Random pics from early summer

Fielding is a miraculous eater. I don’t know if it’s possible to express the extent of my gratitude for his willingness to glom on whatever I put on his tray. He had his 1 year check-up recently and, of course, as seems to be the pattern for the Gray boys, he’s pretty petite. But at least I know he’s getting lots of good stuff every day, because he’s the kid that cries when the tofu and veggies on his plate run out.

I gave Sawyer this really awesome haircut at the beginning of the summer. Eventually the front go so long that he started to complain about his hair being in his eyes—but it was so cute! Chris finally took the clippers to it about a week ago :-(

This was a naughty behavior that I took a picture of, and then promptly nipped in the bud. No more dishwasher-escalade!

Oh yeah, Chris’ father’s day dinner! This was YUMMY. Argentine beef with chimichurri sauce (the greenish-red stuff next to the meat), Israeli couscous, and fennel-apple salad.

For dessert: ginger stout cake and stout ice cream. And man was that ice cream stout-y.

Proud papa and his offspring.

I had the camera with me early one morning when I was out on a walk with Stella. I thought, “Man, do I live in a beautiful place,” and snapped this pic of our neighborhood and the snowcapped Rockies behind it.

The garden got a late start this year, but did manage to bear some fruit. These are the raspberry bushes that we planted last year, and boy have they paid off! The first harvest last about three weeks and was amazing! There is supposed to be another one in September, but we’ll see.

The main reason for the late start with the garden is that we added two new small plots. This one has three kinds of tomato plants, two kinds of eggplant, and yellow squash.

The other one has pumpkin, lettuce, oregano, basil, carrots, and butternut squash. Yup, all of that crammed into that tiny space. My idea was that the vining plants like pumpkin would root there, but would wander off an occupy other parts of the yard eventually.

And here’s the main plot—in late May, at least. Now it’s a jungle. Have had amazing spinach, lettuce, beets, chard, loads of basil, as well as zucchini and cucumbers.

Giving up, in a manner of speaking, or maybe settling.

I’ve been insanely neglectful of our family blog this year. And I think one of my new years resolutions was actually to be better about keeping it up to date. But I swear that it’s not entirely my fault. Blame it on technology. And logistics. And a small dose of perfectionism. By that I mean that I hate to make a blog post of recent happenings when there are previous events that I still haven’t recorded. And so what happens is that I keep putting off catching up because I have an intimidating backlog, which of course continues to grow because I’m procrastinating taking care of it. It’s a vicious cycle which is actually only vicious to me, because I feel guilty for not doing a better job recording the touching day-to-day happenings of our growing family. So my conclusion is that I have to just stop fretting about the past and hunker down in the present: I’m just going to start posting from now, and not worry about what is past. Maybe I’ll catch up eventually, but I’m not going to hold myself to it, or I’ll never get started. The first order of business will be to at least post what's currently on the camera's memory card--brace yourself for a bunch of randoms.