Summer weekend

I love summer.  Always have, I guess, but now, even more so.  We're at the time of the summer when we're in the pool so much, our suits don't have time to dry out between swims.  (Well, mine doesn't, but thanks to Grandma C, the girls have so many suits they could almost wear a different one each day.)   I wonder why I bother putting away the food processor and strainer because I'm washing and cooking up garden veggies every day.  Our counter and kitchen floor are sticky with peach juice and the fridge looks like an Iron Chef vegetarian challenge.  ("The secret ingredients are beets and kohlrabi.")

We're picking cherry tomatoes by the dozen each night and so I no longer have to tell Calla to stop stealing all the tomatoes.  And speaking of vegetables, I should note that while Corrie doesn't share big sister's love of tomatoes, she does follow Calla in adopting broccoli both into her culinary repertoire and into her vocabulary.   The toddler who uses the same word for hand, head and horse ("heee!"), can actually say broccoli, or something fairly close to it.  Quite impressive.

Only a few things dampen my enthusiasm for our current season.  One, the aforementioned mosquitoes, which are big enough to leash these days.  And two, we have a feline situation here.   Due to a terrible tragedy that's not mine to tell, we are foster cat-sitting for a month, bringing us to a total of 3 cats here.  Did you know that when cats are under significant stress, they drool a lot?  Me neither.  Except now Ivy's favorite napping spot (aka my desk chair) is dripping with cat drool and I keep having to break up cat fights.  Cats don't stay in time out, by the way.

We we went blueberry picking this morning, all of us.  The bushes were fairly well picked over, but Joe and Calla got right to work.  Corrie and I, however, re-enacted "Blueberries for Sal" where Li'l Sal eats as many berries as her mother picks.  Where our story differs from that McCloskey classic is that Li'l Sal doesn't scream the whole time because she hates having prickly grass brush her little legs and she woke up too darn early and is missing her morning nap.  Even so, we still ended up with 3 lbs of berries, nearly all of which have now been frozen or cooked down into a dessert sauce.

I could probably keep extolling all the ways I love summer.... but I have to go figure out what to do with the peach butter cooling off in my slow cooker.  It was a good weekend.   And we're just at the All-Star break, so good news... more summer is yet to come.