Work: in progress

The lazy days of summer are slowly fading away. While I welcome the shortening days and routine that fall brings, this year feels like we have a lot of work to do before fall actually begins. I've been busy harvesting herbs and produce from the garden like a maniac. We have basil everywhere (12 batches of pesto is already in the freezer with 8 more headed there this weekend), squash and zucchini with dinner each night, carrots to snack on throughout the day, sweet corn to fight over, jalapenos and banana peppers to turn into chile renellos, and huge heads of broccoli and cauliflower that desperately need to be eaten or frozen.

My neat-and-tidy fortress of solitude is now an unruly and untamed jungle. I picked our first ripe cherry tomatoes today, which Madeleine promptly devoured. When the majority of the tomatoes ripen, I'll probably be spending most of my days standing at the stove canning salsa.

We've also embarked on the path to preschool. For a while this past spring we were unsure whether Madeleine would be ready for school this fall. As summer progressed and her interest grew, I began to drag my feet. Although I said it was because we've had a lot going on, the truth is that I feel a lot of pressure to find the right fit for her. So much pressure that I've been somewhat paralyzed with fear and therefore waited until the very last minute to make it happen. Fortunately Justin helped usher me into action and we think we have found a great place for her. We'll hopefully find out tomorrow if she has a MWF opening. If so then she'll start the Wednesday after Labor Day. If not then we'll be on the hunt again.

This is also the calm before hunting season. Justin is busy practicing shooting his bow in the back yard every night. It seems as if hunting season always sneaks up on us and I'm once again pleading for Justin to not go out all weekend...that the kids need to spend some time with him. But we've been through this routine enough over the last few years that I know that I'll be kicking him out the door to hunt in November if he hasn't bagged anything yet. We're hoping (as we do every year) that he'll get a nice bull on opening weekend so the pressure to get anything else during the season is off. We really missed not having a freezer-full of meat the last two years.

And then there's the constantly unfinished list of projects we've started: the new front and back doors are in but we still need to get new trim and put it on; most of our plants have been planted but we still have a few miscellaneous bushes that need homes; I have a set of cupboards in the garage that I got free off Freecycle that we haven't yet installed in the laundry room; the gravel for our parking pad still need to be flattened out; and our flagstone front patio area hasn't been created. None of this will get done during hunting season so the outside items we don't complete this month will have to wait until spring while we can finish the inside projects after Thanksgiving. For now we're lucky the kids think a huge pile of rocks in our yard is beyond awesome.