It's Been A While......

I know it's been a while since I've posted when I had to stop and think a minute to remember the name of my blog so I could get to it online!!!  Oh well.  There have been no shortage of things to write about and plenty of pictures to post, but it takes time to keep up a blog and my time has been spent on more important things lately!

In a nutshell:

The garden has died down.  I used the last of the spinach in supper tonight and there might be a bit of kale that is still hanging on; there may be an herb or two that's still usable, but other than that, the winter has finally taken over.  I never do as good a job of wintering it over as I'd like to.  It's an excellent idea to plant cover crops for both erosion control and the replacement of nutrients into the soil, but I never seem to make that last step!    I canned corn for the first time this year, a new kind of apple pie filling, about 4 new kinds of jam, and venison stew for the first time as well as everything else I usually can.  At my highest point, I had nearly 700 full jars in the basement, but it's amazing how quickly they start to empty!

We went on a camping trip in late October.  We drove south on the Parkway all the way to the end, camping in different campgrounds along the way.  I hadn't been along the southernmost 200 miles of the Parkway since I was a little girl, so I enjoyed driving down it SO MUCH.  It was absolutely breathtaking.  We drove through fall foliage that was at peak, to past peak, to trees that were completely bare at the highest elevations.  It was all seriously breathtaking.  Halfway through the trip, we met up with some Mazda RX-7 enthusiasts and drove along with them for a day and camped with a group of them for one night.  We had to cut our trip short thanks to the threat of Hurricane Sandy coming through, which in hindsight  we were VERY glad we did.  The heater had stopped working on our camper and we would have FROZEN if we'd stayed any longer.  We had a wonderful time on our trip; I look forward to the possibility of camping next year.

Chuck the steer is no more.  We raised him until he was just over 500 lb and butchered him mid October.  I thoroughly enjoyed milking Daisy and owning a milk cow, and enjoyed hand raising Chuck, but I also enjoy not being tied down to the house to make sure they're fed and cared for or milked.  I love raising our own meat so much and having copious amounts of delicious raw dairy.  And I don't mind the work.  The kids LOVED caring for them with me, but gosh, it's nice to not have to figure out if I have to feed Chuck before or after supper and so on and so forth.  I guess I want my cake and eat it too.  Let's see; I want my milk and drink it too? :P  I don't know if there are more farm animals in our future or not.  I still would really really love to raise chickens and hogs.  :)

The kids are growing by leaps and bounds, every last one of them.  Elizabeth is talking up a blue streak.  She'll be 2 two weeks from today.  Wow.  How did that happen!?  She amazes me at how many colors, letters,and signs she knows.  I think she's asked "What's that?" more than any other child.  Savannah and Alan are both doing online math lessons which they love and online typing lessons which they love.  Katie Mae just wrote her name for the first time today all by herself and did a fantastic job!  Savannah, Alan, and I have spent parts of yesterday and today making paper snowflakes.  We've made 60 snowflakes that we've kept.  It's just so much fun to see what creation you can come up with next!  Now we need to decorate with them!

As anyone probably already knows that is reading this, we had the strange and bizarre occurrence of a scared deer jumping through the girls' bedroom window 3 weeks ago.  Basically, the deer turned our house upside down, wrecking the inside of most of our home before Aaron had to shoot it before it caused any further damage.  Life since then has been rather interesting.  With some help from our homeowner's insurance, we're doing some replacing of flooring, repainting, and several other improvements that we've discovered need to be made.  It took 3 days before we could even live in the house again the damage, blood, and hair were so covering our entire house.  We've been without carpet for those three weeks and on dirty sub-flooring for the past week, but as I type this, I'm taking in the delicious aroma of 16 new sheets of plywood next to me in the living room corner just waiting to be laid.  Our house will certainly look a good bit different once we've gotten it put back together! It looks like it may be as much as another month before everything is put back together, but we're making it work!!  I think the newness has started to wear off what with all 4 kids sleeping in one room since the girls' room is gutted and being used as a storage room.  I keep it new by letting them switch off who sleeps on the air mattress and who sleep in the bunk bed.  The bunk bed has new appeal ever since the air mattress sprung a leak last night, so they're now sleeping on the floor!  Living in the small community we live in, it took less than 24 hours for the local paper to call us to ask for our story; it can be found here.