Mash

Aloha, peoples who read this. How are things? Have you been to the doctor yet? About that . . . thing . . . that's going on? Good. I'm sure there's a soothing topical cream for that.

Lets start out with a couple Asher pics. One looks like it was painted with the left over body paint from Goldfinger, not sure why our living room lamp decided to explode like the sun but it does give a nice hue to the room. 

The best part of Asher on the scooter is you don't get the sense of scale. No depth to the picture. Which is good because we got all of two feet off our property and into the neighbor's driveway when he stepped off the scooter and went, "All done."

Wouldn't let me take the helmet off thought.

This . . . thing is in the Boston Children's Museum. You can only see about two stories so you're missing a third of it. It's a three story . . . climbing thing inside a net. There is literally no way to describe it accurately. You climb from carpeted wood shelf to carpeted wood shelf until you get . . . where ever you might end up.

Perfect for our kids. No clue how an adult would fit into it. Some of the . . . levels (?) . . . were inches apart so the kids had to squeeze their way in. 

They did get to the top, thought.

This was a little pirate dingy that was anchored outside of the museum. The museum is just off to the right.

Anne (with Moses) and Dianna in the bubble room. 

There was one of those Stand Inside A Giant Bubble pit/pool things. Charlie kept cranking the hoop us as fast as she could and popping the bubble with her bum when she bent down to get the hoop higher. 

Asher did it once, hopped out, slipped, went perfectly parallel two feet above the floor and crashed down. You'd think that, since the bubbles were basically made out of soap, he'd end up slightly cleaner after soaking on the wet floor for a second or two. Alas, no. The smell was not clean, either.

Water Balloon Battle: before the war!

These were taken after the Bus Orientation. Getting ready for Kindergarden!

Back up to Lyman Orchards, the local Pick Your own place. In season now are peaches, apples and pears. We went peach picking a while ago, so this week we went back for apples. But before I put the kids to work, we took a spin around the sunflower maze. I'd switch which kiddo got to lead at each sign post . . . or when we'd walked the same trail bit one time to many. It's amazing when you can start telling individual sunflowers apart. And by amazing I mean sanity stripping.

Onto the Apples!

In the apple tree.

So we picked a billion apples (that's the collective noun for apples. A pod of whales. An army of frogs. A Billion apples). In this case it added up to two plastic shopping bags full of apples. So far I've made three pounds of applesauce, some backed apples and an apple cake.

 Of course I buried the peels and cores in a simple syrup. Five months from now **BAM** apple wine. Hooch, my friends, hooch.

 I first tried the hooch with peaches (still buried) and made a peach cake. So far I have about 12 quart jars of in-the-making-hooch buried in two locations in the back yard. If this works (large if there, people) I'll have to set aside more ground for hooch burials. I figure if I make a fruit cake (NOT FRUITCAKE, note the space) each time, Dianna won't mind the giant holes as much. This was the peach cake (it was delicious).

Hum, pears are still in season . . . might have to buy more quart jars . . .

A couple pics from a nice lunch Asher and I had out. Ash got a kick out of one of the highest powered hand driers I'd ever seen. 

I used the Cooks Illustrated Summer Peach Cake recipe . . . which I can't find online. Here's one that's close - in both the apple and the peach cakes I did, I left out the schnapps. I also sliced all my fruit so it was thinner and didn't make them into chunks.