Fall Photos

I get to live in such a beautiful place.

The hens have taken to roosting on the chicken wire.

The whole family now has toe shoes. Weird but awesome.

Newts are fun to play with because they don't try very hard to get away.

My new wall quilt by Kirsten Campbell: "The Gray's North Wind"

First egg!

Gavin feeding Farmer Tom's Scottish Highland calf.
 

Full double rainbow!

Vermont Fall Colors



Horses

 I just realized I haven't posted anything about the horses this summer. They are going home again in a few weeks so I better get some pictures up while I can.

 

 

We have had Beauty and her trusty sidekick Peaches the Pony with us all summer. These are really such pleasant and lovely animals. They sit out in the field, contentedly munching down the grass, until a kid comes along that needs a ride. Then they happily oblige.

 

Lucy and Gavin (and all their friends!) will miss these ladies when they go home for the winter, but we hope they will come back to us again next summer.

Grandparent Fun

In honor of Gavin's eighth birthday and baptism, he had his Grandma, Gram, and Papa all come to visit. It has been so wonderful to have them all around.

 

 

Sharon brought some fabric markers so they could make cowboy boot t-shirts together.

 

Then, the other night, she and Lucy did some watercolor painting while Gavin was at his soccer practice.

 

I didn't realize soccer was among my Mom's great skills, but little did I know! She was out there every night after school kicking the ball around with the kids!

 

Lucy and Gavin are lucky to have two talented grandmothers to play with!

Gavin's Baptism

 

 

Gavin's baptism was very low-key but very nice. Lots of friends came out to support him, along with Grandma and Gram and Papa. We let him determine the program and he gave us all jobs: Lucy and Papa gave talks, Gram and Grandma gave prayers, and I got to play the piano. (I negotiated for some relatively easy songs!) He gave his Dad the most important job, though.

 

Gavin decided to share his traditional Sister Bush rainbow baptism cake after Primary on Sunday, to much rejoicing among the children.

Gavin Firsts

After quite a few years of telling us that there is no way he would ever play soccer, Gavin surprised us this fall by declaring that he couldn't wait for soccer season to start. So Austin signed him up, and last Saturday Gavin played in his first-ever soccer game.

 

 

Turning eight has also made him eligible for Cub Scouts. So yesterday, we sent him off to his first-ever Cub meeting, all decked out in Cub gear (courtesy of Papa) with his Cub Scout laws memorized, all ready to earn some badges!

 

 

I think he looks darn cute in uniform, both Cubs or Dynamos Soccer.

Gavin's Birthday / Chicken Run

 

This kid is eight years old!

 

I think he had a great birthday. He wore his new soccer team shirt to school, and brought birthday cupcakes shaped like Despicable Minions to his class.

 

I came home a bit early to get Gav's gifts wrapped before the kids came home. But when I got home, I heard a hen crying like her little chicken heart would break. Poor Dandelion flew the coop, crossed the road (why?) and was hiding in the raspberry bushes. I went in after her, and she stopped making her pitiful crying sounds, but every time I got close to her she took off through the raspberry stems. It's like she just wanted me in there with her but had no intention of being caught. Eventually I stood up after spending at least 15 minutes crawling through the bushes cooing at Dandelion, and looked over to see the postman standing there with a package, staring at me. My hair was full of raspberry leaves and I must have looked lovely.

 

I decided to wait for Lucy to get home to rescue her hen. I tried to help, but Dandelion wasn't going to allow herself to be saved even by Lucy. Plan B: get a decoy chicken! Lucy grabbed Marvinette in hopes of luring Dandelion out. Instead, Marvinette got free and we had TWO chickens in the raspberries. We eventually caught Marvinette and returned her to the coop. We tried the gopher trap, baited with the chickens' favorite corn on the cob, but Dandelion is too smart for that. Finally we decided that Dandelion was just going to have to be a free-range chicken because we had Gavin's birthday party to attend to.

 

Angel Food cake with strawberries, as requested!

 

Favorite gift: a new lariat and plastic calf head for roping practice.

 

Luckily, Gavin didn't have to use his new roping skills on Dandelion. While we were eating pizza and cake, some Norwich students came along and decided to rescue our chicken for us. We thanked them with copious amounts of fresh tomatoes and salsa and some free calf roping lessons.

Labor Day Parade

Some advantages of living in a small town with a small town Labor Day parade and festival:

 

(1) You know the kid riding with his dad in the fire truck, so he throws you extra candy.



 

(2) You not only get to see the Governor, you get to give him a piece of your mind. Sometimes, he's so impressed he asks his aide to take a photo of you together.



Governor Peter Shumlin.
Lucy insists she said nice things to him.

 

 

(3) You can look for Cadets you know, and try to make them look at you and laugh, even though they are supposed to stay in strict formation looking straight ahead.

 

 

(4) You can be grateful not to be in the Civil War. Or at least, grateful not to have to wear those miserably hot outfits.

 

(5) You can see old guys on old tractors and younger guys on younger tractors.

This is Andrew, "our" farmer.
It's useful to have your own farmer on speed dial.

 

(6) You can think of how awesome it would be to be a Drum Major in a Scottish bagpipe troupe.

 

(7) You and your pals can get some truly fabulous face paint.

 

(8) You can enter the hula-hoop competition, and get third place.

 

Hard to say what the highlight of the weekend was!

Jam & Salsa

I came home from Michigan to find 13 gallons of raspberries and blackberries in the freezer, ready to be thawed and made into jam.

 

 

I tackled the blackberries first. I love the flavor of blackberry but don't love the seeds, so I mashed the berries and set them out to drip. I ended up with 21 pints of blackberry juice. Some of it I used for my favorite triple-berry jam. I also made a large vat of blackberry syrup. The rest I froze in ice-cube trays to add to limeade. Blackberry limeade is delicious.

 

All the raspberries left over after 6 batches of triple-berry I let the kids make into raspberry jam to sell at the farmer's market. They made the jam themselves! (I supervised a little.) And they were very successful little entrepreneurs. (They let me watch, but only from the other side of the market.) Their favorite story was about a lady who declined a sample because she only buys expensive fancy French jam. But then she gave in and tried theirs and bought three jars and told everyone at the market to come buy jam from Lucy and Gavin.

Gray jam beats snooty French jam any day.

Teeny little bird nest in my tomatoes.

Despite several weeks of neglect while I was away, my garden did really well this year. The Roma tomatoes I planted turned out to be cherry-size (oops) but luckily, they were super easy to skin. A quick blanch and they popped right out of their skins. I don't know what I would have done otherwise. I could not have peeled thousands of tiny tomatoes and kept my sanity.

 

 

Another surprise was the chiles. My neighbor brought me four plants that she said were green peppers. I've never had much luck with peppers, but I heard somewhere that if they're planted in black plastic they do well even in Vermont. Something about warming the soil. It worked! My neighbor's plants and the flat of jalapenos I planted all produced tons of peppers. The real surprise, though was that they didn't turn out to be green peppers. They were green New Mexico chiles. All the better! They went in the salsa in place of peppers, and I'm roasting and freezing the extras. Extra jalapenos were made into jalapeno jelly, a new experiment this year that also turned out great.

 

I quit at 68 pints of salsa. That's more than plenty to see us through another year, even if we share a lot. We have Austin's favorite "Second Place" Peach Salsa, Garden Salsa, and, thanks to the neighbors and serendipity, some Green Chile Salsa too.