Whew.

Ah. It's good to be back. Seriously. This is kind of like therapy for me and after the past few weeks, I think therapy is a definite need. :)

It's really not that bad.

First off. I had to grin when I checked my stats. This little spot in the blogosphere has been so incredibly boring here lately that I cannot for the life of me figure out why 146 people checked it out yesterday. 146. Someone needs another bucket of beans to snap.

Just kidding.

This won't be long. It's after 9:00 and I really, really need to be greeting my pillow. It feels as if it's been several days since my pillow and I have met when in reality it's only been 15 hours.

So. What have we been up to?

This should explain a little

- picking, snapping, and canning green beans. And it takes me a while to do just one single five gallon bucket. And I've done multitudes of them here lately.

- picking, shelling, and canning lima beans. It takes even longer to do one five gallon bucket of these. Thankfully, I've only done three of them. And I discovered an interesting tidbit of information for any other loons who may happen to plant them. A bucket of lima beans can last for one whole week, unshelled, sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor. It's annoying to step around them all the time, but they don't spoil in that amount of time. And that's without air conditioning so I can't imagine the life of them WITH ac. I aim to be helpful.

- going on four camping trips. Only for one weekend at a time...but they happened to be on four consecutive weekends.

- doing boatloads of laundry after every camping weekend.

- folding the five loads every week...though I won't mention the fact that they often remained on the couch for several days til I finally found a break in the day to fold them. Oops. Guess I did mention it.

- cleaning the camper. Four Mondays in a row. Or maybe it was four Fridays in a row.

- re-packing the camper. The first two weekends it waited til Friday about 3:30. The last two I got a little smarter and did it on Thursday..or at least Friday morning.

- enjoying two sick children. Addie a couple weeks ago, and Jack now. It's not too bad. Just requires trips to the bathroom every 20 minutes or so and it only lasts about a week. No joke.

- making last minute trips to the grocery on Friday mornings. Without fail I would forget some portion of my meal for the weekend until then. And we now have several bags of unopened marshmellows that will be great to roast this fall when life slows down and we can have an unhurried camp fire out in our back yard. Ahhhh.

-getting in the groove of having a little girl in school. Three days a week. Some days til noon and some days til 2:30. I walk her there and go pick her up. Usually I walk on the pick up too. I'm sure I'm getting sufficient exercise though it's only a two minute walk each way. Maximum.

-spending time in the ER due to a bike wreck that ended up with a certain little girl receiving 35 stitches and two broken teeth. More on that later. That happened this past weekend while we were camping so I guess in reality it didn't really keep me from typing up a post. Unfortunately, the accident didn't teach her much. We caught her this evening riding her bike down the ramps on a trailer...and she ran smack into the camper. No injuries. At least none that she was brave enough to tell us about. This time it was nearly her mother who had to be hauled in in an ambulance. Not for a bike wreck. For heart failure. Bikes should be banned. But then again. Maybe not. What would my children do if it weren't for trying to learn new 'tricks' on their bikes?

That's it. I think. Reading over that little list doesn't really seem like it should be that time consuming, but, trust me. It has been.

And now? I'm tired. I'm going to go meet with my pillow once again.