End of September

Our cats are cute. 

Gorgeous skies one night. Obviously the pool is still open. It is getting cold though.

Kevin tore down our playset that we acquired like 17 years ago. It was falling apart and not safe. Then he decided to construct some swings for our front yard. After figuring out everything including making diagrams and using geometry...

Voila!

Cogburn is still hanging around looking happy. He is also very loud but he is so adorable we don't mind. Much.

Rose played with the train set this week. It is funny; a toy will sit in a corner for literally months and I will think, hmmm, maybe we should get rid of it...

And then the kids get excited.

Kevin did a great job with the garden this year. We had a drought but he watered very faithfully so we got lots of squashes. We are also getting many green beans still which makes me SO happy!

After aforementioned drought, we finally have been getting rain, which is a huge relief. There were dangers of wildfires and now the ground is nicely wet and the water table is probably a lot better.

So we are thankful for that!

 

 

Still sick

 ARGGHHHH!!!

It wasn't COVID. It isn't COVID. We are happy about that.

But while most of my symptoms from the recent illness are gone, I now have breathing problems. I had breathing problems all week. On Thursday I went to an urgent care with Kevin and got steroids. I am better than I was, but am not yet perfect.

It is very annoying. Thursday I couldn't talk for more than  a couple of minutes without panting for air. Now I can talk fairly well though any activity makes me pant.

So baby steps. I am trying to be thankful but I am more annoyed than thankful. But I should be thankful.

Needless to say, Kevin and the kids have been doing all the hard work.

Kevin and two of the girls picked green beans. I love green beans and bacon so much.

As is common for us Kendigs, it took weeks for everyone to get sick with this thing. Joseph called off work on Friday, and Daniel is sick now.  Sigh.

But we are getting there.

Mid May

 

Kevin and the children worked on our garden the last few days. He planted tomato plants yesterday! Hopefully they do well this year.

That is chocolate; namely, Sam's Club's chocolate almond crisps. I love them.

More chocolate. 72% cocoa so quite bitter but still wonderful. 

Trader Joe's has these dark chocolate peanut butter cups that I have zero control over. I mean, I love them so much. I eat them too much. I love them.  They have too much sugar for me to eat with abandon so I really shouldn't eat them at all if I can't control myself.

I have been putting peanut butter on my very dark chocolate and that is tasty (not as good as the peanut butter cups) and I can control myself.

Eating carefully is annoying sometimes.

But I am blessed to have good chocolate and good food for a diabetic.

All the kids were at church so we had a picture. Rose is trying to smile but she is working on her smiling.

Six of the children wrote letters about me and gave them to the church; there was a Mother's Day thing where certain mothers got a gift card based on the letters their kids wrote about them. I won for Isaac's letter. I got all the letters and they are sweet and delightful and all of them were deserving, but of course they weren't going to give me more than one gift card.

It is nice to be appreciated!

Garden

I don't think I've mentioned our garden this year.

Cucumbers have been great.  Beans Ok but not terrific.  And the tomatoes, oh, the tomatoes!

Kevin has been toiling away and we have 41 quarts of tomatoes!

Stay tuned for our sweet potato crop.  (Which Kevin thinks won't be wonderful.)

Our Garden

So I haven't mentioned our garden this year, I think.

Here it is, the vegetable one, that is:

Almost lost in the head high weeds are 3 healthy tomato plants.

That is it. Seriously.  That's all we have for a garden this year.

We usually have cucumbers and zucchinis and lots and lots of sweet potatoes. We've had corn and squash and watermelon.  We've been gardeners.  

Well, Kevin has been a gardener.  I'm not.

But this year we're tired and busy and worn out, and Kevin decided to take a break.

So 3 tomato plants. Nothing else.

It has actually been nice. Yes, we are spending more on groceries and we don't have fresh produce from the garden, but it has been relaxing to not worry about harvesting beans and working on weeds. And actually, there are farm stands and decent produce in the grocery stores, though of course we have to pay for it.

In the Old Testament of the Bible, the Lord told the people of Israel to not plant every 7th year. That was supposed to be a year of rest.  I know all the reasons for that directive are not clear to me, a spindly, wimpy human, but it ties into the idea of the Sabbath rest.

We're not doing this for religious reasons, but it does feel right to sometimes just rest when we're feeling very stretched.  Maybe next year, we'll go back to having a significant garden.

Now let's talk about flower gardens.

The flower beds were awful.  

But then, there was the Attack of the Lydia!

That girl is a weed removing machine!

She's been working for our neighbors with their outdoor work all summer.

One hour later and our flower beds were much better.

There is still a big section that is bad but this week maybe she can do some more weeding.

(Yes, I'm paying her.)

Sweet Potato Harvest

We are blessed with soil that is good for sweet potatoes.  This is 3/4ths of our harvest.  We're delighted that stupid little critters didn't chew on the sweet potatoes much, so we have a wonderful harvest.  

Kevin does most of the planting and tilling and all that.  The kids do most of the harvesting. We had a great many green beans this year, a good tomato crop, and some zucchini.  

I love fresh produce, but I have to admit that fall is its own special time as we finish the harvest and Kevin puts the garden "to bed" for the winter.  It means a little less work around here and also a season of enjoying the hard work on the garden through the summer.

House and Flower Bed Status

  I am pretty good at keeping our house sort of clean.

 That is to say, our floors are clear much of the time and the piles on the horizontal surfaces don't usually reach too high.

  I've been working on steadily removing items from our house, because less stuff means it is easier to keep the house in decent shape.

 Though of course we still have a whole bunch o' stuff.

  I am getting rid of all our baby clothes as Rose grows out of them.  I think we're done having children, and if by some chance the Lord blesses us with another kiddo -- well, the local children's thrift store is great.

  This morning, I went through a tub of maternity clothes.  I got rid of some items, but decided to hang on to some JUST IN CASE.  Because buying maternity clothes is a total pain.  I'm tall and pretty thin and most maternity clothes don't fit right.  It would be horrible to have to buy new ones if necessary.

I decided to show a few pics of our house today, especially focusing on our basement storage areas.

      This is our main storage room, which we call the "secret room."  It is interesting place.  We think it was originally designed as a tornado shelter because it is made from poured concrete. We live within 15 miles from a town that has been hit with 2 major tornadoes in the last 40 years.  One was an F-5!  Anyway, we use this as a storage room.  You can see it is full, very full, but there is space to walk. This room constantly need work as we pull items out and store items on shelves.  All our spare clothing is in here.  The rod with the jackets and coats is a new touch.  Kevin put that up a couple of months ago and I love it.

This is the other end of the storage room. We keep our "grown up" DVD's here.  I ponder that because lots of movies can be streamed now but not all.  So for now, we're keeping probably 50 DVD's. We try to weed out the ones we don't like.  Kevin and I both enjoy watching favorite movies over and over again.  A few months ago, I got rid of all my old Doctor Who VHS tapes.  I just don't have much patience for VHS anymore, and the library has all the DVD's. I will confess that I'm slowly acquiring my favorite Tom Baker Doctor Who videos on DVD...

  This weird little area is behind what was originally a bar in our basement.  We don't use it as a bar (obviously) and now I stick a bunch of homeschooling stuff back here. And dress up clothes.  And miscellaneous stray microwaves.  See, I wonder about the microwave.  This one (lower left corner, brown boxy thing) is usually just sitting, unused, in the basement. But every once in a while, we have a problem with our main microwave and then we really like a back up. But it is  taking up space most of the time. For now, we are keeping it.

   This is the same room as shown above, with the bar at the back.  The bar counter usually has bins for items I am going to donate.  I have a bin for items over size 5T children, and those items go to Vietnam Vets or Goodwill.  On the right, are clothes for newborn through 5T, which go to our local crisis pregnancy center.  This room is obviously not amazingly tidy, but I am proud of the lack of clutter because we work at it to keep it moderately clear.  The kids play here often, and we periodically haul out building toys.

Our kitchen this morning. I am proud of this.  This is a good state of affairs for our kitchen.  You can imagine that with 11 people in the house, the kitchen is a constant battle.

  So, these pics are ... fine.  I'm pleased with how these areas look, though they need constant work to keep them in good shape.

Now let me share my area of shame:

Outside...

Loyal blog readers may remember that a few months ago, my mom and dad came down and my mom brought spare plants from her extensive and gorgeous  and WELL WEEDED flower beds.

This was in mid June:

And this is now:

So obviously, it totally and completely got away from me.  (Sorry, Mom!)

My poor metal birds are lost in the waving weeds.

I am showing my shameful flower bed because I want to point we all have our areas of giftedness. I'm decent at keeping a house in order.  I have had people indicate that they think I'm some kind of super mom for homeschooling and keeping the house moderately tidy with 9 busy kids.

But house cleaning comes naturally, and I don't get attached to objects much, so I'm able to keep clutter down by ruthlessly tossing unwanted items.

BUT, I'm a lousy gardener. I don't like dirt, I don't like sweat, and I don't like CHIGGERS.  I'm horribly allergic to chigger bites, so working outside in the summer is fraught with danger.  I literally struggle to sleep well for a week after getting a chigger bite because of the vile itching.  Chiggers do come off if scrubbed thoroughly during a shower, but sometimes one stays on me and then, ugh.

So really, this flower bed is a mess and I'm not even ashamed of it.  I know my limitations, and I know that I prioritized other things, and that's Ok. 

In a month, the frosts will start and the weeds will die.

Next year, I hope I'll do better than this year.  Or teach the kids to weed :-).

  

Flower Bed Update

This was in mid-May.

For all that this was rather a mess, it was a HUGE improvement over the previous wasteland of tall grasses and miscellaneous weeds.

A couple of days ago, my parents rolled into town for a visit, bearing plants.

I mentioned before that my mother has a MAJOR green thumb. She is a truly excellent gardener. She brought some spreading plants that were overrunning her beds, and with her expertise, we transformed the front flower bed into...this.

Now that looks quite lovely!  There are now 5 hosta plants in the back.  There are...something else in the upper right hand corner, and another something else near the sidewalk.  Yes, I need to ask my mother what I actually PLANTED.

So the current goal is to keep the weeds from overrunning this area, and to remember to water these plants until they establish their roots.

But hey, I'm proud.  These flower beds have NEVER looked this good :-).

And Then A Miracle Occurred

My mother has the proverbial "green thumb."

When I was in junior high, my folks bought a home on ten acres of land. Over the course of many years, my mother (and father) transformed part of it into a 1+ acre garden. That is a LOT of garden.

I didn't realize it at the time, but my mom's diligent gardening brought in tons and tons of produce, and helped us eat during a time when our overall family income wasn't high (and they had 3 hungry kids to feed.)

Somehow I missed the green thumb.  I've never liked gardening at all. I don't like bugs, I don't like dirt, and I don't like heat, and sweat, and bees buzzing around my head.

  Kevin IS a gardener.  But with a full time job and 9 kids and a wife and a host of other outside tasks, he has focused his gardening on the vegetable garden.

  Which left our front flower beds (usually) a wasteland.  It is really hard to convey how BAD they were.  They were full of tall grass and weeds.  There were (and are) a few flowers, but weeding wasn't happening and the flowers were often crowded out.

  Why didn't I do something about this sad state of affairs?

  I didn't prioritize it. Simple answer.  Another, more complicated answer, is that last summer I was having a baby.  And 3 summers ago I was having a baby.  And until recently, I couldn't easily go outside to work on the garden because the kids didn't do all that well by themselves inside. (All of that is a distant memory as our big girls can hold the fort by themselves now.)

  But in the last couple of weeks I decided...to weed the front flower beds.

  It really didn't even take THAT long.

  So (flourish of trumpets), here is the main flower bed.

  Yep, it looks more or less ghastly.  At least we can see my ornamental birds. They used to be surrounded in a thicket of grass.

Think of it as a blank piece of paper, on which an (inexpert) artist might eventually create...something. Not a masterpiece, but something.

But here, here, HERE is my tour de force, my piece de resistance, my treasure, my source of pride!

Admit it.  That looks...Ok.  That looks sort of nice.   I am very proud of it.  And for me, this is a miracle.

Carrots

   These are HUGE carrots from our garden.  The longest ones are about 10 inches long, 2 inches in diameter.  We've never had much luck with carrots, but this year Kevin made hills of soft dirt for the carrots to grow in, and the result was a wild success in the carrot department.

 Kevin spent hours yesterday making his famous chicken soup.  He made the noodles by hand, and added sweet potatoes and carrots from our garden. It was GOOD.

Ginormous Sweet Potato

  Kevin dug up close to 100 lbs of sweet potatoes last week, and he still has 40% of the patch to dig up!

 This is the granddaddy of them all, so far.  Isn't it a whopper?  We made sweet potato bread out of part of it, and ate the rest.  It was good!

Beans

This is one of those times that having 10 mouths to feed is a very good thing.

That, my friends, is quite a hill of green beans.  Kevin doesn't like them canned so...we're stuck with eating them all in the next few days.  And you know what?  We can do it!  Daniel and I are particularly fond of beans with bacon, but actually, everyone likes them well enough.

Random Mutterings

Sadly, but not surprisingly, the robin's nest fell to something, probably one of our cats.  We found the nest on another branch (a lower branch) and the eggs were broken on the ground.

Kevin and I watched Batman Begins a couple of days ago.  I quite liked it.  Most of the "good guys" were genuinely good.  There were some interesting moral questions with some good answers.  It was quite violent, so the children aren't ready for it yet.  I'm a big fan of Focus on the Family's PluggedIn.com website where they provide extensive reviews of movies.  The next 2 Batman movies are apparently much grimmer and I'm extremely sensitive to unpleasant movies, so I don't think I'll be watching them.

We were really busy this week after our week in Orlando.  Those few days of lazing around were nice, though I missed the kids LIKE CRAZY by the time we got back.  I am aware that 8 children are a lot of work, especially the little ones.  Actually, I'd be really exhausted if we didn't have older kids to help.  I've been following a blog of parents with quintuplets (and one older son) and wow, that sounds so tiring!

The 2 older girls are starting a "careers" unit.  They will be investigating various careers, and looking into what jobs are available, what training is required, etc.  One career both will study is being a mother.  There is a lot to being a mother, definitely!  It'll be fun exploring that with the girls. 

Daniel is 1 year old this week!  Wow, our baby is growing up.

I started potty training Sarah this week.  She hasn't really "taken" to it so I may quit and try again in a month or so. I really think she could be trained, but she is very negative and argumentative right now and I don't have the time to keep incredibly close track of her.  She at least has the idea of sitting on the potty and has used it a few times, so that is a step in the right direction.  She also made numerous puddles on the floor, but at least it was always an area that could be cleaned up easily :-).

Weather has been hot, but we are in the middle of a cooler spell. I've been weeding our front flower bed and am proud at how much better it looks.

Kevin hopes to plant tomatoes and sweet potatoes this weekend.

Happy Memorial Day to you all!

Tractor and Tiller

  We have a tractor.  It's red.    We have a mower for the tractor.  And now...

We have a TILLER!

We are the happy owners of 5 acres of land. The back 3 acres are mostly wild, though Kevin has mowed a path so we can walk around there. 

I've thought for a LONG time that we could get really serious about gardening. So far, Kevin has nobly done almost all the work.  Last year, with Daniel's birth in the middle of planting season, we had a relatively small garden.

We've talked for a while about getting a tiller for the tractor.  It makes tilling easier to use that big honking, stable machine rather than pushing along a walking tiller and letting it drag Kevin all over.

So this tiller showed up on Craig's list for an excellent price.  Kevin drove out and discovered he'd need to make some minor modifications for it to work on our tractor, but decided he could handle a "little project".  Fortunately, he was able to make the modifications relatively easily.

So now we have a tiller.  In the picture above, Kevin tilled out a new gardening area, and planted 6 raspberry plants.  Exciting.

The Last Week in Pictures

I know this is a bit late but... better late than never.

We had 3 separate egg hunts on Easter afternoon -- one for Sarah alone (with Daniel crawling around interestedly), one for Miriam and Angela, and then one for the older 4 children.  We filled plastic eggs and then Kevin's mom brought a big bag full of more eggs so the kids got a lot of candy.  They didn't mind too much.

 

 I guess this was a couple of days earlier...Kevin planted a bunch of asparagus.  We love asparagus (most of us, anyway) and we have a large family.  So now we have 60+ asparagus plants over by the barn.

Have you ever tried to do stretching exercises with 3 little girls "helping"?  It's an interesting experience.

 

 

 

Little plants coming up...

 

 

Sarah got sick one day.  You know she's sick when she just lies quietly on the couch in the middle of the day.  She is close to normal again, thankfully.

Kevin spent hours and hours this weekend working on our tractor.  He welded something together and now is painting various accessories.  What is this?  It's... an S shaped doohicky.  It will be used to get rid of weeds.

Last, but not least, is a shot of the latest candy exchange.  Not surprisingly, the children have favorites in the candy department.  Since they just got Easter candy, their candy bags are bulging.  One day this week, they transformed our table into a pit at the stock exchange.  There was much yelling of "2 little rabbits, what can I get for 2 candy rabbits?" and that kind of thing. It was cute and everyone seemed pleased with their exchanges when I called a halt.

The Week in Review

It was a good week but we were plenty busy.

I mentioned that Daniel is into everything.  Babyproofing and making new habits takes some time. 

On Sunday, the snow started falling.  We were privileged to host the neighbor guineas as they enjoyed a late March snowstorm from our pool fence.

That same day, Kevin worked with the children to start tomato and pepper plants.  We keep them on top of our big freezer, which is a warm place.  At least one pepper plant has come up!  No, 2 have come up (I just checked.)

Kevin also spent a good chunk of time considering our gardening plans for the summer.  He has sketched out a 50 foot by 22 foot garden (on paper) and we will have sweet potatoes, bush beans, sweet corn, pole beans, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbres, zucchini, squash, and melons.

  My personal goal is to plant some strawberry and raspberry plants.  Truthfully, I'm a lousy gardener.  I don't really know what I'm doing. But we've got land and I can read and Naomi has written a report for me on strawberries and if they die, it won't be the end of the world.  (And Kevin can help. He's a good gardener.)

 

 
By Monday, we had quite a bit of snow (4 to 5 inches).  It was enchanting, but looked more like Christmas than late March! 

A thread running through our week was a humdinger illness for sweet Lydia, our 11 year old.  She got a cold sore on Sunday, her first.  Several of us get cold sores occasionally...it is one of those tiresome viruses that, once its in the bloodstream, pops back up occasionally.  I was sorry she had contracted the virus from one of us, but didn't think too much of it until Tuesday. By then, she felt terrible with a bad sore throat, headache, exhaustion, fever, and lips covered in cold sores.  Poor darling!  We kept giving her ibuprofin and while she seemed maybe a LITTLE better, she wasn't well. Yesterday, I finally took her in to the doctor and confirmed it was the cold sore virus.  I also discovered there is an anti viral to combat this virus.  I should have taken her in earlier, poor sweet.  I'll know in the future. 

She's felt so rotten that much of the early week was spent in bed.  That meant Naomi and I (primarily) were covering for her in terms of chores and caring for Sarah. It made me appreciate how much Lydia does most of the time.  I am also very appreciative of Naomi, who has cheerfully taken on the chicken chores that Lydia usually does.

Naomi also "stepped up to the plate" by helping with the care of Daniel and Sarah this week.

And speaking of plates, the Major League baseball season starts on Monday!  I'm a Detroit Tigers fan.  Go Tigers!

Rice Stir Fry

 
I have found making meals to be a challenge since Daniel was born. The first few weeks of his life "ex utero" were easy as Kevin and friends took care of it all.  The last few weeks, I have gradually taken over the meal making duties again, with continued help from Kevin and the kids.  I've struggled with not planning ahead as well as usual, and sometimes it has been 3 p.m. and I have had NO idea what to fix for dinner. 

A long time ago, I had a brief season of planning my meals out in 2 week intervals.  I know and respect people who plan a whole month ahead and there were nice things about meal planning, but I've decided long term it is not for me right now.  One big problem is that I could never gauge how many leftovers we would have on a given day, and food would tend to disappear into corners of the refrigerator and be forgotten. 

The last week has been better in that I've been more prepared ahead of time.  I made this stir fry a couple of days ago and it was quite a success.  I cut up zucchini and tomotoes (both from our garden) as well as carrots and onions, fried them in olive oil, threw in some boiled rice and a few eggs and salt, and voila, dinner. The kids mostly liked it.  It is rare for ALL the children to like anything I make, so if 4 or 5 like it I feel I am doing well.  The ones who don't like it have the option of not eating. We don't make anyone eat anything, but I don't prepare separate things for those who don't like a particular meal.  The kids don't have to eat, but they are not allowed to whine and complain about the food.

One thing we have NOT done much is ordered out.  I have a personal allergy to running to a restaurant when I fail to plan. Anything but that :-).  We were blessed with a gift card from our church which allowed us to buy a few meals from restaurants and oh, that was a blessing.  But in general, I always find something to eat in the house. There have been times when dinner was eggs, muffins, or a variety of leftovers.  Very occasionally, we've had cereal for dinner.  So yes, odd dinners, but dinner is served every day.

Garden

Kevin is our gardener.  I do most of the indoor cleaning, cooking, homeschooling, and caring for the kids. He takes care of the outside, and it is a big job!  He has help from the kids for some stuff (like chicken care) and he recruited 3 of our younger children to put in the garden this year.

We decided a small garden was wise given that the baby arrives soon and we'll be especially tired this summer.

So if I remember correctly, he planted tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers, zucchini, and green peppers.  We've planted melons, watermelon, squash, lettuce, sweet potatoes, and carrots in the past, with mixed results.  Well, the sweet potatoes have always been a success, but planting them is extra work and they take a lot of space.  So we'll skip sweet potatoes this year.

As of yesterday, all the plants were up!

Sweet Potato Harvest

Kevin harvested our sweet potatoes last weekend.

The good news is that we harvested many fine sweet potatoes.

  Aren't they nice?

  The bad news was that some nefarious rodent-like creature chewed on a number of sweet potatoes. But as you can see, we still got a lot to eat ourselves.

Teensy Watermelon

It is a little hard to tell, but this was a very small watermelon.  I was surprised that it was good, but it was!