Craft time- June.

Due to the fact that mama keeps turning the thermostat lower and lower (and doesn't feel bad because we live in a wonderful, well-insulated shady brick house!), we've been forced to spend the summer keeping ourselves busy inside. And the closer we get to having this baby, the grumpier mama gets (see the Taller Girls blog for the Grumpy Gertie story). So we need to find quiet entertainment for fear of getting thrown out a window.

Henry gets to stay up an hour later than me at nap time, on the condition he play quietly and mostly leave the grump alone. To help out with this, papa found an old MP3 player and loaded it up with Henry's favorite songs. One day, he kept himself happy doing a whole book of dot-to-dots while listening to a playlist consisting of the Beatles, Johnny Cash, the Beach Boys, and the Kinks.

Mama found a website that had graphing coloring pages. One page is a graph and the key tells you what color to color which square. Mama LOVED these when she was a kid and has many fond memories of doing these in 6th grade while Mrs. VonDeylon read books to the class after lunch.

Here's two finished projects. Henry also likes doing these and now mama needs to find more on the interwebs, which is proving to be difficult, because she doesn't know what they are called. Any help would be appreciated, all you teachers that read the blog!

I don't have an attention span like Henry's, but I did settle down for a little while to color my horsie book. Mostly, I just like moving all the crayons and markers from one container to another.

Have we told you about the CSA we joined? Miss Kerri found a farm that sells weekly shares for $10. And this isn't like the share we used to get in Wisconsin, that mostly consisted of bizarre, obscure vegetables, like ramps, sorrel, parsnips, and black radishes. This share is the bread and butter of CSAs and for each of the first two weeks, we've gotten no less than 20 pounds of tomatoes, a bag of sweet peppers, a bag of hot peppers, three cucumbers, and a big muskmelon. (Side note: no one calls them muskmelons down here. It's a cantaloupe, or else you get a crazy look.) So we've had to find something to do with all of this produce.

The tomatoes have been our first job. Not only do we have the 20 pounds from the share, we also get another 5 pounds or so a week from the three plants out back. We eat a ton and then mama tries to preserve the rest. The first week she dried a bunch on the food dehydrator and ended up with a little bag of "sun"-dried tomatoes. The next week she cut up all 20 pounds and made spaghetti sauce. She actually wasn't paying attention to the recipes she had pulled up on the computer and got halfway through a salsa recipe before it dawned on her that she was adding a lot of peppers and why were they calling for lime juice and cumin in spaghetti sauce? Luckily, she came to her senses in time and managed to salvage the sauce. Amazingly, the 20 pounds she blanched, peeled, cored, seeded and boiled cooked down to only about 8 pounds of sauce. Aunt Jenni says this is why pioneers had big gardens.

The real adventure has been the hot peppers. Miss Kerri mentioned to mama that she's dried them and ground them up for a super spicy pepper blend. Mama thought she'd give it a try and quickly poo-pooed all of the advice she saw on the interwebs about how hot a habanero pepper really was. So she sliced them all up, threw them on the dehydrator and was fine. About 15 minutes later, she moved the dehydrator outside because it was spreading some serious fumes around the house. Hours later she made the mistake of touching her eye with her hand and got a stinging surprise. But not too bad. the big shock came hours later when she went outside to move all of the dried peppers off the trays. I don't know what she touched, but she spent the rest of the night alternating rubbing her hands with baking soda and socking them in ice water. Never again will she turn her nose up at a hot pepper. They are now in a bag in the freezer and mama is too afraid to try anything with them.

Update: she did cut up a few more chili peppers for the sauce and found that Solarcaine aloe vera burn gel works well to counteract the juice. She's also sworn to never touch a habanero pepper again.