More Snapshots of Life

Eating summer berries

Happy 4th

Practicing to be the flower girl

All dressed up and ready to go

Totally self-posed

At the end of the day

Playing on the deck

Eating Huckleberries

First time eating watermelon by the slice.  He ate seeds and all!

Snapshots of Life

Our (not so little) Piggies

Our piggies our getting bigger and bigger and bigger.  Right now the 7 of them eat about one bag of pig food a day!  They really do live up to there name! :)  About a month ago we moved them to a bigger area which they love.  I can now watch them run (and yes pigs can run) around, root under the apple tree, take a bath in a mud puddle and snort and squeal to their hearts content.  They are funny animals and I do get a kick out of them.  Strangely enough they're rather entertaining!  Liesel loves watching the piggies and I know she's going to miss them when they go to their "new home" at the beginning of next month. Liesel will especially miss Lulu who is the runt of the bunch and the only pig with a name.

Callie and Liesel checking on the pigs

"Here piggy, piggy" eat a flower

What's Been a Happin'

With coming back from the trip to see my family, summer kicking in and misplacing my camera for a week we've managed to stay pretty busy.  Here's a few photos to show you what we've been up to...

Canning cherries from our tree

Checkin on the piggies

Gooseberries from our bush

Future Lawn Mower of America

Hayin' the field

Berry smoothie mishap

Pickin' some berries

Someone is tired of watching the picking!

Our wealth of berries (round 1)

1st batch of raspberry jam

Cookie clean-up

Some Summer Pictures

My family has been up visiting for the past 2 1/2 weeks and boy have we had a lot of fun.  Thanks to my dad my computer is back into commission so I'm slowly getting everything back together.  Here are just a few pictures of Liesel to enjoy while I get the rest downloaded!  She's quite the busy little girl!

Playing in the dirt

Eating the dirt-yucky!

Playing in her little pool!

Eating her 1st garden cucumber and boy did she like it!

A Fun Saturday!

Our sweet cousins invited us to go out boating on the lake Saturday.  Boy did we have a fun time! We went tubing, water skiing and soaked up the warm sun.  It was a wonderfully relaxing time!  Thanks for taking us A & C!

My DH water-skiing!

Busy and then some

I had many  goals the last couple of weeks.  But the goal of blogging didn't make it to the done side of the checklist.  Other things have keep me busy and not all bad just well busy things.
What's been going on...
-My DH and I celebrated our 3rd anniversary. (Sure love you Sweetie!)
-DH and I went away for two nights to the coast. We had a wonderful time hiking, talking and relaxing.
-JB's last baseball game was last week. (Yippee, we have our evenings back!)
-All the haying is done and in! (We got the last load in the night before it rain!)
-Liesel turned 11 months (One month away from being a one year old.)
-Our deck railing is almost completed
-My DH went clamming with a friend. I now get to try my hand at making homemade clam chowder!
-And I know there are a few other things I'm forgetting.  On the bummer side my computer decided to retire (without much warning) so I've been using my DH's.  The only problem with his is I can't download pictures, which then translates to not being able to post pictures.  I do have a few pictures on my phone that I've been able to forward to my email so until we get a new computer that will have to do!

Liesel at 11 months

From Our Garden

After taking this picture I felt like I had my own produce stand! We had apples, tomatoes, cucumbers, yellow squash, potatoes and our first cantaloupes of the season! It sure is exciting to see the garden growing.

So what did we do with all the garden goodies...my sis and I made applesauce, pico de gallo, dill pickles, dried apple rings, fried potatoes, and of course ate the yummy cantaloupe!

Applesauce

Can it really be two weeks since I last posted. I'm finding that hard to believe but when I think back onto all the different things that we've been doing I can believe it. In the last two weeks we've had company over, been company several times, cleared, scrubbed and sealed the deck, front porch and carport, attended a weekend history conference, went to the State Fair twice, had company spend the night, attended the church picnic and in between all of that I did some baking and cooking. Gosh when I look at all that, I realize why I didn't have time to post!

One of the fun baking projects I did in the last two weeks was make applesauce. We have several apple trees and my husband and brother-in law (DN) picked a good amount and I spent the afternoon making applesauce. (A special thanks to B. Shubin for sharing her yummy recipe with my family!) Here's some pictures of the process!

The recipe calls for the skin to be removed but since the apples are so small I decided to leave the skins on!

Here it is cooking and getting mashed up!

Once all the apples were cooked and mashed, I placed them on rack (actually its my cookie cooling rack:) and moved the mixture around so that the apple skins would stay on top and only the sauce would go through. I had a lot of skins left over and I didn't have the heart to just throw them away so I saved them and my DH and I have been eating them. They are very yummy!!

I then bagged all the applesauce into quart size bags and put them into the freezer to save for this winter. In all I made 1 gallon and 1 quart of applesauce!!! There still are a lot more apples to make applesauce out of so I have a feeling I"ll be working on this project for a while!!!