So the desire to post is strong, but the desire to be creative is weak.  I have a sick little one, who collapsed on the couch in a heap after his playdate, and 60 minutes later was running a 102.5 degree fever.  Poor monkey.  And I have a two year old...a stereotypical two year old, fulfilling every cliche in the book these days.  Hittypants McThrowy Spit.  Yeah.  I'm waiting to write his "Dear Corben you're two" letter till I like him a little bit more.

Instead of trying to write when it's just not in me, I leave you with these few gems from our fun yesterday.

 (This photo?  Slays me!)

But look, he's OK!

And for today, mes amis, that is all.

Hot.

It has been hot here, like CRAZY hot.

Thursday was the hottest day on record in Toronto, which is where I happened to be all day. Oh, and I was working. Outside.

The thermometer hit 38 degrees in the shade. Plus that blasted humidex. And of course, the sun.

It took me more than 24 hours to recover from the day.

We haven't had rain here since Canada Day, over THREE weeks ago. (Which is also the last time I was in a tent, incidentally.)

It's part of the reason that my grass looks like this:
(Rain dance?)

Today was the first day in a few that it actually felt like we weren't going to asphyxiate when we walked out the door, so out we went. There was a little bit of swinging action on our new to us swing set...it needs a coat of paint, but the price was right, and the boys don't give a crap that it's rusty!
We spent the whole day outside. Eating, playing, sprinklering, the whole shebang.
And this. This? I don't even know what to say about this photo...only that it's 87 shades of awesome:Weekend. Nutshell. Scene.

(P.S. Right now, for the first time in three weeks, it is finally raining. Thank god.)

FIN

I screwed the tops on 14 pints of salsa today, and officially declared the canning season here on the roof over.
We did not too bad this year, canning more varieties of stuff than ever before. Still, for next season I'm hoping that we can get a pressure canner (do you hear that, Santa?) and I can go way above and beyond what we did this year. However, between Picklepalooza (dills, bread and butter pickles and relish,) peaches, apple sauce, blueberry jam and salsa, I'd say we did OK.
I'm also over the top excited about my new little basement "pantry," even though we ran out of room half way through the season (there's a bunch of pickles stacked on the floor, and the salsa is still cooling in the kitchen.)

There's also a bushel of tomatoes that were blanched, peeled and put in the freezer, because I ran out of time to can them all before they went off! Good thing though, because we wouldn't have had room for them!

I didn't freeze as much as I could have this year, there were a lot of beans that could have been salvaged, and I'm sorry that I didn't cut the kale more often and freeze it. However, there is a whole pile of blueberries in the freezer, and even more strawberries to get us through the winter.

There are still a ton of potatoes in the garden that haven't been dug, and a wheelbarrow full of squash sitting at my back door. Seriously, a wheelbarrow. What the hell am I going to do with a wheelbarrow full of squash??!! I'm considering digging the potatoes and trying to store them in the basement somewhere cool, but I'm not sure if it's actually cold enough in the basement for them. Anyone have any potato storage tips?

(By the way, this year's salsa? Is AWESOME! It's got a nice kick, with a bit of a smokey flavour thanks to some chipotle chili pepper I tossed in there at the last minute.)

So, when winter's frigid hand finally strikes, we'll be the ones sitting around eating salsa and sweet Ontario peaches, tasting the fresh tastes of summer all over again. You know where we are, if you want to come and join us!

Just your average Sunday...

It was a regular Sunday morning, when a routine traffic stop informed us of trouble on the way."Dragons" said the blue suit dude, "A whole lot of them."

The fun roundy abouty the tracky ceased immediately, and we started making preparations.

We decided to fortify, it was our only choice. In the end though, while our wall was colourful and pretty, it was a bit shakey, and wasn't likely to hold them off.

Our next best option? Reinforcements. We called 'em.

They came in droves, from toy boxes all over the house, and we ended up with a fairly large army. We decided to concentrate our efforts on the west side...everything nasty around here tends to come from the west.

There were horses and pirates, trusty old Buzz, and even Bo Peep got in on the game, because if there's one thing that females don't do around here, it's shy away from a good fight. (Hell, it might have even been her fault they were coming here in the first place!)
Ever battle needs one dude on steroids to lead the charge.
"Hey Howdy Hey, I'm gonna be in a battle!"
It takes all kinds to win a battle, even the likes of these two: Creep and Creepier, the Dollar Store Dino Duo.
Then this guy showed up...he's what we call a ringer - the guy who tipped the edge from us maybe having a chance at a win, over to we might as well all sit back and let the big guy do all the work.
Except...what the?
Seems someone got hungry while he was waiting for the enemy to show up...

Over on the east side...woah, wait a second, exactly WHAT is happening over here on the east side??!!Lets keep this family friendly, you crazy pieces of plastic!

In the end, the dragons did show up. But they were less of the hoard we were expecting, and more of a lone ranger.

That's right, dragon. Just one. Two headed and fire breathing, but on his own none the less.

Quickly seeing that he was outnumbered about 47 to one, he quickly remembered that age old adage that his mother taught him:

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Which is exactly what he did. We all shook hands, decided to be friends, and adjourned to the porch for a tasty snack of blueberries.

Which goes to show, you should never count on stubby legged conductors as a reliable source.

Later in the day, while Griffin rested off battle weary bones in the basement, the unguarded fortress came to an untimely end:He's cute, but don't let that fool you. This kid eats a mean railroad track!And that, my friends, is how we spent our Sunday.

You?

Picklepalooza: The Aftermath

On Tuesday, I spent ten hours in a kitchen with 3 other ladies making pickles. TEN HOURS!

And, if you can beleive it, I left early...crazy ladies were in the kitchen till midnight, finishing up with relish.

Sweet Mary, if I never see another pickle in my life it'll be too soon. (Aside from the thirty some-odd jars I have in my basement of course.)

We made about 95 jars of dill pickles. 29 jars of bread and butter pickles. And 24 jars of relish.

Holy. Shit.

So we weren't planning to go so crazy, but my friend GROSSLY overestimated how many cucumbers we'd need.

Note for cucumber buyers - four bushels is TOO MUCH, even split between 4 people!! (We even gave a bushel away!)

The trouble with canning though? It's like a sickness. Yesterday (on my way home from picking up the pickles no less) I passed a vegetable stand and there were beautiful baskets of green beans there...I almost stopped. But then I stopped myself! I need a bit of pickle recovery time before I bust out the caner again...you know, at least a day or two.

Anyone up for caning beans this weekend?

The Weekend: How it looked

Saturday looked a little like this:
Griffin started swimming lessons last week, and the difference with him in the water is night and day after only 2 lessons. He WANTS to swim. He wants to get his face wet, jump in the water, blow bubbles, and for you to toss him in the air! He's done all these thing before, but with trepidation, and only once before it was kiboshed. Now - it's full fish ahead, and I couldn't be happier. I spent the better part of 10 years in water, competitive swimming until I was 16, and I'm so happy to be able to share this love of the water with my kids.

Sunday looked a little bit like this:
After years of talking about it, Steve and I finally sunk some hooks into our porch columns, and strung up our hammocks. We have a few, (OK, three,) and there's nothing better in our humble opinions than swinging in a summer breeze with a book and a baby!
Happy, chilled out, relaxamatastic* days.

Hope your weekend was just as awesome!


*If it wasn't a word before, it is now.

Surprise

My favourite thing about this photo isn't the bright green grains (even though they're really that colour in real life.)

It isn't the layers on layers of stalks behind stalks.

Or the detail captured in the kernels and the awns* of....I'm pretty sure this isn't wheat. Oats? Barley?

My favourite thing in this photo?

Is the bright red Ladybug...that I didn't even know was there.

Hello Mrs. Bug. You just made my day!



*Awns. That's what the long straight feathery things are called. Did you know that? Neither did I, I had to look it up.

The Sigh of a Summer Breeze

I'm sitting on the porch, laptop in lap, chilled beverage in arms reach. It's cloudy, a bit unsettled, feels like there's a storm brewin'. Corben is napping next to me on our outdoor couch - it's turned around to face the house, he's on top of one of my oldest and most favourite blankets, with a new summer sheet sewed by Mama covering him from the slightly cool wind. There's a piece of bug netting over top of him, and he looks just about as comfortable as can be.

I could be sweeping the floor. I could be tying up my sweet peas that refuse to grab a hold of the trellis they're right next to. I could be taking the diapers off the line before it starts to rain.

Coulda, shoulda, woulda.

Whatever.

In just a few months, it'll be October. Then November. And then December. It'll be too cold for books and iced drinks on the porch, not to mention porch naps. So for now, it can all wait. The floor isn't going anywhere, and maybe, just maybe the sweet peas will be pushed towards the trellis in the breeze. I'll probably think about the diapers again when I hear the rain start to fall or the rumble of thunder in a few hours, and then those will be taken care of too.

But for now, I sit.

Summer is too short. Life is too short. If you can't make the time to watch a baby sleep for an hour (hopefully more) every once and a while, then what's the point of living in the first place?

******

About a 1/2 an hour after I closed the computer on this post, Corben woke up. I picked him up and snuggled him, and he fell right back asleep. So I went right back to the little couch he was curled up on, and curled up there myself, with him on my chest and the breeze blowing in our hair. He slept for another hour. And I might have too.

Conditioning the Air

We've lived here for nearly 5 years, and I can count the number of time's we've turned on the AC on one hand.

(Life on the ROOF. Up high. It is ALWAYS windy here.)

The first few times were in the first summer we spent here. It may have had something to do with the fact that I weighed over 200 pounds and had a bun in the oven; a bun that was nearly cooked, and an oven that seemed to be constantly turned on HOTTER THAN HELL.

I don't do hot well.

I actually consider myself lucky that I'm fairly cold blooded. In the winter, if you're wearing 2 layers, I'm wearing 4. You're wearing 4, then I'm wearing 7. Spring, and everyone is in t-shirts? I'm the one with my sweatshirt on, and my toque in my bag, just in case.

So today, when I was effing hot, I knew that others around me were even hotter.

Proof was in Corben, who every time I picked up, started dripping sweat from each tiny spot where our skin made contact.

We gave up on clothes two days ago. The boys have been running around in their underpants/diapers. (Well, except for Steve, who I insist gets dressed before he leaves for work.) I started Monday in my underwear too, but decided to change to my bathing suit, in case the UPS guy or some random Jehovah's Witnesses showed up. (Me and the UPS guy are buddies, but we're not THAT close.)

Needless to say, there's a lot of skin for to drip around here these days.

And then there's Corben. Corben is teething, with every pore of his gums and is MIS-ER-ABLE. He's not napping, which is making him crankier. And instead of napping, or jumping, or rolling around on the floor? He's nursing. And nursing. And nursing.

And when there's all that nursing, there's lots of sweaty skin touching sweaty skin. When I pulled Corben off me after one (of a bazillion) nursing sessions today, and had to get a towel to dry us both off, I knew it was time.

I cracked.

I turned on the AC.

Now I don't know why I didn't do it sooner. Only now I'm also afraid I'll never go outside again.

Please, send vodka.

Laundry Line Love

I can't explain why, but hanging little people laundry on the line makes me very happy!

Maybe it appeals to the little bit of OCD in me!

Thank you Sunshine

We spent the WHOLE DAY outside today. There was grass cutting and gardening and greenhouse fixing and dragon fighting and water playing, and brand new today tire swinging!



What a glorious day! Hope yours was the same!

Just when you thought you had nothing for Wordless Wednesday...

...Some asshat goes and lights a pile of tires on fire next door. (Because a pile of tires can't spontaneously ignite, as far as I know...)



P.S. Happy day before Earth Day!

Like a moth to a flame...

And now if you'll excuse me, I have an extra load of laundry to do!

Body Heat

Today is one of those days that despite the fact that we have a house with walls and windows and doors, it feels like the wind is coming right through all of them, and settling its chill right into my bones.

I have candles lit in every room. The fireplace is on. I'm wearing woolly socks and slippers, and a woolly sweater too. I just downed a mug of hot chocolate. I'm STILL cold!

The only thing that keeps me warm is Corben. He's like a little furnace. And so, we're likely to spend most of the day curled up in the big chair in front of the fire, covered up with a cloud of fluffy pink . Rocking, staring at each other, likely napping, him keeping me warm and me keeping him warm. Chances are Dudley will want in on the action too, and will curl up on the foot of the chair and snuggle up with us. Everyone keeping each other warm.

And really, what's wrong with any of that??

Incoming...

Well, we're battening down the hatches and preparing for the first "decent" storm of the season. I have my doubts that it will be anything too hefty, but everyone always gets so excited about the first big snow. The fact that we've made it till December 8th without a snow storm is a bit of a minor miracle. But now the tractor is tuned up, the gas tank is full, all the snow tires are on, the snow fence is up, and I'm crossing my fingers for enough of a deluge to warrant a snow day!

In other news, we're down to 23 days to go till the Cheese (supposedly) makes his first appearance. The midwives come this week to check out our digs and make sure we have all the necessary stuff for the home birth. I have 6 days of work left. The only thing we have left to do is to stock the freezer a bit (how did I forget that part?) and take the comfortable sheets off the bed and put the nasty ones on with the layer of plastic underneath. I'm leaving that till the last minute, because I have enough trouble getting in and out of bed, and rolling over in the night without a layer of plastic underneath me to slip-slide me around.

I'm still kicking myself on a daily basis for not buying stock in Tums when I found out I was pregnant.

The three year old of the house is being remarkably well behaved these days (or my tolerance level is higher because I figure at least he can express in full sentences what the issue is that's causing him to FREAK OUT and sob uncontrollably...and even if those issues are something as trivial as me sitting on his Spiderman, at least he can tell me what the trouble is, which is more than his little brother will be able to do.)

I'm treasuring every last morsel of sleep I can get, especially the morsels that come in 6 or 7 hour chunks, because we can soon kiss those goodbye. I'm enjoying my last days as a mother of one, and looking forward (with only slight trepidation) to being a mother of two.

And while I'm trying to enjoy these last few weeks, I'm also taking every available opportunity to milk my pregnant status, including going so far as taking a Starbucks card that was up for grabs in a family gift swap this weekend, and placing it atop my protruding belly, and then looking at my Starbucks-hungry cousin with sad, pregnant doe eyes, and pleading with him "don't take it away from the baby." Heck if it didn't work too!

So...that's about all that's occupying our brains these days, incoming snow and incoming babies.

Stay tuned...

Countdown: Somewhere between 7 and 6 weeks....

I'm certain that there should be more going on in my life than working, and complaining about my pelvis, but that's really all there is. There's really not much room for much else when one gets up at 5:30 am, doesn't get home till 6pm, and is ready for bed by 8pm. Griffin hasn't been sleeping well these days, and neither have I (even when he is,) and Steve is putting in his last 2 weeks of long hours before having nearly 2 glorious months off. So generally things are a mite bit cranky around here. And heart-burny. And cough-y (going on 3 weeks for Steve.)

Good times.

All I want to do is park myself in bed with my laptop for a day, and christmas shop. On line. Get it all done, and feel better about at least checking one biggie off my list. We did get a chance to clean out the shed and put all the summer stuff away this past weekend (thrill a minute here, peeps!) and I'm glad that's done. Couldn't do a damn thing for the rest of the day because it totally wore me out, but at least it's done.

Now I'm just waiting for the snow fence fairies...seriously. Because snow fence is a 2 person job, and this person? Not so much up for hoofing massive rolls of snow fence across the fence into the neighbours field, and mucking around in the cow poop for an hour. Go figure.

Well, I've had about enough of me...likely you have too! Piss-and-Vinegar Central, over and out!

Misty Morn

(Friday was actually the Misty Morn I speak of...I'm just a little slow on the posting!)