Random update

I don't really have much to report, but I'll post some catch up pictures anyway.  

For the last couple months, another first grade mom and i have been working on a quilt for the school's fund raising auction.  We had the kids all color a quilt block, and then we sewed them together and had it professionally quilted.  The quilter was either inspired by our great design, or took pity on us and did a great custom job, going around all the hand prints and adding hearts here and there.  It looks so nice!  Now all we have to do is bind it, and hope it sells for a lot.  Here's Parker's square.  I'll show a pic of the whole semi-completed quilt in another post.

Buddy the fish is doing well (knock on wood).  We've upgraded his tank to one that is lighted, heated, filtered and planted.  Bob has him trained to eat from a syringe.  After some tummy issues, we had to switch his food to tiny pellets, but they sink, so you have to give them to him one by one or he misses them and the foul up the tank.  We also have to soak them first, so the dropper makes them easier to handle.  Buddy gets very aggressive and bites the dropper if you put it in the water...I'm pretty sure we could get him to 'jump' up for his food if we wanted to, but that doesn't seem very nice. 

It's warming up here.  I noticed today that the Angel Trump that we had in the garage for the winter has a couple big flowers on it.  This was a big surprise since I've only seen it bloom late in the summer.  The Myer lemon tree (far right) has lots of blooms too.  Hopefully we'll have lemons this year.

Fall Foliage

 

Aren't the trees pretty this year?  Ours are some of the first to begin to turn.  I think the stress of the dry summer helps their color. 

No interesting news around here.  We made it through the busy Halloween weekend and now we're gearing up for the rest of the holidays.

Parker funny:  she was at a friends house yesterday and when she came home, she mentioned that the neighbor had given them some M&M's.  I know the neighbor, so it's no big deal, but I took the opportunity for a 'teachable moment' and told Parker if we're not with her, she should not take candy from anyone, even neighbors, blah blah blah.

Without missing a beat Parker said "ok.  I need to go write myself a note that says "no trick or treating next year."  When Bob and I closed our jaws, we reminded her that technically, we go with her to trick or treat, so that doesn't count.  Little smarty pants.

Random Pictures - week review

Has it been a week already? The 4 day week last week really threw me off. We had a pretty boring week, not much new to report. Here are some blurbs on what Parker did in school this week from the teacher's weekly email:

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Academic Focuses

Math

Ask your child what the word “attribute” means. We have been discussing the different attributes of our button collection and of our parquetry blocks.

We our still enjoying exploring the many different manipulatives we will be using this year.

Writers Workshop

Stories are popping up in journals, we are learning to really think about real things that happen to us, and put our thoughts on paper as illustrations and words. We thought it was pretty special when Mrs. Foster took time to come read in our journals!

Science: Magnets

We took magnets outside to see if we could find anything that would be attracted to a magnet (I was reminded by the students it meant it had iron in it). The biggest thrill was when our magnets stuck to the school bus! Children were busy recording the results.

Language/Arts

We are busy practicing becoming independent readers using a great resource called “The Daily Five”. This takes lots of practice and we are building stamina (ask your child the meaning of this new vocabulary word) so we can read longer each day by ourselves. They are very proud of their accomplishments this week and so am I!

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Parker really struggled with being tired this week...which means lots of whining and crying and unreasonable arguments. She was especially grumpy and mad at me on Thursday so she got a post it out to 'journal' about her bad day. She started out by drawing a house....OUR house. Luckily she calmed down before she added a picture of me sending her to her room. When she calmed down a bit, she started adding lots of other parts, and told me she was doing "el-ab-or-ation. Adding details!" Nice to know she's absorbing what they're doing in school.

Random picture: getting a haircut last weekend at Bob's parent's house courtesy of Gigi. It was just a trim, but I had her do the bangs just short enough that they'll pull out of her ponytail after a little while and make the pretty curls around her face. She hasn't seemed to notice...as long as it's all pulled back ("not poofy!") in the morning when she looks in the mirror, she's happy.

Here's a better picture of the volunteer angel trumpet/moon flower.

We've had a ton of rain the past few days. It's very welcome, but I'm getting a little tired of it. A fun thing we did today when we were stuck inside was to watch the preying mantis that lives on the gardenia. He's been there most of the summer, and he's getting bigger and bigger. He was sitting there today in the rain enjoying his front row seat to the hummingbird wars. I have 2 feeders and 4 hummingbirds and they fuss and fight and zoom around ALL DAY LONG. If everyone would just relax and take turns, they wouldn't need to consume so many calories. If i would move the feeders farther apart, it would be harder for 1 bird to try to guard both feeders, but what would be the fun in that (for me)?

Finished garden boxes

Here are the completed garden boxes. One was from last year, and Bob made 2 new ones this year. He also filled them with dirt for me, which was awesome.

This picture was done April 12th and the next one was done May 5th. You'd think I'd have a little more growth on things by now, but it's been chilly and gloomy. Plus I've had to start a few things over after they were eaten by pill bugs.

In addition to battling pill bugs, I'm also battling CRAWFISH coming up in the garden. That should give you some indication just how swampy our back yard gets in the spring. Everytime Mr. Crawfish digs a new hole, I cover it with a heavy flowerpot. And then he digs a new one. It's a fun game we've got going....I'm hoping to eventually chase him out.

I've planted: shallots, blackberries, tomatoes, peppers, squash, zuchinni, zinnias, eggplant, thai basil, cucumber, dill, Indian corn (Parker brought home from school), marigolds (to keep aphids off the tomatoes) and I'm on my 3rd attemp at both sunflowers and beans (the supposed easiest thing in the world to grow).

You'll notice that Parker's wearing her swim suit. Every day after school, ran, shine, or chilly weather Parker puts on her swimsuit and runs around and plays in it. She can't wait until it's warm enough to go swimming.

Spring Break - Garden Box Update

One of our projects for spring break was to plant seeds for our garden plants. Parker has a lot of interest in plants and seeds and planting....but no interest in the actual consumption of vegetables.
We planted seeds for eggplant, cantelope, beans, zucchini, squash, and cucumber. Everything is up now except for the beans. I've tried them twice. I thought those would be the easiest.

Since i have 2 garden boxes to fill, and we need mulch, we ordered in bulk. Here's dirt arrival day:

I'm going to put pictures of the completed garden in another post. I've taken several, but none are very good. I keep thinking my plants are really going to take off, but they're just limping along, like they always do this time of year.

Yard updates part3

Here are some pictures of the new walkway and the front beds. I don't have 'before' pictures of that because it was such a last minute decision.

New Walkway After:

Paula and Jack, I swear we aren't copying you. Our landscape plans really did call for a walkway like this!

Front view After:

We're really happy with all of it. And except for adding a few plants, getting the beds in shape for spring and summer, and giving the grass a little TLC, we are DONE with the yard improvements finally. That's the good news, the bad news is that we need to start on the interior next.

Garden (and Parker's) Growth

We had a super busy week last week. Construction finally got underway on the playroom. The new lighting, new windows and new door were installed. Tomorrow, hopefully, the "mud people" will come and the cabinets are being installed this week too. I'll post some progress pictures after the mud folks are done. Just the new windows have made a HUGE difference in how light and bright it is in there now.

On Thursday Parker had her 4 year old "well visit" or checkup. She's continuing to grow along her same growth curve, and she's in the 25th percentile for both height and weight and BMI. And her blood pressure is normal. They also checked her blood sugar and iron levels with a finger stick, because I said that she seems like she has low energy some of the time. We don't have the results yet, but I suspect she'll be diagnosed as 'lazy'...or another polite medical term meaning lazy. I'm making an effort to boost her stamina.

The garden is limping along. Parker and Bob planted sunflowers, and one is finally blooming. I've had several tomatoes and cucumbers and dill and we also have some jalapeño peppers but they're pretty tiny since they're in the shade of the sunflowers. The other day I made a yummy ziziki sauce using cukes and dill from the garden. Pretty thrilling. Next year I'm going to try zucchini and squash and eggplant.

Striking a pose for the sunflower picture:

Cucumber - I planted the english kind that have a thin skin. Very yummy.

Green tomato. I should have picked this one green....the birds found it when it turned red. They've taken care of my grasshopper problem though, so I guess I shouldn't complain too much. I'm getting a net next year though.

My garden clogs. Army green with ladybug jibbitz.

Flower bed overhaul

As Parker says "ta-daaaaaaa!"
We have finally finished redoing one of our existing flower beds. It's been driving us crazy and an embarrassment since we moved in. It was full of overgrown weeds, brush, tree stumps, poison ivy, fire ants and existing plants that didn't belong. After several weekends of hard work (mainly Bob's hard work, although I did help more than usual) we are finally done! Now it just needs to grow.

There was an existing cedar/cyprus (?) tree that was odd and out of place. Bob used his brute strength and iron will and dug it out....along with many other large thick-trunked 'weeds' that had grown into small trees. We replaced it with an Autumn Blaze Maple. The other plants in the bed are purple verbena, Compact Pomegranite, Goldmound Spiraea, Blue Star Juniper, multi-color Sage, Frost-Proof Gardenia, Crimson(?) Barberry, and Dwarf Burford Holly...which will eventually grow in a bit to provide some screening of the house behind us.

Here's the before.....it's taken from behind the bed...it was the only before I could find.

During.....Bob v. Tree

All the stuff that was dug up.....and Parker (for scale)

And the finished product. It will look really great in 3 more growing seasons....but I'm happy with the results already.

Parker was great every weekend at amusing herself - a miracle. She'd play on her swingset and trampoline or with toys we brought out while we were digging, and endured several trips to the plant store. It was definitely a family project!

New Garden! New plants! New spring look!

I decided to change the blog masthead to look more spring-like. I wish I could say that I did it myself, but I had it done by a local digital scrapbook designer...with my detailed requests of course. I think she did a great job! Check out her digital artwork, and buy things! She has free stuff here: http://seebeesfreebies.blogspot.com/

And she sells things at Digitals too.

Now that it's spring, we are spending lots of time in the yard. Our first big project was to build me a garden. Yay!!! No more container gardening! Bob whipped up this raised planter, out of cedar I think, and I filled it with a carload (literally) of dirt and I've planted 2 tomatoes and a jalapeño so far. I'm going to add a cucumber or zucchini soon. Sort of a lot of effort just for 4 plants, but if it's successful, next year I'll do another one.

Parker found a worm to torment when I was planting herbs in another bed. I convinced her he'd like living in my garden, so she shortly set him free in there.

The finished product. We have it located in the back of the house by the trampoline. It's probably going to be too much sun, but hopefully we'll add another tree back there soon to give it a break part of the day.

Our winter plants are looking great, like they always do in the spring. Maybe their know their days are numbered. I'm so glad we planted the kale/cabbage stuff this year. It looks so pretty as it grows....plus it takes up a lot more room than pansies.

We got 3 new hydrangeas...the one in the picture is an Oak Leaf hydrangea, I've wanted one forever. Even if it doesn't bloom, it has such pretty leaves, and grows a little bit taller than the normal kind I think. The hosta is old. We also got 2 'pink lady' hydrangeas, (not pictured) that have reddish stems and back of the leaves. We put it out by the dogwood in the little circular bed.

New Tree

We got a new tree! We needed something to replace the one that fell this summer to prevent our shade garden from baking in the afternoon sun. We chose an Autumn Blaze Maple, like we have in the front yard. It gets very pretty red and orange leaves in the fall.

BEFORE:
This is Bob out pre-digging the hole for the tree planters


(acutally, he wanted to make sure they didn't hit a sprinkler line, but it's funnier to act like he couldn't wait for the planters to get here)

AFTER:

It's kind of hard to see and to tell the scale, but it's a nice sized tree. The best part is that the nursery planted it for us, and it has a one year guarantee.

While we waited for the planters to get here, we debated whether or not it would rain. Parker braced for the weather with her new rain coat and kitty boots. She asks me everyday if it's going to rain, and she's had her coat and boots hanging on her chair since she got the rain coat.

Bob did more work on the bathroom. He's sealing the grout here. He also stained and restained the trim, and will probably install it in a day or two. We cannot wait to have this bathroom functional again!

Chives

And in landscaping news, my chives are blooming. I hardly ever even use chives for cooking, but I keep them around because I love their blooms. They bloom late in the year after everything else has started to dry up.

continued flower bed talk

I probably should have combined all these posts into one, but it's easier to do them this way.
My mom had the following comment about the flower bed:
"Looks good. One question -- what happened to the rose bush?"

The rose bush was unceremoniously hacked up and stuffed into the trampoline boxes and hauled to the curb. I'm just the messenger, remember.
We were done with that bush, it was too big for that spot and our new plan for those beds, so it needed to go. If you're scoring at home, we've removed 2 old roses, but put in 3, so we're +1 for roses.

We keep all the little info spikes that come with the plant and write the date on them. I stuck them in a little album to make it easier to sort through:

New flower bed pictures

Before

During

Bob, during

After

I forgot to mention that there's a "Gold Dust Aucuba" (varagated japonica) in the back corner that will get about 4'x6' hopefully.