Vegetable gardening

This broccoli was harvested from our garden.  It is so exciting to be starting to eat food regularly from our vege patch.

We have more broccoli growing and nearly ready to eat.

 It actually looks overgrown, but it's just full of food, and 'almost' food.

There are tomatoes beginning to flower.

Fresh iceberg lettuce straight from the garden tastes amazing!!

My parsley has recovered after it was nearly demolished by the possum.

There's rosemary in one corner.

The cos lettuce is delicious in caesar salad.  We pick leaves as we use them so they are going to keep feeding us for some time yet.

We also have purple carrots growing, beetroot, snow peas, zucchini, and I was hoping some capsicum would come up [I sowed the seeds with the tomato seeds but no sign of them yet]. It really is an experiment for us, we've never successfully grown vegetables before [on purpose].  I am starting to plan what we will plant next.  I can see how gardening becomes addictive!!

Miss 3's birthday cakes

 Miss 3 loves yellow.  So for her third birthday we had to have not one, but two yellow birthday cakes.  One for her 'party' with her family, the other for her 'party' with her three little friends. We had yellow balloons, yellow food, and played 'parcel parcel' as she calls it [pass the parcel].

Almost each day since her birthday, I have been told that now she is a 'big girl'.  

My new strawberry patch

We planted a strawberry patch 6-8 weeks ago.  Three different varieties of strawberries, hopefully will extend our harvest as we have one early, one mid and one late-season variety.  We got 4 strawberries off recently, then the night before we harvested our second lot, a possum ate the lot.  Not happy.  Hence the netting to protect our fruit from possums and birds.

Little Red Riding Hood cape

Recently I was delivering the children's address at church, and I needed to recount the story of Little Red Riding Hood to help to illustrate the verse.  I made up this cape to help to illustrate the story.

It was extremely easy.  I used this free pattern and whipped it up in an hour or so.

Now we have a Little Red Riding Hood dress-up.  Very satisfying to run up when I haven't felt motivated to sew anything for a while.

my laundry system

People often ask me how I 'do it' with four children.  Funnily enough, I have also asked this question of other mums, usually when I see them doing things well that I struggle with.  I am generally a fairly organised person [one has to be with a larger family] but it doesn't always come naturally.  I think it is learned, or perhaps something I have chosen to do to cope better.

One of the things I have always struggled with is washing.  Not the turning on of the washing machine, that's easy.  But actually washing clothes, getting them dry, folding them and putting them away every time I wash.  I don't know what it is, but I just struggle to get every part of the process complete.  I always seem to have clean unfolded clothes in a basket [or three] hiding somewhere, dry washing hanging on a line inside or out for days on end, ironing in a basket not ironed etc. etc.

I have been working on trying to improve this reality for many years.  While my current system is not perfect, IF I actually follow it I am able to keep more on top of the ridiculous volume of washing that a family of 6 seems to produce.

Basically my system is made up of two parts:
1) I do at least one load of washing every day no matter what [sometimes I have Sundays off]
2) I wash only one or two people's clothes in a wash [makes it easier to sort and fold]

I usually end up needing to do two loads a day, more if I miss a day.  I also tend to put two people of very different sized clothes in together, so it is very easy to work out whose socks/singlets are whose.

I also try to fold straight off the washing line, because otherwise I never seem to get back to the folding!!

Do you have a laundry system that works for you?  I'd be interested to know how you tackle this issue.