wanted to be crawling around. Sorry baby, not going to let you crawl around in a bowling alley. Yuck!

Joey Graduated from Brighter Day Preschool

So I had two boys graduate from Preschool this year from two different preschools. Joey did very well and will be heading off to Kindergarten in the fall. He's a smartie. Tested as a 6 year old on most of his Kindergarten Pre-tests. He really loved his teachers Ms. DeAnne and Ms. Rosa. He misses them and talks about them often.