Summer days come and go, some times slowly, some times swiftly. Either way, I haven't managed to get back on the computer much. My days are filled with our own yard and garden work and being miserable from coming in contact with poison ivy. I'm helping my mom and sister with their yard and garden work, painting the trim on their exterior windows, and also helping them sift through and fill out insurance and medical assistance papers.

The girls and I are also sorting through years of accumulated "treasures" which is taking us a while but we're gradually making progress so that I hope to finally get to my "spring" kitchen project by the end of summer or early autumn. Right now, we sorting AND boxing AND tagging AND stacking AND pitching, deciding what to keep for a garage sale in a couple a weeks. The dining room hasn't been a dining room for a long time. It's stacked with tons of stuff to sort through and is more a storage-computer-office-library-pantry room than a dining room. I really need to stay off the front porch and put my books away and get busy on all this. While I haven't got the dining room back to the way I'd like, we have managed to concentrate on cooking more from scratch and experimenting with recipes. Orangeblossom has been doing a lot of the cooking and is becoming quite the cook. She's filled the house with the aroma of home made pancakes, blueberry muffins, cakes, cookies, macaroni salad, broccoli salad, potato soup, breads and puddings.

As I'm continuing to prepare for the new school year this fall, I'm taken back some what and filled with mixed emotions and a bit uncertainty by the fact that Orangeblossom has only two more years of school and my official homeschooling years are coming to an end. We will never stop learning of course, but that milestone is approaching quickly and things will be different. I'll be sorting through some of the homeschool materials, trying to decide what to keep, what to let go of too as that has changed and I have kept things way too long.