New (to us)...

We have been casually looking for a new kitchen table since we moved to this house. We didn't really like the look of our old table (white, with medium oak top; very "country kitchen") in our new kitchen (dark brown cabinets and floors with black accents; much more "contemporary"). So we have been looking and found one that we really liked on KSL on Friday; Saturday morning we brought it home. It is counter height with dark wood. It looks so much better in our kitchen, and it's a little bit bigger than our old table too (can seat up to 8 people).

I really love it, although I have to admit that I have to get used to the taller chairs...when we first sat down to eat lunch at it yesterday, Bryan & I both looked at each other and said, "I can't get my chair to scoot in..." Then, after lunch we both couldn't scoot OUT! So, there's a little learning curve to scoot in and out when your feet don't touch the ground, but I think we've got it figured out now!

A few friends have asked for pictures of our house and I haven't done it yet because our yard was just dirt for so long; but here are finally some photos of the house and yard. (In the backyard you'll see our newly "walled around" garden area; Bryan just put that little garden wall in on Friday. We didn't have a garden this year, so you can see where the grass grew into the garden area, but we'll be all ready to go next year!)

Saggy, Baggy Elephant

Yesterday we went to the zoo. There is quite the Baby Boom going on at the Hogle Zoo this year. There was a new Snow Leopard cub, 3 new tiger cubs, a baby giraffe, baby prairie dogs, and of course, the star of the zoo, the new baby elephant. They have not named her yet, but we did get a chance to vote for her name. Tess chose to vote for Apara (a-PAR-a) if I remember correctly. She is dang cute and truly "saggy, baggy." She was playing around and she walks really well except for on the small hill in her enclosure; she'll carefully walk up the hill and then stumble back down it awkwardly, just like a toddler. Tess really loved her, but Miles didn't care much. I thought he would just LOVE to see all the animals, but he mostly acted like it was no big deal. The thing he loved most of all was a magpie that had flown down onto one of the railings. It's just a good thing he was free! :)

Ditto previous post

More canning. This time plum jam. I decided to include a few pictures (and a movie) of the "during" part this time, instead of just the finished product "after."

Millions of peaches, peaches for me...

Yesterday was the day that happens a few times each summer, where I think in the morning "I am so excited to can today!" and in the evening I think "I never want to can anything again." But, then I wake up the next day and see the fruits of my labors and I feel pretty happy/proud/domestic/provident. My friend offered me free peaches from her parents' tree and we canned them together yesterday. At the end of the day, my kitchen was an absolute disaster, but now we have 40 quarts of peaches that we can eat during the upcoming year. It's great! (Plus, I feel so lucky that I had the space to MAKE that mess; in my old kitchen we wouldn't have had the room to make the mess!) And, of course, no self-respecting blogger-who-also-cans would post about canning without sharing the obligatory photos.

I can taste the peach cobbler already!

Also-I just picked a whole bunch of plums (from the same generous friend and her generous parents again!)....let the fun begin again.

Emotional Development

I'm always happy when I see my kids learning, growing, maturing. Yesterday, both kids showed some new emotional development; one made us happy and the other made us kind of sad. I'll start with the sad...

I was at the DI, where I always like to check out the Disney movies for sale. I saw Lion King there and bought it for Tess to watch. Last night after dinner she was watching it, and really liking it. Someone came to the door, so Bryan & I were outside talking for a few minutes. When we came back in, I noticed that Tess was absolutely distraught and had giant tears in her eyes. I asked what was wrong and, crying, she said, "there were some mean guys and they killed the lion's daddy!" And then she started sobbing. I felt so horrible. I truly (cluelessly) didn't even think about the scene where Mufasa dies when I bought the movie. I just figured--hey! It's Disney! It's rated G! It'll be fine!

I started thinking about it and Disney movies have people in them dying all the time, then I realized that it's only the "bad guys" who die. Lion King is the only one I can think of where a "good guy" dies. Anyway, our sweet daughter suffered sorrow for the first time yesterday. It kind of broke my heart. She wanted to turn the movie off and said, "maybe I'll watch it when I'm bigger, like 5 or 9."

But, on to the happy development, Miles is starting to develop his sense of humor and it's really cute. We were watching Wipeout on TV (I guess it seems like all we do in this family is watch TV...) and if you haven't seen that show it's basically just a bunch of people going through obstacle courses and falling off stuff, getting hit by stuff, just "wiping out." While we were watching, Miles starting cracking up everytime someone would wipe out. He had us all laughing at him laughing. Then a few minutes later he tickled me for the first time! He tickled my hand and said, "kih, kih, kih, kih" over and over. He did it again this morning. Pretty fun.

Taller every day...

We finally got some trees planted in our new yard. We wanted to wait until the grass was established so that we didn't completely drown new trees (I think I killed many of my new flowers because we were watering so much with the new grass.) Anyway, we planted 3 trees, and in about 10 years we'll have some shade! Yay! Actually the tree in the backyard is supposedly a very fast growing tree, so maybe we'll get some shade in only 5 years. :)

I thought it would be fun to take "1st day of School" pictures out by the tree each year so we could see how both the tree and the children grow. So here is Tess on her 1st day of Preschool for this year. She is attending a school called "Smarty Pants Preschool" and she has been so excited. We met the teacher and toured the school last Friday and I think it's going to be a great place for Tess. The class has only 8 kids in it and I'm sure she'll have a blast.

(By the way, Tess is in quite a growth spurt right now. Since we moved into this house in December--only 8 months ago--she has grown 2 inches! That seems like a lot to me... Now if only she'd put on about 5 more pounds she could use her car seat with the seat belt "booster style.")