Localvore

I recently had a conversation with one of my Aunts about being more concerned with things being local and not organic. Of course, local food around here also tends to be organic, so I win out either way. Actually, I have recently discovered I am a bit of a local snob: I drink local beverages, get my vegetables from a farm down the road, our milk from the dairy of a family in our church, and the list goes on. For those of you who have never tried this mode of thinking, I dare you to give it a try for just a month. I guarantee you will be hooked and never go back. Trust me, just one month of eating locally and you too will be a localvore and will tend to frequent restaurants that serve local food. Even the coolest food network states embrace this mode of thinking. A majority of the restaurants in Vermont tend to also. Let me give you a taste of the amazing places I have eaten at this past month (so much better than fast food).

For starters we have this amazing place the next town over where I joined three of my mom friends (no kids or husbands) for dinner. The Belted Cow. I have to start by admitting this is not a place I get to eat at often because it is not a kid friendly place and it is not cheap, but the food is amazing! We ordered two entrees and a few appetizers and shared everything. It was amazing! The only thing I did not love was the fact that it was a bit spicier than I would typically eat, not due to the fact that it did not taste amazing. Most of the food comes from local sources and the menu changes with the seasons and all of it is fresh and amazing. The bread that we ate was baked that morning at one of the local bakeries. Everything had amazing flavor and I would recommend the restaurant to anyone looking for a kid free night out.

The second place that I have visited twice this past month is Archie's Grill. It is a new Burger joint in Shelburne that serves local meats and is pretty good. (I should also mention that it is owned by the father of one of my cross-country runners which makes it extra special. When you can go in, order a burger, and know that you're supporting someone you actually know and have a connection to, that's a neat feeling.) The restaurant also has pictures of athletes from the high school I work at on the wall; it makes enjoying my burger even better when my two year old can point out people on the wall that he knows and has watched . As a side note, I think my two year old has a crush on most of the girls on my cross-country team.

The most recent location we visited is a place I have been meaning to stop at for a few months now. My aunt, who knows that I love local places, suggested I check out Red Hen Baking Company for lunch some day. My son and I finally stopped in on the way back from Grandma's for lunch the other day and it was pretty good. My son loved the fact that he could sit at the window and watch the guys making bread. I occasionally had to remind him that he needed to eat his lunch.

All three of these embody why eating local is so much better: you are supporting people you know - not some corporation who care less about your family. You know the food is fresh and quite frankly tastes better because it does not have all the preservatives (because it does not need to), it came straight from the source and onto your plate in some cases that same day, and you actually know and in some cases see what went into making it. I love the fact that my son knows that his milk comes from a cow and not the store and that he can actually watch the bread he is eating being made.

I'll end my soap box by suggesting you give it a try, for just one month. Trust me, you'll be glad you did. You can even do it when traveling, just ask my poor husband who had to go cherry picking on a road trip to Michigan, I'm totally obsessed.

The Perfect Reason to Have a Child

Friday, one of my coworkers made a general comment on Christmas and having kids. He said, "We have them so we can share the excitement we got to enjoy as kids with them." After the weekend we just had I think he is right.

A theme park near where I grew up called Santa's Village decided four years ago they were going to open up on the weekends leading up to Christmas. I have to say it was a great business plan, what better time of year for a place called Santa's Village to be open? Little Man had a blast, so much so that there were a few times we were worried that there was something wrong - he just went around with this awestruck look on his face, and when you finally managed to snap him out of it, you couldn't shut him up. It was really cute. For those of you who also grew up going to Santa's Village, it it much more impressive at Christmas.

....

View from the monorail

The following day we took an early Christmas present from Grandma out for a spin.

What It Takes to Be a Northerner

I was born in New Hampshire about an hour away from the Canadian boarder, My husband in Virginia south of the Mason Dixon Line. While he has acclimated well to northern life, there is just something unnorthern about about him (outside of the slight southern drawl he still possesses). While I was outside with my son last night (the first day when there was actually enough snow to justify snow pants, I realized what it is). My husband hates the cold and hates the snow. A true Northerner embraces it and makes the most of it.

Little man could not wait to get outside and was crushed when I told him we needed to go and invest in new pair of mittens first. Then of course we had to eat lunch and take a nap. This did not go over well with the 2 year old. Of course I remember my mom doing the same thing to me as a child, and knew that mittens and a nap would be needed before embracing the cold. It also made me think of a good friend of mine in New Hampshire who prays for snow all summer long and I am pretty sure cries the day it melts away in the spring. I have to admit there was a part of me that wanted to play in the snow as much as he did, however, cold hands make for an unbearable 2 year old, so I patiently rushed him to the store for a new pair of mittens, if I was the prepared type I would have anticipated this back in March and purchased mittens on sale then. But look how cute my little kola bear is..........The matching mittens and hat were totally worth the wait.

Then as soon as were were outside little man grabbed the shovel and stated cleaning the walk. No, not really, he was actually shoveling it all into a big pile to jump into, off of and oh did I mention he is really into skateboards(I had to explain to him in the snow, you use snowboards)? Yes, he used the shovel as a snowboard to come down off the mound of snow a few times.

As you can tell by the picture, it was dark out by the time I finally convinced little man that hot chocolate with marshmallows might be a good idea. Although, I should not have been surprised at this since as a teenager I used to plop down into a snowbank with one of my closest friends and talk for hours looking up at a starry sky. For those of you not from the north, the best nights for start gazing are freezing cold ones.

And where was daddy for all of this......inside complaining about how cold it is.

Egg......And a Really Big Storm

During the epic storm we had a few days ago (no joke, trees falling in front of cars, extended power outages, roofs being ripped of trailers oh and did I mention Santa and his reindeer flying down the road?) we finally found our first egg in the coop. To see it and hear more about the storm, go to Andy's Northern Baby Blog.

I may actually let the chickens live for a little bit longer :)

The Weird and Unusual

What have I learned from having a winter CSA? I have discovered what foods really look like coming straight from the farm, and that there are a whole lot of varieties of "normal" foods that I didn't know about. Take for example this carrot. It looks like it just went 5 rounds in a boxing ring.

The weird-looking food for this round; drum roll please..........Brussel sprouts! Looks like our new Christmas tree! :)

Have a happy Thanksgiving everyone.

To Do or Not To Do

I have a confession, there are times I have to admit I don't always do the environmentally friendly/healthy thing. This week happened to be the tipping point on two things.

You see, little man is at the very edge of the weight limit for his cloth diaper covers and after them coming undone in the community and at daycare and completely soaking himself, I caved. I debated going and buying the next size up, however, I couldn't rationalize the cost. You see little man is in the midst of potty training. He uses the potty at daycare almost every morning now and runs around the house in underwear at night. And although we are not without accidents, and I am an not quite willing to take the plunge into taking him out in underwear, he is starting to get it and we are using diapers a lot less than a month ago. So I caved and he wears disposables when we are out in public and to nap in now. Basically any time he is sleeping or going to be riding in my car (I am not quite ready to pull over on the side of the road so little man can pee).

The other thing I caved on was butter. You see, a few months ago we switched over to an all natural - no chemicals added butter. Andy in fact still uses it and enjoys it very much. However, I am on a diet and quite frankly I like butter on things. So when I realized that the real stuff is 55 more calories then the unnatural yogurt kind, I broke down and bought the yogurt stuff this weekend.

On the less confessional side of things, our girls' cross-country team won New Englands this past weekend and are heading to the pre-qualifier for Nike Nationals in a week and a half.

Yum!

I decided to splurge today and loved every minute of it.

I had heard from two different people that the Vermont Meat and Seafood Market just opened in a location I pass by every day. The market sells fresh all-natural local meats and cheeses as well as fresh seafood from Boston (since ocean front property does not exist in Vermont). Since the last day of my coaching season is Saturday, I received my coaching stipend this week, so today being payday, I decided I was going to splurge a little. It was worth every penny and even little man gobbled up his dinner, of course that may have been because of the cookie bribe if he finished dinner.

For dinner tonight we ate fresh salmon that was delivered this morning, cauliflower from our CSA, and bread that Andy baked last night. Life is good!

I Tried

I had very high hopes for our winter CSA. I had a goal to make wonderful food that is healthy for my family and instill good eating habits in my two year old. The result: a toddler who can cook good food: wash it, put it in the pan, sprinkle some spices, load the veggies and homemade cheese on the pizza and put it in the over. The problem comes when it is time to eat. He starts out by picking all of the green stuff off the pizza and spends the rest of the meal repeating over and over again "I don't like that!"

Eat Them!

I've nurtured them, saved the remaining 4 from the fox, fed them grass and other goodies since their confinement in the safe run and what do I get in return? Nothing! There was much debate about when our chickens would lay eggs since they came later than expected back in the spring. The lady at the place we got them said November. The problem with this...... unless you have electricity in your coop in which to run a light to fool them into thinking it is still spring/summer..... chickens stop laying eggs in the winter. My vote: eat them and try again in the spring. Apparently my husband is more attached to them then I am.

If they only knew......

Yum

We have had a wonderful---well, almost wonderful week--- of exploring all the different recipes there are for our different winter vegetables. Since it has been a cold week, many of the different recipes have been winter soups and the house has smelled great most of the week. And most of our meals have looked wonderful.

I have learned plenty this week and am quickly learning that I am missing or missed a few things. For starters, there is an herb garden at the farm we get our share from. Since I was unsure what I needed for herbs, I clipped some rosemary and went on my happy way. I planned out the meals for the week during nap time after I had picked up the share and was able to see what I had. The problem with this was, several of those great herbs hanging out back at the farm I needed and ended up purchasing from the store. Oh well.... live and learn.

The other thing I learned is that my husband does not like squash. This is a problem since I love it and we had 2 delicata, 1 winter and 1 acorn squash. Of course I was going to use them. I was frowned at severely during these meals and Little Man picked up on his father's "I don't like it" mantra, which almost resulted in both of them being banished from the dinner table to leave me in peace to enjoy my squash. I did relent halfway through the week and let Andy make a beef stew. Meat makes him happy.......

As a total side note, our girls' cross-country team won states and is moving on to New Englands in two weeks!

Why I Love Fall

No words needed.......

CSA

We picked up our first basket this morning. Little man is psyched.

Winter CSA

After much pleading with Andy, I have officially signed up for a winter CSA from Jericho Settlers Farm this year. And this one is about as local as we can get without growing everything ourselves; the farm is less than half a mile down the road from us. They are a family about our age that farms the land on their own and other local farms and have quite a bit to offer.

This Sunday was an open house/potluck/listen to some great music and meet your neighbors kind of thing. Of course, the thing they failed to mention was that while they said be there by 3:00, no one would actually arrive until 3:45. Oh well, we got to know members of the band (Red Hot Juba) and the people who run the farm while we were waiting. And Little Man ran all over the place and had a great time. Although next year, we are going to show up fashionably late as well :)

Once people started to arrive, we were given a tour of the farm - or at least this part of the farm. They actually farm at 6 different locations in the community. If you look at the background of the picture above, that is called a hoop house. They actually have several of them and that is where our winter greens will come from this winter. If you look below they also house the chickens in the winter time. The chickens were just moved into this particular hoop house for the winter (they live in the field across the street during the summer), which houses tomatoes over the summer, hence all the green tomatoes still left on the ground of the hoop house for them to eat. If you look really closely, you can also tell that the chickens are running at this particular opening because they think we are there to feed them. Little Man was very thrilled by this, as well as by the two pigs we had just seen in the field. They did not move to another field with the rest of the pigs for the winter because they will be dinner a week from now.

After a tour of the farm we settled in for great food and music. Since the members of the band also happen to be members of the CSA, we hung out with their families and one of the wives showed little man how to play the trumpet. Less than 5 minutes later, she handed the spit-covered trumpet to her husband to play. Poor man didn't even know.

And all of this, was surrounded by this........

Stuff

Due to coaching, I have been lacking my 2 hours of peace and quiet on Saturday while little man takes a nap. Unfortunately, I typically return home from races just as he is waking up rested and ready to go. So I apologize to the grandmas in the family about the lack of updates. Read Andy's blog: he still has the nap-time hour to post. So, what have we been up to?

We have been enjoying all the amazing things fall has to offer.... (I see this driving home from work every day!)

The colors are wonderful this time of year.

Raking leaves. OK, so little man actually does not rake them, he throws them, jumps in them, and rides around in the wheel barrow.

Then he takes a nap.

We have been enjoying time with friends; even when things get a little out of hand. One of our friends brought a coconut to playgroup the other night, and none of us really knew how to get it open - even though the coconut itself was labeled easy open. We started with a screw driver and mallet and were able to poke a hole in it and drain the milk out. Oh, and just for the record, straight up coconut milk does not taste good. Did I mention we shared it with the toddlers before the moms tasted it? After a broken plate due to a flying mallet the coconut was taken outside where it was easily opened by one mom smashing it with a hammer. It tasted great, even if the toddlers were not so sure after the coconut milk incident.

We have planted a ton of garlic. They were selling the stuff by the pound for planting. Does anyone know how much garlic that leaves you with for planting? Let me break it down for you: each clove planted produces a bulb of garlic, each bulb had 8-10 cloves and a pound of garlic equals about 8 bulbs. That is a lot of stinking garlic. It smelled great though and I can't wait till we begin to dig it out next year.

We attempted to make butter again using a different recipe. We were able to make whipped cream with it. We're still working on the butter.

And the Grand Finale if you have not been reading Andy's blog. Our first official snow fall was last night. Not enough to to last for very long, but enough to make a nice slushy mess last night.

So............

I have to admit I am not a garden decoration type of person. I like it when my flowers can speak for themselves (I do apologize to anyone who has ever given me a garden accessory and is currently reading this, but you would have figured it out anyway if you were ever looking for it in my garden). I will admit, I do have a bucket and old milk can that were in my garden when we moved in, but they have been a nice backdrop for my daffodils in the spring and the bee balm quickly hides them as summer takes off.

Where am I going with this you ask? Well, about two weeks ago my wonderful husband(who by the way wants the bucket and milk can out of the garden now!) found an old rusted bird bath and brought it home. In fact he is very proud of his bird bath. Are you getting where I am going with this? Not only do I not want extras in my garden, but I have never been much of a bird bath person. Not that I dislike the robins, yellow finches, wren and several other varieties of birds we have hanging out in our yard. I am actually planning on putting some bird houses just beyond our yard for a focal point into the trees/field behind out house. But a birdbath is a different story. I guess I am asking for some creative advice as to what to do with the birdbath, so my loving husband who will probably edit this post is happy and I maintain the natural zen in garden that I so love.

(Free bird bath saved from the landfill....Some sandpaper and paint and it'll be good to go. Was going to put it in the garden to distract one's eye from the weeds, but now I'll have to find it a new home. -Editor)

Chicken Update

It has been a while since we have had any chicken updates. Basically because there has not been a whole lot to update. Here are the updates we have as of right now:

They are like most of the neighborhood chickens that have been reduced to hanging out in their chicken run during the day (the exception to this rule is the house with 8 roosters - only a stupid fox would mess with that house). In our neighborhood there are 7 houses with chickens. The one day I took one out, it freaked out on me, because it knew that the fox was right there waiting for me to set it down on the ground. Thankfully, I figured it out before I set her down. The results: She stares me down every time I get near the run.

I do bring them into the garden with me since it is fenced in. When our garden was plentiful, I would only bring them out one at a time because they love tomatoes and trying to keep the chickens from eating my tomatoes and the toddler from ripping everything out of the ground was a lot of work. Since most of my vegetables have run the course of their growing season, all four now join me in the garden.
Little man spends a lot of time looking for worms to feed them. I should mention that before he realized that the chickens will eat them, he would not touch the things. Run screaming in the other direction was more like it. So is it worth it? You tell me.

Keep checking back, we should have eggs sometime in the next 4 weeks or so, depending on who you talk to.

Apple Season

I love fall

Little man needed some help getting to the good apples.

My little chef

Yum, homemade applesauce!

Eat Local Challenge: How To Fail Spectacularly

This week (September 11 -19) is the week for the Eat Local Challenge in Vermont. (See Cari's post from Sept.4 about the challenge to eat local for a month...)

To provide a little background, an Eat Local Challenge attempts to encourage people to eat only foods sourced locally. Locally is defined in different ways by various people, but in Vermont, local means anything produced inside the borders of the state (as the VT Dept of Ag says: inside the state or within thirty miles of the state's borders). There is a "Marco Polo" clause that allows the use of spices and seasonings that 'a sailor could carry in his pockets for six months' - that makes salt, pepper, and things like that "legal". (It's not like there's a food police that's going to arrest you if an unapproved ingredient is used....) The idea behind Eating Locally is to make consumers aware of where their food comes from; how much fuel/energy/resources and effort go into the production and transportation of many "normal" foods. Challenges also showcase the flavor and freshness of local products, introduce the concept of eating foods 'in-season', and increase the money flowing towards the local economy (farmers and other producers).

Now that we know what the Eat Local Challenge is, how did our family do?

We failed miserably.

Normally, we try to eat healthy and "real" foods. Things that are not processed, created synthetically, or contain ingredients that are bigscaryscientificwords. "Don't eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food" is the philosophy that we've adopted. We can't put ourselves up on a pedestal as being totally true to that philosophy - we make mistakes, get lazy, and sometimes just don't see where we make wrong food choices.

We make good choices:

- we stopped making iced tea from a powdered mix because, well, using tea bags to brew our own is real tea instead of, "Sugar, citric acid (provides tartness), instant tea, silicon dioxide (prevents caking), natural lemon flavor, artificial color (red #40)". Home-brewed is cheaper and tastes better, too. We don't sweeten our tea - notice that sugar is the first ingredient in the mix...

-we switched from "Brand X" vegetable oil spread to real butter. Wandering through the grocery store one day, we found a small tub of salted butter - the only ingredients being milk cream and sea salt. It tastes pretty much the same as the oleo, but doesn't have nineteen ingredients (of which only three are recognizable - the other sixteen aren't even easy to pronounce).

We make bad choices:

- every once in a while, we purchase and eat tubs of pre-made mashed potatoes. Those loaded mashed potatoes with bacon and ham and chemicals and preservatives....For a small premium of time (maybe twenty minutes), we could prep real potatoes, boil them, and mash them - no chemicals or artificial flavors. This bad food choice comes down to laziness and poor meal planning.

- we buy plain ol' regular supermarket chicken (and pork and beef). Despite reading numerous authors' works on how industrial farms produce chicken (and pork/beef) and the, um...what's the word?..., appalling conditions in which these chickens are raised and processed, we still toss that styro tray of meat into the shopping cart. Why? We do it mostly because we are accustomed to eating meat as a regular protein source, and the industrial stuff costs less at checkout.

We make un-informed (or by-mistake) choices:

- we were in the store picking out some veggies for a salad (our garden wasn't so productive this year), and decided to get some bell peppers. The sign above the peppers stated that they were from a very local farm - good, since we're trying to muddle our way through an "Eat Local Challenge". In an attempt to include Little Man in the shopping choices, we let him choose which pepper (by color) to get. He picked the orange-colored peppers, so we put them in the cart. It wasn't until much later that we noticed the sign about the local farm was only for the green peppers - the orange one we picked was grown in Mexico. Chalk that poor choice up to misleading marketing/cross-eyed sign reading.

- we used to make mistakes by seeing a phrase that seemed to be good on a label, but turned out to be not so good. Examples? Buying wheat bread instead of 100% whole grain wheat bread. All-Natural - manufacturers are allowed to use the term 'all-natural' for synthetic compounds derived from a substance found in nature - that means that high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) can be the main ingredient in an "all-natural" drink or snack. Ever seen HFCS occuring naturally? Going back to our guiding philosophy, do you think that Great-Grandmother would recognize HFCS as food?

It seems that your author has gone off on a ranting tangent and veered away from our central theme - eating locally. Please forgive the interruption.

To get back to the eat local results, we need to take a peek at some of the reasons our family failed. Mainly, it boils down to the fact that we did not draw up our normal weekly menu/shopping list. For a typical week, we plan every meal for each day. The meal plan is (a pain-in-the-a**) a carefully crafted document that tries to provide healthy meals. It also has to plan meals around the schedules of three people, have enough variety to stave off complaints, ensure meals are easy (read: quick - less than thirty minutes) to make, and, above all, make sure that the weekly grocery total stays low. Toss in the goals of sourcing food locally and following the "Great-Grandmother" philosophy, and you end up needing a lot of energy and focus to create the meal plan. It also requires more money to eat clean/healthy/local than it does to eat processed/unhealthy food. This week, we were short on money and time. Thus, we ate things that were quick and easy - but not necessarily good for us. Too bad that the eat local challenge didn't come a week later....after payday!

What the Eat Local Challenge did do for our family was to sharpen our focus on our food. As stated before, we're usually pretty good at following our chosen food philosophy. This week, as we made 'bad' choices (due to time constraints, budget shortfalls, or laziness), we were sure to identify a 'good' alternative. We started to weed out the areas of our eating that we hadn't addressed before due to ignorance or laziness. Even though we failed (bombed/choked/fell short) miserably at the Challenge, we still intend to work the "Eat Local" idea into our meals.

Spoiled Rabbit

I figured I had not posted any new updates on the bunny recently. To sum up her life in one word: "spoiled". She lives in our mud room and, while she spends most of the day in her rabbit hutch, when little man goes to bed we let her roam the mud room. In fact, either Andy or I will sit with her in the mud room and read. We do occasionally let her out when little man is awake, but the visit is often short lived since, like any toddler, he does not quite get the term gentle.

Some pictures of our spoiled rabbit:

She has learned how to jump up onto the bench which is about 2 feet off the ground.

She constantly wants attention.

"I know my food is in there."

"I am going to chew my way out of this mud room. "

Small Farms Food Festival........Or Not

Since we have lived here, I have wanted to go to the Small Farms Food Festival at Shelburne Orchards. It boasts of all sorts of wonderful kids activities and a chance to sample food from several small local farms. In their defense, I will say it was a great chance to sample food from several local farms, some of which I had never heard of before. Among those our favorites were Stony Pond Farm, Taylor Farm, Vermont Pickle, Bread and Butter Farm, and Folk Foods. There were some that were not among our favorites, but I won't go there.

Now with that out of the way, while I loved sampling the food from local farms, I will probably never go to the Small Farms Food Festival every again. You see, I have this thing for having to pay $5 to get into an event and not actually getting anything for free and having to deal with the large crowd. Now some could argue that the music was free, but that just isn't going to do it for me, when they are charging $2 for the tractor ride around the orchard and their supposed "hay maze" is a short tunnel that the kids have already done a pretty good job of destroying. Did I mention we were there within the first hour of them being open? Being a big festival family (apple festivals, kids festivals, brewers festivals, garlic festivals, you name it), I understand how this whole thing should work. Either you charge to get in and have some (not all, I understand people need to come out on top at these things) things for free, or you don't charge to get in and charge for everything. Honestly, I really don't care as long as you don't charge me to get in and then charge for everything you have to offer.

OK, I am done with my little rant for the day and am going to enjoy some more of the fresh bread that we picked up. Although, if I wait a little bit, there will be warm fresh bread. I have noticed that when we go to these things, my husband comes home and tries to outdo any bread maker I have just bought bread from. Did I mention he has not baked bread since May when his parents came to visit? (From the editor: it's been too hot to run the oven in the house!)

I love this time of year!

The farm down the street from us.

For Comparison

You've all heard me complain about the soil in my garden. This past week we purchased a soil test kit because my dad is bringing us blueberry bushes and we want them to survive, so we actually tested a few different areas. The one to the left is the soil from our vegetable garden, the one to the right is where we are going to put it next year. Need I say more?

Eat Local Challenge

During the month of September, Vermont does this 'eat local' challenge. Andy and I have always talked about doing it, since we eat a lot of local food, but have never actually attempted to do it. The challenge is to eat food from local producers for a month. Now, the degrees of local vary from person to person and some people go all out and some people make certain exceptions to the rule (salt, for example, is not produced locally). Some people vary their definition of local, 50 miles from home, 100 miles, comes from Vermont, etc.

Because I am not taking the holistic approach, here is the definition for our family: It must be produced in the state of New Hampshire or Vermont. My dad often brings food over with him from New Hampshire when he comes (he has already told little man he is bringing carrots for his bunny tomorrow) and since it is cross-country season, I have races along the Vermont/New Hampshire boarder and one that actually takes place in New Hampshire. That and I grew up in New Hampshire, so why not? Also if we already have the food in the house, we're eating it! Spices and things like that do not count (I like salt, get over it!) and all bets are off tomorrow when we go to the fair.(YAY! THE FAIR! FRIED DOUGH!-pardon the interruption,it's just your editor) Although, they do have a few booths that do sell local food like maple creemees and apple crisp. Other than that, we are eating locally.

Here are some highlights so far:

The weather has been hot and it is much cooler outside than in this week, so we had friends over to hang out in the back yard and enjoy the evening. My enticement: pie! Of course, one of my other friends brought pizza and wine, which was just as good. We also had the friend who we are pretty sure bailed because she is the only one with air conditioning in the group and she didn't want to leave it

OK, so this one is kind of cool. Our school has this crazy senior project that all students have to do called graduation challenge. Because of the project, the middle schools that feed into our school, do something called an 8th grade challenge. This one kid, Alec, took a family recipe and went into business selling these pretzels http://www.alecsspicypretzels.com/. They became so popular that he now sells them everywhere. They are pretty good.

I was just impressed that Andy found meat that didn't cost a fortune. (It did cost a small fortune - I just wanted local chicken.)

This one is actually the source of some debate in our family. Andy hates corn, but I love corn on the cob in the summer. Little Man not only loves it, but has a ton of fun shucking the corn beforehand. Mommy 1 Daddy 0

Happiness is......

What comes from my garden!

And when my hubby finally updates his blog (he makes me laugh).

Home Sweet Home

One of my aunts often refers to Camel's Hump in Vermont as "her" mountain and often talks about how she likes to travel, but can't wait to be home. Last week we were away visiting family in Virginia, and while I'll admit we had a great time, and I loved seeing all of them, I could not wait to be home. Thankfully my husband was at home carefully documenting what I was missing.

There is just something about Vermont and the other New England (I grew up in the White Mountains) states that is just different. As you travel north, you slowly feel all the stress and tension going away and begin to enjoy the beautiful scenery around you. And then at some point you leave the Interstate (there are not many places in northern New England right off the highway) and begin to meander through beautiful secondary roads. Of course all that said, what I really missed was in my back yard.

I have worked very hard to get my garden into shape (and probably have one more summer to go before I can begin to truly play in it) and this time of year by far has the most "fireworks".

Then of course there is my sad vegetable garden. While sad, I still love it. And I missed it very much

And so did little man.

And with that, I happily declared to my husband that I would not be leaving New England -and possibly Vermont- again during the month of August (I have weirdly enough also declared this about February, the coldest month in Vermont).