Battle Wounds

I confess that I was a bit prideful when it came to my canning. Well, I've been humbled. On Wednesday I burned myself very badly (a severe second degree burn). I don't recommend holding jars full of apple slices while filling with boiling hot pie filling. I had to sleep in a chair with my hand in ice water overnight to get the burning pain to stop.

Since I've been complaining about how bad my burn is to a lot of you, I tried to photograph it so you can all see my battle wounds.

This pic shows how it wraps around to the inner side of my thumb.

This one shows how long it is (from my cuticle down to just above the bottom knuckle).

This one shows how far it stands up.

And this is just another shot of how gross it is.

I have to put a clean dressing on it every day for the nest week to keep out infection. So far so good. I hear it should take about 14 days to heal, which means no more softbal for me this season:(.

Brushing teeth

Jane loves brushing her teeth, and I love watching her. When I walked in the other day, I heard her spitting, "puh, puh, puh" in rapid fire succession. Of course, she never duplicates when I have the camera, but this is a brief clip that hopefully lets you enjoy this experience too. I alos love that big grin!

Harvest Time!

We have a peach tree in our backyard and the peaches are finally ripe! On my first day of canning, I canned 14 quart jars of peaches and 10 pints of rasperry-peach jam. I always feel like such a domestic goddess when I'm done, that I just needed to show you all how beautiful my work was! (Thanks for humoring me!)

Jane had a birthday!

Jane's birthday was a few days ago. She is now 2 years old! I made a piggy cake for her. We were both quite pleased with how it turned out. (Thanks for the idea, Meg!)

She really loves her new talking baby doll, with bottles and stroller. She loves drawing with her magna-doodle, and reading her new books, with me first, and then to her babies (and Piggy) at naptime. (As a side note to anyone looking for fun stories, Jane's favorites (we read them daily) are "Duck on a Bike" and "Alice the Fairy" both by David Shannon, and the good old stand-by "Goodnight Moon" by Margaret Wise Brown.)

Here is a picture of Jane taking care of her new baby.

I thought this was a cute one of her laughing because her Piggy was sitting on her baby's lap in the stroller.

Labor Day Fun

We usually go to my parent's house on Labor Day for a barbecue and a final swim before they put away their pool for the winter, but this year the weather didn't cooperate. There was a huge thunderstorm and there was even hail! The kids thought it was perfect weather! They all dressed up in their winter boots and gloves and then wore raincoats and ponchos. They were having so much fun I just needed to take a few pictures. I thought these were some good still shots.

I also got this short video of them jumping in the rain.

And to give you a better sense of just how wet they really got, I'll include this clip too.

NFL Week 1

Kirk was in the starting lineup for the Bills this weekend. He played well against a pro bowl defender and the Bills won. Here is an article from a newspaper in Buffalo about the game with some quotes from Kirk:
http://www.buffalonews.com/sports/story/433589.html