I went out to our gardens this week to see if there might be anything left, just in case. To my surprise I found over 65 items (Gus counted!) that were ready to be picked and brought in. Some were things we planted this summer like carrots and tomatoes, but there were plenty of self seeders and mystery plants that appeared out of no where.
This fall may win awards in Minnesota for being our best, most beautiful, ever. It has been sunny, warm, cool, crisp, barely rainy and absolutely wonderful for colorful leaves and playing outside in the piles of them.
With an hour or so of chopping and chatting time with my mom plus a few hours afterschool, I've been able to make a pretty good dent in the supply. There are two boxes of apples left on the porch that need to be cut up and cooked, but we have 11 quart jars canned and 11 32 oz. yogurt containers put up in the freezer.
The month of August is just about over and I'm finally sitting down for a breath. The warm, slow days of summer blended into a quicker pace as we ran into cabin season, cousins visiting from out of town and then finally my trip to Angola for two weeks. The shock was great upon my return, with just a day of rest before I dutifully returned to my teacher's meetings. Tomorrow, of course, is the first day of school. Good bye wonderful summer, we enjoyed every little jump, splash, berry, tomato, squeeze, giggle, snuggle and leap!
My dear friend Stephanie lives in Angola (in southwest Africa) with her fiance Rolf. Their baby Cecilia Caroline was born in Namibia in May and died 17 days later when she stopped breathing and had to be put on a ventilator. Her cause of death is still inconclusive and the pain has been awful for everyone.
To those of you with kiddos heading off to school these next few days and weeks, good luck! 
We've got a good gig set up with Ron's sister Gretchen and her husband Tieg. They have three kids and live a mile away and we're very close friends with them. A while back we decided to set up a regular date night exchange with them, meaning one Friday night a month, each couple gets to drop off their kids around dinner time at the other couple's house and pick them up the next morning. We try to get the dates on the calendar many months in advance, ensuring that the dates never get skipped over or pushed to the side. 
At the beginning of every summer, we sit down and make a list of all the activities and projects we want to do during the summer. Usually the list is long and we don't check off every item off the list, but we're going to try our best to do most this summer. 
The summer officially started for us just two days after school got out for the kids: we went camping with our original ECFE (early childhood family education) group that we've been camping with since Carl was one. We've taken two years off with newborns, but otherwise, it is a trip we look forward to sharing with old friends. The kids were delighted to find some other old friends near our site, the monarch caterpillars. 
After carefully taking care of them for several weeks throughout their steady diet of milkweed, climbing to the top of the critter cage and forming the "j" and then going into their chrysallis, we've been very attentive care takers. This week, the butterflies released to celebrate with us.
Not really shooting and killing, just shooting photos of the chocolate frogs we made for Carl's Harry Potter birthday party this year. If you've read any of the books, you'll know that Harry and his friends enjoy a little sweet treat here and there. One of them is a chocolate frog. These were the hit of the party as cake toppers. They were so wildly successful that the kids barely touched the homemade chocolate cake beneath, but instead focused all their attention on the slimy green stripes on the dark chocolatey frogs. 
If you've been following me here for more than a post or two, you'll know that food and photography are definitely in my top five list of favorites. Toss in a little travel and a language or two, and we've nearly hit all five.
This is a wonderful time to be alive and awake in Minneapolis. We have THREE new bakeries in South Minneapolis. We're a bit sad that Rustica headed for Uptown, but are quite glad that Patisserie 46, Sun Street Breads and Sweets Bakeshop have arrived and are in a lovely bikeable proximity from our house.
The weather has been on-and-off here lately in MN. Recently as I was trying to wrangle the kids into the house for a bath and bedtime, I spotted Louise in her studio, er, in front of the garage with a masterpiece.
Carl turned 8 recently and I missed the occasion to send well wishes out into the blogosphere. He said no to a cake, unless I could quickly whip up a crazy cake in an hour, so we went with his old favorite treat to bring to school on his birthday, donut balls. Yes, good old donut holes. They make for a great cake, don't they? This Carl guy isn't so little anymore, and is starting to do things in a very grown up way. He's speaking Spanish to me and Gus much of the time we're at home, has really taken to Harry Potter books (is almost done with #4 on his own!), takes charge of a few household jobs, and is really learning how to think about other people's needs. He loves legos, beans and rice, soccer, making scrambled egg dinner for the family by himself, reading, playing outside, fishing, drawing, wrestling with Dad, calculating money, homemade coleslaw and riding his bike, in no particular order. We're really looking forward to lots of free time outside this summer so we can ride bikes and work on growing a sunflower forest for the kids to play in, with the seeds that he picked out. . Happy Birthday, Big C. We love you! 
Who needs fancy doilies or brownie wrappers? I just got out my roll of parchment paper and my rotary cutter and made my own!
As the temperatures have been rising and the snow doesn't seem to want to disappear, we've been spending a lot of time outside. Now that we've had a full five months of winter, we have made the executive decision that it is time to get creative with how to be happy outside, even when you're ready for some green. Enter: the colored water spray bottle! Ah, the smiles and laughs and interesting creatures to be made with colored water!
And Louise even got in on the fun, but she was mostly busy digging in the cave looking like a fancy snow queen!
Our dog wasn't too pleased when we kept throwing her stick inside the tunnel to retrieve. Guess tunneling into a cave isn't a natural instinct for a lab, maybe just for wolves.
