7QT, Monday Edition

M is off at a rehearsal tonight, so here comes the blogging I've been longing to do for so... long.  Haha.

I'm going to try to make these takes truly quick, seeing as I have a date with a certain gentleman

   

and a bowl of cereal here in a moment.  Plus I'm already nearly four days late to the link-up.  Such is my life these days.

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So this little lady turned one this past week.  ONE.

 

There's so much I could say about it.  This past year has certainly been a whirlwind.  But of course I just couldn't imagine life without her.  She is so dear.

I read this article recently (and it's a great read, Mamas) and I really related to this part: 

It was the best of times and the worst of times. There were moments when my heart was so full I thought I might explode, and there were other moments when my senses were under such intense assault that I was CERTAIN I’d explode.

I was both lonely and absolutely desperate to be alone  .I was saturated—just BOMBARDED with touch and then the second I put down this baby I yearned to smell her sweet skin again.

Yep, that pretty much sums up my life in the past year.  I have never worked so hard or had so much going on, and while I look forward to the time when life will be a bit quieter, I'm also filled with a little panic that my littles are growing up so quickly.

Trying to soak up all that sweet baby skin.  That's all I can say.

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I also enjoyed re-living the same week that I had when I was 39 weeks pregnant last year... minus a gorgeous wedding the weekend before the birthday, of course.  Although I certainly would have re-lived that if given the option.  :)

We had all the same activities that we had the week before J was born:

First day of preschool for C

 

Homeschool day at OSV

Second day of preschool for C (she insisted on a "second day" picture... big change from last year when she was so traumatized by the whole thing that I could not get near her with a camera)

 

and the first Brownie/Daisy meeting of the year!

 

(compare this to last year's photo-- so little! and minus one sister! and so few badges on their uniforms!)

 When I got to the end of the week I was completely exhausted and wondered how I ever managed to do all that at 39 weeks pregnant.

I think the answer was that I was a little younger, and I didn't have a year of sleep deprivation behind me.

It was a wonderful week though.

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Followed by a wonderful weekend!

Uncle Ben and Tatiana came up from DC for the weekend, and we had a little birthday celebration for J.

 

(her shirt says Happy Birthday to Me... the bigger girls insisted we buy the matching tutu)

 

A glorious weekend.

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Speaking of glorious weekends, we have reeeeeeally been enjoying the cooler fall temperatures after such a hot summer!

 

Attending N's soccer games on bright and sunny chilly fall mornings has been so much fun.

 

And it has led to many impromptu soccer games with other girls and Dad (and Ben and Tots when they were here) both in our backyard and at the farm up on the hill!

My favorite time of year!!

And of course breaking out hoodies for babies always makes things fun.

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And speaking of soccer (are you enjoying all of my nice segues?), I have learned a new dimension of the term "soccer mom" this year.

Travel soccer is no joke, dude!  Two practices a week plus a game every weekend.  Combine that with a team gymnastics schedule for L and our calendar is jam-packed.   I don't have a pic of our wall calendar to share with you right now but suffice it to say that we went with the dry-erase wall calendar and got a different colored marker for each girl and we could not write another thing on it if we wanted to, it's so full.

 Every evening we have some practice or another, and sometimes two or even three.  There has been a lot of splitting up and juggling who takes what kid where between me and M.

So in the first week of September when things were still relatively calm, I did a freezer cook sort of like this one:

 Voila, jam-packed freezer.

I use the term "freezer cook" quite loosely since this was really more like "stuff some meat, sauce and veggies in a ziplock bag".  Very unlike the 3-day extravaganza of cooking that I used to do back when I was on the Once-A-Month Cooking bandwagon (before kids, of course).

This type of model worked much better for me, because not only is it far less time-consuming to just stuff ziplock bags rather than actually cooking/assembling casseroles and stuff... but the ziplock bags can be laid flat and so they all fit in the one freezer we still have (again, back in the Once A Month cooking days we had an upright freezer that we got rid of when I got off the bandwagon).

I used some of the recipes from the website linked to above, but added quite a few meatless ones to make it less expensive, healthified some of them, and made them all dairy-free so that Miss J can enjoy them with us.

Would love to do a more detailed post on that soon, so that I can remember what I did.  It worked great and I'd like to repeat it.  Stay tuned.

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Obligatory sisterly love footage

 

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And lastly, this hilarious video of the two bigger girls going down the inflatable slide at our town's fall festival this past weekend:

Okay those takes were totally not quick at all but that's what happens when you don't blog for a month.

Tootles!  Off to Poldark land!  Happy fall to you, my friends!

(For more quick takes, visit thisaintthelyceum.org)