On Sunday, we celebrated (one day early) my son’s eighteenth birthday.

Also, he got baptized.

One day he came home from church and said that he’d decided to get baptized and would be taking the catechism classes. Okay, we said.

And so he did.

For his birthday breakfast, he requested day-old apple pies (for some reason, they got weirdly saucy). Lunch was waffles with all the fixings, and my parents joined us, as well as my brother’s family. I’d told my son that we wouldn’t be having cake — too much sweet — but then I went and bought an Oreo Blizzard Dairy Queen Ice Cream, I mean Chemical, cake to surprise him (we never buy DQ chems)…though I kind of think he might have preferred a homemade cake? Oh well. And supper, since I’m being all nitty-gritty about the food, was pesto torte and crackers and raw veggies and dip. Then we sat around reading all his birthday surveys, from age 7 to 18, for the very last time.

On Monday, my son made an appointment with an investment advisor, and then the two of us had an exciting date at the bank where we spent an hour discussing stock and looking at charts and learning about The 30-30 Rule and The Rule of 72 and a lot of other things that boggled our brains.

We really know how to tear it up.

My son is pretty tickled about all the privileges that come with turning 18. Now my money is all mine, FOR REAL, and I can get a tattoo! and If I get pulled over for driving a 100 miles an hour, I don’t automatically lose my license. I just get a hefty fine or go to prison.

Also on the list: drive an ambulance, go skydiving, begin paramedic training, vote, be the accompanying adult when his sister drives, see R-rated movies at the theater, join dating websites, take out a loan from the bank, get a motorcycle license, walk into Verizon and set up an account, legally kiss a girl who is over eighteen, get married, buy a lottery ticket, donate blood, go into bars, watch explicit content on youtube, sue someone.

But make no mistake — in many ways he’s still a child. Also, my husband and I are still king and queen of this roost. It’s just that now that my son is getting older and wiser, he both knows and appreciates this.

And that, if you ask me, is one of the very best parts of having a (somewhat) mature, young adult child.

This same time, years previous: cilantro lime rice, the quotidian (10.26.15), the quotidian (10.27.14), the quotidian (10.28.13), the details, sweet potato pie, the morning kitchen, 2009 garden stats and notes.

For the past couple months, my younger son diligently tended to Chomper. He fixed him up with a variety of homes, researched turtles (sometimes obsessively), and plied him with raw liver and oatmeal and lettuce. Although Chomper seemed to be doing just fine — burrowing in the sand, swimming in the water, scampering about and exploring — never once did we see him eat. And then I noticed that he seemed to be getting smaller.

“You should probably set him free,” I said.

My son did not like that idea, not one little bit. So we did more research, learning about special lights and water filtration. He begged to be allowed to buy the necessary equipment, but I said no. “If you want a pet turtle, you need to get set up first and then get a turtle.” Because I wasn’t about to let him spend lots of money on a pet that probably wouldn’t make it.

When my son persisted in digging in his heels — but I wanted a pet turtle! — I turned blunt. “He’s going to die,” I said. “The kind thing to do is to set him free. That’s the only way he’ll stand a chance.”

For several days, my younger son was tearful and sullen, and then, one day last week, he finally agreed to set Chomper free.

We drove over to my parents’ place, my son holding the wriggly (a good sign!) Chomper in his hands the whole way there, and parked the van by the little creek at the foot of their drive.

When my son set Chomper down, the little guy immediately made a beeline for the water. Of course, the current tossed him upside down and carried him off, but my son scooped him back up, found a nice muddy spot along the shore, and set him on a sunny leaf.

While Chomper sunned himself, my son fixed a little shelter out of leaves and twigs. The house finished, Chomper crawled right into it.

We stood there for a bit, watching. My son cried. He agreed that he knew he was doing the right thing, but still, he was so sad.

And then, after a few minutes more, my brave little boy waved good-bye to his pet, and we scrambled back up the creek bank and drove home.

This same time, years previous: growing it out, the quotidian (10.25.11), tales of terror and woe, buttermilk pancakes, apple tart with cider rosemary glaze.

This year, I had every intention of doing a better-than-normal garden—to save on money! to reduce our carbon footprint! to cut down on our pesticide consumption!—but it didn’t go so great. We planted green beans not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times, and even then, only bits and pieces of a few rows made it. We plodded along, picking a little here and a little there. It wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t great, either.

And then we didn’t pick the sweet corn in time. (Alice was decimating the corn patch, but we thought she was just picking it young because she didn’t know what corn was supposed to taste like. Turns out, the corn was ripe.) Also, the peppers, basil, and tomatoes got frost-bitten (I planted too early, my bad), the kale got eaten, the tomatoes got a fungus, and the strawberries drowned in weeds.

So, all in all, it was a fairly ordinary year.

Sigh.

Stats:
Rhubarb, chopped and frozen: 1½ gallons
Strawberries, sliced with sugar: 19 quarts and 2 pints
Strawberry freezer jam (4 batches): 9 pints and 4 half-pints
Sour cherries from our trees, frozen: 20 one-cup bags and 8 quarts
Sweet cherries (picked 33 pounds for a total of $61): 7 quarts canned with sugar, and 9 quarts frozen with sugar
Zucchini relish: 7 pints
Swiss Chard, steamed: 7 eight-ounce bags
Green beans, frozen: 36 quarts and 1 pint
Sweet pickles: 6 quarts and 2 pints
Corn (overripe), frozen: 28 quarts
Roasted Tomato and Garlic Pizza sauce: 25 pints, 1 half-pint
Blueberries (ordered from afar, 4 scant gallons for a total $80), frozen: 27 pints
Nectarines (4 bushels at $32/bushel): 41 quarts canned, 5 quarts frozen, 12 pint bags dried
Tomatoes: 31 quarts, 5 pints
Peaches, Glohaven (2 bushels at $32/bushel): 23 quarts
Salsa: 49 quarts, 6 pints, 1 half-pint
Roasted tomato sauce: 33 pints
Grape jelly: 9 pints (weak), 7 pints and 17 quarts (good)
Grape juice with (⅓ cup per quart) sugar: 6 quarts
Grape puree: 7 three-cup freezer boxes
Applesauce: 2 bushels Lodi for 40 quarts, maybe (I forgot to record this) and 2 bushels of Super Gold, Golden Delicious, and Stayman for 39 quarts

Oh yeah, and TWO BEEF.

Notes:
*The children are at the age where they can be counted on to do much of the picking. My older daughter, especially, picked a huge portion of the sour cherries, green beans, and strawberries.
*Skip the fancy heirloom cucumbers and get one basic kind. Plant a lot of them, in a row (as opposed to mounds). And then do at least 14 quarts of sweet pickles. Because potato salad is so much better when loaded with tons of chopped sweet pickles.
*Hopefully we’ll have enough salsa! (My husband thinks we should reduce the garlic a little. I don’t agree.)
*Finally, we like our grape juice, because I’m adding plenty of sugar (in the form of a simple sugar syrup) to the jars before topping them off with juice.
*Next year, buy four bushels of Lodi apples to turn into sauce. It’s our favorite, now and forever, amen.
*The strawberries are slowly killing us. We can’t seem to stay on top of the weeds. It feels like a losing battle. Are we doing something wrong?
*I didn’t do any pesto because I had a bunch left from last year. Even had about a whole pesto torte left over!
*Our tomatoes, especially the juice ones, get hard white spots. A fungus, yes? They are still edible, and perfectly fine for canning, but they’re not the most attractive. Maybe we should plant in a different part of the garden next year?
*Peppers got nipped by a frost. Totally underwhelming.
*On recommendation from a friend, I planted Red Russian kale. It was delicious—so sweet!—but then it got utterly destroyed by some super-aggressive bugs. Oh well, the chard, at least, never wavered.
*Next year, watch the dogs—when they start stealing the corn, it’s time to pick.
*I LOVE BEEF.

This same time, years previous: the quotidian (10.24.17), our cracking whip, aging, boy in a blue dress, brown sugar syrup, love, the Tooth Fairy.