This and That

We've been busy with harvest season!

Here's Dominik with his sunflowers last month.  They are now ripening and bowing their heads, so it will soon be time to harvest the seeds.

The boys on a hike with Tom in the hills.

We made a family trip to pick peaches and plums.

Nothing better than a just-picked peach!

So many plums on that tree!  Natalie's in the background because the sun is too bright.

How about a trip or two to the ER?  Lukas' first trip was to get an airsoft pellet sucked out of his ear (he was checking to see if it would fit in his ear...it did!) The trip the following week was to get stitches in his elbow (I'll let him tell the story).  He used a red washcloth to go to the urgent care, and Tom told everyone that it started out white...that's my Tom!

There are the peaches that I meant to freeze, that became jam instead.  YUM!

The boys removed dirt from a gravel area by sifting it.  Great teamwork!

That watermelon we grew was soooo tasty...Dominik snuck away from the party and ate the last of it.

Konrad and Dominik and me with one of the sunflowers that broke off early...I have since read up on how to let them dry, so hopefully we'll have a nice crop.

More watermelon eating and seed spitting!

I love Natalie's self-portrait!

The mud monsters are attacking!

Quasimodo!

Tom cut one of the many trees that were planted too close, and the boys are working together to pull it to the woodpile.

Konrad is perfecting his blow-out-the-candle-by-pinching-it-with-his-fingers technique.  Dominik can't wait to be six so he can do it too (six seems to be about the age they get the courage to do it).

Then it was off to an airshow!  Tom took the boys to an Air Force air show, which is similar but different to the Navy air shows they've been to in the past.  Checking out the landing gear of a B-1 bomber.

 Cockpit of an air tanker.

Cockpit of a jet trainer.

The German Air Force was at the air show too.

Watching the Thunderbirds perform.

While the boys were at the air show, Natalie and I stayed home and made Concord grape jam from our grapes.

Dominik is checking out the little puffy clouds above our home...

...and looking for waterbugs in the ditch along our backyard.

Natalie had an EEG, which showed that she has likely been having seizures (we suspected as much).  We're seeing if an increase dosage of Depakote will help.

If you want a grape pie recipe without seeds in it, it's quite an involved process...but having kids squeeze the centers out of the skins helps a lot!

 

We harvested about 40 spaghetti squash (some were already eaten or given away).

Lukas with the spaghetti squash and one of the two pumpkins we grew.

Most of the summer, we left the pond dry to make sure there weren't any kid accidents.  But now that the irrigation water is almost ready to be turned off and it's much cooler, Tom filled the pond.  A week later, the first ducks showed up!  The cats and the boys were quite interested...but now the water is gone so the ducks are gone too.

Another beautiful sunset on our street.

Konrad and Lukas took advantage of a homeschool archery afternoon.  This was Konrad's first attempt at archery...he is barely strong enough to pull the bow, but I know he'll get better each time!

Tom put a lot of work into preparing a planting bed for bulbs...

 ...and then the boys and I got to do the fun part of planting.

Tom caught Lukas reading a bedtime story to Dominik and Konrad.

Natalie at GEMS at church with her aide and a teacher...

...and Lukas at Cadets, watching his pinewood derby car getting shaped.

I spent a lot of time this summer filling field mouse holes in our front yard and trapping the ones that the cats didn't catch...here in the fall we found a few more, so we did some more discouraging and hope they are gone again (for now!)

 

Beautiful lighting on the poplars in our backyard. This week Tom mowed the grass and leaves from those trees and they are already composting.  But...several more loads of leaves will fall from those trees before winter...more work.