Our family is going all-natural.

Okay, not really, but it's been a whole lot of fun helping Dad can vegetables and make homemade tortillas and shop at the farmer's market in the past several weeks.

It started with tortillas....I guess Dad realized how much "extra" stuff they put in those things to keep them "fresh" when you buy them from the store. Kinda freaky that the ingredients list is 4x longer than it would be if it were fresh. So we made homemade tortillas. And I believe we have now perfected them. I made one for the first time last night. It's sort of like working with a really thin piece of pizza dough.

Last week, we canned squash and green beans, which we got fresh from the farmer's market. So, I've always known that you could can fruits, and I knew that you could can jellies and preserves and such (I've done that before) and I'd heard of pickling vegetables, but I don't guess it ever occurred to me that you could can vegetables. But we did. And they are amazing.

Another thing that we've been working on getting together is getting a vegetable garden started. Dad's going to plant squash and tomatoes (at least, that's what I know for sure) and one day, we may even do some fruit trees. We had blueberry bushes at our old house, and we would pick and eat them, but we don't have them here.I love fruit. I love apples, muscadines, oranges, pears, starfruit, watermelon, cantaloupe, lemons (in things, I do not eat them straight; same with limes). I can tolerate peaches, bananas (on rare occasions), grapes (particularly jellies and juice, but I do not care much for them plain). The prospect of our family planting fruit trees is appealing to me.

Vegetables. I love a lot of veggies. Broccoli, squash, beans of any sort, corn. Love corn. And butter. Lots of butter on the corn. I don't like celery. Potato's (don't tell me they're a starch. I know that. I just like to pretend otherwise. And I guess you can call corn a starch as well.)
I don't drink milk.

CHICKENS. You guys, Our family is getting chickens again!! (at some point)!
Do you know how happy this makes me?
Very.

That was another thing we had at our old place. We had them for about two or three years or so, but we got rid of them a couple years ago. Josiah was two-ish when we first got them. (I know that because we have a picture of him after he was taught the lesson of "Dont Throw Things At The Chickens. He doesn't look very happy in the photo. ;-) )

But the chickens were fun. I had one that I kept separate in a dog-cage-pen-thing because the other chickens would jump on her and claw at her. She was really sweet. I think I called her "Baby", but that may not be right. I was probably 11-ish. yeah, that's about right.

See, when we first got chickens, we made the mistake of getting twenty.  Twenty hens and one rooster. Bad idea, when you only have a family of eight. Each hen produced an egg roughly every 25 hours. DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MANY EGGS WE PICKED UP A DAY? A BUNCH. Like, 18 eggs daily. Do you know how many eggs we eat daily? No where close to 18, unless we have scrambled eggs for breakfast.  So guess what? We had scrambled eggs for breakfast nearly every day. For two years. And it was awful.
We will not be getting 20. LOL.

 I'm going to go. Something is starting to smell really good and it's coming from the kitchen. I think I'd like to get my mouth on whatever it is. I'm hungry.

Also, JSYK, I have a goal to post once a week throughout the summer, starting in June (now) and going through until school starts back in August. We'll see how long I can last. :)