Susiej

This year, we thought it might be a good idea to take advantage of the sandy soil up here and grow our own blueberries. We planted three different varieties; the first one blooms in late June, the second in early July and the last blooms in August, giving us a steady supply of fresh berries for breakfast every morning.

No doubt, the addition of these blueberry bushes has remarkably cut our travel expenses this summer… if you know what I mean.

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Filed under: Laugh, gardening, the lake house by SusieJ - 3 Comments →

First sunset shots with my brand-spanking new, Nikon D90 Digital SLR Camera.

Wordless Wednesday

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A brown and white speckled egg sat in the palm of a little hand in my kitchen. “Look Mom, now we can have a pet baby bird.”

The egg came from the Martin nest the birds had made under the canopy of the boatlift.
“Oh no, honey, we can’t keep the egg… it needs to be with his mommy.”
“Well, there’s still four eggs left,” he said.
Gently, I coaxed him to return the egg to the nest. Almost there – almost back… and then he dropped it, right below the nest, as egg yolk spilled on the front of the boat.
For twenty minutes, he hid under the covers of his bed, feeling sorry for what had happened.

A few days later, we were happy to see mother and daddy bird fluttering in and out of the canopy catching bugs, and dropping it into the mouths of the baby birds that had just hatched.
I decided it best not to mention the birth of the chicks to my son; but in time, he soon figured it out.
One day, he was playing in the fishing worms. “What are you doing with those?”
“I’m feeding the baby birds.”
And that is exactly what he did.

And, here’s my best shot of the babies.

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Filed under: Life, boy, the lake house by SusieJ - 4 Comments →

When I expanded the Jack in the Beanstalk bean fort this year, I used corn to fill in the walls. Farmers sometimes plant beans around the corn, so that the beans can grow up the corn — the beans are legumes, and they feed the soil.

This has proven to make great walls for the fort, but one element that fell through the cracks was the ceiling. With the “walls” spaced so far apart, it was difficult to imagine vines that could reach the top, and then across to the other side – even though, logically, I knew the Jack in the Beanstalk variety does grow to 21 feet.

As a result, the beans have grown to the top of the poles, and then, continued to drop down and vine around the same pole. This has not created a “fort” but an actual garden, and the kid’s have not even acknowledge this fort’s existence, like they did last year.

Kids need a roof over their heads before they can transform a space into something magical. So, pulled out the twine and started tying lines from the top of one pole to the next. Then, I found that I was a bit too late in my plan, as many of the vines had twisted themselves so tightly back down the same pole. If I had started this process a few weeks earlier, I would have had a true green ceiling by now.

The beans revolt against me whenever I do this, but I did it anyway – I began to untwist its curls and vines and re-aligned them to vine around the twine of the ceiling. In their protest, many vines have since wilted and died — but that only seems to make the plant spout a new stronger vine. Some are taking the plunge and making the journey across the top.

This should be good for the beans, as sunlight will be much easier to reach from here, than rather dangling down on an already-too crowded pole. Not to mention, making it much easier to pick the beans. Finding the beans in this jumble is more like a scavenger hunt, as the dangling beans blend so well with the vines, and are hidden by the leaves. The kids love going out to pick them when they’re young and small, as they taste so sweet right off the vine.

Still, quite a transformation from this, on June 13, 2009,

to today, July 27, 2009

Soon, we’ll be picking beans from the ceiling, and there they’ll be much easier to find.

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A defining moment of motherhood comes when you feel as if you’re getting a “break” when you’re down to two, rather than four, kids. I still laugh when I remember that a break was Daddy coming home to watch the baby, just so I could get a shower.

My blessed break came this week when the older boys left with Dad to go back home for basketball camp. My mind is suddenly free to focus on one age group – rather than four. When the two little ones are together, they morph into their own age group– make-believe.

We are living it up. The weather is unusually cold, rainy and windy, so we’re snuggled indoors, with ITunes set to our favorite Read-Alongs, like Big Red Barn, The Lovely Present, and Green Eggs and Ham. We listened to an extended book on CD of Mercy Watson, which inspired us to call it a complete supper with hot buttered toast with Nectarines. (The nectarines were our idea, not Mercy’s.)

We warmed up the kitchen by making Monkey Bread with yeast, so we had something to wait for,

and drank hot chocolate with our big campfire marshmallows, without the campfire. When they were busy building forts out of picture books for their stuffed animals,

I cleaned out the pantry, the garage, the freezer and the bookshelves. They never seem to run short of props – they even found a use for a stack of washcloths. It’s a bed for the horse—Princess and the Pea style.

When they started to squabble,

I pulled out a picture book that they had used to make a castle for an animal,

and read them a story, an instant antidote. Then, their souls appeased, I was able to go out and work in the garden for as long as I liked, while they played contentedly beside me, catching the toads.

Life with two means that I can focus on one thing at a time – or as much as is possible for a Mom.

I realize that life with four boys is much more mentally exhausting than I had thought. The age span makes thing tricky. Meals are a challenge – no way would my 13-year old settle for hot buttered toast and nectarines. In addition, there is no way the little ones would settle for beef stew.

Then, I gather the little ones to take their baths, brush their teeth, and we snuggle into one big bed together, while they both kick me all night long.

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The kids couldn’t believe that a dill pickle was actually a cucumber. I can remember the same bewilderment when my Mom told me the same thing about pickles and cucumbers. So, Dill Pickles we made. The recipe came from a neighbor, and used, what I thought were, exotic ingredients, like grape leaves and garlic. Low and behold, there are grape leaves growing wild in our backyard up here at the lake too. My only mistake, back then, was that the recipe said to cut pickles in fourths — I cut it along the length, into chuncks. So, they looked funny. Today, mine look much nicer. Let’s just hope they taste as good.

It was time to make the same thing with the kids. Making dill pickles is an easy project to do with kids, as you don’t need to pressurize the jars, and all of the scary canning stuff. So, we found a suitable cucumber hanging around in the garden.

1. We sterlized a canning jar,
2. cut the cucumber (2) into spears. The recipe says to blanch the cucumbers — but I skipped that step. We’re going for “crunchy dills.”
3. We added a clove of garlic,
4. and some sprigs of dill we found growing wild in the garden.
5. We loaded the jar, and added water to the top. Then, we poured out the water to see how much we have — two and a half cups. That means we add 1.5 tablespoons of canning salt. Add salt to poured out water, stir, and add salt water back into pickle jar.
6. Then, we added a wild grape leaf, we found that growing in the backyard too. This helps the fermentation begin.
7. We covered the jar with a cloth, and we wait for two weeks.

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Filed under: boy, eat, gardening, the lake house, try this by SusieJ - 5 Comments →