Playing at the mall

Katelyn and I had lunch at the mall today with a friend we haven't seen in five months and her 3 month old daughter. Before they got there, we of course had to hit the little play area in the middle of the mall. I haven't been here with Katelyn in months. This is a great spot in the winter when it's too cold to play outside, but this time of year I usually just take her to the park. On Wednesday nights when I'm at work Katelyn is either with my neighbors or my parents. On the weeks she's with Grammy and Papa, they take her to the mall to play and eat dinner (spoiled!). All this to say, I haven't been here with her in quite some time and it's amazing to me how much she's grown and how much more she's able to do. Now she can climb up all the things she couldn't before. She loves it!!

This picture makes me laugh because it looks like she's surfing. And I have no idea who that baby is back there, but he sure is cute! :)

Here's some rolling around silliness.

Climbing, climbing and more climbing. My new phrase for Katelyn is "Get off the table." (She likes to climb all over the coffee table now.)

I must say, it was hard to get the kid's picture. She was all over the place and doesn't slow down...ever.

Working out is good and I'm glad I've been losing the weight...but the real benefit is that I can keep up with this speedy little one. :) Whew....

Oh, and I made such the yummy dinner last night. Chicken breast baked in the oven - wrapped in foil with marinade, a fresh onion from the farm and fresh cilantro, fingerling potatoes out of my pastor's family's garden that I roasted with olive oil, salt, garlic powder and fresh rosemary, and then yellow squash and zucchini (from the farm) that I cooked up in a little olive oil with fresh parsley, salt, and red pepper flakes. I am pretty sure I'm going to cry this year when winter comes. Must keep canning and freezing!!! (I really need a little deep freezer.)

A night at the fair

The Bluegrass Fair is in town and Katelyn took a super long nap this afternoon, so it seemed like the perfect evening to bring her to her first fair. Katelyn is a very observant child. She likes to just soak everything in so the fair is an ideal spot for her. She loved it!! All we really did was roam around, eat some popcorn and check everything out. She didn't seem very interested in riding the rides and she's actually too small for all but a few of them anyway. So parking was free, I paid $5 to get in, she was free and the popcorn was $1. I need to enjoy this year at the fair with a two year old. It's officially the cheapest fair I'll ever go to!

Here's my big girl with some big popcorn...

She got to "ride" the tractors

There was a little petting zoo and of course Katelyn just wanted to jump in the pile of hay.

Future Farmer of America...I think this could be true.

Katelyn loved the baby chicks. They were hatched yesterday. So cute.

I love spending time with Katelyn. I love watching her experience something for the first time. She's a little ball of wonder! I think we might have to go to the fair again next weekend. :)

Happy girl

I knew that I couldn't post about vegetables (see next post) and not put up new pictures of Katelyn. Katelyn is a happy (usually), active (always), 2 year-old. She's into everything, has little arms with an incredible reach (not always sure how it's possible she can get ahold of things). She's talking up a storm. I was in the kitchen making dinner last week and I hear her counting to twelve in Spanish in the family room. I didn't know she could do that...Thank you Dora the Explorer. She can sing the ABC song, Itsy Bitsy Spider, Pat-a-Cake, Twinkle Twinkle and can count to 20 (in English). :)

Katelyn has learned to pick the red grape tomatoes in the garden. (I always have to remind her...just the red ones.) Of course as soon as she picks a red one it gets popped directly into her mouth. One day I'll get one too.

Katelyn continues to love eating. She's very good at it and continues to like quite a nice variety of foods. Below she is showing you how she chomps her food. :)

I was trying to catch this moment on film but was a few seconds too late...She was wearing just her diaper and picked up her sparkly purse and her little broom and dust pan. She looked like she was going off to work. Silliness.

Katelyn will sit independently and read for good amounts of time. She knows several of her books by heart and I will hear her "reading" the stories word for word. Utter sweetness.

As I type, Katelyn is watching Finding Nemo. She LOVES this movie. It's the only one of the full-length Disney movies that she'll watch. She likes it when I pretend that I'm the sea turtle...Fin, Noggin, Dude! She just laughs and laughs...big belly laughs. That's the best part of every day...

Summer bounty

This summer my parents and I became members of Berries on Bryan Station (http://berriesonbryanstation.com/index.html), a community supported agriculture farm here in north Lexington. We each get 1/2 a bushel of produce each week that's grown locally and organically. The weather has been perfect this season and there is an abundance of everything. This week, we received a ton of yummy vegetables and berries. I got 7 yellow squash, 2 zucchini, 1 cucumber, a small container of mixed small tomatoes, a bag of small potatoes, a bag of mixed greens, 3 onions, a bag of cilantro, a bag of basil, a pint of blackberries and about a pound of rasberries (that I picked), and a small bouquet of fresh flowers. That was just what I got! My parents got the same pile of stuff. (We've figured out that next year we can share one 1/2 bushel between us.)

All of the food is so good. I cooked up an AWESOME stir fry with olive oil, garlic, onion, zucchini, yellow squash, peas and snow peas from last week's basket, tomatoes, fresh basil and some crushed red pepper, salt and pepper and I mixed in some cheese filled tortellini with a little parmesan on top. Literally everything was freshly picked. TASTY!

This was the perfect summer dish!

Here's the result of last weekend's canning extravaganza. Lots of peach jam, several big jars of halved peaches, and rasberry jam.... Even winter-time will be tasty around here!!

I've had a couple of people ask for the link to the yellow squash pizza crust recipe...so here it is: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Summer-Squash-Pizza-Crust/Detail.aspx My disclaimer is that I haven't cooked this yet myself...I'm just trying to find creative ways to use a ridiculous amount of squash. It looks good though...so I will be trying it soon.

I love summer time!

I love yard sales!

Today my subdivision and another subdivision up the road had their neighborhood yard sales. Cha ching! You know I love a good deal. And honestly, I love roaming through a yard sale. I know there's lots of junk...but I love it when you find the treasures. People get rid of some seriously good stuff....for cheap!! I'm all set to sell Katelyn's old stuff at a consignment sale this fall (get much more than selling it at a yard sale) and I've been giving all my clothes away to our clothing bank at church...so I just didn't have it in me to have my own sale today for all the odds and ends around my house..so I went to check out everyone else's sales.

I spent a total of $6 and got Katelyn 2 pairs of pajamas, 2 pairs of pants for the fall, one t-shirt, one sweater for this winter, a dress for next summer, a shirt for me for 50 cents! (It's great to lose weight...but I can't wear any of my clothes from last year and there is no budget to buy a new wardrobe...plus, I have no plans to stay in the size I'm in now anyway!!), a little play dustpan and broom thing for Katelyn (brand new in the wrapping for a quarter) and a glass pitcher (like new and exactly the same one I've been wanting to buy that's usually $15...I got it for a buck.) Whew....successful morning. I'm not sure why people buy new clothes for their toddlers. They grow so fast and all they are doing is climbing and playing and running anyway. Katelyn moves so fast you can't even see what she has on. :) I got Katelyn about $50 worth of clothes this morning for $4.

The church had a bushel of peaches donated for our kids. We ate them last week, but they weren't going to make it through the weekend...so I am canning 3/4 a bushel of peaches today. I'm making a bunch into jam and then I'm just canning the fruit that was still in the best condition. Definitely didn't want to throw away that much fruit...

The farm where we get our produce from each week is having a bumper crop of squash and zucchini right now and since we are "shareholders" in the farm as members of the CSA...we get our cut of the harvest. This week between mom and dad and I, we got 14 yellow squash and several zucchini...along with all the other vegetables, herbs and berries. I'm going to make a batch of rasberry jam when I'm done with the peaches. I'm trying to figure out how to get squash into everything I cook. I found a recipe for pizza crust that has a bit of wheat flour in it, but it's mostly grated squash...I'm going to try it out. I'll let you know how it goes....

A day to myself

Today was the PERFECT day! I love my daughter with all my heart, but I have not had an entire day to myself, to do whatever I wanted since she came home 14 months ago....and I was really, really needing this kind of day. So I had today off in observance of 4th of July and Katelyn was with her dad...so off I went to Bernheim Arboretum and Forest. Bernheim is about an hour and fifteen minutes southwest of Lexington. It's a 14,000 acre piece of property with 35 miles of trails. The high today was in the low 80's...humidity wasn't bad and there was a bit of a breeze. So I decided a day of hiking would be just what I needed.

Bernheim is really beautiful. The front part of the property is more arboretum-like with a couple of ponds, a little lake, a prairie area, flowers blooming.

Then the back 2/3 of the property is more forest-like and the trails are more rough and wooded. Also beautiful and very peaceful. Once I got back in there other people were few and far between. The solitude was good. The picture below is me at this overlook area that is 75 feet above the trees where I could see the forest below. AWESOME! (And yeah for the timer on the camera...since there was no one else around.)

This is what I could see from the overlook. Spectacular. Have I mentioned that Kentucky is an incredibly beautiful place and I felt so blessed today that the only money I had to spend was money for gas and $6 for my really yummy lunch at a little cafe they had at the visitor center.

One more beautiful shot looking across one of the small ponds. Today was good for the soul.

I hiked a total of 7.5 miles today. Yesterday I hit the official 50 pounds of weight lost. I just know that a year ago I wouldn't have been able to hike anywhere near that far. Katelyn weighs 28 pounds...and she's getting heavy to lug around. I just keep thinking about lugging around almost two Katelyns on my body. No wonder I was miserable and tired all the time. I feel better than I have in more years than I care to count and I'm so excited to start losing the next 50 pounds...