Week in review: donkeys to kablabi

The husband made something called kablabi for dinner tonight and it was delicious, even though he only gave it a C-. It's Tunisian and he read about it in the Wall Street Journal this morning. It's a garbanzo bean stew. Kablabi! Say it, you'll feel better. And not only did he prepare the kablabi, he also unloaded AND reloaded the dishwasher and did all of the cleaning up, something I doubt many Tunisian husbands do.

Let's review the rest of the week, even though I have technically begun at the end with all this kablabi blathering.

Monday:

Our second annual trip to the wonderful Oil Ranch. We rode a train, we took a hay ride to feed the cows and the sweet baby donkey:
We played a little miniature golf, climbed on rusty old tractors, bounced in a bounce house, milked an extremely patient cow named Daisy:The kids' favorite part this year seemed to be the barn, where they leapt around on huge stacks of hay bales and then moved vast amounts of hay from the ground floor to the hay loft. I think they could have done this for many, many more hours, but there were baby animals to visit with: A little lamb tried to escape, but Mrs. S was quite the shepherdess:
Then, as a grand finale, since we pretty much had the place to ourselves at that point, each kid got to ride the horses as many times as they wished! Helena hopped right on like it was no big deal:
I would love to post a picture of our whole group, but I don't have one. It was great to spend the day with the Swanks, Whiles, Rives, Wimberleys, and Wheelers though--even if I have no photographic proof!

The rest of the week was pretty low key. We stayed home on Tuesday and Thursday, played at the park with the Swanks on Wednesday, and went to school yesterday. On Thursday, Harper and Hudson decided to help me mow the back yard, which, because of the drought, hasn't really needed it most of the summer. They took the task very seriously:It's funny to me that they rarely want to do most of the easy tasks I ask them to do (for example, one afternoon, I asked Harper if she could push Helena in the swing for a minute while I ran in to put some clothes in the dryer and she complained and acted as though I had just asked her to mow the back forty with a pair of scissors) but they jump at the chance to do something that frankly isn't all that helpful (they can't really push the mower hard enough to actually cut the grass properly) but feels really difficult and important.

It has been raining steadily here for about 4 hours now! Our dry and weary land rejoices.