Sugar

A few nights ago, I wanted to do something fun with Joey without all the other kids. It seems like it's harder to find one-on-one times with each child, so when I catch a minute, I try to make the most of it. I started pointing to different places on my face and asking her to name them. If she got it wrong, I tickled her, so she intentionally got some wrong. I asked her some easy ones (nose, eyes, ears) and some trickier ones (eyebrow, ear lobe). When I pointed to her cheek and said, "What's this?", she said, "That's my sugar!". I don't even know if she knew the actual name for her cheek or not.

Au Revoir, Chapel Hill!

So last night was Jimmy's last night of Chapel Hill forever. No more papers. No more problem sets. No more trips to Chapel Hill. When he got home last night, he told all the kids that he was really done. It still doesn't seem real. He walked with the graduates on Mother's Day but still had one more class to take. That really made NO SENSE to the children! Anyway, Yay Yay for us!

Vegetable Mixup

So we have found and bought into a local CSA to get some organic produce, fresh from the farm. Actually, it's not exactly local. The farm is on Powhatan Road in Clayton. How odd is that? My grandparents attended Powhatan FWB church on Powhatan road. You pass by the church and keep trucking and you finally get to the farm. We only bought half a share just to see how it would go. I didn't want to have lots of leftover food wasted, but I think next year we'll buy a whole share. We get a box of produce a week. So far we've gotten...collards, spinach, garden peas, cabbage, squash, zucchini, cucumbers, and basil.

Basically what I do is get the box, find out what we have, look up recipes in my cookbooks or on the internet, and then throw something together. We've had spinach lasagna, cabbage cooked with bacon, squash with nutmeg, and broiled zucchini. Things that I wouldn't have tasted before are now options for me because I spent time cooking them. Everything I've cooked has been pretty good. My children haven't fallen in love with any of it yet besides the spinach lasagna, but they have tried every new recipe. To me, this is a plus. At least they're getting a taste for all different kinds of vegetables. I especially love the fact that I'm getting fresh vegetables from Powhatan Road in Clayton, so close to my grandmother's house where I used to get fresh vegetables from :).

The first week all we got was spinach and collards. I got up early Sunday morning and began freezing the collards and making spinach lasagna. Later on that week we determined that I had actually made collard lasagna and frozen the spinach using "freezing collards" directions. Jimmy kept eating it and said it tasted pretty good. He was surprised that I had gotten it mixed up, but my grandmother never messed with spinach, and when she did collards, I didn't really help because there was no "before-the-kitchen" work to do. When she did corn, I helped silk. When she did peas, I helped shell. No ahead of time stuff was necessary for collards, so she pretty much did it all. Anyway, it gave us something to laugh about!