Princesses, Nudibranchs, and Sniffles

Today the future farmers were all sniffin' and sneezin'. They all have a summer cold! Pass the tea and tissues. So for dinner, I made a big pot of chicken soup with loads of garden veggies, served up with farmer's market herb bread with a rhubarb crisp for dessert. Great cold comfort food!

Alex acted in his play over the past weekend. He had lots of small roles in a group of Princess plays. He wasn't to thrilled with all the girlie princesses, but all the princesses think Alex is "so cute!"

Ari finished up her spring college classes and she has a week off before she starts her summer online class. She's also thinking of taking a writing course or two with some other teens.

Anni is the sniffliest of the bunch, but she did enjoy our short outing to Edmonds Beach yesterday. It was a -3.2 low tide, which meant there was oodles of cool marine life to peek at on the beach. Our favorite were all the nudibranchs (colorful sea slugs) under the ferry pier, congregating for mating. We counted hundreds of them and 4 different species. (This is terribly exciting to a former biologist such as myself as these are usually quite hard to spot). We also saw baby sea cucumbers, zillions of hermit crabs, sea anenomes, sea stars and brittle stars, baby flounders and sculpins, sea lemons, chitans, and moonsnails. We also picked up a couple of larger red rock crabs. One was very grabby with the big claw! We also saw a heron catch a fish that was almost too big for him to handle. It took the bird quite a while to figure out how to hold and eat it. (Sorry, no photos. Camera battery died!)

I've been reading and writing up a storm lately. The garden is also keeping us very busy. The Russian Kale grows faster than zucchini! I'm sneaking it in to almost every dinner. The kids are becoming quite adept at finding it! We harvested our first runner beans of the season! Our sudden cooler weather seems to favor the strawberries and peas as we had pile of both in the harvest basket today. David is continuing to work on the chicken coop. Hopefully, we'll finish it this week as the chicks are growing bigger by the minute!