Tales From Our Garden

 Our sunflowers have sprouted......

 ......and we are well on our way to yard of the month fame.  We've been trying to spruce up the front beds with things that will grow quickly, are perennial and also don't require a lot of effort to maintain. Being perma-renters is hard, especially when you're looking at moving every two years or so, but we refuse to live with the shame of ugly flower beds hanging over our heads.  And besides I think there's intrinsic value in gardening and taking something ugly and turning it beautiful.....or in our case semi-beautiful......or maybe just less ugly......well, hopefully the next tenants will enjoy the fruits of our labor anyway.

This plumbago we planted is supposedly invasive.....to which we say, excellent--hopefully it will be as fast growing as all of the doomsayers would have us believe and will quickly fill in the holes left by the half dead azaleas we pulled out.

I totally impulsed on this lavender while we were at the nursery but it's one of my favorite things right now :)

And since we are obviously such expert gardeners we thought to ourselves, "Hey!  Since we are obviously such expert gardeners, why not put in a vegetable garden into one of our existing flower beds as per the rules and regulations from the housing office?"  So we did.

We began by clearing out the overgrown sad flower bed on the sunnier side of the house only to find that it was hiding a deep dark dirty dirty secret......

After a week of chain-sawing, axing and repeated house-shaking mallet hitting* the stump is still there--standing proud and strong albeit a little shorter behind our new vegetable patch.

While Chris was handling the stump situation, I checked out every book I could get on Florida gardening from the library and we decided to go with the square foot gardening approach since we have limited space and they say it is super easy (they being the authors and why would they lie to me?).

Here it is during the putting together phase....if you look closely you can see a lump of a stump behind the left bed and if you are still looking closely you will notice that *shocker* we made our raised beds from our never-ending supply of found wood.

We got a bunch of organic seedlings from a local nursery to start off with (because we aren't completely delusional about our gardening prowess).  The blank squares have squash and jalapeno seeds--well we hope they do--they've already been attacked by some unknown critter so we aren't exactly sure if they are still in there or not......

And here is our finished product.  I'm loving that we haven't actually done any gardening at all but it already looks so green and lovely and productive with all of our cheater plants :)

I made some super fancy plant markers....I know, I know....I should totally open up an Etsy shop to start selling these one of a kind beauties.....

We also rigged up a trellis of sorts for our tomatoes and beans to climb up.  Hopefully it holds--we figure we can always prop it up later if it turns out our tomato plants are just bursting with fruit and the trellis begins to buckle under the weight of all the tomato-y goodness.....which is, probably unlikely.......

The boys were various levels of helpful during this whole process.  David really liked planting the seeds and seedlings with me and both boys liked watering the plants with the tiny bucket I gave them which had the double benefit of keeping them busy running back and forth to fill it up and also not allowing them to flood any poor plants with water from say, the hose.  

Most of their time was spent somewhat less helpfully though, as per usual.

They got the scathingly brilliant idea to drag Chris' car into the street while our attention was otherwise occupied.  They still think they can tow the car away if they just really put their backs into it.  I wasn't about to tell them that they had zero chance of moving daddy's car anywhere with this rope looped round the bumper method--the attempt kept them busy for at least a good half hour......

Will the raccoons and/or armadillo continue to raid the garden?  Will the sunflowers grow into something other than just sprouts?  Will the boys figure out how to put daddy's car in neutral?  Stay tuned to our garden adventure to find out the answers to these and other really really important and interesting questions.

*Chris has requested that I amend this to sledge hammering not mallet hitting--apparently they are not the same thing at all and one is immeasurably less manly than the other.  My apologies :)

How Old is He?

lady at the park:  "Oh, he's getting so big!  How old is he now?"

me:  (panicking--oh no, I have no idea, I'm the worst mom ever)  "Ummm....ten weeks ......no no wait eleven......it can't be twelve can it?.....let's say ten......well I'm not exactly sure........definitely more than nine but less than say thirteen?.........(insert me trailing off lamely)......."

Total.mom.fail.

Poor third born.....smile while you can little man.......it's probably only going to get worse from here........



PS the correct answer would have been eleven--almost twelve, and yes I did have to pull out a calendar to figure that out and yes, yes he is getting so big :(

Look Mom, a Dancing Octopus!

Henry's dancing octopus joke is still hilarious every time we open up the play dough....to Henry anyway......

I may have gone on a bit of a discount school supplies bender with the tax money we set aside in the "homeschooling" section of our budget.  Art supplies are essential to Kindergarten work, right?  If you haven't poked around their site yet you definitely should.  I bought a bunch of washable tempera paint, liquid watercolors, new brushes and I may have gotten a little carried away with the new play dough tools.  They had these dough squishers and three different sets of rollers, hammers, and clay tools and they were all huge hits--with the squishers coming in first, closely followed by the wooden "knife."  We make a semi-weekly batch of play dough so it was well worth the investment!

You can tell David's taking his play dough very seriously by the look of concentration on his face with his glasses perched on the tip of his nose........

I also restocked their regular watercolors which we usually do sans Henry, because, well, it's Henry.....

 
Once David made about six mini paintings he declared that he was a "real artist" and then promptly asked if we could have the real paint now.  Awesome.

Then there's the weaving board we made the boys out of the mini pallet our air conditioner repair men left behind and some extra chicken wire from the garden.  It has nothing to do with discount school supplies but it is arsty so there you go.  It's not the prettiest thing we've ever built but it sure is fun :)

David does a nice job weaving with my scrap ribbons (which I have a lot of because I compulsively save ribbon) and Henry has become pretty adept at un-weaving.  He likes to take all of the ribbons out and drape them over the top of the structure to "decorate his house" before he crawls under, which is pretty cute even if it is destructive.....

....and even with all the new art supplies and creative outlets we still didn't manage to keep the tv off as much as I had hoped this week, although there were two full days mixed in there that were totally screen free.  I'm hoping if I can dial back the tv watching, I will see a corresponding dialing back of David's craziness as well.........here's hoping........

{p,h,f,r} Yardwork Showdown Edition

{pretty}

Henry got some seed packets in his Easter basket and we finally got around to planting them.  They aren't pretty yet but the zinnias are already sprouting so I'm hopeful!

{happy}

Happy boys planting with their daddy....as you can see by Henry's outfit, (and like pretty much all of our activities), pants are strictly optional.

{funny}

David caught a lizard and Henry looked at it in the box and declared that it really wanted to go back to its mommy and daddy and we should set it free....David was not amused when he found out it was gone.  I may have let him believe that the lizard was in fact a Houdini lizard and that it must have escaped of its own accord......

Can you find the lizard?  They change from brown to green depending on...I have no idea what....

{real}

Does anyone know what this is?  Chris has put me in charge of finding out what type of palm it is so that he can determine the proper way to care for it and what he should do about the palm babies it's growing underneath itself.

Our neighbors won yard of the month this month so Chris has taken up the challenge and is determined to bring our front beds up to snuff--which Chris will tell you are much larger and also left to us in much worse condition than the reigning champions' flower beds are/were.  Just sayin' :)

Will our sunflowers grow?  Will we win yard of the month?  Will Henry ever wear pants?  I guess you'll just have to stay tuned to my super interesting blog to find out......And I'll be sure to keep you updated on the yardwork showdown as it progresses......


For more pictures of contentment be sure to pop over to LMLD!

Project Simplify: The Lego Dresser

Project Simplify is going on over at Simple Mom and if you know me you know I don't need much arm twisting to organize something.  This week is drawers and shelves so I tackled our newly founded lego dresser.

Last week after losing the battle on whether or not to let the husband's childhood lego collection into the house, I subsequently lost the battle on whether or not we should bunk the boys' beds.  I'll share some pics of the new arrangement as soon as I can get at least three quarters of the toys put away for long enough to take a decent photo....so maybe never.....If you've Face Timed with David recently you've already been blessed with the whole fifteen minute tour of their new space and received a detailed explanation of the whole bed-bunking process--if you haven't had the pleasure just call in the evening when Chris is home with his iphone and I'll be glad to set something up for you :)

Anyway.....the gain in floor space from bunking the beds meant that we could fit the boys' other dresser (that had been residing in our storage room since we moved in) back into their room--and (I hope) it is our perfect lego storage solution.....

You remember the before?

Well welcome to the after....

At first we just dumped the legos into the drawers and called it a day, but it was a lot of legos to dig through and they were ending up all over the place so we decided to sort them out by color--mostly because there is no way the boys would be able to put them back if we sorted them by type which was Chris' first preference.  If the boys are ever at the point where they want their legos sorted by type they can go ahead and take care of that themselves :)

I was going to make some cardboard dividers and duct tape them in, but Chris thought that that was really ghetto and sad so he used some extra plywood we fished out of the river on a recent river-fishing expedition and made real dividers for me instead.

Thanks to the giant ship and submarine sets I bought Chris in college, we have a ridiculously disproportionate number of grey to colored lego pieces........I'm not sure I would have given him those if I had known how they would come back to haunt me.....

The other drawer is for base plates and special pieces in an old silverware tray and then the top has instruction books.

So far it's been working well but I think we need to invest in one of these to use when the boys are building to help contain the mess and allow for easy transport from room to room, especially when Henry's napping and all of the lego pieces left in the room are being held hostage until he wakes.  I'm thinking the true blue one.

I guess I'm warming up to the legos....they are kind of fun to build with......

.....and I don't think I'm too shabby at building random lego things either :)


P.S. it's supposed to be a dog in case you're wondering.......

Yay for storing lego pieces off of the floor and check out the other before and afters!

Cooking with Littles.....

Me:  "Hey guys, let's make chocolate granola!....just hold on a second while I switch out the laundry...."

Henry:  (quietly goes into the kitchen and reemerges carrying a giant glass jar)  "Here mommy, I've got the jar of chocolate......."

.....I'm not sure if there's anything worse to clean up than molasses mixed with glass....at least it didn't land on the carpet.  If he had made it a few inches further I'm not sure I would have been able to see the humor in the situation......and thank goodness it wasn't actually a jar of chocolate either....I also would not have seen the humor if I had lost that much chocolate in one fell swoop......

Ah, the joys of cooking with so many little hands to help :)

Bells Are For Ringing

So as I may have mentioned before, last year when I was (unknowingly) pregnant with John Michael and also convinced that I was never going to conceive again I garage saled away every piece of baby gear that had ever annoyed me....so pretty much anything of the light up, noisy and/or plastic variety.  I only kept the things I really loved.  Once I found out that I was indeed being ridiculous and my child bearing years were not in fact behind me, I didn't regret anything that I had purged and this time around I'm taking a different baby play approach that doesn't involve filling up the house with ugly plastic stuff.

So far it's going well, but feel free to laugh at me if you find me making an emergency run to the nearest Once Upon a Child for a lights and sounds baby distraction device :)

Since I no longer had an activity gym type contraption I went in search of something different and found this really pretty wooden number which unscrews for storage and seems to have unlimited usefulness as both a puppet theater and cave, among other things.  I found mine on ebay for nowhere near what it costs new....mmmmm....I love ebay....

Well clearly a play gym needs dangling toys so I went to work recreating these Montessori bell and ring mobiles that I loved on a much shorter scale (for some reason I didn't think having these hanging from the ceiling would be a good idea in this particular house with these particular children....).  

Things were going fine until I managed to mess up the tension on my sewing machine (see sad pic below) and since I'm just winging this whole I know how to sew thing I had no idea how to fix it and gave up....

I was originally sewing them because I wanted to put a bit of elastic at the top so the baby could have fun tugging at them, but for right now he's just batting at them anyway so I can fix them up later.....and just tying them on was so much faster.....

Don't let this video of his totally underwhelming play session fool you....he really does like the bells....and the sound of bells jingling is music to my ears--did I really just type that?  sorry :)--much more so than our previous version whose song even now just thinking of makes me want to bang my head against the wall......

  

Yay for homemade toys that don't make mommy want to bang her head against the wall!  

Disclaimer:  Of course I don't leave him unattended with ribbons and bells.....I don't leave him unattended anywhere....have you been paying attention to the kind of loving attention his brothers give him?  He wouldn't last five minutes alone on the ground........

Two Months....

11 lbs. 14 oz.

24.5 inches

Dislikes vaccinations.

Smiles for mommy and daddy, not so much for the camera......