1. I spent September canning. I'm not at home, but I plan to post a list of everything I canned over the season. The first week in October, I peaked at 300+ jars waiting in the basement. I plan to can soups and dried beans occasionally over the winter and maybe more apples, but the season ended abruptly with a hard freeze and three inches of snow the second week in October. I am a big fan of my KitchenAid mixer attachments and the pressure canner I got for my birthday.
2. I'm thinking about doing NaBloPoMo to attempt to jumpstart my blogging again. We'll see how that goes.
3. We're waiting for Dan's sister to have her first baby. This is my first niece or nephew born since my kids were born (Dan's older sister's kids were born before I was around or while I was in college) and it's so fun to have the anticipation of a new family member without the fear of labor and postpartum recuperation looming in front of me. It looks like I'll be winning the birthday pool since everyone else guessed dates that have already passed but I went for November 1st because I'm a big meanie who had really late babies and sort of wants everyone else to be late too. She hit the 41 week mark a few days ago. I made a bunch of diapers, gowns, sleepers, soakers, and longies for the kiddo with the arrangement that if I need them for a third child, she'll lend them back to me. If she has a boy, there will be many bins of blue clothes waiting for her. My boys are really excited about their cousin and have asked all the fun questions about how babies are born in the past months.
4. We're plodding along with the Dave Ramsey program. If we hadn't had to replace Dan's car this summer (we bought his sister's 2001 Toyota Echo and have been very happy with it), we would be debt-free except the mortgage by now. This fall we started paying preschool tuition, saving for next year's pre-k, saving for self-employment taxes, dealing with a lower salary for Dan (whose school didn't lay anyone off but froze all salaries), and less nannying income for me, so our snowball has nearly disappeared. I think we'll have the student loan paid off by spring at the latest.
5. We're hoping that a 2010 baby will join our household. After very quick conceptions with Peter and Leo, we're learning more patience this time around. By golly, I can't plan my life out after all. There's some relief in that -- part of me felt weird having that much control over my fertility. I wonder how much of it is my being 6 or 4 years older versus random chance.
6. Five of our six chickens are now laying -- the first began on Labor Day, the second was a few days later, the third and fourth trickled in eventually, and the fifth just started this week. The biggest surprise has been Queen, one of our Americaunas, is laying brown eggs instead of the brownish-green that Stripey lays. The Barred Rocks were the first three to lay. We'll see how long it takes Raccoon to get going. We have a lightbulb on a timer going on from 3:30am-8am so their days will be long enough to continue laying through the winter. The eggs are bigger than medium now, working their way up to large. At first, they're peewee size, about 40g. Now they're 50-54g (large is 57g).
7. I'm on Twitter a lot, so if I disappear for weeks, head over there to hunt me down (the link is on the right).
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