Peaches. Gardens. Getting Messy.

It's cliche to say, but I'm a mom that has a hard time articulating what exactly I've been busy doing. I mean I know I'm busy, and why...but the details of the day escape me and I wonder, "What DID I do today?"

And yet, this was not the case last Friday when we were to bring dessert to our friends place and I decided on peach dumplings from Smitten Kitchen. She doesn't have the recipe online but this is pretty close. It was supposed to have bourbon sauce but because I had none, well, it was just vanilla extract sauce with icing sugar and butter. Same thing.

It was a bit of an undertaking as you can see...

I didn't have a chance to take an "end result" picture, but this is the only one on google I could find that was exactly what I made.

They were delicious and totally worth the effort. My point is, it's August. It's peach season. Find a reason to make something good with peaches. The end.

(Photo from thefreshfeed.com)

The summer days mean less naps and more falling asleep in front of the show being watched before dinner time...

And here's more pictures of our garden from last week that actually doesn't depict it very well anymore. I feel like things have grown since this was taken. 

We've been loving the peas (here and at Nana's house as well) as they're easy to pick and eat. Ellie gobbles them up, which is amazing because she doesn't gobble up any raw vegetable otherwise.

Wren's tiny little corn kernel turned into this mammoth in the garden too. She is SO proud of it. 

And beautiful sweet pea flowers that Aunty Andrea gave us to plant have done well in our disgustingly hard, clay-like soil. It's amazing anything has come up, actually. Wren also likes to pick these and put them in small vases in the house. The smell so good and in turn help her room stop smelling like stinky little kid. 

A friend told me that they took their little one camping this summer, and the best lesson she learned was to stop fretting about her child getting dirty. When she let go, she enjoyed herself more. 

I have been taking this simple advice to heart and remembering that all it takes it just stripping off your kid's messy clothes and putting on another outfit. Who cares, right?

I bring the girls out with me in the morning after Kenton goes to work and we water the garden before Ellie's first 9am nap. It's been suggested to me to move her to one nap a day- she sleeps twice, at 9am and 1pm. 

But after thinking about it, I realized I like her morning nap as it gives me time to shower and get ready for the day. Wren watches a morning tv show while I do all that and it's a nice little system. I'm not ready to let it go. 

On a total side note, we went to the John Janzen Nature Center today to play in the indoor playground, and let me say...it was awesome. I'm sure you've already been there and known all about it. But today was our first time on this rainy morning, and the girls loved it. 

It kind of makes me wonder what took them (and Telus World of Science) so long to install these indoor play facilities for younger kids and parents to visit. John Janzen was basically the most boring place on earth when I was a kid. I'd highly recommend going there now.

Below, Ellie is alternating picking up bits of sand and bits of dirt and eating them, and really quickly. She figured I'd take her hands out of her mouth so she had to be fast...she didn't know I could care less.