Joey's Green Beans

When we planted our garden, we made sure to include several bean plants. Green beans are one of the only vegetables Joey really likes. Most of the beans we planted were green beans, but we also have purple pole beans.I felt like we planted a ton of beans, but we haven't had a very large yield. Next year I plan to sow more of them. For now, we only had a small handful growing. And one evening, Joey asked if we could "please, please, please!!!" go out and harvest some green beans for dinner. So we went out and picked some. Like I said, it was only a very small handful. Here's Joey showing off our harvest. Doesn't he look excited? And he's excited about vegetables! Obviously, I'd like to encourage this!
Here's a close up. That's a whopping TEN green beans total. But Joey was thrilled to have them with our dinner.
Here's the thing. I've cooked fresh green beans before. I steamed them. So I thought I'd do the same with these. But since there were so few, it was hard to know how much time it really needed in the steamer. I overcooked them. One of the beans actually looked kind of burned, actually. How do you burn something in a steamer? Anyway, I took out the singed one and gave the rest to Joey. He took a bite and then instantly grabbed up all the beans off his plate and made this face:
I guess I fail at green beans.

4th of July & Kory's Birthday

For the 4th of July we all gathered at my mom's house for a BBQ & small birthday party for Kory. His birthday is on July 8th, so it makes it easy to combine the two holidays. I love a 4th of July BBQ! Here's Matt and Simon showing off the matching shirts we get every year:
Here's Korinne and her two aunties!

And here's the birthday boy. Gee, doesn't he look thrilled? It always makes it so nice when you celebrate someone's birthday and you see how happy and excited they are to receive so much attention. A second after the photo was taken, Kory blew all those candles out in a single puff. It was rather amazing, to tell you the truth. How does someone recovering from a kidney transplant manage such incredible lung capacity?

Here's Kristin enjoying her piece of cake. Tandy make the cake herself - it was a Jello poke cake, using red and blue Jello. Very patriotic! And then it was frosted in Cool Whip. Delish!
After the BBQ and the usual round of board games, we headed home. Simon was exhausted from the excitement, so I stayed home with him so he could sleep while Matt took the older kids to watch fireworks. Hope you all enjoyed Independence Day!