Did you miss me?
I can't believe it's been almost 2 months since I posted. As usual life's been busy, but I've gotten a few things done as well.
Ramadan matched up almost exactly with the month of August this year. Between daily baking and cooking and then dinner and programs at the masjid/mosque, Ramadan related activities took up no less than 5-6 hours each day. Besides the work, I finished handquilting the batik baby quilt, made one scarf for the Special Olympics, crocheted most of an almost twin size throw for DH's birthday and made two simple skirts for myself.
Now that we're in September, we're back to homeschooling. Once again this year, DH and I are teaching (in an informal co-op)not just our kids but now 5 other kids from 3 families. (Biology, English and history for me. Physics and math for dh.) I, also, have one girl who is going to be hanging out with us part-time every weekday since her mom works but still wanted to homeschool her. Mom homeschools in the a.m. then brings her to me and she finishes up whatever she needs to and gets play time with my girls. She's the youngest in their family with both of her sisters grown and married so it's more like she's an only child because of the age difference. She seems to be enjoying herself so far as do my girls. We're still working on balancing social time with assignment time though.
Another friend is about to be put on 3 months bedrest with her second pregnancy. Her husband plans to work from home 3 days a week and take her to preschool/daycare 2 days but he's just asked us if we can watch her at least one of the days he works from home. He's afraid he's going to get too far behind in his work especially since she's a bit of a handful. So there is a possibility that we'll add a 3 year old to the mix once a week. I don't think my house will ever be clean again. ;D
My garden didn't produce much this year. We had really dry weather most of the season until the beginning of this month. Now we've had over 9.5 in. just this month with more rain predicted for the next 3 days. The 4 zucchini plants all died out mysteriously with only 4 zucchinis produced. We got 3 mini watermelons a bit smaller than soccer balls, 3 tiny eggplants, 1 red pepper and 3 ripe full size tomatoes. The only plant that really produced is the cherry tomato. We've gotten over a 100 ripe tomatoes off of it with a lot still developing. We would have had more than 200 but the abundance of rain has caused at least 100 to split open. With the weather being so soggy and cooling down, I picked all of the green tomatoes off of the other two tomato plants. I'd rather they ripen inside and we might actually get to enjoy them than wait and hope the bugs and rain don't destroy them.
Note: The one ripening is supposed to be that weird color. It's a purple tomato, as are more than half the tomatoes on the plate. Notice how small my little eggplant is and they all grew C-shaped.
For this week, I'm hoping to finish up the black, white and pink log cabin blocks and get them to flimsy stage. My best chance of that happening is either Wed. or Thur. when we have nothing planned for the day except the kids doing their weekly assignments. Wish me luck. And go check out the other design walls for inspiration at Judy's blog.
