Abundance

What would you do if your husband came home from work with two flats of tomatoes? (Again) I mean seriously, we figured we would dry some in the dehydrator, and got through maybe a half of the small ones before it was full. Tomorrow....sauce! The new rule in our house is that every meal must contain a tomato and more points if it has significant tomato presence...like tomato salad, or tomato soup.

Last week we had a porch party and invited the neighbors for ice cream. I significantly overestimated the amount of ice cream we needed, so now we have an abundance of that as well. Ice cream sundaes every day in order to clear out room for the tomatoes we must freeze. This makes for interesting bedtime scenarios. Timing the ice cream perfectly allows for wild dancing and gymnastics in the living room and then a sugar crash which can be capitalized on. I'm just kidding, we don't really time bedtime like that.


We actually have a very systematic bedtime routine. I hold up five fingers and we count off the tasks we do. Take a bath. Put on pajamas. Comb hair. Brush teeth. Read stories. I never thought I would be the kind of mother who bathed her kid every night, but she's pretty nasty at the end of most days. I aim for lights out to coincide with it getting dark outside. She only falls asleep when it's dark. If I put her to bed before she is going to fall asleep I just spend all the minutes until darkness falls putting her back in her room or pulling her down from tall things she's climbed up.

So, it happens a little bit earlier every night this time of year. It can be very annoying to have a bedtime routine that is dependent on the sun, because you can't just trick your illiterate two year old into going to bed early because they can't tell time. It is mostly only annoying when you have two trays of tomatoes that need to be processed somehow and you would rather get started sooner rather than later.