Wednesday, August 26, 2009

First Day

Monday was our official "first day of school". I have that in quotes because we do work all summer but the "first day" is when we try to get back into the swing of doing a lot of work in a day. It was also Friend Husband's first day back.

Well, in addition to all the craziness which is inherent in the first day back, Mama decides that it would be fun to have a tea party to commemorate the event, complete with company in the form of some church friends. So we did. It was fun but it made a lot more work and worry in the middle of the day. Why I do these things to myself, I don't know.

The folks we invited are friends of ours from our congregation. The little girl was having her first day of kindergarten on Tuesday, but school had started for the rest of the children the previous Friday. So I thought it might be nice to celebrate her last day before school (and to keep her mind off the fact that her sister was already at school, where she wanted to be!) They also babysit a little boy. The twins love Christian, so it was a bonus to have him around.

On the day, I decided that, instead of tea, we'd have lime slushes, my favorite from Sonic. I figured out a way to make them so that they were good and that's what we had in our tea cups instead of tea. Generally, the children don't like tea anyway. It did get everyone pretty sugared up!



See what I mean? Sugar!


Apparently Abby wasn't getting enough sugar because her eyes were closed.



Slushie!



This is what the tea table looked like prior to our sitting down. We had hard boiled eggs (which were supposed to be deviled, but I ran out of time), red grapes, baba ganoush, hummus, roasted tomato soup, & chips. How about that?



Kez loves tea parties.



After the sugar surge, we went outside to swing and play with the dog. I love this picture of Adalyn...she loved the swing!



The look on Zi's face cracks me up. I don't know what she was in a snit about but it's right on out there.



Christian loved Lucy. I tried to give her to him as a party favor but Tonya was having nothing of it.

After the guests left, I went back to canning. I had already finished off the tomatoes, but here are pictures of them anyway.



These are the 20 # or so of tomatoes that Friend Husband and I picked. Plus some green beans. I picked corn last night and we had that for supper. It was good but I was still miffed that, of the many many seeds I planted, only 5 or so plants came up.

But Monday I was working on canning peaches. I had bought a bushel from our local apple orchard (they import them from PA) and had started working on some peach butter, because my beloved sil loves it so much. Here's the peach butter long before it was ready to be canned:



It's more the color of apple butter now, and it's all canned, as of yesterday. Because I hit it in high gear, canned that, and canned some more peaches, just as peaches. So now I have no more peaches to can, but I have a lot of medium syrup left. I think I might have to go get another bushel of peaches...



Here's the beans, tomatoes, & corn from my very own garden plus peach butter and, in the back where you can't see them, some canned peaches. I feel just like Olivia Walton. Except less. Yeah.

JoAnn wanted to see a picture of my new/old desk. Here it is, already covered with papers to grade.



I did get a new lamp because that clamp lamp was just not working. Plus the lightbulb on it, combined with the general gloom of the basement, made it impossible to see my scrapbooking stuff correctly (ie, see the colors correctly). I had intended to get one of those lamps that mimics daylight but settled for a desk lamp with a Reveal bulb, which is closer to the actual spectrum than are incandescent bulbs. The folder on the right side of the desk holds my current scrapbooking project (the tea party books). To the right of the desk are some built-in shelves which have been housing part of our voluminous record collection. I moved some of those records out and put my teacher's manuals and scrapbooking stuff in the cubbies. It made me happy! Here's a photo:



And I guess that's all except to say that Friend Cherylyn got some good news from her recent MRI. They indicate that her breast cancer and lymph node cancer are completely gone! Hallelujah! I know that a lot of you were praying for her, so I thought I'd give you the good news. I've been floating on it for a while now!

Have a good day! I'm way past the time I need to get out and pick more tomatoes! Yikes.

2 comments:

Gina said...

So much fun all in one post! Good stuff!

Anonymous said...

Your tea looks lovely.

Beverly and I have been doing letter sounds and a page or two of Math-U-See, but official school will start next week. I am trying so hard to tell Marissa we have to follow the law. Minnesota state law says that you can't start school until after Labor Day. I suppose we need to make sure the kids can show their animals and crafts at the fair.