I have been absent for nearly 2 weeks, so this morning when I saw that some of you still stopped by the pocket, I felt quite humbled. I fully intended to do a travel post after our trip to the mountains of NC in July, but when we got back the green beans were producing and they just wouldn’t stop! We finally pulled them out this week, just because. There is a later crop coming and the boys are already so excited about picking them every other day. Not.
Also when we got home, we dove into school. The first week we cleaned and organized and bought our supplies. This is the first year ever that we were ready to go before the Back to School sales hit! Some of our eagerness was due to having finished early in May and the children were actually bored with swimming and picking beans and making stuff. Or maybe it was me who was tired of keeping the flock reasonably occupied and the house decently ordered. I was ready for more of a schedule, especially since we plan to take time off this fall. I have purposed in my heart that I will never again attempt to do school and peaches or school and tomato sauce or school and pumpkins on the same day. That is just ignorant. But I am also not ready to throw in the towel on home-preserved foods, therefore we are tucking in some extra school days now.
Well… here we are again, 4 days later. I need to do this post and move on. Summer time is not optimal blogging time. There are just so many flowers to pick and raspberries to eat and porches to sit on whenever all the other stuff has been attended to. The last thing that happens is writing. But I do have some photos to share from July.
I am not good at capturing the moments, like my scrapbooking friends who take pictures purposefully with an album layout in mind. For me it goes like this: “Oh, I should take a picture! Where is the camera? Hey, everybody, hold that right there while I run to the vehicle to scrounge for the camera in the bowels of my purse.” Usually by the time I get back on scene the spontaneity has gone and my boys have evaporated. They really, really dislike posing. So does my husband. 😀
Here we have cousin fun. All these girls are my girl’s cousins and did she have fun. There are four NC girl cousins more that are not even in the photo.
This is my little brother giving the children thrills on July 4. There was a constant scream of hilarity wafting out of that little cart.
And my big brother holding the wee-est baby girl. Aren’t they cute?
Like I mentioned, my photos are quite inadequate to detail the great time we spent with siblings in NC, and I completely forgot to fish my camera out of my purse when we stopped for an afternoon and a night at P.D. and Leeny’s place enroute to the the coast. I guess I was too busy catching up and watching our children become acquainted, not to mention eating so much fabulous produce from their garden.
We crossed the 13 mile (or more) Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel to the Eastern Shore peninsula and meandered through the countryside to Chincoteague. All of my life I have loved the story of the Phantom and Misty, and here we were in wild pony beach territory. (So were a few other people. 🙂 )
The days were hazy, but the water was great. We had a lot of fun fishing for crabs with chicken necks for bait. I may have warned them a time or three about being careless about the edge of the walkways.
Out of all the takers, only 2 crabs were big enough to keep. We steamed them with Old Bay Seasoning in our motel room and extracted the minuscule bits of meat for tastes all around.
The little girls were in hunter-gatherer heaven, picking up bucketfuls of little crabs and shell bits while the boys were happy jumping the waves. I wished they would have found Gabe’s prescription sunglasses washed ashore, but no such luck. We had walked pretty far up the beach, way past the crowded areas to a spot where we were mostly on our own. To our astonishment, friends from home who live only 4 miles from us came walking along in the sand looking for a spot of their own. 🙂 Small world.
The ponies are smart and elusive, staying out in the marshes, far away from the roads. Just before we left for home I convinced Gabe that it is some sort of crime to leave without at least going to look at the rescued ponies in a paddock where they are quite tame from being fed handfuls of corn from a vending machine. It was a bit of a let down, but the children thought it was neat.
I gathered the troops for a group photo on the morning we started home. I thought it would be such a happy feeling, you know, all lovey and “we had such a good time”. Snicker. Here is what we came away with. In their defense, the sun was a little bright and they hadn’t had much breakfast and it was time to go home and wash the sand out of all the crevices.
I will treasure these pictures always.
wocket in my pocket 