Hosting Dinner and Stomping Grapes

It is Friday and friends are coming for dinner. I ask the children what makes a meal nice. I asked them why we like going to restaurants. 

They are very very clean.
There is always a bouquet of flowers
There is a welcome sign
There is a sign to the restrooms.
There is a menu.
The silverware is wrapped in a napkin.
The food is served on nice plates.
The food is not on the table it is brought to the table.

"What is an appetizer?"
"Can we make signs?"
"I'll clean off the table."
"Can I put a sign on the mailbox?"
"I know where the flowers are."

Friday afternoon turns into menu planning and cooking and sign making and setting up the place for a crowd.

William keeps us on our toes with two steps forward three steps back.

We don't get to the carrot cake, but there is nice ice cream and no one complains and the spaghetti is divine with fresh herbs from the garden.

Basil. Oregano. Mint. Lots of It.

They are sweet with conversation and kind to the guests but insist that they jump on the trampoline with them.

Sweaty guests and sweet children.

Wake in the morning and head to the grape harvest festival. 

We as a family and new friend Catherine make a grape stomping team for the contest and I laugh so hard and stomp so hard and eat a lot of grapes and taste a lot of wine.

We bring home muscadines, plump and juicy. Amelia grape stomps out the juice (with clean feet)

We make gallons -- gallons of jelly.

We pray it makes and it does.

Friend Catherine helps. Picture is yellow. I'm learning folks. Can't quite get it straight. You will see progress with the new camera. . . . 








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Cattle Are Lowing

Image
We’d waited since February for her to calf. By November 20th, all eyes stayed on mama cow - Trahlyta. Her due date was close and we were more than ready. The waiting wrung our patience.  October was wet and boggy and Trahlyta looked sick. We discovered rotting flesh in her foot. Foot rot set in from standing on soggy ground day after day. George and the children tended to her around the clock as they cleaned out oozing infected sore and cared for her hooves. We’ve had her since she was a few days old. The children raised her. She’s part of our family. And, she’s our first cow to calf. She held the keys to our own dairy supply and to our tender hearts as we watched her stay under the weather. All we could do was wait and make sure she stayed healthy and it wasn’t as easy as we expected. But now, her hooves were healthy and her belly was swollen and we were waiting.  On the morning of the 24th, I rushed to the window at the first day light. Down by the creek, I saw Trahlyta and a red cal
Read more

Love Them. Feed Them. Talk To Them. The Rest Is Icing On The Cake.

Image
We've been homeschooling for ten years. At LEAST once a week I think that homeschooling is the worst possible thing on the planet. I look at my kids and think, "I've got nothin'!" It is scary. It is hard. How many hundreds of times have I called my extremely patient husband and yelled, literally screamed into the phone, "I CAN'T DO THIS!" There was a day, in the middle of a lesson that wasn't going well at all, that I walked out the back door, walked to the pool, jumped in fully clothed and yelled as loud as I could under the water. I got back out of the pool, calmly walked inside, changed my clothes and continued with the day feeling much relieved. George, my husband and biggest cheerleader - also a major part of our homeschooling life, is diligent to walk me off the cliff of homeschool despair. When I feel like I am failing our children, he offers me this morsel... Before I give you his advice, I would like to mention at this poi
Read more

Coffee Shop

Image
A little water. A little dirt. Buckets of imagination. They opened at 9:00 a.m. and didn't close the doors until the mud covered dishes were recollected and soaking at 5 p.m. The Best Food Whale Coffee.  Amelia made special food for the whales to eat. Their play was seasoned with the things we've read this week like the rules (The Code of Hammurabi) for the shop. School met them during their serving breaks. William loved playing along side them. He pulled weeds from the monkey grass for an hour straight and then played at their feet. He had a lot to say as well. The rain started in the late afternoon and George let them make us "real" coffee in the kitchen. A bike ride through puddles. Friday night pizza turned into Friday night spaghetti (I was out of flour due to "Waffle Friday" breakfast).  Whale Food Friday night movie -- "In Cold Blood" -- BBC's reptile documentary. Brilliant. Music turns
Read more