Where have we been, you ask?

The task seems daunting to actually write everything we've been up to these past few weeks.  We have been busy harvesting, canning, freezing, and drying food as well as traveling, welcoming visitors and loving life.

Labor Day
Was spent at our friend's, the Nobbs, lake house on Lake Chautauqua which is beautiful and fabulous.  It is also the home to a place called "The Institute" which is an amazing private neigborhood with a central college which kind of reminds me of the Dharma Project on LOST.  Another place called Lily Dale is a place where they teach you to communicate with fairies, gnomes and to bend spoons with your mind.  I plan to go up there next summer to attend the spoon bending class with some friends.  Want to come with? Anyone, anyone? We cooked amazing dinners, played in the lake on a giant tube with my friend Melissa, met a darling Italian family and stayed up way too late.  Henry found his favorite new girlfriend, Eliza, and now I'm singing "There's a hole in my bucket dear Liza and dear Henry" all day.

Then we were supposed to go to NYC but our plans got postponed which gave us time to do much food preparation for the winter.  Check the food blog shortly for the juicy details:)

Henry really loves to play with playdoh so I decided to make some with a recipe from a book I have and Henry was more excited than I had seen him in a while.  We decided to make really thick dinosaur statues but they cracked really badly and fell apart.  Beatrice also ripped some of the apart with her iron grip.  It's always fun to be able to make something you spend a fortune on.

Next, my friend Sarah Morris came up for a couple days to cook gourmet food. She also has a giant baby girl named Eva who is the exact same age as Bea, almost to the day.  In fact, we have three friends who have baby girls only two weeks apart from Bea's Birthday.  Miraculous. Anyway, it was so nice to have someone in the kitchen who knew what they were doing and had the confidence to just do what needed to be done.  I kind of like two cooks in the kitchen! We also spent some good time out back with the swimming pools filled up with warm water, went shopping down on the Strip District, and made her fall in love with Pittsburgh(not hard to do), took a trip up to our local farm, Soergels,  and cooked up a storm.  Henry's favorite was the home-made dark chocolate mint(real mint leaves not the fake ones) ice cream.  Probably the best ice cream I've ever made.

Henry really had a blast with the two babies.  He tortured them a little here and there, but all in all he was pretty decent to them.  He thinks babies at this stage are so funny because they just talk and babble nonsense and I often her him laughing his hardest laughs at these little girls who say such funny things. 

Actually, I think I'm going to do a separate post for the camping trip we did last weekend.