Summertime Harvest

Whew!  We did it!  In 10 short (or actually pretty long) days, we canned 30 quarts of salsa, froze 15 more pints of green beans, froze another 10 pints of shredded zucchini, another 10 pints of squash puree, dried 5 pints of cherry tomatoes, froze 7 pints of carrots, harvested and froze about 75 pints of sweet corn, and ate lots and lots of delicious food :)  Now we can relax a bit.  We're down to mostly just tomatoes right now, with a few cucumbers, beans, and corn for eating.  In a month or so, we'll have more potatoes to dig and the butternut squash and pumpkins to pick, but the freezer is about as full as we can get it, so that means we HAVE to be done with some things :)

Anyway, the rest of life last week was about surviving the garden storm.  The girls finished up their swimming lessons, so that was enough to keep them happy for a few days.  Then my mom came down on Thursday to help entertain Kate and Anna while Matt took a "harvest day" in the morning to help with the corn.  Then the real fun came on Friday.

My mom took Anna up to Camp Luther in Northern Wisconsin for a grandparents' camp weekend.  They had a great time.  As my mom said, they were exercised physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  It sounds like Anna did wonderfully on this first "summer camp" experience, although sleeping was a bit challenging, understandably.  Some of their activities included archery, canoeing, kayaking, swimming, arts and crafts, hiking, campfire time, worship time, land olympics, minnow racing, and making new friends.  I'll try and post some pictures of this adventure soon.

Anna trying archery for the first time

Anna and her special minnow

Minnow races!

Anna and her counselors, Fresh and Bass

A fun part of this weekend for Anna was learning some camp songs.  Little did she realize that I already knew quite a few of them :)  The look on her face was priceless when I started singing "I just wanna be a sheep" with her.

Kate also got to have a special weekend being the only child for more than 48 hours.  At first she simply loved being able to play on her own wherever she wanted, with whatever she wanted.  But I think by Sunday she missed her sister buddy.  We asked Kate if there was anything special she wanted to do with us over the course of the weekend and she voted for going to the zoo.  So Saturday afternoon (after canning 16 quarts of salsa, processing the carrots, and drying some cherry tomatoes) we went to the zoo just the three of us.  Kate had a wonderful time.  We just let her set the pace (which often doesn't happen when you're not the oldest) and ended up spending about 40 minutes checking out the hands-on exhibits about insects and amphibians and then another 20 minutes watching the prairie dogs.  We were so involved with everything else that we even missed riding the train!

Sunday evening and yesterday were definitely days of transition here, but today we seem to have started off on a better foot.  We may even end up in the pool this afternoon, although the weather seems to have finally shifted and since we turned off the air last Wednesday, we haven't had to turn it back on!  So I'm not sure that the pool is going to be quite warm enough ...