Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Just an idea...

So I thought I would share a few photos to illustrate part of the reasons I've been so incognito this summer, you know in addition to being pregnant, working full time, and raising 2 kids.
Today's beefsteak tomato harvest

Today's roma tomato and yellow squash harvest

Yellow squash from earlier this week that I haven't processed yet!
Frank took a whole hopper of squash down to the food bank this afternoon.  Right now I am making tomato sauce with all those tomato.  These pics don't even take into account the beans, peas, corn, or zucchini. I'm loving and hating the garden all at the same time!

Friday, August 17, 2012

Time for a belly pic

I know I have been totally MIA this summer but we've just been busy!  Between work, the garden, the animals, fairs, family visiting, etc I just haven't found time for blogging.  It also doesn't help that uploading pictures now takes like an hour because our internet connection is just terrible.  So you'll get infrequent posts from now until the new one arrives and then I will try to post more often as he/she grows.

Here I am 34 weeks and 3days pregnant with baby #3:

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Trip to North Conway

Xander shooting water pistols

So in July we went to North Conway for a couple days with Frank's parents.  We drove up on a Wednesday afternoon, went for a swim in the hotel pool, had dinner at a nice little Thai restaurant (Frank did not think that pad thai was like mafe by the way...), and then attempted to get the kids to sleep in a hotel room.  Actually we abandoned the kiddos to Grandpa so we could go shopping at the LL Bean outlet store! They did eventually make it into bed- one in one bed with me and the other in the other bed with Frank.  Who says romance is dead?



 
 
James trying to shoot water pistols but he wasn't quite tall enough!
Thursday we went to Storyland which I thought was a blast. Xander was like a man on a mission- go, go, go and don't stop until I ride every single ride or I drop face first to the ground. It was pretty funny to see.  Around noon or so he started to get kinda cranky so we had some lunch and went to watch the circus- thinking it would be nice to sit down for a bit.  Too bad it was so hot under the big top!  All in all it was a pretty hot day and we all suffered from it a bit but luckily there is enough shade and mist tents around that mostly we stayed cool.  After the circus, which actually was a really decent little circus, we did a bunch of water rides and the boys all got soaked so that helped cool us off.  James and I retreated to the Loopy Lap for a while because apparently pregnant women and kids under 36" can't ride ALL the rides.  Poor James missed it by a 1/2 in but at least he got to keep me company and Xander was pretty thrilled that he was big enough to do everything even if James wasn't!


Grandma enjoying the meag blocks!
 We left the park around 5:30 and the boys were both passed out by 6pm!  We ended up going back to the hotel and ordering take out because it didn't seem worth it to wake them up.  James stirred for a little while later on but Xander was out from about 6pm till 6am.  I've never seen the kid sleep so long! We abandoned them again to Grandpa in order to hit the outlet malls.  It's so nice to go shopping without two littles in tow!

Friday morning we were up early and off to the North Conway Scenic Railway to see Thomas the train in person. We started out with a 20ish minute train ride which the boys thoroughly enjoyed and then there were several other activities like story time (a total bust), meeting Sir Topham Hat (too long a line), seeing a model railway (ahhh air conditioning), a bounce house (big hit), playing with toy trains (another big hit), arts and crafts (a total bust), and temporary tattoos (James was thrilled, Xander less so). Thomas in general was not the funnest thing we have ever done.  I don;t know if they just needed to recover from Storyland from the day before or if crankiness was ensuing because it was broiling hot (like 100+) but Xander especially was a total crankpot most of the time we were there. We stayed a couple hours, had lunch, and headed home.  We took the scenic route past Mount Washington and then down 91S through Vermont so it was a nice leisurely journey home.  All in all a nice little getaway- we may have to try Storyland again next year so that James can ride the "crazy barn" too!

Really they did like riding on Thomas!

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Updates...

my little hmbone
So I didn't really plan for us to fall off the face of the earth for this long but you know how life can get in the way sometimes!  We've had a very busy summer so far.  They boys have continued with gym and swim class at the YMCA and we have made regular trips to the beach at Spofford Lake. James has started back in speech therapy and we have enrolled him in preschool for the fall.   The boys have remained miraculously ear-infection free since April so we hope that trend continues.  We are scheduled to see the pediatric ENT specialist up at Dartmouth in September when we will reevaluate their hearing and determine whether or not further surgery is warranted and whether their hearing loss is likely to be permanent or not. Both boys will be attending preschool this fall- James in the am and Xander in the afternoons so it will make for busy days shuttling!

We had a lovely visit with Grandma and Grandpa Linnenbringer in July which I will talk more about in another post and Uncle Luke is scheduled to come visit in 2 weeks so hopefully we can have some more fun times.

We added 3 news lambs and 2 new pig to the menagerie.  The lambs are just so cute and 2 of them were ewes so we'll have to think of names for them as they will remain part of our breeding flock. The pigs are a breeding pair names Ralph and Lillian.  They probably weigh in at about 300 lbs apiece but they are enjoying life in the back pasture as they attempt to root up the fence line.  It's nice to have your own personal garbage disposals! Hopefully within a few months Lillian will grace us with some piglets.

Riding the Conway Scenic Railway
The garden has been keeping us extremely busy.  We have a few rows that have pretty much gone to seed and my roma tomatoes need some serious TLC but otherwise we (i.e. Frank) have done a good job keeping up with the weeds and we have been on the daily zucchini/yellow squash/green bean diet. We should have plenty of popcorn to go around too!  They boys are somewhat helpful with the weeding but mostly they drive their dump trucks up and down the rows.

In other big news we finally succumbed and bought a minivan. We purchased a used 2005 Toyota Sienna from a dealership in Lowell MA.  It needed a little TLC but I think we have finally gotten it where we wanted it to be.  We ended up keeping my Vibe and will use that for a commuter car seeing as the gas mileage is so much better and until baby arrives it will still fit all of us. Not to mention they weren't really going to give us hardly anything to trade it in!


I'm still trucking along, still pregnant, getting bigger by the minute.  This hot, humid weather hasn't really been my friend and going back to work after vacation was a total bummer but I'm mostly back into the swing of things now. I'm finding that I am much more tired this time around and as much as I have a million things that I would like to get done , I need to be good about taking breaks. That being said I need to get my cleaning groove on and shovel out the kitchen sometime this week! After that I'll be tackling the sewing room b/c baby needs some new diapers and it is hard to sew if you can't find the machine through all the clutter! Hopefully that nesting instinct will kick in soon!