End of summer and beginning of school

For a few months, we managed weekly posts or email letters, or both. Now it seems like we rarely communicate. It also didn't help that our iMac was in the shop for about a month or so. Yes, we are still here.
For those of you who saw Henry over the summer, he is now talking much, much more than he did. We started speech therapy with him, and he is doing amazingly well. He actually asks for things using words (some of the time) and says two- or three-word sentences (occasionally). He is to about 40% of his vocalizations being words. He says his name now!

Henry put himself to bed for nap the other day. 

Lucy started kindergarten. On the way to school one day, Edward said, "Why do I have to go to school? Why can't you home school me?" Then he turned to Lucy, "Don't you want to stay home with Mom and do home school?" She looked at him as if he were crazy, "No! At school I get to do recess!" She loves kindergarten. Since we have very reduced expectations of the schools here, we just let the children enjoy kindergarten and work with them on reading or other things at home.

Lucy's first day at school.

Edward is in 2nd grade and doesn't care for school, though this year is better than last year so far (20 students versus 35, just to start). He loves to read and play, though when forced to go outside, he often takes a book with him. He is also taking piano lessons and is almost to the reading-notes stage.

Edward at Big Springs park in South Fork Canyon (Provo Canyon).

Andrew started 4th grade at the Center for Accelerated Studies, a new school. He gets to ride the bus, which he doesn't like very much. He loves his school. They have required homework and challenge the children. He is still doing piano and Cub Scouts, though mostly he does the Cub Scouts stuff with me. He would do even better at everything if he could stop reading long enough. I bought new Sunday pants for the boys in September, and today I looked at Andrew and wondered why he put on Edward's pants. He hadn't. I guess he just grew another inch or so.

Andrew with a hummingbird fledgling that we rescued and helped care for until it flew away.

Kirk is busy with research and teaching and endless meetings. When he isn't working at those things, he is trying to complete our long list of home and yard projects.

Kirk has taken most of the photos for the past few months, so it was hard to find any of him. Here we are camping at Butterfly Lake in the Unitas.

As a family, we had a wonderful garden this year. We spent lots of time over the summer with Kirk's family and saw more of Boise than we ever expected. We also went camping once--with Mom and Dad Tanner in the Unitas.

Butterfly Lake.

Our garden, part of it. We have five large garden boxes and three small ones.

I spent time processing the bushels of tomatoes and using the other produce from the garden in our meals (roasted eggplant dip, chard "saag," fresh tomato everything, and so on). Since most of my time is spent taking care of the family, my news includes such stellar items as (1) our old blender broke, and we got a new fancy one that allows us to try all sorts of new food, including the funny "green smoothies" (pretty good, if you add a tablespoon or two of vanilla sugar); or (2) for several weeks now, I've got all the laundry done, including sheets and towels on only one day; and (3) I cleaned up the basement so I can walk over to the laundry machine without tripping on anything.

Some of our produce. We still have fresh tomatoes, and it is the middle of October.

We had enough strawberries from our yard to make a strawberry pie, even with Henry eating about two cups of them before I could get them in the pie shell.

Maybe in the next post we will show our 12 pumpkins from our one pumpkin vine!