The Best Part of Your Birthday

. . .has got to be eating the very last piece of birthday cake for breakfast right out of the pan.

Happy Birthday Liam!

Liam turned 6 today. He requested a wizard cake. This child has much more faith in my artistic ability than I do and has a knack for requesting creative cakes that I have no clue how to make happen. But in the end, he was happy.
After our busy morning at the farm, he got to stay up at nap time today since he is one of the big kids now. He put in his standard request for "spaghetti with meatballs in the sauce" for dinner and cake with vanilla ice cream.
Liam enjoyed his day and we are all very proud of him.
Happy birthday, Liam.

Party at the Farm

A few weeks ago I entered a contest for a party at a local farm. I think they started as a dairy farm but now run a huge playground and corn maze type place. I won the free party and we took advantage of it today. We had perfect weather and a bunch of friends came to join us.
Gabe is driving a train.
Katie is feeding the goats. I never knew goats would eat ice cream cones but I guess they'll eat just about anything if given the chance.
More goats.
We had ice cream.
The kids panned for gemstones.
Katie is hard at work.
They had go-carts to ride.
Round and round the track.
Coming down the giant slide.
Bouncing on the jumping pillow. Everyone had a great time.

A Robert Smile

Please ignore the cluttered desk in the background. I swear if I clean it, I'll never find half of the stuff again. Just focus on the cute kid.

Fields and Flowers

Strawberry Time

It's strawberry season. Which means making the yearly trip to fill the back of the van with strawberries. We ended up with 36 quarts this year and I am hopeful this will be enough to last us all year. The debate now is over how many batches of jam I should make.
Gabe spent the morning riding with Dad. This is just not fair. Last year he rode on my back in the Ergo and was quite happy to smear strawberries all over my back. This year he rides with Alan in the backpack and actually eats the berries. Just not fair I tell you. Poor Gabe fell off the slide yesterday and sprained his ankle so he has spent most of the past two days being carried around by someone.
Bryan is a big help since he has gotten past the stage of scarfing down every berry he picks or jumping up and down with excitement over each berry insisting that we all look at it because it is the biggest one ever. He's a quiet and hard worker which makes it much easier to get in and out of the fields quickly.
Katie is very proud of her full basket.
Here's one that Abby actually didn't eat.
Yes, the kitchen is covered in strawberries so I guess I'd better start getting them cleaned up and dealt with. Hopefully we'll get raspberries and cherries next week.

Today's Harvest

I will admit that these pictures represent food that we have to do basically no work to grow. The asparagus patch was well established when we moved in and the trees were already producing. But these pictures remind my why I am grateful that I do not have to rely on my rather lacking gardening skills to feed my family all winter. Yes, we are slowly learning a few more tricks each year and learning more each year. But if we had to rely on our own skills at this moment to feed the family all winter, well, we would be mighty hungry and sick of slaughtering chickens after a while.
Hopefully later this week or early next week we will get out to an actual farm and pick some decent sized cherries. The ones on our trees are rather small and many are too high in the tree for us to safely reach.
I imagine if you grow up in an environment where your basic survival depends on your own gardening abilities, you learn rather quickly. Good thing we have grocery stores around here.