The Harvest

We had a good week. There were many accomplishments and some moments of peace. I must admit that the boys are feeling the strain of this pandemic. They are tired of being cooped up and unable to do the activities they did before. There are so many emotions wrapped up in this experience. We just have to take it all day by day.

My mother had a terrible leak in her roof a few months ago. The insurance company replaced her roof long ago, but the inside work of redoing the floors and walls of her small home couldn't be worked on until now. She is in a hotel this week and her home is being redone (all covered by insurance). What a gift to her in so many ways. I can't wait to see the results.

Elijah Dean had another appointment at Vocational Rehabilitation. His career aptitude test results came back and they were so interesting. They weren't a huge surprise, but they were interesting to see all laid out in front of us. He is probably going to start some job shadowing and a paid internship next. I am very grateful for these wonderful opportunities. Without Vocational Rehab, he would have settled for a big box store job without every exploring other options. He may still settle there for now, but at least he will get to see where his talents could be used if he wishes to work toward a career, sooner rather than later.

Anne and I have been exploring some locations for a small dance performance coming up in a few weeks. This is a barnstorming style dance project where just a few informed people show up to see you dance, plus perhaps a passerby or two. The small band of dancers will move from spot to spot around the city. This is the location Anne is most likely using.

Anne also completed four dance classes this week, two on Zoom and two in the park. She also completed 12 history lessons and three sewing lessons. Next week, she will add in English or Latin.

It took a fair amount of work to get our rather high strung cat, Rosie, to accept the new kitten, Salem. However, they truly are friends now. I don't hear anymore hissing from Rosie (Salem hasn't hissed yet; she is ultra laid back). We can leave them alone for a few hours and all goes just fine. They even take naps together now. I am so glad we have cats that are friends.

We enjoyed a walk around a park we hadn't explored in many years. I am glad we are getting out and seeing what lovely parks and trails we have in our area. We didn't have time before COVID-19 to explore all these lovely places.

The harvest is really coming in around here. Our peach tree lost some branches because we forgot to prune it, but we still got a great harvest of white peaches. I spent two days processing all of the peaches. We ended up with about five gallons of frozen peaches and three peach crisps that are tucked away in the freezer for special desserts.

When COVID-19 started, I didn't have any food in the emergency pantry. We had just eaten it all up to clean it out. I had planned to restock slowly, but was forced to dip into savings and restock as much as I could very quickly. We had food, but it was a bit of a mess to find things and try to reduce how many stores we were visiting. Fast forward to now and I have eliminated the emergency pantry. Now, we just have a pantry as an extension of our kitchen, and I am trying to make sure that we always have about three months worth of food between the kitchen, freezer, and pantry. We eat down what is in the kitchen and shop from the pantry and freezer. When I do go to the grocery store, we restock the pantry and freezer. It is working so much better. I also emptied everything out of every cabinet and reorganized the food to make it work better. Now, I can find everything and won't buy too many of some things and not enough of others. 

Before

(Our pantry is really deep ~ there are eight jars of spaghetti sauce in the sauce row you can see in the picture.)

After

We also got a second harvest of green beans. I planted them on a staggered schedule so we would get lots of fresh green beans throughout the summer. I have one more crop in the garden that won't be ready until September. Considering how small our garden is this year, we sure did get lots of green beans with this staggered approach and they are so easy to freeze for winter. 

What we ate this week ~ 

• Fried Rice and Pot Stickers
• Tortellini and asparagus
• Fish nuggets, tater tots and apple slices
• Burrito bowls
• Grilled Hamburgers with green beans and cucumbers

Blessings, Dawn