You can teach an old dog new tricks (me)

Instilling a sense of duty has not come naturally to me as a parent.  I'm all about inspiration and affection, learning to love the world around us, taking time to appreciate "the little things".  But duty?  Not so much.  Duty is "boring".

However, in recent years I have come to realize that duty is a very important part of life.  In it lies the simple building blocks of daily life: respect, patience, perseverance, serving others, care of possessions, maintenance of living spaces, etc.  Without these habits built into life, chaos reigns.  Chaos is worse than boring - it is dreadful.

A habit is "an acquired behavior pattern regularly followed until it has become almost involuntary".  Of course we clear our spot when we are done!  X-Y-Z goes back on the shelf after I'm done with it.  And that life-simplifying mantra, "a place for everything and everything in its place". 

Without a doubt, order and cleanliness comes easier to some than others.  Children amplify the need for these life skills, or lack there of, beyond reckoning.  I fall into the second category.  Lack there of.  Doh.

I remember reading encouragement to involve young ones in chores right from the start.  It will often take longer, but it is worth the effort of patience and (sometimes) added work to train them to help.  While I am doing that with Jamie, I never really did with Diego until he was a bit older, perhaps around 3-ish.  Probably because most of the said-chores were not on my radar screen.  The messes seem bigger and more ominous now, but also . . . prior to children, my jobs were to wash the dishes and clean the cat litters.  Squeeze did everything else. 

It has been a slow transition over the years, but I now hold the reigns of household management.  Of course, this also involves cleaning up after three little rascals, but I am floored by the amount of labor that is involved in "just life".  The daily grind.  The endless minutiae of picking up, organizing, cleaning, re-organizing, picking up, cleaning it again, and so on. 

Without daily maintenance, I am toast.  The tsunami-force of the mess monster swallows one whole - mind, spirit and all.  It is like a black-hole of despair.

My recent understanding of all this has initiated a major overhaul this past year.  The boys are becoming more and more responsible in household maintenance.  We all live here, and while I am your mama, I ain't your maid.

It has been a work in progress for several years.  I've spent a goodly amount of time hammering out my own failings . . . developing standards and creating structure in my own daily/weekly routines . . . and while I am not perfect, things have improved drastically.

Through all these inner-workings and sight of tangible results, I've realized that instilling a set of expectations in the daily routine is key.  It used to be the darndest thing to have my boys get dressed every day.  And brushing teeth after breakfast?  Fergettabou'dit.  They hit the ground running for the play table as soon as their breakfast dishes were cleared.

But then it hit me: make it an expectation.  Schedule it in to the routine.  Normalize it into daily reality.  One small example of this is my recent regimentation of "morning chores", which is nothing more than clearing the table, wiping their spot, brushing their teeth, and getting dressed.  But now . . . if they forget, all I need to do is ask sweetly, "What do you need to do next?" and they know exactly what I am talking about.  There is no harassing and the work gets done, in large part because they expect it.

It is embarrassing to know that I am just figuring this out with a seven, four, and one-and-a-half year old, but things change over the years.  Demands and challenges are different, as are the levels of activity and distractedness.  And shoot, I'm an ENFP.  We don't do well with the "trivial drudgery of everyday life".  Heh.

What is best though, is that I've come to realize that I can make ANYTHING into habit.  Whatever portion of the daily grind I need them to take responsibility for . . . I can instill it as habit into their daily routine.  One at a time, slow and steady wins the race, but I can. DO. it.

And that feels very good.

The past is a foreign country

Retronaut: I am beyond intrigued.

People are people are people are people.  No matter when or where. 

I love stuff like this because it helps me get out of the entrapment of feeling like I am (or we are) "the first".  We are pioneering our own lives, yes, from birth to death - gaining the experiences and maturity that comes through living - but it has all been done before, a million times over.

Look into the eyes of some of these people.  I've seen them before.  I've seen them!  They are the faces of all of us.  Ever-changing, always the same.

Preservation blitz

It is the wee hours of the night/morning and I've been in the kitchen for most of the day . . . decanting sauerkraut, jamming and canning 12 cups of concord grapes, canning 9 quarts of tomato sauce.  I didn't get started until mid-afternoon, but crikes . . . I'm bushed. 

Tomorrow I will need to re-fill the Pickl-It jars with a fresh batch of thinly-sliced cabbage n' caraway seeds for 'kraut and quarter plum tomatoes for the dehydrater. 

I really should blanch and freeze kale and collards as well.  They "keep" so much longer out in the garden, but better to get a jump on it vs. waiting until I am totally burnt-out and the plants are half-dead.  I doubt I'll have it in me, though.  Maybe sometime this week.

'Tis the season.

Harvesting & homeschooling

I feel a burning lack of contemplative thought in my life right now.  I don't have time to read, I don't have time to sit and stare, I don't have time for blogging.  It burns.  I sat down to write a contemplative post today, but realized that I don't have the time or ability to hammer my thoughts into a cohesive thesis.  So I shan't.  I just can't.

Our tomato table is full to the brim, waiting for me to slice plum tomatoes for drying.  I hope to have enough big-juicies to make a batch of tomato sauce soon.  Salsa, too.  I de-stemmed 10 lbs of grapes yesterday, concord grapes from our neighbor Walentyne.  They are such a gorgeous dusky purple-blue, my heart leaps whenever I look at them.  The next step is to separate the skins from the pulp.  I am making grape jam, so I will then cook the pulp, strain the seeds, then add the chopped skins back to the greenish-goo, add a sweetener and vioa-la!, jam.

I looked around the house yesterday and remembered, "Oh yes, this is September".  Of course it isn't September yet, but the harvest has started.  Things are getting wild.  I want to keep my perspective this year, to remember that the house might look like a cyclone hit it, but the chaos is only temporary.  It is worth it.

I am also looking toward the reality that we are starting Year 1 . . . first grade . . . of homeschooling this year.  We will start in October.  I feel fairly relaxed about it as I did most of my planning this past spring (with two year of reading and research undergirding it).  We have cultivated our home and lifestyle as a rich learning environment, so even if we haven't officially done "school", our little fellas have been schooled in many life skills and sciences since the very start.  I am also realizing that I am of the "better late than early" variety. 

I will be following the methods and philosophy of the educator Charlotte Mason using Ambleside Online as my training wheels, though I will be using The Story of the World as my history "spine".  I will be very curious to see how everything plays out.  It will involve a lot of reading aloud, which I think we will all enjoy.  I'm not exactly sure how to re-organize our day to make everything work, but I have read enough about homeschooling to know that it might taking several readjustments before things gel.

Other goals include teaching Diego how to read (which I think he is totally ready for, it should be easy) and teaching both boys how to tell time, as they currently measure time by Mr. Bean episode-lengths.  I think I need a morning board, so I can go hard at it with the season, temperature, date, time, etc.  Any suggestions out there...?  For some reason, I can't muster the inner strength to actually make one (though it must be easy).

Olson Extravaganza

Posting a little sooner than last year . . .

My parents & sister left yesterday after a two-week visit.

We spent a week at our place and a week in the Twin Cities.

Lots of time with my sibs, grandparents, great-grands,

and a menagerie of extended Olsons.

'Twas good.

 The usual with Unky Erik

 The extended Olsons --

We had many a night like this.

Laid out flat at the beach --

three days without a nap'll do this to yeh.

My youngest sibs --

Snacking on homemade hummus

after splashing around with the nephews in the lake.

 Watching the koi at Como Park

Examining the fountain coins with Unky Andrew

 Blasting Grandma with the bubble gun --

She's the one that bought it for them! :)

Unky Jayna outright laughing --

Jamie's face was smooshed beyond belief in that mask.

Uncle Andrew & Auntie Brenda --

Keepin' it real with the kiddos.

Playing Go Fish with Grandpa & Great-Grandma

My lovely grandparents

"Up at the cabin"

The boys with their great-grands

and the friendly neighborhood kitty.

The last-minute goodbye photo 

Postus Interruptus

I am supposed to be putting a chicken into the oven to roast; but instead I am snuggling with my littlest guy, still groggy from his nap. 

He wouldn't be awake, except that Truen dropped an aluminum pail right in the front entry while begging me to come outside (as I readied the aforementioned chicken).  The giant reverberating crash that it produced as it hit the ground woke his baby brudder up.

Sheesh.  Go figure.

The last two days have been warm and sunny (and not the heat box we've been living in).  It has been delightful.  The entire house is open and breezy, flooded with fresh air.  It feels good to go outside.  Hearing the birds chirp under the shade of a tree with the breeze on my skin felt like a downright luxury this afternoon, especially after the weeks and weeks of scorching misery.

Ahhhhhh . . .

Jamie is up and running with his brudders, so I'd better get back to my chicken. 

We are finishing a run of two weeks with Squeeze working overtime, up an hour earlier every day and skipping his lunch hour.  It has been a grueling couple of weeks for him.  The poor guy was almost slug-like on the couch last night and eventually crawled upstairs to bed like a beaten dog.

A catch-up list

• Various posts keep running through my head.  The one stuck on repeat most recently would have been titled "Things I Thought I'd Never Hear Myself Say as a Mother", with the headliner of "Please get your face out of my butt".  Yes, I've said that.  More than once.
• But(t).  I'm not in the mood.  I'll just do a list-post to catch up on life.
• Jamie is starting to connect words with concepts.  Like today, when he put his fingers in the bottom of the glass sliding door, then held up his filthy little hand and said, "Doh-dee".  It took me a second for it to register, then I realized that he telling me that his hand was dirty.  The sweet little fella.
• Or yesterday, when we were in the garden and he was nervous around the sprinkler.  He kept on backing away and saying, "Cold! Cold!" whenever it veered in his direction.
• Speaking of veering.  I am actively trying to reprogram my nickname for Schtinky.  The time has come for a change, mostly because I don't want him to get upset about it as he gets older.  Recently I've been calling him "Voosy", which is Squeeze's nickname for him, or have defaulted to my new one: "Tsamie".  He answers to all of them.  Schtinky, Stinky, Jamie, Tsamie, Voos, Voosy.
• Our summer has been very hot and dry.  We've had one real rain in the last two months.  All the grass is brown and we are watering our young trees to keep them going.  Ditto on the gardens.  Squeeze runs the sprinkler almost every morning or night.
• Because of the heat, we are going to have AMAZING melons, squash, eggplant, peppers, okra, etc. this year.  It is looking doubtful for the tomatoes, though.  The plants look phenomenal, but it isn't cooling down enough at night and we are losing blossoms, especially on the big juicies.  No flowers, no fruit.  Frustrating.
• This is definitely the hottest summer we have had here.  Squeeze heard somewhere that these are the warmest temps in Minnesota since 1987.  In the past, we've run our air conditioner maybe once a summer, perhaps for 3-4 days, during a miserable run of hot, humid days; but this summer, the a/c has been on for most of July.  Life would be miserable without it, though I am getting very tired of feeling cooped up.  We have enough of that in the winter months.
• My parents and sister are coming for a visit next week.  They will be at our house for a few days, then we are all heading to the Twin Cities for my grandparents' 60th where we will meet up with another two brothers and a SIL.  One brother and a SIL won't be able to make it, so it won't be a complete reunion, but fun nevertheless.

Back to the old grind.  Nap/Quiet Time is officially over.  Goodbye, silence . . . you carressed my ears and mind, but my jaw still hurts . . .

I love my boys. ♥

The brudders with their great-grands

In Wisconsin, the week before last

Domestic bliss

We've been here for 5 years now.  A post on that fact (five. years!) brewed in my head for several weeks, but nothing ever came of it.  My thoughts aren't transferable amongst the screaming and I haven't had the inspiration to sacrifice my sleep/stare/read times as of yet.  Besides . . . that last post?  Yeah.  All hell broke loose with the brudders and the baby scribbled on the wall with a pencil in the chaos.  It just isn't worth it.

Nevertheless, we've been here for 5 years.  And it has been just this year that we are starting to get radical on improving irritating things about this house.

Squeeze replaced the high-tower toilet.  He replaced the leaky plumbing under the sink and the faucets in the bathtub and bathroom sink.  But most deliciously . . . we had our neighbor come this spring and install shelving into a long kitchen closet (it actually used to be an elevator) that turned a piddly few shelves into a true-blue Pantry Closet that I can't gush enough about.

Here's the BEFORE shot.  Why the previous owners had three shelves so-very-far apart is beyond me.

We were able to consolidate a number of scattered storage spaces into something entirely more efficient and amazing.  Seriously, we batted our eyelashes at it for days after install at the beauty of it.  We kept the light on in the evening that first night just to LOOK at it.  Storage room and plenty of it.  Shelves for food, shelves for surplus kitchen equipment, shelves for craft and art and paper supplies.  Shelves for games!  Shelves for toys.  Shelves for cookbooks.  Shelves and shelves and shelves!  The glory.

This is the AFTER shot.  Things are gotten even more wonderful as we have settled in.  Oh, the beauty!  It has definitely added to my overall level of happiness and sanity.  I am thankful for it every single day.  (The filing cabinet was moved to the bedroom closet and the food dehydrator went to the top of the dryer and we added a plant near the window.  Whee!) 

The three existing shelves went upstairs to the closet directly above this one (the top portion of the former elevator, about half the size of this one due to the slanting roof). It also only had three shelves, just as far apart. Squeeze screwed the two additional shelves between the existing so now we have five! shelves! in what we call the Holiday Closet. It is 100% seasonal decorations. Who knew one family could amass that much decor??

All the glory and grandeur of the reorganized closets has inspired us to finally organize the other storage closet upstairs.  Yesterday we went to what Truen calls "The Bernards" (AKA the hardware super-store called "Menards") and bought steel storage shelving.  The wonder!  I can't wait.  We are going to pull everything out of the closet this evening and reorganize.  The weather is nasty (90 degrees F and above), so indoor work is ideal.  It is going to be awesome.  Totally tubular.

Estoy aquí

Has it really been over two weeks since I posted last?  Ugh.  Time flies, especially with less an hour of down-time each day.  I could stay up later I suppose, but I'm just not willing to do that.

Updates?  The only thing I have time for is to report that I've started pulling out gray hairs.  Double-ugh.  Just within the last couple of months, I've noticed stray white hairs glimmering on the top of my head.  They are shorter, bristly and they stick straight up. !!! 

They are getting the boot.  I don't think I would mind so much if they laid down flat, but they stick up like little wires.

Lovely.

Tidbits

• Today I'm going to make garlic scape pesto.  I dropped last summer's pesto remnants in a glass storage container that shattered on the kitchen floor and honestly contemplated trying to eat it in spite of the glass shards.  It is that good.
• We killed another baby bird last night.  Not on purpose of course.  This time a robin fledgling that fell out of the tree in the front yard last Saturday morning.  We read online to leave a fledgling alone and let its parents take care of it, but we have three children under seven and it was in the front yard right outside our windows.  It didn't stand a chance.  They couldn't leave it alone and we weren't willing to spend an entire day or more fighting them off of it.  The boys did their best, feeding it all kinds of chopped worms, but in the end "mother knows best".  Sad.
• The linden basswood tree in our front yard is in full bloom.  It is literally buzzing with honey bees and its flowery fragrance is almost overpowering.  I am extremely fond of this tree, feeling thankful for it (and the people who planted it) almost everyday.  The shade that it provides our home and yard below it is so luxurious, a haven to hide under on a warm, sunny day.  It is downright gorgeous undearneath its leafy spread.
• Schtinky AKA Jamie has been very opinionated about which breast he nurses on for awhile now.  He now says, "ah-side" when he is ready to switch.  Before that it was just a lot of squeezing and shirt-pulling.
• Last Saturday I slept in until 9:00 AM, very comfortable and dozing in and out of sleep throughout the morning.  Ladies, it has been a long time.  Probably more than year?  Maybe longer.  This too, felt like a luxury.  Wow.  It was amazing.

I laugh every time I look at it

Post title: The Bright Side
Picture caption: Only one of them was aware it existed.

Endless giggles: Awkward Family Photos

Obsessed with "chesst"

All three of our boys are going through a chess binge (otherwise known as "chesst" at our house).  We have three sets: one cardboard and plastic-piece set from Wilburn, circa 1974, one wooden set from Squeeze's childhood chess obsession, and a small magnetic travel chess set, also from Squeeze's childhood.  He used to play against himself in the car.  All three boards are in circulation.

Diego begs both Squeeze and I to play every day.  Most of the game is punctuated with "No, a pawn can only move one space forward", which seems to be the rule he has the hardest time remembering.  He obviously has no ability for strategy at this point, but he loves moving the pieces around the board and capture his opponent's pieces. 

Truen likes to use the pieces for his own imaginative battle scenes, complete with sound effects.  He doesn't play "chesst", per se.  Like Diego, he can set up the board with the pieces in the correct spots.  "I know how to set it up, do you know that Mama?" he said this afternoon.  And he had, it was set up perfectly.  Wow.

Jamie is very interested with both the pieces and boards as well, not only because they are new, but also because his brothers' major "chesst" jag.  He likes to suck on the pieces and throw them around the room as well as scrape the chess board against the kitchen floor.  Uff.

It has been a intriguing phase to be thrust into.  Who would have thunk it?

Silver lining

Every cloud has one, right?

While I was vacuuming our gargantuan living room today (a later addition to this old, patchwork-quilt-of-a-house, larger than the size of our first apartment), I was able to think of some good things about being done with having babies.

• Not having to be pregnant again.  This is two-thirds good news, as I only truly enjoy the second trimester anyway.
• Along the same lines . . . suffering less wear and tear on my body.  This last time around, I remember feeling like I was recovering from pregnancy, not childbirth.  One would think it would only get rougher.
• Less expense in our yearly flight to Seattle to visit my family.  And less insanity en route.
• Not having to reconfigure how to share myself with four children.  Everyone wants to sleep with me.  Everyone wants to snuggle with me at the same time.  But there is only one of me and I only have two arms.  (Though Diego has been snuggling with my LEGS at night.  He wakes up on his own and then comes and snuggles in at the bottom of the bed.  I actually like it, unless I am so cramped that I am unable to move.)
• Done with diapers and night-nursing forever 'n ever.  Yes.  That sounds nice.
• Not having to come up with another name.  Weird I know, but I honestly consider it an unpleasant task.  It is just too hard.

We shall see.  Squeeze is 100% ready to be done.  I am probably 75% ready to be done.  I think.  Some days I am okay with the thought, but I mostly feel mournful and incredulous.

Seasons in clothing and life

I finally finished re-organizing the boys' winter clothing for storage in our household's biannual seasonal clothing change.  Just yesterday.  It is a task that I both enjoy and dread.

On one hand, I am pleased to remember how blessed we are.  I revel in the base-level practicality of it all, knowing that I don't need to even think about clothes for the next boy.  I like the nostalgia of memories triggered of my boys at certain ages.  I love the frugality.

On the other hand, it is a fairly sizable task to tackle while my three little guys dance around me.  It always seems insurmountable and I usually put it off for weeks and weeks.

But as I folded baby clothes yesterday morning, the ones that Jamie has grown out of, stacked upstairs for later organization, I felt the weight of sadness.  The memories.  Those little, soft baby clothes with the sweet-smelling, fat baby that goes in them.  My tender heart!  Indeed . . . babies are very likely becoming a thing of the past for our little family.  It makes me so sad.  I can't even bring myself to speak of it in certain terms.

No more babies?  Never to birth again??  Never to hold my own newborn close, savoring every little snort and grunt?  Never again?  It hurts, ladies.  It hurts.  And it is probably - I think - pretty much, most likely, the end.  Probably.  I think.

I know we must all go through it to some extent, but it is just. so. sad.

Just like brudder

Just like brudder.  Always.

It is so fun to watch the wheels turning in his little head,

seeing how he works it out to mirror his brudders.

(I remember my sister squatting like this with me when she was a similar age.)

On a sidenote: Truen wore those shoes when he was 2.5 years old.

And they definitely won't fit Jamie next summer.

Currently: Schtinks = 27 lbs :: Truen = 32 lbs

I thought I'd try to get a good shot of the three of them while I was at it.

No luck . . .

Though I do love seeing what each of them are up to.

They are sitting in front of the chicken yard --

currently we have 9 chick(en)s which we will butcher this fall.

(We liquidated our egg-laying stock last fall.)

Same thing.  Just like brudder.

He insisted on having his towel wrapped around him

just exactly like Truen had his towel wrapped.

He has been wanting to "help" in the kitchen too --

In this case, making ice cream.

Yesterday he was "helping" me pound bread crumbs.

On the step-stool, a good 2-3 feet off the ground.  Gah!

I spent most of my time hovering,

worrying about a misstep vs. getting dinner done.

(: But how I love this little brudder. :)

Squeezing in a post

There is too much to say and not enough time to write a coherent post, so I defer to the list-post.

• We had another huge green salad for lunch today, topped with tuna, sunflower seeds, raisins, radishes, shredded cheese and olive oil with balsamic vinegar.  It was scrumptious.  I am endlessly pleased that my boys eat this without batting an eyelash.
• I bought two quarts of strawberries from the farmers' market in Big Town, SD yesterday.  We ate sliced strawberries with breakfast, made strawberry-banana creamsicles this afternoon, and will have strawberry shortcake this evening for dessert.  Though actually . . . it will be shortbread.  Same-diff.?  Not sure, but it is gonna be awesome.
• Eating our strawberries this morning I pondered on the idea of eating seasonally and came upon something.  I realized that I don't mind eating strawberries just during June, or tomatoes in August and September alone, because there are so many other wonderful treats rotating throughout the year.  Citrus and soups in the winter months.  Apples in the fall.  Asparagus and spinach every spring.  What a rich cyclical bounty!
• Of course, we are eating home preserved and processed foods throughout the year as well, but there is something very special about eating fresh food in season.  I never would have known.  I'm so glad to have conditioned myself to this way of eating.  It is so much more of a thrill.  Honestly.
• We've been eating another seasonal treat recently as well: ice cream.  We have the ice cream attachment for our KitchenAid stand mixer (oh my goodness, if you have the mixer, buy the ice cream attachment).  Oh my, but what lovely delights that can be made with that little beauty!  And no filler.  Just cream, egg yolks, maple syrup, vanilla.  Yo.
• Our little Jamie.  What a cutie.  His new words are "Go!", "Hi", "Cheese" and he even said Grandma when prompted last week, though I can't remember how it went.  He likes it when I say, "One - Two - Three - Gooooo!" and joins me on the "Gooooo!", sliding down the slide or whatever other magnificent feat he's performing.  It's adorable.
• Speaking of the little bugger, I've added peeing on the potty right before bed to his potty-training regimen.  Every morning and every night, I sit him down and ask him to potty.  He almost always does.
• Two weeks ago, I noticed that his little hands were so dry that his thumbs were cracking.  Ugh!  It was terrible.  He squeezed a kumquat and cried and cried because it stung so horribly.  I started giving him cod liver oil in what we have now started calling "chewy pills" (AKA softgels) and they are healing nicely.  I tried giving him cod liver oil from this spoon this past winter, but he spit it out on to his shirt and peeeee-uewy, but that will stink for untold amounts of time. 
• I learned that trick from dealing with my own poor cracked thumb in the winter months.  Starting the year after Diego was born, my right thumb started cracking along the right-side of my nail line and nothing I did would heal it: lotion, ointment, band-aids, whatever.  It would heal up and crack right open again.  Oy, it hurt.  Enter cod liver oil, and *poof* gone.  It has threatened to come back in recent winters, but I amp up on the CLO and it disappears.

The baby awakes.  Much love.

Streaming

• Another windy day.  We've had several days of such fierce wind in the past week that it's just better not to go outside.  My hair whips around my face and practically stands on end.  The wind has battered a number of spring flowers into an oblivion and snapped several flowering varieties in half, including a cypripedium orchid that was getting ready to bloom for the first time in four years.  Boo.
• Schtinky AKA Jamie has started saying "poo-poo".  This morning as I walked into the living room with a diaper right after his bath, he pointed at his pee-spot on the floor (grrrrreat) and said, "poo-poo".  He has also pointed to Truen on the toilet and responded to my inquiry about poop in his diaper with "poo-poo".
• He also makes farting noises and laughs.  And holds objects that look like guns and makes the "pshw-phsw" sound.  Is that the youngest of three brudders or what??
• Diego is going through a huge obsession with the I SPY books.  We read through a few pages on an almost-daily basis.  He love-love-loves finding all the hidden objects.  He has also been using our wooden blocks, tinker toys, duplo blocks and little tidbits around the house to create his own I SPY scenes.  Some of the stuff he's come up with is quite well thought-out.
• Truen's current obsession is my jewelry boxes.  Last Friday, Schtinky attempted to climb our bedroom dresser using open drawers as a ladder.  I don't know how he survived unscathed, but he did.  (And nothing broke!)  Everything came crashing down, including a whimsical "jewelry tree" that Squeeze made for me a couple of years ago (an arty-looking tree branch stuck into brown aquarium-rock in a vintage plant-pot).  Ugh . . . the horrors.  We had weekend guests coming, so I did my best to pick up all the small pieces, but then had to move on to more important messes.
• So yes.  The jewelry.  I've never thought of myself as a "jewelry girl", but I have quite a lot of it.  It has been sitting out within reaching-distance on Squeeze's grandma's buffet in the living room, much to the interest of my little "Truby-ruby", as Diego is calling him these days.  Both my jewelry boxes and the box of my great-grandma's cheap costume jewelry bequeathed to me by my grandmother.
• He has to sit at the table to go through it all and puts all the necklaces and bracelets on by turn.  With a gleam in his eye.  "I'll wear this and this when I go out in public," he says, showing me his arm and chest.
• Truen has also been getting upset by being smaller than Diego recently.  He doesn't like that he is littler, that Diego will always be bigger, and will work himself up into tears, wailing, "and I am always getting hurt!".  Which is true.  He gets hurt with unbelievable frequency.
• His current injury is a scrape to the side of his right big-toe knuckle.  If you can follow that.  Diego basically slide into him while they were playing on the front walk, causing him to scrape that spot on the inside of his foot a number of inches on the cement.  It is a DOOZY.  Very nasty and hard to heal because it keeps on getting re-injured.  I've finally insisted that he wears socks and slippers inside and socks and shoes outside.  Enough already.
• Shifting gears . . . with our gardens completely planted, our focus has shifted to weeding and watering (especially with this hot, wicked wind blowing).  Soon we will be paper-and-strawing, though I am lobbying for just "strawing".
• The moths have been un-un-un-un this year.  They are everywhere.  If something hangs out on the line overnight, a dozen moths will be hiding under it.  Every time I open the garage door in the morning, a couple dozen moths fly out at me and make me squawk as if it were Hitchcock's The Birds.  It is getting down-right oogie.
• We found two baby blackbirds that fell from their nests last Friday.  The first was big and strong enough to put back into the tree so it could hop back up to its nest.  The second was too young, very fuzzy and just starting to get its feathers.  The boys have been begging to raid bird nests to get a "pet bird" (right, like that is ever going to happen), so this was the perfect opportunity for me to satiate that desire.  I reasoned that even if it ended up dying, it wouldn't have made it anyway. 
• Oh, they were thrilled.  So thrilled.  We found a wind-blown nest and Diego made it a soft bed of fresh grass inside it.  They fed it moths and worms and softened catfood (yuck).  They learned to tap the side of the nest so it would start peeping and begging for food.  They held it and fussed over it.  At one point I found Diego sitting alone, holding the nest and staring off with dreamy eyes.  "I'm just so happy," he said, smiling hugely.
• And then it died.  The third day. 
• Our theory is that it got too cold in the night (a storm blew through) and that it waited too long to eat that morning (the boys slept in due to late nights and all the thrill of our weekend visitors).  Saaaaad.  Diego cried (Truen seemed less affected).  The 13 year old girl who was staying with us brought it in the house as it was breathing its last, barely able to lift its head.  Oh, it was terrible.  Just terrible.  We were all sad. 
• But even then, I was amazed how quickly they got over it.  It was a good experience for the boy-ohs, though I do wish we wouldn't have let the little guy down.

Garden notes: fully planted

Is it Thursday already?

We had an extremely productive three days last weekend.  Squeeze took Monday off, an excellent move which produced some massive results.  Massive?  Yes.  Both gardens are 100% planted.  All supports (cages, frames, poles, wind protection, etc.) are in.

Stats from this weekend:

• 54 tomatoes
• 41 peppers
• 16 eggplants
• 6 tomatillos
• 4 varieties of winter squash (Buttercup, Butternut, Spaghetti, Triamble)
• Cucumbers (Lemon and Bushy)
• Summer squash (a yellow patty-pan and Black Beauty zucchini)
• Gourds, pumpkins
• Melons (Charantis and Sweet Siberian for sure)

We've been eating huge salads all week.  In fact, for lunch the other day I served the boys a giant salad with sunflower seeds, raisins, tuna chunks and shredded cheese with buttered toast.  They yummed it down and Truen requested it for lunch the next day as well.  I also picked enough spinach that all of us were able to eat it with dinner one evening in delightful quantities (we usually end up fighting over it).  With butter and salt.  Yo.

We feel very good with where we are at this year.  Very good.  "Experience is the best teacher" and man, we learn more and more with each passing season.  When a tactic fails, we take note and make sure not to repeat it the next season.  Or even accidental or circumstantial failures, like last year when we didn't get the tomato support fences up until early July.  It couldn't be helped . . . there was just too much else to do.  But this year?  The fences were already made (a huge boost in working towards our goal) and we got them in as we planted.  That is huge.

More notes from this spring:

• April 2nd
• April 23rd
• May 7th

The boys and I were in Minneapolis last week, staying with dear friends and visiting with my brother while he was in town.  We hit up the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Como Park, Minnehaha Falls, hung with our buddies, satiated my cravings for Nepali and Middle Eastern food, spent time with a friend and her new baby and visited with a college roommate (and her children) I hadn't seen in almost 9 years.  A very full and rich few days.

More spring notes from the garden

One of the nests we are watching this spring:

Aren't robins' eggs so gorgeous?

That blue . . . so hopeful.
Mesmerizing.

We are catching up from our dry winter with a downpour of spring rains - 5 inches in the past 3-4 days.  Work in the garden this weekend was muddy.  We slogged around with muck all over our boots, getting taller and more heavy-footed with each step as it compacted underfoot.

We didn't get into the garden until Sunday, as it was raining buckets all Saturday day and night.  And what a sight it was.  Totally overwhelming.  With all this rain (and last week's temps in the 80s F), everything has been growing in turbo-speed and it felt like the weeds were the most prolific of the bunch.  It was discouraging.

But we rallied and attacked and by the end of the day, things looked pretty darn good.

I weeded the peas, celery, lettuce/radishes, spinach and garlic.  Squeeze weeded the carrots, kale, collards and chard; he also prepped the cabbage bed (which involved a full-on frontal attack on mats of grass), then planted the cabbage seedlings. 

Those poor little cabbages . . . they have been sitting outside for the past week "hardening off" (AKA getting used to outside temps) and have been absolutely assaulted by the weather.  They've been drowned several times, blown-silly by fierce winds, hammered by rain, and just this past Saturday night, pelted by hail.  Squeeze had to don the rain slicker and rescue them from certain death.

We ate a yummy-delicious salad of lettuce and radishes last night, composed entirely of newly-seeded plants . . . the earliest salad on record.  (Other early salads have involved cold frames or mild-winter survivors.)

2012 Spring garden notes:

• April 2nd
• April 23rd