baking, raking, laundering, and pondering

My favorite days are the ones when I can stay home all day homemaking at a semi-leisurely pace. Today I enjoyed baking muffins for breakfast, some natural apple-raisin-cinnamon cookies (both made with home-ground whole wheat pastry flour), catching up on laundry, and enjoying a very warm jacketless November day of raking those crunchy leaves...and being surprised at my marigolds and these die-hard dianthus that are still blooming (next to a volunteer maple seedling):

And my poor buddy Jude put himself down for a rest on the living room floor halfway through the morning. "Mommy, I'm tired," he tells me...

So I served this odd hybrid of leftovers for a 10:30 lunch and put him down for a nap. Despite a fewer slower-than-usual days, this week was not lacking some excitement. There was a pantry-avalanche from the shelves being used as a ladder, a discovered enscription on the top of our white tufted fabric headboard (thank you Calvin, for signing your name in ink), and a piece of mucous that was misjudged by a 2-year-old as an 'owie' may or may not have been band-aided to my thirdborn's arm for about a day and a half. And here is last week's preschool field trip that I was able to enjoy with Calvin:

Shaping dough and eating the final product:

So we are enjoying a few slow days this week and gearing up for a busy weekend and will be packing soon to leave for all of next week! It seems hard to believe that Thanksgiving, Christmas, and another year's end are upon us...these changes in seasons make me more reflective and, lately, more ever-aware of the tiny blip that we are in light of eternity. May you be blessed with a good week of 'making it count' --for God's glory.