pumpkins and apples

what a fantastic weekend we just had!!! it was a fun fall celebration all around. good friends from portland and my cousin jim and his family made it up for the festivities.

first we went up to rasmussen farms pumpkin patch (sadly this may be the last year for the farm as the owners are retiring). the kids had a great time picking out their pumpkins, running through the corn maze and playing on the tractor.






then back home we borrowed a cider press and pressed some apples! it was so. much. fun!!! a few warm cider barn burners to drink and everyone was having a great time.

....my friend camille cranking the press

....the kids checking out the yummy juice coming out

....my turn with camille's husband reuben working the crank

....my cousin jim and his wife megan (who by the way has two little kids, is 7mo pregnant with #3 and is still working the cider press... she rocks!)


so some of that cider made it's way into buckets to be fermented into hard cider (under the direction of my wine making friends camille and reuben) .....we are looking forward to a little something to warm our evenings this winter.


....and then to finish off an already fabulous weekend we also made our traditional halloween monster cookies!! yum!

seriously good times!!!!

canning madness

we are in the midst of a full force canning madness right now!! we had a very cool summer (and thus not a great harvest). typically most of our canning would be done by now usually by the end of aug or early sept. we did an mid-summer jam can (blueberry, raspberry, strawberry jams) in july and not much since (though i have been freezing any vegetables we harvested in the meantime so it wasn't a complete loss).

now with the frost looming we had to throw in the towel and finally pull what tomatoes we had and put up what we could. todd's mom judy came out to visit last weekend and got caught up in processing tomatoes for sauce (bless her heart she just dove right in coring and chopping). even with our paltry harvest we managed to put up some salsa, pizza sauce and plain old canned tomatoes.

we also canned a fair bit more green than red this year. in addition to canning the typical dilly beans (just delicious in a good bloody mary), we also for the first time put up some pickled green tomatoes and some green tomato chutney this year (we had to do something with all those green tomatoes!!!). and last but not least some salsa verde with the tomatillo harvest and the chiles.

now this time of year we normally are canning our pears (which is why with the summer harvest and the fall harvest all going into cans in the last couple of week i can truly call it a canning madness).... we canned two batches of pear butter, plain old pears in simple syrup, and for the grownups some pears in brandy....yummm!

thankfully i think we are near the end of our canning craze....maybe with all our 'extra' time we can actually finish painting our house...and the garlic needs to get in the ground...and... and.. and...needless to say life continues to be busy on our homestead in the hood.

ten

today we celebrate our tenth anniversary. wow. time does certainly fly!

here's a little peek back to that beautiful day up on mt. hood ten years ago.....

how lucky am i to be married to this man...and have this life of fun and spirit and love.....plenty to celebrate that is for sure.

the first ten years have been a blast....and i am happily looking forward to the next ten!

happy anniversary to us!

malibu wedding

so this post is about a week late but we traveled down to los angeles last weekend for my college roommate lisa's wedding. we left the kids with my dad and again has some great adult time (i told todd that i've seen him more in the past 6 weeks than i've seen him in the past 5 yrs). anyway we had a great great time. many of my college girlfriends came which made it a little reunion and all the more fun.

lisa looked amazing, brian (the groom) dashing, the setting was beautiful and the wedding was fabulous! (not that i had any doubts that lisa could throw a pretty kickin party...she even had it catered by a food truck...kogi korean bbq...yummmm!)

here are a few shots from the wedding......

.......the ceremony

my college girlfriends (me, lisa, hava, renee)......

so wonderful to see good friends!....

.....the newlyweds (they have that just got married glow)

.... hava and her husband adam clearly having a good time

......cutting the cake

.....another happy couple

....ahhhhhhh

.....lisa and i discovered blue raspberry blow pops in college and you know its a good party when the blow pops come out (god bless her for having them at the bar!)

.....the college roommates (19yrs after we first showed up at the dorm room freshman year)

such a fun wedding......great great weekend.

back to school

well we have officially started school. each kid got to choose what they wanted for breakfast on the morning of the first day of school. riley wanted scrambled eggs, grits and bacon. lucy wanted chocolate chip pancakes. luckily they started on different days or we would have been cooking all morning!! i don't know what their food choices say about them but both started their respective school days with full happy bellies.

riley started on tuesday. a big first grader. he just exudes confidence this year as opposed to the nervous anticipation of last year.

lucy started on wednesday. she is all casual ease and smiles.

and so school starts again....hope your back-to-school days were happy too!

summer grand finale

so we have just finished up the end of summer play extravaganza....and what a last week of summer it has been!!!

first we went to sunriver (a resort type place outside of bend in central oregon). the campbell family (my brother and his family, my mom and her partner, and us) rented a house for a week of r and r. we had a great time hanging out, reading books, hot tubbing, playing games.

....momo reading books to lucy and ella

...ella having a little sticker fun...

....the classic 'cousins in a bathtub' shot

...everybody all together...

then we were back home for just a few hours before todd's dad and stepmom came for a visit. they just left this morning. what a lovely visit. it's such a treat to share our lives with them.

and lots of fun to be had too.....a morning at the fish ladders

a great ride on the train with grandma lynn and grandpa dierker

it was a great end to our summer.....now we getting ready for school to start in a couple of days.

anniversary trip

we just returned this morning from a very wonderful trip. in celebration of our upcoming 10th anniversary (can you believe it?), we loaded up our packs and headed out into the backcountry of glacier national park for 6 days!!

we are blessed to have grandparents close who were willing to watch the wee ones. the kids stayed 1/2 the time with my dad and 1/2 the time with my mom. lucky are we (thanks mom and dad!!)

so todd and i have always tried to give anniversary gifts based on the traditional gifts for each year just to make it more interesting and more challenging. for the 10th anniversary the gifts were 'aluminum' or 'tin'. in a creative effort to meet this, todd booked out transportation to glacier on the train (which hopeful was made with one or both of those metals). we hopped the train at the town across the river from us in the evening, slumbered in a sleeping car, and the train delivered us to east glacier park the next morning at 9 am ... pretty awesome.

glacier national park is A-MA-ZING (an i don't use capital letters casually). for all you lovers of the wilderness out there glacier has it all. rugged mountains, glaciers, blue blue alpine lakes, beautiful wildflowers, forests, cascading waterfalls, lots of wildlife, ....it is truly a stunning park.

please join me for a visual tour of our trip.

here comes the train....

all aboard!!!.......

packs on and hitting the trail....

.....the first day took us through this tunnel in the mountain...very cool.

epic views....the effort to reward ratio was very high this entire trip....

soaking some tired feet in a cold alpine lake....

.....lakeside camping was blissful

early morning calm, what a reflection!....

lots of great waterfalls...

....happy trails....

...each camp had well established hanging poles to prevent grizzlies from getting at the food (shout out to todd's aunt nancy for making those brilliantly colored stuff sacks)

....i mean wow....

...you can't fake that color blue.

....the 4th day we enjoyed a wonderfully leisurely morning by a lake before hiking on...

....todd crossing one of several very cool bridges...

....at the end of our trip, after six days of backcountry adventures, we treated ourselves to a night at many glacier hotel built in 1914....a very very cool old lodge, and a well deserved sound sleep on a soft mattress!!

...the happy couple enjoying the sun on the deck of the lodge before getting on the train home.

such an unbelievable trip. i gotta say that after all these years there is no one else i'd rather be on a trail with, and i cannot think of a better way to celebrate 10 years of marriage than going back to our backpacking roots!!