so those green tomatoes...

I finally made jam out of them yesterday. Benjamin helped me wash them a couple of days ago.

The next day, he helped me crush them up in the food processor. I let them marinate with the sugar and lemon juice overnight in the fridge. Then they went on the stove. I think we ended up with about 4 kg (8.5 lbs) of green tomatoes.

A while later, here is our finished product - 9 jars! (One is already in the fridge in case anyone's counting.) Maybe I should put "real canning supplies" on my Christmas list, if we're going to start making a habit of this. We may also have to make more friends so we can give some of this stuff away.

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This is one of Benjamin's favorite activities lately, thanks to the craft set his French grandmother brought him last week. When it's naptime or bedtime now, instead of asking for "2 minutes," he now asks for "2 minutes to cut!"

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We are at D-4 weeks for our trip to the US... but before that we are heading up to the mountains in 2 weeks. Benjamin will be on fall break from school and Frederic wangled an extra day off with all his comp time, so we'll have a quick 4-day trip to check on the condo and be sure it's ready for this winter's rentals.

Autumn (winter?) in the forest

This is what you do when you live in the forest... Frederic, his dad and Benjamin went mushroom hunting yesterday and came back with these.

This is what came wandering into my office this morning. Isn't he cute?


We had our first freeze last night, so we harvested the last of the garden today. I did not realize we had quite so many tomatoes still on the vines! The tomato plants were even still flowering - they were not ready for winter so soon either!

Since we still have oodles and oodles of green tomato pickles left from last year's late harvest, I'm going to try green tomato jam this year.

Keeping with our tradition of child labor

Noah is following in his brother's footsteps. Which is a good thing, since his brother is letting things slide lately.

Still warm enough to play outside

Benjamin recently rediscovered the tennis racquet we got him last year (thank you, Goodwill!). He's having a great time playing tennis - or Bing-Bang, as he prefers to call it - with Frédéric. We've had great weather all summer that is so far still holding (despite the morning chill we ward off with the fire), so this has been an almost-daily activity lately.

Noah gets to be the ball boy.

Can you spot what's wrong with this picture?

Let's take a closer look.

Noah is not actually *that* advanced- he can't quite reach the pedals yet. Maybe next year!

Trying to get a picture of the two boys together is something of a near-impossible feat these days. This is as close as I've gotten lately.

Noah is a little gardener... or perhaps just a scavenger. He likes to pick and eat anything he finds growing outside, including our entire 6-grape harvest, the raspberries, or green tomatoes fresh off the vine.

Happy Belated Birthday to me

Belated on the blog, early in real life. Benjamin and Frédéric made me a birthday cake last weekend.

We celebrated a little early because my friend Delphine was spending the weekend here. She gave me a book (in English, yay!), and Frederic gave me a wireless mouse. When they come out with a wireless laptop, I will be set! (Actually, it seems they did, I just read about it this week.)

I turned 32, not 3, but we didn't have 32 candles so they only gave me one.