Fruit and Glimpsing the Future

This morning, upon hearing Rick put his breakfast dishes into the sink, Henry comes to his bedroom door and says, “Oh.  It’s you.”  Rick turns around to face him.  “I thought you were Mommy,” he says.  Then he goes back into his room to continue playing with cars.

I can’t believe how big (and funny) my boys are getting.  I recently started reading this blog, and I feel like it’s a glimpse of our future.  The father of four who writes it is quite funny and very honest about his kids.  It’s great for a laugh, and makes me feel sane as a parent.  His posts have titles like, “We put the “us” in ruckus.” and, “The Age of Bike Riding and Ramps.”

I realize that the different ages of childhood are each funny and unique and the one we’re in now is a great place to be.  (Yes, it is an up day for me).     Here’s a quick clip of my boys this morning.  Not sure if you can hear on the audio, but Emmett is laughing just as much as Henry.

This weekend was the weekend of fruit.  On Saturday morning we went to Palisade for the second time this summer, and we came home with 319 pounds of peaches.  150 pounds were for friends, and we kept the other half for ourselves.  Then, Sunday morning, before we had even gotten a peach into the freezer, my brother-in-law came by with over 1500 Italian plums.  Thankfully the plums are a bit green, as we didn’t really have much time to mess with the fruit on Sunday.  We headed to Harris Park for my Grandpa’s 87th birthday.  We had a fun time in the mountains with my family and got home late.

Monday, we ate some of the plums in a plum coffee cake, and then we went to our friend’s home outside of Allenspark.  Mike grilled and we gathered around the fire pit, and had a nice evening with friends (and peach cobbler), watching the smoke from the fire in Boulder county blow over the horizon.

On the way home we stopped outside of Longmont where we could see the fire above Boulder.  My pictures here don’t do it justice, but it was incredible.

Tuesday is farm day for me, when I go and work at the CSA.  I brought home our share, and had barely pulled into the drive when our friend, Rich drove up with twenty plus pounds of concord grapes!  These grapes are our favorite and they were very generous!

So we have a fruit filled week ahead of us.  I had actually planned to pick strawberries and raspberries this week too, but I am putting that off until next week in hopes that I can get somewhat caught up around here before adding more to it!

Here’s the update:

Plant something – nothing.

Harvest something – eggs, tomatoes, zucchini, peaches

Preserve something – three batches of peach preserves, two and a half boxes (approx. 30 lbs) of peaches sliced and frozen, 3½ pounds green beans frozen, 1 gallon bag of tomatoes frozen, 2 batches of carrot soup in the freezer.

Waste Not – compost and recycling, scraps to chickens, etc.  Lots and lots went to the goodwill over the last couple of weeks.

Want Not – nothing that I can think of right now.

Build Community Food Systems – all the fruit trading!  Yum!

Eat the Food – as mentioned, plum cake and peach cobbler.  Also eating all the yummy farm veggies.  Nothing out of the ordinary.