Garden update

I went all out with my gardening efforts this year, and have thus far really managed to stick with it.  I'm really great at going all out, but the sticking with it part is usually a little spottier, so I'm proud of myself for hanging in there.  It helps that I've put in the initial effort to make everything as low maintenance as possible--the drip system is the biggest thing.  And here's the progress to date:

Sugar snap peas--is there anything better (I mean that isn't made with butter and sugar)?  These have been so fun for the kids.  They have discovered by experimenting that the little ones are the most tender, and if you leave them on long enough they'll make great big peas.  It's immensely satisfying to see them pick food we grew off the vines and eat it right there.  It's akin to feeding your baby--producing something to directly nourish them.  There's something about doing it yourself start to finish. 

Zucchini is coming along.  I love this plant because it grows inches a day.  Raelynn is pretty sure she can see it growing.

These are some of my roses, which I know we can't eat, but I sure love having around to make things beautiful. 

My herbs--I grew the thyme thinking I'd branch out from basil, but the truth is, I really only love the basil. 

One of the cutest peppers--This plant is going to be prolific;  there are a dozen of these little babies coming on.  Mix then with the tomatoes and the basil, and I'll be in summer salad heaven.

I've had bad luck with mandarin oranges up to this point, but I think I've finally found the right location.  My lemons are looking great, and the peach and nectarine trees are getting heavy with fruit.  The tomatoes, and cucumbers are doing their thing, though I have my reservations about the watermelon.  But why not give it a whirl?

What is it about these baby plants?  The magic of dirt and sun and seed morphing in to something so beautiful and essential just about makes me weep.  My kids call it eating sunshine, and what could be better than that?  I'm sure I can't think of a thing.

Super Paige to the Rescue?

This evening we watched a delightful video featuring Cody as a little man at the Dyers.  The film was entitled "Super Biddo," and had Paige thinking super hero thoughts at bedtime tonight.  I asked her what her super power would be if she could choose one, and she said--no hesitation--"to force people!"

Very telling, this little incident with my youngest.  Anyone who knows Paige will appreciate the dead on accuracy of this comment.  She can boss like nobody's business.  Anyone who doesn't know Paige well now knows everything they really need to.  Type A.  No nonsense.  Control Freak.  But so refreshingly clear about her expectations.

The way I see it...

It's all about perspective.  I really believe that how you see things can determine who you are and how you live, and I try to give my kids the chance to see things from varying points of view.  I think that if we could just learn to see things from other peoples' points of view, the world would be a drastically different--and better--place.  Now I realize that as a parent, my idea of things is generally pretty far from my kids' idea.  I remember childhood enough to be realistic.  Still, I think it's important for their developing brains and personalities to practice seeing things from another side, so I try to help my kids see the reasons for the things I do as I go.  Sometimes this alters their feelings about what I require of them.  Sometimes not.

I make them do morning jobs.  School doesn't start until nine, and that leaves less time for after-school teaching at home to occur.  I'm not asking them to do an excessive amount of work:  piano for a few minutes (and I think I should be making them do this longer), keyboarding practice, clearing thier breakfast mess, taking out the trash and recycling, and generally being responsible for thier own grooming.  (I was a teacher once;  I appreciate a kid who's brushed his teeth.)  My kids are generally fairly good at knowing this little bit is expected of them and don't complain loudly about it.  They will, however, slide as far as they can if it goes unnoticed.  I had been seeing such a slide for the past week. 

My instinct was to make them do the work after school, but the problem was that I wasn't prepared to leave the breakfast mess, the trash and recycling undone--I have to live here while they're at school, you know?  Plus, I don't want my kids to feel like they're just slaves I birthed in order to ease my workload.  Any parent will appreciate the hilartiy of that idea.  So I settled on a writing exercise which would allow them to avoid feeling used for labor and would give them a little writing practice to boot.  Win-win, right? 

Wrong.

I went upstairs to fix my dryer (yes, you heard that right;  I diagnosed and fixed my broken dryer myself because I'm that awesome, but that's another post entirely), and this is what I found magneted to the fridge.

So clearly, Miles was lacking in enthusiasm.  Raelynn, however, was eagerly scribbling away.  When she finished, she insisted she read it aloud to me--I wouldn't use the right voice.  Here's what she read with obvious relish, clearly expecting praise at her genius and sense of irony.

She was devestaed when I failed to see the glory in her piece and rewrote a very brief and tear-stained list.  She's such a good girl and thought I'd know from the beginning that she could see where I was coming from.  She genuinely thought I'd appreciate her wit.  I need to tell her teacher to knock off with the autobiographies at school;  she's imitating the style well enough.

Miles, after watching the drama unfold with Raelynn, very quietly and happily wrote the following.

I love those kids, and am so proud of them.  They have these amazing abilities that are all their own, and I just am blindsided by their individual and independent little personalities.  I keep thinking about that line in the Alice in Wonderland movie where the Hatter tells Alice she's lost her muchness.  She was much muchier before.  My kids have muchness.  Their perspective, sometimes delightful and sometimes not, expands my own.  I'm grateful.

Spring time, the only pretty fling time...

Is that how the song goes?  Anyway, it feels like spring to me and I'm obsessively trying to clean things out.   That means that some areas of my house look like a tornado hit, but nooks and crannies are sparkling.  This week, I cleaned out my pantry and got these cheap and wonderful can rotaters.  Is it weird that I've been wanting a can rotating system?  Well I have.  But who really wants to spend that kind of cash to rotate cans?  So these delightful cardboard dealies from thecanorganizer.com fit me just right.  My pantry went from this:

to this.

I still have a ways to go when it comes to food storage, but every baby step is better than none.  I've really latched on to Tiffany's little phrase--"the time is going to pass either way."  Tick tock, right?  I mean, whatever I do, the day will come and it will go.  I can move toward my goals or not, but the time keeps on ticking regardless.  Something about that hit me just right.  Timing, I guess.  I tend to have times when, as Mike puts it, I'm "on one."  I'm bipolar, not so much with my mood, but definately with my projects.  Burst of energy followed by total lethargy.  I try to ride the wave as long as I can. 

And in that spirit, I also built a light stand for all my emerging seedlings.  And they are emerging!  Here are some of my tomatoes.  I'm still waiting patiently on my peppers; they take longer. 

Now I have to figure out how to keep Leo from using the garden as a litter box--why do I have a cat again?  Oh, and the website I've been enjoying for some gardening how-to is mysquarefootgarden.net. 

I also took the time this week to create an emergency binder for the family with all our important documents, etc. in one easy to grab spot.  Each week's new topic for this class leaves me with a list as long as Raelynn's legs of things I need to do to be on track.  I'm glad to have the binder, but ugh about the rest.  I really hate 72 hour kits and all that emergency preparedness.  The last kit we made sat in the garage next to the gas can for the lawn mower.  After a year, we decided to use the stuff in it that would go bad, and it was all heavily flavored with gasoline.  I'm not saying it's a bad idea.  I'm all for it.  I just don't love it.  Here's the good website I found for helping me through all that.  It's foodstoragemadeeasy.net and it's been a great resource for me. 

I'm wiped out.  It's 8:30, so that's not great.  Bon soir.

Self-Reliance

So as part of my calling at church these days, I'm teaching a class on self-reliance during Sunday School.  You always hear people say that they have a calling or a speaking asignment or whatever because they needed to grow from it, but I have to be honest--I don't generally feel that way. I do, of course, feel I get some benefit from the service, but I guess I'd really rather get along without that particular growing experience.  I don't know. 

It's doubtful whether anyone else is getting much from this class, but this time I am growing in leaps and bounds.  Last week the topic was physical health.  I spent three weeks paying attention as I was preparing and lost 5 pounds.  That's me benefitting.  This week:  gardening. 

I've tried to garden before with occasional success, but now I feel the heat.  If I'm going to tell people to plant a garden, I better do it myself, and if I'm going to tell them how to do it, mine better be successful.  So last week I did this:

The kids and I started seeds, which I am determined to nurture along until we transplant them in the garden. 

The thing about gardening is that I really enjoy doing it.  It's the time it takes to do it regularly that gets me.  And gets my poor plants.  I'm trying to remedy this by one:  putting the kids on the job.  Raelynn and Miles are getting old enough to like the empowering feeling they get when I give them control over useful tasks like this one.  I am admittedly a person who struggles with giving up control and have the audacity to think I can do it better myself.  But the more hands on deck, the better our chances.  Two:  making as much of this self-regulating as possible.  That means I'll have the lights over the seeds on a timer and I'll have to get an irrigation system in place as well.  That's the biggie for me.  But I'm loving this class because it keeps me on task.  Here's what we did this weekend--

Raelynn for all her sign throwing was the biggest participant.  She watched eagerly the whole process of repairing the frames, and dug right in with the shovel, rake and her bare feet as we made the special mix of peat moss, vermiculite, compost and--yes--steer manure.  She watched me mark off the spaces carefully, her garden blueprint in hand, and generally enjoyed the whole thing.  Miles put down the basketball long enough to come plant some peas in his box, and Paige did her usual stuff in the house.  In case you're wondering what her usual stuff is, I mean things like this--

And things like this--

She's four and a half now, and I thought we'd kicked the whole writing on everything phase a couple of years ago.  Paige is bringing it back with a vengence.  She's also taken sharpie to the dishwasher and red pen to my purse.  I'm not even going to go into her experimentation with what things scissors will cut.  She did participate, however, in the kitchen garden by helping me plant these--

I've had fabulous success here with basil before and am adding thyme to my list this go around.  Nothing better in the summer than some fresh mozzzerella, tomatoes from your garden and basil you picked right there. 

So that's been my week.  I sure miss mom's greenhouse and her tomatoes.  Her homemade pickles, not so much.  But the wide-mouth frog joke she told while pickling, that I wish I could hear again.  No matter how old I get or what I learn to do, she always stands like a giant in my memory and I feel I will never match her.  I spend plenty of time attempting to channel her in my daily life, but darned if I don't still feel twelve.  It's something to work toward, anyway, and I'm feeling pretty good about my work this week.  Hopefully next week I'll have little baby sprouts to show for it!  Makes me want to sing out loud, greenery does.

2010

So this year I think I'm going to really post, at least the basics of what we're doing, so I have the record.  I get bogged down with the idea of people reading what I write, but since it's been a few months I'm probably pretty much alone in cyberspace.  So I'm not going to try to be very interesting--I'm just too lazy and too busy.  But I'll have the record.  Funny creatures, aren't we, that we want that record, as if recording it makes us something other than the little ants we are.  I'm under no delusion that my life is in any way unique, but you know, it's uniquely mine. 

So here's a few pictures from Knott's Berry Farm.  We went the same weekend as Grandpa Black's funeral.  It was a strange experience for me to be around all my mom's brothers.  The whole thing was a little surreal and kind of lonely in the way any glimpse into a lost world is.   As usual, I missed mom.  I was glad for grandpa, though;  I think he was ready to get out of that body.  And of course, I got to spend the day with my sisters, and "never were there such devoted sisters".  I really love those girls.

I have almost no pictures of the boys, and this is because they were running amuck and generally acting stupid.  Usually when we get together, they run off and we hardly see them.  This trip, I had to wonder if this weirdo-ness was what we were missing--and it's really no loss, believe me.  I only missed seeing Autumn's kids--they were all sick.  Boo.  Next time.

Also, I discovered that I am a total weenie.  Chicken to the max.  I sat at the top of the kiddie ferris wheel with Ava and paige and thought, you know, I might actually wet my pants.  Ava was saying what's wrong with you, Goochie?  Nothing dear;  do hold still.  No leaning over girls--of course it's all perfectly safe, just no rocking, okay?  I don't delude myself into thinking I was ever a daredevil, but really.  If I weren't strapped in I might have jumped just to get down faster.  Protect the five year olds?  Uh-uh.  I used to say that I wasn't afraid of the rides;  I just didn't like them.  Bull.  I'm afraid.  Very afraid.  And what reasonable person wouldn't be?  It isn't natural.  Like dad's view of ultrasounds to determine a babies gender--it's against god and nature to strap yourself into a hunk of metal (or worse--wood!) and go flying through the air at unholy speeds.  I'm a very grounded person.