yesterday, we made homemade pizza. BBQ chicken pizza to be exact. it was delicious. kenny grilled the chicken to perfection with my favorite BBQ sauce (i love making my own sauce, but i love this flavor in the summer months, despite all the prefab ingredients!) and it had just the amount of mozarella and BBQ sauce on the crust.

we enjoyed yesterday’s pizza with a local white wine and a bag of potato chips (a compromise between our favorite ways to eat pizza).

let’s talk about making our own pizza crust now, shall we? i love sending out requests to you all for your best recipes. (i am holding onto all of your salsa recipes for as soon as our tomatoes and peppers are ripe.) we love to make our own crusts, and kenny’s been pretty pleased with the crusts that we’ve tried so far. but i’m picky. and there’s just this little flavor thing in the doughs that we make that doesn’t taste right to me. i read this morning that the secret is to use bread flour instead of all purpose flour. i’m trying that next. but i thought i’d send out a request for your favorite homemade pizza crust recipes. i’ve got all the ingredients for some more pizza (more BBQ chicken and some pepperoni for the less adventurous pizza eaters, namely everyone under 5 in our house).

so, email or leave a comment with your favorite dough recipe as soon as possible. or your computer will blow up.

just kidding.

i’ve linked to jennifer’s blog, “Et Tu?” before, but i absolutely must point you to her article in America Magazine, found here.

it’s brilliant and lovely. she takes a controversial, yet important subject and wraps it in grace.

we are keeping very busy being outside. depsite the recent raindrops, we’ve had some great weather days and have been enjoying some play and outside yardwork. we’re FINALLY getting to the front door area that i can’t stand. i hope to have before and after pictures eventually, but the work we’re doing is minimal since i have big plans to add a big country front porch eventually.

i’ve been doing a bit of sewing. remember how i got into sewing just a year ago with these fun pants (that’s three diffferent links) for our trip to the beach? i found a great tutorial online (thanks to polka dot creations) for bandana pants and i just had to try them out for rowan and sawyer. here is the finished product:

i recommend this sewing project to all of you who have a sewing machine. the directions were easy, clear and it was fun to do! and at $2.00 a pop, i can make more, more more! if you have only little girls, i’ll bet you can get a cute skirt out of one bandana really easily (go ahead and put me up to the test…i’ll try it for you!).

i haven’t been able to get them down to adam’s small size yet. maybe i can do a bunch of cutting and sewing to see what i come up with. he needs a pair for our vacation too!

i leave you with the following image. we’re having trouble feeding the hummingbirds again this year, as our new hives-of-thousands-o-bees have decided that hummingbird water is just as good as flower pollen. or else that red plastic flower really looks like a flower to them:

this is what we fight every spring, summer, and fall. the deer tick:

that little poppy-seed-sized bug is what gives a human of any size lyme disease. we search the boys’ every night for the little buggers. until the first snow that sticks. once the snow melts in march, we start the nightly bug-check.

i really don’t know what’s worse – the bear, or the tick. your thoughts?

rowan and sawyer had their first, ever outside-the-home-without-mom-or-dad-hovering (well, sort of) learning experience last week in the form of a local Vacation Bible School program.

our church is too small and, well, let’s just keep it at that…too small to have a VBS and the older two are finally old enough to attend, so i signed them up at the local church and i can’t tell you how much they (and we!) enjoyed it.

i don’t remember much about VBS, but i attended it as a student and a helper in my (Orthodox Presbyterian) church growing up. i feel as though i liked it because i couldn’t wait for our boys to get involved in one. and i think VBS has changed quite a bit since i was a kid. the church used a VBS package curriculum that really (REALLY!) resonated with the kids. the church was packed with nearly 100 kids every day, and roughly 25-30 adult helpers. the church was barely bigger than our house, but it was doing big things for the families of our little town. i nearly choked up when i saw rowan and sawyer doing all the motions to all the songs the first few times i dropped them off. i think i was the only parent who didn’t really drop off my kids: i walked them in and stayed for every opening, and got there early enough to attend the closing “ceremony” each day (like the geek that i am!). I couldn’t wait for bible school. and the boys were giddy each morning as we drove the country road to the church. we have a cd of all the songs they sang throughout the week and it’s playing nonstop in the house and in the car.

even though we plan to start homeschooling in the fall (with curriculum…a lot of homeschoolers say that they homeschool from the child’s day of birth, so i feel the need to clarify), i love how much they loved this experience.  i loved how it changed their “God conversations” just slightly. the
theme of the week was God’s power, so they were all about how much
power and strength God had. i have their daily papers hung up in the
kitchen and i plan to go over their daily lessons from last week. am i
a homeschooler or what???

one thing i didn’t groove on was how much i actually missed them! no doubt the first day was nice as adam and i had lots of quality time together, but by the second day we were both bored. next year, all three boys will attend. if adam ever decides he’s not a baby.

a week ago, the boys and i met a friend and her kids for a hike in the woods. it was a lovely day and we were shaded by big trees so we weren’t too hot. unfortunately, my left shin met a not-so-nice tree stump sticking up out of the ground and i got one nasty looking scratch. i was afraid to look at it for two days, but when i finally did, it looked yucky. and by that second day, my lower leg began to hurt. of course i was freaked out that i had a blood clot, or an infection, or my leg was going to fall off from gangrene. all from that nasty little tree stump.

so i made an appointment with a doctor and i was there this morning. of course, the leg pain subsided and the scratch looks much better, and the doctor said it was healing quite nicely and said i had no blood clots (ha!), but asked if my tetnus was up-to-date. i had no idea, but i so wanted to tell him that “yes! i just got a tetnus shot last week. thanks doc, i’ll be on my way.” but honestly i have no idea when my last tetnus was, and i’m a horrible liar.

so when the nurse returned with the shot, i took a big breath and let him have my arm for the shot. everyone knows that tetnus shots are fairly painful. but i never even felt it. whew. piece of cake!

but now? i can barely lift my left arm. so that’s what they mean by tetnus shots aching and hurting and oh my lord can i take an advil for this?

i missed week one because i couldn’t pull together a meal with strawberries and asparagus – the only two things in season right now! week two will be published at farm to philly. stay tuned for more delicious meal ideas!

so i did more searching and purchasing this week. i splurged and went with local meat sold at a local family farm. i’m also leaning on their strawberries this week as we’ll probably be picking and freezing some from another local u-pick farm later in the week for our fall and winter months.

i’m turning this meal into a lunch as this is so up the boys’ alley for lunchtime goodness.

eggs (from our chickens) – fried. hopefully i’ll be makingsome local butter later in the summer
local smoked sausage with locally made horseradish cheese (3 miles to the farm where we bought it, 10 miles from the farm that processed them)
strawberries, grown 3 miles away.

i’m having trouble finding locally grown grains. i called a place that sells locally milled grains to ask if they also grew it and they said they get it shipped in form the midwest. and that defeats the purpose of this whole challenge, right? i’d like to make a quiche with our eggs soon, but it might have to be a frittata.

here’s a fun little project that rowan, sawyer, and i did over the past week. homemade (washable!) placemats!

i found this project idea in amanda soule’s the creative family and it turned out to be ideal for rainy summer days (of which we’ve had plenty over the past few weeks, along with those few days in the 90s). we were goign to do it when ramona was visiting, but were having too much fun outside! instead we made one for her after she left and we’ll send it to her.

our friends just bought a new house, so to help make it a home for their 1- and 2-year-old boys, we made them their own placemats for their kitchen table. the material is canvas and i just bought a cheap canvas drop cloth from lowes for $9. i’ll probably get several placemats out of the amount of canvas the drop cloth provides. it’s inexpensive (much more so than buying it by the yard at a fabric store) and i love the feel of the canvas for the finished placemat.

you need a sewing machine to finish, but if your kids like to color or paint, this is an ideal proejct. we used fabric markers, but you can use fabric or acrylic paint as well. i’ll venture into that when i have the patience and energy for a big clean up!

happy birthday, little adam!

you are the first smith boy to have a second birthday and NOT have a younger brother in the house. your big brothers adore you, look after you, include you, and can’t remember life in the house without you. even if sawyer wasn’t so sure about you at first:

your daddy and i are amazed at how quickly you’ve grown, how different you are than your older brothers, and regardless of how much of a handful you are at times, how much of a blessing you are to us.

we are blessed to be your parents, adam henry! happy birthday to you….