I do apologize for the blog silence over the past couple of weeks. We’ve been busy having a fun summer and that, combined with lots of emails to answer and other stuff has meant that I just haven’t managed to press publish (or even write anything) in a long time. So, in lieu of anything substantive, here’s our last couple weeks, in pictures.
We’ve gone for early morning walks in fancy dresses (thank you thrift stores) and splashed in post-thunderstorm puddles.
Both Mark and Ellie have gotten haircuts. This was Ellie’s very first one (other than the self-inflicted slash a few weeks ago)! Ellie had told me that she wanted to get a hair cut on the day we made her birthday cake for her fifth birthday. But then last Tuesday, she said she wanted it cut NOW! So I got to have fun playing hairdresser.
Not much cut off for almost five years of growing!
so big girl of her!
This was certainly not Mark’s first hair cut but it was the first time that Nik attempted to give him a real hair cut. We had to do it over two days but in the end, he looks super grown up!
with the half-cut style (pretty hipster, right?!?!)
all done!
I also made nutmeg plum jam, my own flavor innovation and my very most favorite kind of jam! I used three different kinds of plums, including shiro plums (those yellow ones), which are my very most favorite kind of plum. I look forward to eating them all year.
I love the color of this jam, which is delicious on French toast!
The dogwood outside our office/playroom window has been a tree of delights for us, including a visit from this woodpecker and almost daily visits from our friend, Mr. Cardinal. (His wife hangs around a lot too.) 
Ellie has been obsessed with drawing a very particular type of fairy/princess/ballerina (formula of her own devising) and then Nik has been working with her to teach her how to write. We have stacks of these drawings now. I’ll devote a whole post to them soon. Suffice it to say, Ellie says she LOVES writing!
Finally, Ellie has initiated Mark into the “cut up vegetables” club. Mark is only allowed a novice’s butter knife at this point. Ellie, however, is relatively proficient with the real thing and Mark is dreaming longingly of the time when he can use a sharp knife too.
They’re cutting up the insides of giant zucchinis to put into compost – perfectly soft for beginner knife handlers!
Don’t be too surprised if you don’t hear from me for another week or two. Based on the way our summer is going, it will probably be fall before I blog much again! In the meantime, if you’re bored, I now have all 4.5 years of my Xanga blog loaded into Salmon and Souvlaki. Look in the archives on the side bar and you’ll see that there are posts going back as far as December 2005. If you read through some of those, you’ll see the less-polished, wild-and-crazy blogger me! 🙂
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Don’t they just look so grown up when they get their hair cut? My Ellie announced one day she wanted hers cut off, as short as Grandma Chisholm (my mom) or Joan’s (if you’ve ever seen Joan Nelson’s pixie cuts). The hairdresser and I both thought a pixie cut was a little too short, so we chopped it at the shoulders, with a promise to cut it shorter if she really wanted it. My, how much older she looks. And now she wants earrings, but I’m going to try to hold her off ’til her 6th birthday. And this is the first year I’ve done plums. Our orchard had Methley plums, and I did two batches and thought that was well enough, but still had four pounds, so after messing with the blackberries I tried to think of something to do with the rest of my plums. They were too squishy for plum dumplings. I remember when I had more peaches than I could sanely do anything with, I ended up making peach butter. Carter and his dad love fruit butters, so I looked up a plum butter recipe. And fell in love. I wished I’d made all the plums into butter. And just drove back to the orchard today to pick the last few plums from the very tip tops of the tree (Jacob had to help), and I’ve got 14 more pounds to turn into butter. I think I’m little crazy. Enjoy the rest of summer! We miss everyone at Faith!
It is amazing how much of a difference a hair cut makes! I haven’t thought about making plum butter before! It sounds wonderful. That will certainly be on the list for next summer! We miss you four also!
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