Saturday, July 7, 2012

What I've Been Doing...

I've been outrageously busy as of late!  In my last post you saw that we started swimming lessons and that consumed my life for four weeks! We had two weddings (both outside in the 100 degree weather) and I've been doing lots of gardening/canning!  We've spent time visiting friends and family, the little one got to meet his great, great, great aunts, and we've had many a play dates with lots of little people!

My father-in-law has a beautiful huge garden! He said that he wasn't going to plant a garden and well he did and its massive!  It could easily feed 5-6 families instead of the three people that live in his house! Well after his garden was planted he had to go in for surgery! He had knee replacement surgery a few years ago and one of his artificial knees got infected and he had to have it removed and then had to undergo 6-8 weeks of IV antibiotics and then will have his knee put back in! So that means that his garden needs tending to! He has some good friends that care for the garden and then he sends me down to pick veggies for him and usually whatever I pick I can keep!  I take it to him to see what he wants first since he's done the hard part but I get to keep tons of stuff! So he has 4 rows of green beans and each row was producing 2.5 five gallon buckets FULL of green beans! So one lady picked one row, two of his friends picked the other rows and I picked the fourth row! The two friends gave me most of their beans and I ended up having an entire trash bag full of beans, a five gallon bucket, a mop bucket, and multiple food lion bags! I also had an entire milk crate of beets and I've had 3 heads of cabbage that were probably 12-15 inches in diameter! I also had tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, squash, bell peppers, broccoli and potatoes! EEK the veggies are coming out my ears!!!

So I've been canning like a crazy woman! I've canned 18 quarts of beans, 17 pints of beans, and I've frozen 10 quarts of beans! I also canned 6 quarts of pickled beets, 4 pints of beets and 4 jelly jars of beets! The week before that I had 7 food lion bags full of yellow plums from my grandmothers plum trees and I made plum freezer jam, plum baby food, and homemade plum ice cream!

Friday, July 6, 2012

Swimming = So Much Fun!

We started the sweet boy on swimming lesson for the month of June!  We had 4 weeks of lessons on Tuesdays and Thursdays for 30 minutes!  It was a blast!  He loved every minute of being in the water and is on his way to becoming the next Olympic Swimmer!  I figured I'd do the first round of lessons at the local pool and then use the skills we learned the rest of the summer by bumming off of other people's pools! Swimming is one of my favorite activities and I want the little man to be as comfortable in the water as he is on land!  He was so cute throughout the lessons and we quite a hit with the older ladies that take swim aerobics on the other side of the pool!  There were three other children in the class and two of them were two years old!  The two year olds were phenomenal!  They could swim to the bottom of the pool and pick up diving sticks and diving rings!  They could also swim a short distance to another person AND they could float on their backs for up to 30ish seconds! It was amazing! 
Going Under!!!

Practicing reaching for toys!
Kicking!!!
Playing with the watering can!

The lovely instructor!