32/52: Lucy, Lucy, Lucy, Lucy (and Elderberries)

I feel as though there just haven't been enough pictures of Lucy on here lately, so today will be the day to remedy that! Especially since we had a good two days in a row where she actually let me put her down long enough to snap a picture of her.

She has been teething for weeks (months?) and has two little bottom teeth to show for it, but somehow she's even MORE fussy now that they've broken through. More night wakings. Rarely longer than an hour or two goes by at night without her fussing and needing snuggles, despite the fact that she was NOT a co-sleeping fan for the first five months of her life. Sad, pitiful excuses for naps. Angry raspberries of contempt blown throughout the day just to express her disdain for her current circumstances. She's finally rolling and I'm hopefully that when she's mobile she'll be a little happier? We shall see...

In the midst of all this, though, she's just so tremendously adorable. Can you EVEN deal with those hat pictures? And so it's likely that the hat pictures are what we'll choose to remember from this stage, and not the fact that she's most definitely our most high-maintenance baby ever. This bodes well for school starting again next week (not.).


In NON-Lucy news, we finally had a decent elderberry harvest, nearly 4 years after planting our bushes! The birds definitely got quite a few berries, but after picking all that we could reach and separating them from the stems, we ended up with about 5 cups. Unfortunately all our recipes are for dried berries, so I'm trying to figure out what the proper fresh:dry conversion ratio should be without ending up wasting a lot of berries. Nobody actually likes the flavor of elderberries, but the kids are convinced that if we make the elderberry gummy recipe in their foraging book, they'll eat those. They're probably right, it looks like candy and will be sweet enough that I'm sure everybody will eat them!