Busy Bee's Garden Experiment

Finally

2010-06-16T11:25:00.002-04:00

I can finally post about some gardening. This has been an odd year. We were drowning in school in the beginning of the year and never got any seeds started. Tim isn't happy because we won't have oodles of amazing tomatoes again this year. I kind of decided that I wasn't going to garden this year and that I was just going to buy a LOT of stuff at our farmer's market.

We had crazy weather this spring. We had a couple of nice weeks and we though Spring had sprung but then we had a couple of weeks of below freezing temps in the evenings. If we had put anything out, it most likely would died. A couple of weeks ago I began to regret not starting anything in the garden and decided to go out and try and get some things.

Two weeks ago, I went over to our local dairy to see if they had any heirloom tomatoes growing. They had Rutgers there, but were gone by the time I got there. I walked through their amazing greenhouses and met this lady Anne. We got to talking and I learned so much from her. I came home and my head was swimming with knowledge and I kind of felt like I was drowning. I did come home with one Legend tomato plant. Anne gave me the ever so generous price of one dollar because she was having a hard time keeping up with them and she didn't want it to die. She also gave me some seed for Abernaki corn, some barley and some oats. She also recommended a seed company if I was looking for organic and heirloom seeds.

I came home and tried to tell Tim all I had learned but couldn't remember it all. I then did some research on the things I came home with. The corn, for instance, is not a sweet corn. It's a corn used to grind into flour. That will be fun. The barley I learned will make for a good cover crop in the fall to feed our garden beds.

The next day, it was cool and windy out and we were getting ready for some big storms and Nancy suggested that we all get out there before the rain hit and get the four beds cleared out. They were in dire need of attention. Tim, Nancy, Ethan and I worked furiously to get the beds done. We got three of them done and then it started pouring. In the torrential downpour we mixed in manure into one of the beds and planted the corn. Then we ran inside. Then I ordered some seeds from Fedco. I ordered some Kentucky Wonder pole beans, some New England Pie pumpkins, some Table Queen acorn squash and some Blackstrap sorghum seeds.

We wanted to try the Native American "three sisters" way of growing. The corn came up last week so I planted the Kentucky wonders around each of the corn sprouts that came up. They will grow up the corn stalks. At least that is what they are supposed to do. I think the beans add nutrients to the soil that corn needs too. It's all an experiment now. The third sister is squash. The Native Americans used to plant them around the corn/bean patch. The prickly nature of squash plants kept the corn and beans safe from animals. We don't have enough room in the bed to put the squash, so I'm going to plant the squash in the bed behind the corn.

Last weekend I went back to the farm to see if I could get another couple of tomato plants and see if I could chat with Anne some more. Score on both. I came home with two more Legend tomato plants and one Razzleberry tomato plant. I learned the difference between hybrid, open pollinated and heirloom varieties. I also came home with some sorghum plants. I told Anne that I got some Blackstrap seeds and she said that those wouldn't make syrup (which I why I wanted it) and then she handed me a tray of 18 plants. She said she was going to end up composting them because she didn't have the room to plant them so I gladly accepted them. I just finished planting them and I look forward to seeing them get tall and hopefully I'll be able to figure out how to make syrup.

Hmmm, what else? I did start a salsa mix of hot peppers for Tim and he transplanted them into four containers. I am looking up how to build a cold frame so that in the fall I can grow some lettuce and chard. I'll also be able to start them early in the spring too. I have decided that I'm going to take gardening seriously next year again. I'm going to order my seeds in January/February and then start the seeds March/April. We are striving to eat as locally as possible and there is nothing more local than our back yard. I can't wait until next week because Farmer's market opens up again and I'm going to stock up things to preserve.

In other news, I took the boys strawberry picking last week. The weather was gorgeous. I knew storms would be rolling in the next day so we loaded up and drove through some beautiful countryside and picked 11 pounds of strawberries. I haven't had fresh picked strawberries since I was a child. My mom would load my brother and I up and drive to Plant City, FL to spend the day picking berries. I remember coming home with sunburns and belly aches from eating the berries as we picked them. The boys and I had a lot of fun picking. I think made 23 half pint jars of strawberry jam, some of which were strawberry lemon marmalade. I wish I had made more of that because it tasted way better than I thought it would. I'll see if there are any fresh berries at the market next week. If so, then I'll make some more of the marmalade. I know that I want to make peach jam this year too.

I think that should bring everything up to date around here. We have finally started gardening, albeit not as much as last year, but it's something. Next year I will be more organized. In fact, I should go order some beet seeds to plant in the fall. I'll share some pictures of the garden. It doesn't look like much now. I'll have to wait and see if they work out or not.

Three Legend tomato plants. In the background are some onions that were left in the ground from last year and Tim's containers of hot peppers. I need to stake the tomatoes still.

1 Razzleberry Tomato plant. The tomatoes are supposed to be a hot pink color. I can't wait to see them.

Four rows of Abernaki corn and in the background one bed that still needs to be cleared out. That is where the acorn squash are going to go.

My bee balm plants (two of them) have finally exploded with these gorgeous red flowers.

Connor and Aidan picking lots and lots of berries.

Eleven pounds of fresh picked strawberries

The first of three batches of Strawberry jam.

Crazy weather

2010-05-10T13:19:00.002-04:00

Here it is the 10th of May. I'm sitting at my desk looking out the window to a beautiful sunny day. It's breezy and cold. I have the heat on again. A couple of weekends ago, we had to break down and put the air conditioner on as it hit the 90's here and the humidity was making my ever so stick straight hair start to curl. We closed up the house and put set the thermostat to 75. Last weekend, we had to put the heat back on as it got to 60 degrees in our house. We've had overnight lows between 29 and 33. This is May people. I should be out gardening. I should be getting beds ready for plants to be planted. I'm hoping that this cool weather is on it's way out and that maybe next weekend we can get some work done in the gardens. I have pepper seedlings that are ready to be put out and Aidan's watermelon seedlings are taking over my kitchen table.

The weather doesn't seem to be bothering our honey bees. All of our flowers that are brave enough to stand up to the cooler weather are literally buzzing with activity. I was taking a picture of one of my clematis vines and the roar of their little wings was nice to hear. I'm happy that it appears our bees are back.

Not much else is going on. My baby turned 10. He's learning to ride a bike. He's not enjoying that. We are trying to finish up school so that we can get out and enjoy some fresh air. I'm hoping the weather will cooperate with us and be warm by the time we are done. I've been doing a lot of reading about eating seasonally and locally. I've been blogging on my Real Food blog and trying not to make it too boring. I've also been trying to survive what is either a cold or some nasty allergies. I can't tell the difference, but I'll be happy when it's done with.

Well, until we get into serious gardening , that is all I have for you now. I hope everyone is well and warm.

Gardening soon?

2010-04-28T13:01:00.003-04:00

Here we are rolling close to the month of May and I have done nothing gardening wise. Maybe my laziness is being directed by mother nature. I just checked my blog from last year and saw that I put plants down into the ground on April 26th. Fast forward 327 days and we are due to have temps down to 30 tonight. I'm glad I've been lazy this year and not put anything out yet, it would all be dead.

We have had some crazy weather this spring. One week it's in the 80's and sunny and kind of too hot for spring. The next week it's grey, windy and cold. It didn't even get above 50 yesterday. We've had below freezing temps for a couple of nights. Heck, today while I was taking Connor to his PSSA tests, we saw snow flakes. So maybe I'm not being lazy. Maybe I am one with the earth and know that it's too soon. Yeah, that's what I'm sticking to.

I did work in one of the beds last Friday. It was actually a nice day and spent most of the day outdoors working in the garden and cutting grass. I bought some bee balm plants and some dahlias (which thankfully I didn't plant in the ground yet so I could bring them in) and I got a bunch of herbs planted.

One of my dahlias that are being transported indoors at night.

I'm not really sure what I'm going to do about gardening this year. The plots that we've been using over behind Nancy's other house don't look like they are going to work this year. The house next door is now a huge apartment building for the college kids. Their parking lot is in the back yard. Basically if one drunken student falls out of his/her car, they will land in a garden plot. Add to that some pretty gross neighbor who live behind that house now who have taken to throwing their bag fulls of garbage over the fence onto the gardens. Nice classy neighborhood we are living in these days. I have been kind of hinting to Nancy that I want to build a couple of raised beds in our back yard, but she doesn't seem too keen on the idea. It looks like I'll be working some container gardens this year and hitting the farmer's market with a vengeance.

I've been happy with our living conditions for a couple of years but now I'm starting to really want to get out of the city and have a little land to garden and have some chickens. The only reason we haven't left here yet is because we LOVE our immediate neighbors. They are the best. I realized though that we will all still be friends, we just won't live next door to them anymore. Last Friday night we drove out to the country to pick up our 50 lbs of grass fed beef and all four of us said how nice it would be to live out there. It was so quiet and it smelled clean. Of course, that would mean a 30 minute commute for Tim every day and he's not too keen on that. Our lease is up in September and hopefully by then we'll have something figured out.

So, what else has been going on? We've been keeping busy, that's for sure. It seems like every weekend we have something going on. We go out of town one weekend, then have events planned all the following weekend, then we go out of town again. It's been fun though. We spent Saturday at the local dairy farm volunteering and then Sunday we took the kids to a minnow trapping and stream exploration class. I think we'll be looking into getting fishing licenses soon. Both boys were ready to get in the water and start trapping fish while we were there.

Connor holding a monster sized tadpoles caught in a local stream.

Aidan checking out one of the minnow traps.

School is finally winding down. It's been a long year and we are all ready for the summer off. Connor has just finished the last of his PSSA testing so those are done too. We're not really sure what the summer holds for us yet, but I do know sleeping in a couple of days will be on the list of things to do. Actually I think the boys will be spending a couple of weeks at a summer camp at the local farm. It's Monday through Friday 9 to 4 and they will learn about living on a farm, taking care of animals, working in gardens, etc. I think they will both take part in the peace camp this year too. We don't really have any vacations planned yet. I guess we are just waiting to see what comes up.

Well, that is all I have for now. I have to go print out a science test for Aidan and try to keep the boys quiet while Tim tries to write code. Not an easy task.

Spring has Sprung!

2010-03-17T13:39:00.003-04:00

The crocus are in full bloom reaching up towards the sun.

A bee rests his pollen covered body for a moment.

Another bee dives in to gather some of the yellow pollen dust.

Hi there Mr. Bee. I know you are as happy to see the sun and flowers as I am.

A boy tests his brother's water gun out to see if it's ready for action. It is.

Priorities.

2010-03-03T11:18:00.002-05:00

What is it about this time of year that I start to ponder things that I want to do? I chalk it up to Spring Fever. We are still in full swing of home schooling. We have our struggles. We are a bit behind schedule right now (as we seem to be every year at this time). I sit here looking at the kids' schedulers and figure out how to catch up with classes. At the same time I long to do the things I want to do too.

Tim and I have already started to map out our year and trips that we want to take. We have a growing list of weekend trips we want to take the boys on. We want to take them up to Syracuse to the zoo. We haven't been there since Connor was a baby (he'll be 10 in two months), we want to go down to Philadelphia and take the boys through some historical sites. We want to venture over to Portland, OR and see if that is someplace we will want to live in the future. We want to go to Baltimore and take the boys to see the National aquarium. There will be trips to NY to visit grandparents. There will be trips to GA for more grandparents. We have to get this stuff on the calendar or we will end up doing none of it. That is what happened last year. We had all kinds of trips that we wanted to take but never did. Mind you, we still went away a lot (more than Tim would like) but we never seemed to get anything done that we wanted to. Our family trips have to be scheduled out so that they will happen.

Photography. Oh, how I long to get out there with my camera and go take pictures. There is a problem with that though. I am bored with my lenses. I want a couple of new lenses. Why, oh why do they have to be so bloody expensive? Also, I'm kind of tired of taking pictures of our dingy little city. That ties in with taking new trips. I suppose my thirst for better pictures will be quenched with some planned trips. I just need to figure out how to afford a couple of new gadgets for my camera.

Exercise. This is one thing that I think I might be getting a handle on. I don't want to say I've got it figure out because I know once I do, I'll falter and quit. We spent some of our tax refund on a new treadmill. I love it. It's so nice and easy to use. It lets me plug my iPod into it and blast whatever music I want. We've had it for two weeks now and I think I've walked on it almost every day. I ramped up from 20 minute walks to over an hour now. I struggle with the time it takes because I know there are piles of laundry that need to get done. I know that there is a good chance that there are dishes that need to be stacked. I am trying to look at my hour of walking as "me time". It's my one hour to go downstairs, get away from the kids, get away from the everyday crap that needs to be done and I can blast my music and slowly (much too slowly for my liking) get in shape.

Our home. There are a lot of projects in the house that I would like to get done. When? Who knows? Which one do we start on? Again, who knows? I suppose this should get penciled onto our calendar as well. We need to pick one thing and do it well and finish it. I know I would like to get our basement cleaned out. We started cleaning it out a month ago when we had a potential move pending. I don't want to move crap that we don't have to move. Tim and I spent a day down there going through bins. Needless to say, the basement is now a bigger mess than it started out as. We have a giant pile of garbage that needs to out. So, yes, I think the basement will be the first thing we should tackle. Then we can move on to other projects in the house.

Gardening. This is a gardening blog, no? It used to be. I started it two years ago when I tried my hand at gardening. I can now say "been there, done that". I haven't even started seeds this year. Why? I don't know. I guess part of it is because I can't think about planting a garden when we get 15 inches of snow. I'm sitting here at the desk watching the snow melt and seeing the birds flit all over the place. Spring will be here soon. I just won't have my seedlings ready. I think I've kind of decided just to hit one of the many local nurseries and buy my veggie plants. I'm also really wanted to plant more flower gardens this year. I would like to figure out how to get a nice flower garden in the back yard. Maybe back by the rhododendron.

Well, Connor's 15 minute break from Social Studies has turned into a 30 minute break as I try to get this mish mash out of my head. He's not complaining. It's just going to push back our day a bit.

Priorities. I need to figure them out.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

2010-02-16T23:12:00.002-05:00

Ain't that the truth?! You've missed me, right? It has been a long time since I've been here little blog. For that I do apologize. I have a laundry list of excuses that I may or may not hit you with. I have not decided. I'll see where my late night tapping of fingers on the keyboard takes me.

Why do I blog tonight? Why now instead of say, five months ago when I stopped. Short answer, I can' sleep. You see, my dear sweet hubby is out of town on a business trip. Man, that makes us sound so grown up now. He's in Atlanta meeting up with his new team. He flew out Sunday and will be home on Friday. We've been married 11 years in August and I think we've only been apart for three times. It sucks. I miss him. The boys and I are fine. We are doing our daily routine of school, reading, playing, etc. It's just different when Tim isn't around.

I told the boys we would have a sleep over tonight. They have been dying to sleep in the "big bed" with me while daddy is gone. I've been able to hold them off for two nights because I had some back issues but relented today and told them tonight was the night. I was in there sleeping with them but was awoken because both of them are snoring. Not cute little boy snores, but head cold snores. Maybe they are trying to make up for daddy not being here. Were they missing his snores? Who knows? I am now wondering if I'm going to get any sleep tonight at all.

So, what's new, you might ask? Where do I even begin? Does anyone really care? Huh...I just paused because I'm not even really sure. I guess nothing major is new. We are still living in the same home that we have lived in for three years. I think that is the longest we have stayed in one place in our marriage. That being said, we are itching to move. We are trying to figure out where to move on to. We came very close to picking up everything and heading to the opposite side of the states. Tim had a very good job offer in Oregon and we were soooo close to taking it but fear set in. Now, Tim's team is wanting us to relocate to Atlanta. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I did my time in the south. I'm in no real hurry to end up back down there again. The only plus to it would be that we would be 2 hours from my family.

School is still going well. We have our days when we just don't feel like doing much. On the other hand, we have days that the boys impress the hell out of me. We are sailing through our second semester now and we have our eye on the end of May, first of June to be done with another year.

It seems like I have worn myself out with this little post. Maybe I can go back and snuggle between my boys and try to get some sleep now. We have errands to run tomorrow and I'm hoping we can get them done. Aidan ran a fever all day. It broke around dinner time but it appears it is back now. If he's still running it tomorrow, the errands will have to get pushed back another day.

I'll try to get back into the groove of blogging again. I'll post some pictures soon. All of my pictures are on Flickr now and I feel like it's redundant to post them everywhere. I can sneak one in here and there though.

Night all.

Week (end) recap.

2009-09-07T18:01:00.004-04:00

I could not have asked for a more perfect week last week. Both boys blew me away with their getting right back into the school routine. They were both so grown up about everything, from earlier bedtimes to going back to classes. I keep kind of pinching myself because it was perfect. It led up to a fabulous weekend.

Saturday ran smoothly. The plan right now is to have Saturday be our cleaning/laundry/errand day. That way we can save Sundays for a nice big breakfast and then football. I would say by 12:30 on Saturday we had the house cleaned. Tim did all of the floors and I did everything else (four loads of laundry included). Then I worked on menus and shopping list for next week. Then we took our weekly trip out to the dairy to get our milk and farm fresh eggs. The kids look forward to that trip because they get ice cream cones. Saturday night the boys got a surprise too. I had a party to go to so Tim surprised them with Pizza Hut. Now, we don't normally do chain pizza places because we have a really good pizza place down the street from us, but they saw a commercial for this pizza that the crust is wrapped in cheese and they've been longing for it since they saw it. They haven't had "real" pizza for a couple of months now since we've gone gluten free. Tim ordered the pizza without their knowledge and then piled them in the car without them knowing what was going on. They were extremely happy to find out they were having pizza for dinner. I had a great night with all of my friends from the Obama campaign. We had lots of margarita's and some amazing food. I didn't get home until 11 and I was tired.

Sunday I was up early with the boys and let Tim sleep in, although I could have used the sleep. It was a nice cool morning and I was missing cinnamon rolls so I looked up online to see if I could find a gluten free recipe. I did, and they were easy to make and the dough was so unbelievably easy to work with. The other GF doughs I've made have been crazy sticky and hard to work with, not these. They whipped up really fast and baked up nicely. It was so nice to smell cinnamon and coffee through the house. Like a Sunday morning should be. We then lazed around a bit and then took the kids to the park. The park was nice except for the inordinate amount of little bugs that kept flying into my eyes. The kids were annoyed with them after a while and they were ready to come home when we did.

Our day started with GF Cinnamon buns. Oh so tasty.

Partly cloudy skies, but on the cooler side.

Connor balancing his way across. He used to hate these things.

Aidan doing what he does best, climbing.

Patchy watching them to make sure they were safe.

A couple of races up the giant berm.

And a couple of chases down. Although the boys loved rolling down the hill the first time.

Today was another lazy day. Aidan and I did our shopping since we didn't do that on Saturday. Tim burned another pot of rice making the whole house get smokey and it still stinks in here. It's making my throat hurt. I say again, because this is like the third time he's done this. He's not allowed to make rice anymore. Thankfully, we were able to get out of the house for a couple of hours because we took the kids to see G-Force. I had hoped we could wait and see this once it was on DVD, but they were begging to see it. They loved it...me, not so much. They were happy though and that is all that matters.

Now we are two hours away from bed time. I've got our lesson plans all ready for tomorrow and we are good to go for another fantastic week. I'm tired tonight and plan on going to bed probably when the kids do because the alarm will be going off at 6:30 for Patchy's walk and then our week is rolling again.

Vindicated.

2009-09-03T15:01:00.004-04:00

I am smiling from ear to ear today. I can't wipe the grin off of my face. I am so very happy. I am so proud of Connor. Why? Well, let me explain.

Connor's teacher called today to introduce herself and set up a day for her check in calls. She then asked if I wanted to hear the results to Connor's PSSA results from last years testing. I paused for a minute and said yes. We've been waiting to hear the results. A lot is riding on these results. There was a lot of drama last year concerning my ability to teach. So, when Miss Wagner told me the results I almost burst into tears. I did cry when I called Tim and told him. He scored "off the charts", he scored "advanced in both Reading and Math". Not too shabby for a third grader taking a big state test for the first time. I remember he was done two hours early on one of the days of his test. So, not only did he fly through the test, he ACED it. I could not be prouder of anyone right now. I'm so proud of Connor and I'm proud of myself. Never again will I doubt my ability. We have a good thing going and now there is no need to make any changes. He is taking two gifted classes (Reading and Science), he's taking the Junior Great books class, which reads above level stories and then they pick the stories apart. After they pick the stories apart on their live lessons, they have to do a project to go along with the story. I never felt he was behind...lazy sometimes, but never behind. So, today is a happy day.

I am also very happy to report that we have had a perfect week so far. Everything has stayed on schedule. Everyone is having fun and liking school so far. Yesterday was a really long day. I think I'm going to leave the schedule the same though. Monday and Tuesday are easy days and today was a good day. We were done with school by 2:30. Friday looks like it's going to be a longer day but I think it will work out. The easy beginning of the week helps us ease back into school, Wednesday is long, but it's half way through the week and Friday may be a longer day, but it's Friday. A weekend of fun will follow. I might have to tweak the schedule around the kid's live lessons a little bit but I'm happy with how everything is working so far. Live lessons are like conference calls. I suppose I should explain how exactly we do school.

Both boys are enrolled in Connections Academy. It's a "virtual" school. It's still considered part of the public school system, hence the need to take the PSSA tests. Instead of going to school, we do it at home. They supply all of the books. They supply the "learning coach" (me) materials. If needed, they supply the computers. Each child has a teacher that checks on them every two weeks. They have assignments that they have to submit to them and they get graded on. Like I said, the live lessons are like little conference calls for the kids. The teacher will have a virtual room that all of the classmates meet in and the teacher talks with them and they can chat amongst themselves. It's really cute to see them at the computer with their little headsets on chatting with their friends. We can make our own schedules up and take days off as needed. The kids love it. I love it.

Ok, enough about school. It's funny because for the longest time this little blog sat around getting dusty and now that school has started back up and we have a set routine, I have more time than I thought I would. I also have a theory about why I am feeling better and more in control of things. I am wondering if it's because I've taken the gluten out of my diet. I don't have the terrible mood swings anymore. I have my energy back. Heck, I've been able to get out of bed every day this week at 6:30 and taken Patchy out for a 30 minute walk. I've even been waking up before 6:30. I had thought that I would be exhausted and needing to be in bed by 8. I actually tried to get to bed early the other night and I was awake until 1. Long story short. I feel great and in control. That is a nice feeling after not having a handle on things for a while.

Speaking of morning walks, here are a couple of pictures from this mornings stroll. A nice foggy start to the day. It's been starting to feel like fall around here and I'm loving it.

Kind of creepy looking, but oh so awesome to be in.

Dew on the grass around 10 am.

The kids get a fifteen minute break between each hour class. They like to spend that 15 minutes running around outside. I noticed the dew yesterday and it was there again today. I thought it looked so pretty.

Well, Tim will be home from work soon. Then it will be dinner, Chicken Taco Chili tonight and then Tim is heading out to his Aikido class. I'm not sure what I'm going to do tonight. Probably curl up with a book or work on next weeks menus.

I hope everyone is having a great week too!! If not, tomorrow is Friday and then it's a three day weekend!

A good day.

2009-09-01T15:21:00.002-04:00

No, let me change that...a GREAT day. I am writing about this so when (and I know we will) we have a bad day, I can remember that today ran perfectly.

I was actually able to drag my butt out of bed at 6:25 and was walking Patchy at 6:30. It wasn't easy. I had a crappy night of sleep, the second one in a row and it was cold out this morning. I had to dig out a sweatshirt before I head out the door. I had prepped the coffee last night so I flipped the switch as we were walking out and I had a nice big pot of coffee waiting for me when I got home. By 8:30 I had dinner in the crockpot, everyone had been fed and the kitchen was clean. I had 30 minutes before school and I was at a loss at what to do. I didn't really plan on having free time.

9 o'clock rolled around and I sat both boys down in the classroom. First thing we did was discuss the code of conduct for the classroom. Then we discussed our fun fact for today. I also told them how the schedule was going to work. One hour of lessons, 15 minutes break, one hour of lessons, 15 min break, etc... Then we jumped into the books. Aidan and I worked on one computer (Aidan had headphones to listen to his course online) and Connor was on the other computer. The lessons taught them their concepts and then each of them hit the books. They both loved their little dividers on the desk. The two of them worked side by side and if they needed help with something, they would let me know they needed help. The rest of the day ran along so smoothly. I was able to work with both of them (which I was not able to do last year very well). There was no arguing. There was no whining about having to write or do work. Connor even admitted that his hand didn't hurt with all the writing this year.

Who are these two boys and what have they done with the snarly ones?

Now, I know not to think that this whole year is going to run as smoothly. I do know that I am going to make a concerted effort to ease up on them. I do know that we will not end up in yelling matches over assignments. I do know that we are going to have more fun this year. I think they are up for it. I do know that I am loving being able to see my boys grow and get more mature every year. I love to see them love learning again. Last year, not so much. This year, they both seem ready to take it on. Here's to a seriously kick butt year. I feel like it's going to be great!

Aidan working on his handwriting pre test that we drop boxed to his teacher.

Connor working on his Skills for Success (PSSA prep class). He was taking his reading beginning of the year benchmark test. He scored 100 percent (advanced). I'm not surprised.

I hope everyone else is having a great day and week!

We are ready for lift off.

2009-08-31T20:24:00.006-04:00

Today was our final day before school officially starts tomorrow. We couldn't have asked for a nicer day either. Dare I say there was a chill in the air today. We finally turned off the air conditioner and I opened all the windows up. I dried three loads of laundry on the line and I worked on this weeks lesson plans and schedules while the kids played.

Nothing but blue skies and cool breezes today. My clematis has climbed all the way up the side of the garage and I'm training it on a string across the patio to our carport.

Aidan's racetrack he drew on Nancy's driveway. It has crocodile pits that you have to take a ramp over, and walls that you have to jump over, and walls with rocket launchers on them that you have to punch down...or you can take the short cut on the right side and miss all the fun stuff.

Connor and Aidan trying out the race track.

Patchy keeping an eye on everyone...and happy to do so.

My favorite little piggies enjoying the cool grass.

It's now just after 8:30 pm and both boys are tucked in and headed to dreamland. They have actually been really good about adjusting back into a nighttime routine. The rule is lights off at 8:30. Well we were letting them brush teeth and all that jazz at 8:25 and then they went to bed. Connor has decided that he likes to read for a half hour before he sleeps. We have readjusted and now they start their bedtime routine at 7:45 with their butts in bed at 8 pm. Connor reads and Aidan either flips through a book or plays on his nintendo. He was just playing Big Brain Academy. I guess he's prepping for school tomorrow. I can hear them in there chatting to themselves right now but I suspect they will both be sleeping in about 5 minutes.

I am feeling pretty good about school this year. We are going to try to get some pretty strict routines down that will hopefully make it easier on everyone. One thing is that I'm not going to even think about laundry until Saturdays. That will be official laundry day. Another thing we are trying is Crockpot dinners. We've done it two days in a row now and it is working great. I get up and throw everything in the pot and then I don't have to do anything until I dish it out at dinner. It really helped today because while Tim took Connor to his karate class tonight I did another huge batch of tomatoes. I'm also happy because the first two weeks of school are four day weeks and I think that will help ease us ease back into hitting the books.

The rules are up...let's see if they follow them.

The apples are hanging. Sept is the month Johnny Appleseed was born. There will be a lot of apple activities.

The kid's workspace is ready to go. Oh, how I hope it always looks this picked up.

The dividers are mostly done. I had this idea for splitting up the big desk so that Connor and Aidan can focus on their own work. Connor's has his monthly schedule and a fun facts calendar and a list of the classroom rules. I would like to put more in there, but I don't want it to be distracting. Aidan's I'm going to have him write his "words he knows" as he learns them. He decorated his a little bit with some glitter.

And last, but not least, my new best friend. I had to go out and get a bigger crockpot. I had a 3.5 qt one and it always boiled over so now I have a 6 qt one and it works beautifully. I am so happy/excited that I found another blogger who blogged for a whole year with her crockpot. The best part?! Well, two best parts...One...all of her recipes are gluten free! and Two: she has a book coming out in October. I already have one pre-ordered. Check her out if you want. I've made two of her recipes so far and they have been really good.

Tomatoes. Ugh. I don't care to see another tomato for a while. Unfortunately there are bunch more out there on the plants. I don't think we are going to plant as many plants next year. Although they are really good. We picked a whole bunch of them on Saturday along with a lot of peppers and a couple of cucumbers. I'm not sure what I'm doing with the peppers yet and I'm scared for when Tim's haberneros are all ripe. I counted about 20 of them on one bush and he has four bushes out there. Yikes.

Saturday's harvest. Not too shabby!

Well, the clock just chimed 9. As I guessed, both kids are sleeping and I'm about to curl up with my new Country Living magazine. I have to get up early tomorrow to walk Patchy before the kiddies get up and then we start our first day. I'm pretty optimistic about how it will go. I hope I'm not singing another tune tomorrow night.

Agenda

2009-08-27T18:49:00.004-04:00

What I did today was not on my agenda. I was trying to lay low and relax and prepare for starting school next week. Wrong. When I was out with Patchy I was looking at one of the tomato patches and realized that I need to pick them NOW.

So pick them I did. Sadly, I lost 8 of them to the compost bin. We left them on the vine too long. I posed them for a lovely picture:

A huge haul of orange tomatoes.

Here's when the funny thing happened. I had a total brain fart. I got them inside and knew that I needed to deal with them ASAP. They were really ripe. I ran for a couple of my books. Do I can them whole? Do I make sauce? Do I attempt to use my pressure canner? Ack. What to do, what to do. After a few minutes I calmed down and decided to blanch them, peel them, run them through the mill and then Tim could make sauce when he got home from work.

I set up a nice little line in the kitchen. First I boiled them one or two at a time. Some of these tomatoes were bigger than my hand. I dropped them in then water for a minute until the skin started to crack:

Boiling for a minute.

I then fished them out of the hot water and plunged them into ice cold water. The skins for the most part just slid right off.

You can see the skins pulling away from the tomatoes.

The skins went to compost as did the cores. The tomatoes were so large that I had to cut them in quarters before I could run them through the mill.

Waiting to be quartered.

A very large pile of scraps to go out to compost.

Now the tomatoes are ready to be squished. I am pretty sure this is what a mill is, if not, I apologize. It's like a big mortar and pestle in that you squish the tomatoes and it separates the juice from the seeds.

A very large pile of peeled and quartered tomatoes.

The mill...I think. =)

I ended up with a very large pot of tomato juice. I called Tim at work and told him he was making sauce when he got home. He ran by the Farmer's Market and picked up some onions and garlic.

Big pot of juice waiting to be spiced up and cooked down.

So, Tim is home. He chopped up a bunch of garlic and onions and sauteed it in olive oil. He then dumped it all in with some oregano and it's currently reducing as I type. In the end, Tim is going to add some Parmesan cheese. We are going to fill up freezer bags and freeze the sauce. There was a lot of confusion (on my part) about if the orange tomatoes would have enough acid in them to use a water bath canner or if I had to use the much feared pressure canner. We are taking the easy way out (this time) and just freezing it.

We still have one more very large patch of tomatoes that need to be picked ASAP. I'm hoping that I can hold off until Saturday, but then again, I don't want to lose a bunch to compost. Tomorrow might be a repeat of today.

Well, I'm going to go enjoy some gluten free peanut butter brownies and finish my Dead Until Dark. Connor finished his first 39 Clues book last night and is bugging me to go get him the second book. It is gearing up to be a busy weekend. Have a great night everybody.

Direction.

2009-08-26T11:54:00.005-04:00

Sorry faithful readers for my lack of posting. There really is no excuse except for laziness. I'm trying to figure out the direction I want this little blog to go. I originally set it up to keep track of my garden experiments and keep family members in the loop with the craziness we call life. I'm not sure if I should limit it to just gardening. Or include everything else. Maybe I'll make a daily schedule like Monday will be news about kids, Tuesday will be gardening news, etc. Of course that means that I will have to do something daily and I'm not sure if I can commit to that right now.

I think for this post I will break it up into topics.

Homeschooling:

Where did this summer go? It boggles my mind that next week we start school again. I am going to do another year of homeschooling with Connections Academy. I like the ability to work at our own pace and the curriculum provided. I like that each of the kids has their own teacher that I can touch base with if I need help. I like spending time with my kids because I know soon enough they will be out on their own and I like being able to mold them into decent human beings while I have the chance. I also like that I get to see them progress through the years. If they were in public school I don't think it would be as noticeable. Their teachers would change from year to year and the new teacher would not know what giant steps the kids make each year. I get to see them mature and learn every year. I learn too, which isn't a bad thing. So, school is back on as of next Tuesday. I have the classroom 95 percent ready to go. The kids have all of their books and I have the first week of lesson plans already organized and ready. Tim has to make sure their computer is up to date with all of the software they need. I am also going to try and make something to put on their desk to separate their work areas so there will (hopefully) be no fighting/arguing. I am hoping this year will be better than last. There were a lot of things going on and I wasn't as focused as I should have been. There were also some serious extended family issues that we had to deal with but all seems to be calm for now. I did learn that I am not going to give my power over to anyone to adjust how I feel or make me feel like I'm not doing what I think is best for my family.

Garden:

This is a gardening blog, is it not? I like to call my garden the half-assed garden this year. We planted our things into the ground and have occasionally weeded and that is about it. I'm not too proud about it and I am already starting to plan out next year. We had a rough start to the season with an inordinate amount of rain. I thought that perhaps we had turned into Seattle. The high amount of rain had it's ups and downs. We didn't really have to water anything this year...but I think our tomatoes suffered early on because of the amount of water. We have had a couple of large harvests so far and I think we will probably pick most of our tomatoes this weekend and then make them into sauce and can. I will say that the tomatoes that we have picked already have been so amazingly tasty. They are insane too. They are big and meaty. When you cut into them there is very little seed goop. It's all meat. We have also been very successful with peppers this year. I'm going to do some reading about pickling some peppers later today. The cucumbers have been so-so. For the amount of cucumber plants that got planted I haven't really seen a lot coming off the vine. I was hoping to make some pickles, but no such luck (yet).

An assortment of peppers picked before vacation.

Tower of tomatoes picked before vacation.

Tomato picked yesterday.

Tim's haberneros are starting to turn orange. His four plants are covered with peppers.

Food:

Yes, this is now a big topic in our house. I've been gluten free for a month now. At first I didn't see any real big changes in how I felt. I do think that I am starting to feel better and I know that I have more energy. Tim says he can see a big difference in how I act so that is something. It's been a huge adjustment though. I love to bake. I mean I reallllllly love to bake. It's not so easy do to when you have to do it gluten free. Instead of using all purpose flour, you have to use a mix of other (expensive) flours. I have been successful in making cakes and bread and I even tackled a pretty good pizza crust. It's harder though. The pizza crust for instance is a pain in the arse to get rolled out into the pan. I also miss kneading. I used to take pleasure in kneading dough for ten minutes. I could feel the elasticity of it and I could feel it getting warm in my hands. I miss kneading. I have also decided that I'm going to have to break down and buy a KitchenAid stand mixer. I only have a handheld mixer and it barely cuts it for the mixing. I haven't gotten one yet because I haven't decided if I'm going to just abandon my love of baking. I'm sure around the holidays I will change my mind because the kids and I really do enjoy the tradition of cookie weekends.

The other problem that I've run into is gluten hiding in things that I don't expect. I've always been a pretty good label reader. You have to be when you are vegan (as we were for a year), but gluten takes on so many names that it's confusing. I find myself cheating and just buying things specifically labeled gluten free. That is all well and good until you travel. Let's just say we had a very packed cooler of things safe to eat. So, we are still trying to adjust to the new GF lifestyle. I find that I'm not as interested in food as much, which is probably a good thing. I'm just replacing it with liqueur. Just kidding (I think).

Vacation:

Ah, vacation. The one time a year that I look forward to and dread all at the same time. Don't get me wrong. I love to travel down to Florida and spend time with my family. That is not the part I dread. It's the drive. 18 hours. Long hours. This is the first year that we took it easy on ourselves and didn't drive all the way through. We splurged and got a hotel for the trip down and the trip back. Not an easy task when traveling with a dog either.

We left on a Friday afternoon and drove 12 hours and ended up in South Carolina the first night. We rolled into the parking lot at almost midnight and before we got out of the car we were approached by a woman and her two children begging for money. Tim talked to her because I was trying to get the kids to pack up all of their electronic equipment into their backpack to take inside. The woman told Tim some story about how they were staying in a nearby hotel and that they needed (she sized him up to see how much she could get away with asking for) 22 dollars. Huh? You are going to approach a very tired family at midnight in a dark parking lot with your kids and ask for money?! I think not. Tim said he got a weird vibe and was pretty sure it was a scam so we didn't give her anything. It was weird. I didn't sleep all that well that night because of that and because it takes me a while to unwind from driving 12 hours to actually go to sleep. Everyone else passed right out.

Then comes Saturday. We were all up and showered and on the road by 8 am. Yay us! I stopped at a Dunkin Donuts to get Tim and I a coffee and get the kids each one donut. This is where our day turned sour. I don't know if it was something in the coffee, or if it was the fact that I touched the donuts as I handed them to the children (and then proceeded to eat my watermelon) but an hour later I knew I was in trouble. I was driving along the highway at about 75 mph and I got sick. I had a sudden stabbing pain in my gut and then I felt like I was going to get sick and pass out. I was attempting to find a rest area to pull into but I knew I was a minute from passing out. I very quickly pulled off the highway (scaring Tim) and got out of the car....got sick and then passed out. We were on the side of the road for about 2o minutes. It was terrible. I am so thankful that I knew that I was going to pass out though. My ears kind of went dull and I had the cold sweats. It's happened before. I don't even want to think about what would have happened if I had passed out while I was driving. Probably wouldn't be sitting here typing about it now. I am also thankful that when I pulled over it was really cloudy and windy but not yet raining. The breeze helped me slowly come back. Tim took over driving for a while and sure enough five minutes back into the drive it started to rain really hard. Good timing, eh? Well, that little incident kind of wore me out for the rest of the day. Tim drove for a couple of hours until I felt better and then I took back the driving duties until we got to my parent's house. I was beat and not very sociable when we got there but was much better by Sunday. Like I said, I'm not sure what set my episode off. I still am a tiny bit skeptical if I am in fact celiac or at least intolerant to gluten. I don't know if the fact that I handed a donut to each child and then ate my watermelon did it or if it was just something in the coffee. I may never know what happened...but it seems to have convinced Tim that I cannot eat or be around gluten.

The rest of the vacation was nice. We had an amazing day at the beach. I mean AMAZING! We got there early before it was filled with people. It wasn't too hot. The tide was on the way out and the kids had a blast in the water. We saw a lot of small white fish with each wave that came in and receded. We also saw a lot of little live conch shells. The kids were fascinated with them. I was also amazed at how much Connor has grown up. In the past, he has been terrified of the beach. The waves were always too loud and too rough for him. This trip he strapped on a boogey board and hit the waves with Tim. Aidan, as usual, showed no fear of the water at all. He went right in, got knocked over, got back up and did it all over again. I kept freaking out because there had been rip tide warnings because two separate tropical storms were off the coast, but everyone survived. I also scored one of my classic beach sunburns which I enjoy. I know, it's crazy, but I can be bright red one day and the next day it's nice and brown. It was awesome.

We could not have asked for a nicer beach day. It was perfect!

Aidan showing his no fear. This was like two minutes after arriving to the beach. Everyone else was laying out blankets, putting on sunscreen, etc and Aidan was running towards the water by himself.

The only other major thing we did was take the kids out to Downtown Disney. Aidan got jipped out of a trip to the Lego store last year so we had to do it this year. He was beside himself with excitement. He looked at everything. He spent a lot of time on the wall where you can pick out certain pieces. He spent time playing on the table where they had legos out to play with. He scored a bunch of stuff. It was a great trip. We then ate at the T-Rex Cafe. If you've ever been to the Rainforest Cafe, it's the same thing instead of having Rainforest scenes and animals it was all prehistoric scenes and dinosaurs. It was really good. The chef came out and talked to me about the whole gluten thing and helped me pick out what I could eat and was a great help. The food was tasty and the meteor shower stopped the kids in their tracks. We shot a video of Aidan with a spoon halfway to his mouth and him just staring at everything happening during the meteor shower. Highly recommended if you happen to see one.

The rest of the vacation was just spent hanging out with family and spending a lot of time in my parent's pool. The visit was somewhat bittersweet though because I think my parents and my brother and his family are going to be moving out of Florida within the following year. I basically grew up in Florida and I have a lot of memories there. It will be sad to not go down there and see things and spend time in the pool anymore. Of course, I guess there is nothing saying that we can't go down and get a hotel and do stuff...it was just nice to not have to worry about the expense of that.

Aidan an d Connor hamming it up in the pool.

Oh well, we are home now and Tim is getting back into the work routine and I'm getting back into my routine and trying to plan for the school routine for next week. We are glad to be home all safe and sound. Tim has 8 days of vacation left that he needs to use before the end of the year and we are trying to decide what to do. Neither one of us really want to go anywhere. There are a couple of things I would like to do before the end of the year and maybe he can take a day here and there to do that. I know that I want to go to Knoebel's again in the fall when it's cooled off. I want to go to the county fair next month and the Sheep and Wool festival in NY is quickly approaching. Beyond that, he will probably just take a day here and there and do nothing.

Misc:

Well, I don't really have all that much more to write about right now. I have a kitchen sink full of dishes waiting to be tended to and some folded laundry that needs to be put away. I think I will spend the rest of my afternoon trying to finish my book as I know reading books for pleasure will be a luxury once school starts. I will probably try to do a summer wrap up in the next week or so.

I hope everyone else is doing well and enjoying the winding down of summer. Personally, I'm ready for fall and all that it entails.

Note to self....

2009-07-21T13:58:00.002-04:00

Self,

Happy day! After doing some research, ALL of the Method products are gluten free. You don't have to go through the house and rip out all of the foaming hand wash, the bar of soap in the tub, the many assorted cleaners that are around. It's all safe. Oh, such a happy day.

Love,
Me

Seriously, how awesome is that. I stumbled across Method products a few years ago when we did our year of vegan. They were products that smelled good that didn't have any animal products and they don't test on animals. I have stuck with the products. I have a foaming hand wash at each sink in our house. We use the bar soap in the bath. I use the counter cleaner, the window cleaner, the furniture polish, the floor wash, the hardwood floor wash, and now the dishwasher tablets. I've been waiting and hoping that they would put out a tablet for the dishwasher that would fit into our "be nice to the earth" lifestyle, and alas, they did. I ♥ Method products and will continue to use them daily. Thanks Method, you rock!

Musings.

2009-07-21T10:16:00.003-04:00

It's Tuesday. It's 10:18 am. I'm still in my pajamas. I may stay in them all day. It's one of those days. It's grey outside and we are supposed to get some rain today. I have been up and gotten some things done. Both children have been fed. Coffee has been made (and drunk). I've finished another granny square and that may be the extent of my day. Thankfully, our home is pretty much picked up and the kids are content to play on the computer. Connor did have me put his time in for reading on the Scholastic site. He's been devouring a new book that I got him last week. I hope he slows down so I'm not buying a book a week like I was with the Wimpy series. Aidan has been ruling supreme on Bejeweled Blitz. Although I just beat his score and he has vowed to take over the top spot again.

It's been an interesting week. Two weeks ago I went for some blood work (a lot of it). Thursday night around 5 pm, the doc's office calls and the nurse tells me that the Celiac test came back positive. I had antibodies in my blood and the doc said that I should adhere to a gluten free diet. That was pretty much all she said. No follow up appointments? No words to the wise? I was kind of shocked, but not really. I had a feeling that I had at least an intolerance because I couldn't seem to shake my crappy feeling. I started reading immediately and 9 out of 10 of the symptoms fit me to a T...all except the weight loss. Go figure. I had a quick little cry...really just a couple of tears at the loss of my fave foods and beer. I was happy to finally have a conclusive reason for my feeling the way I have.

Friday morning I geared up to go hit the book store to get a couple of cookbooks and a book about the disease. Right before I leave the house the phone rings. It's the doctor's office. I pick it up thinking that maybe they were going to schedule a follow up appointment. Nope. The nurse tells me this time that the doctor consulted a GI doctor and that I don't have Celiac. Huh? How can you misread a test like that? Apparently it's a common test that is misread all the time. So, now what? Do I sigh a sigh of relief that I can continue to live without any restrictions or do I pursue the gluten free diet? Right now I've decided to eliminate gluten. Not only for me, but for the whole family. I figure it will be better for Connor's diabetes. Also, I can't get the symptom list out of my head. I had every one of the symptoms. It made perfect sense. I went out and got some books and spent the weekend reading them.

Saturday was also my birthday. I'm inching closer and closer to 40. I'm ok with that though because I still feel like I'm in my 20's (minus the digestion issues). Tim was super sweet and printed off a list of gluten free products from Burt's Bees and hooked me up with a bunch of lotions and shampoos and stuff and he got me one of my favorite movies, Amelie. The biggest thing that I got though was my Ipod Touch. I was surprised. I'm such a gadget geek and Tim is the total opposite. He hates them. He is the best. I love it. The kids and I have been playing with it non stop. So, a nice weekend kind of took my mind off the gluten free nonsense.

Oh, and Sunday I was just finishing up cutting the grass and our neighbor Jeff brings over a bag of three trout that he just caught in Toby creek. He offered to them us. I know Tim had been wanting some fresh fish and I asked if they were ok to eat. Jeff said they were, so we took them.

The smallest of three...before gutting.

Connor loved identifying the guts as they came out.

Tim cleaned them up, with the kids watching his every move. They have been wanting to go fishing for a while and we might have to break down and actually do it soon. I remember going fishing once when I was Connor's age and I have one word for my experience. Boring. I was bored to tears...and hot. I didn't have fun. Now, I don't think I would mind it as much. Sitting still next to water in the quiet. I think I could handle that. I see a fishing license in our future. Tim grilled up the fish Sunday afternoon. I wasn't planning on having any because it kind of grossed me out but I caved and had a bite. It was good. It was really good. Both boys ate it too. I was surprised that Aidan ate it. Mr. Picky. I will say though that he is starting to slowly branch out and try new things. We just had to stop bugging him all the time.

The garden is doing great. We've been picking zukes and summer squash like crazy. Both of which are tasty grilled. The tomato plants are officially taller than I am. The tomatoes are huge but don't seem to be turning color yet. Tim and I starting to lay down bets as to how big they will get. I've seen a couple of cucumbers starting to get bigger. Peppers, oh man, we are going to be drowning in peppers. I let Jeff pick a bunch as a trade for the fish. They are getting big and I'm going to be making some salsa soon.

I dragged the kids away from their water gun battle to stand in front of the tomato plants so you could see the difference in size. I'm 5'10" and a couple of them are over my head.

Perfection!

Patience will pay off.

What else? Oh, I got an email today saying that Connor's textbooks will be here tomorrow. I'm just now starting to unwind from last year and now we are looking at next years work. Do I start early? Do I let it go until Sept and enjoy the summer? I know that I'm going to take off the rest of July. I might start him up in August so that we can get some lessons done and work ahead a little bit so that we have some "give" time next year. We'll have a week off in August for our trip to Florida, but we could still get three weeks of assorted lessons done. I guess I'll have to wait and see what shows up tomorrow.

27 days until we leave for Florida. We are all getting excited. I'm looking forward to a week of laying in the pool and going to the beach and seeing my family. We usually drive straight through but this time we are stopping mid-way to take a break. I already have reservations so it will be nice to have a destination to shoot for. I had to make sure that the motels we are staying in will let us have Patchy. We are taking Patchy with us. I don't think my dad knows that we are bringing him yet. My mom is keeping it a secret. Patchy is the worlds' best dog though. 100 percent house trained. Quiet. Cute and fluffy. What more could you ask for...plus Patchy loves and I mean LOVES riding in the car. It will make packing the trunk a challenge though. His crate takes up 80 percent of the trunk space. We'll pack the crate full and then wedge everything else around that. The only thing I'm kind of freaking out about is the food issue. No more running through a fast food on the fly. It should prove interesting in making sure I have breakfasts, lunches and dinners packed for us to eat. I've already started my list making and research.

I think that is the extent of my news for now. It's inching close to 11 o'clock now and I should get up and do one more productive thing before I call it a day and play with some more crochet...or read a book....or play scrabble on my itouch. I hope everyone is having a great week!

Busy day!

2009-07-14T21:21:00.007-04:00

I had a very productive day today! I made 8 loaves of bread. A couple of weeks ago, our lovely neighbor Debbie gave us a loaf of bread with a bag of starter for Amish bread. I took care of my little bag of dough for ten days and made two loaves of bread. That one bag of starter dough made the two loaves and 4 more bags of starter. No one wanted any of the starter and I couldn't bring myself to throw away the starter. It had all organic flour, sugar and milk. So for ten days I tended to four bags of starter. Today I made 8 loaves and now I have 16 bags of starter. I can see this spiraling out of control here. I googled and found out that you can freeze the starter and then take it out and start from day one again. So, now I have 5 loaves of bread in the freezer with 16 bags of starter dough.

Before.

After. Two loaves of each: apple/walnut/cinnamon, chocolate/nut/coconut, lemon/poppy seed, and plain 'ol cinnamon. Delish!!

The other big thing that I'm proud of is that I FINALLY taught myself how to crochet a granny square. I see on Flickr all the time this one lady who is always crocheting these amazing granny squares in the most brilliant colors. I was jealous. I have tried several times with no luck, but found a decent site yesterday that walked me through it step by step and now I'm a granny square making machine. I see a large yarn purchase in the near future.

Not too bad for a newbie.

We have been having the most unbelievable weather here for July. Today it was 75 degrees at like 3 in the afternoon. It has been so nice. We had a perfect weekend to drive over and hang out with Michael and Carrie at Reptiland and then had an awesome meal at the Bullfrog Brewery. The kids enjoyed it because Carrie's nephew Noah was with them and they had fun tromping around looking at the snakes and alligators. I just enjoyed the beer at dinner...well, and hanging out with Michael and Carrie. We invited them to go to Knoebels with us in a couple of weeks. I hope that is ok with you Brian.

What else? I got a great book last night. I can't put it down. The Backyard Homestead. It's awesome. It says that on a quarter of an acre you can harvest 1,4oo eggs, 50 lbs of wheat, 60 lbs of fruit, 2,000 lbs of veggies, 280 lb pork, and 75 lbs of nuts. What more could you want or need? For some reason I had in my head that we needed 5 acres to grow enough for us to live on, but this is showing how to use what space you have to the best ability. I will be reading this over and over.

Not too much else going on. Oh, I did want to brag about our power bill. I paid it last week and compared it to the same time last year and our usage was way down. Our bill was 40 dollars cheaper than it was last year even though our rates have gone up. The ONLY thing that I've changed is that I am hanging out all of our laundry now. I think I had to run the dryer only one day last month when we had like three weeks of rain and we were out of clean clothes. Otherwise, it all goes out on our rigged clothesline.

It's funny how much I've changed in the last couple of years. I was telling Tim this morning that I am totally content hanging out the laundry, spending the day in the kitchen baking breads, knitting and crocheting...I think my grandmother would be proud of me. She did all of that and ran a farm. She was a pretty fantastic lady.

Well, I'll leave you a couple of picture from Reptiland. I have a ton of pics that I have to run through photoshop and then I'll post to Flickr. It gets to be a pain with posting pics all over the place...which is why I procrastinate all the time. I will work on my pictures tomorrow. For now, I'm going to curl up with my book and read until I fall asleep. Night all!

I loved the little poisonous frogs. I told Aidan that I wanted one, and he rolled his eyes at me and said, "They are poisonous Mama." I guess that is a no.

This guy was hilarious. The kids tried to feed him but he pecked their hands so hard they ended up throwing the food at him.

The perfect end to a great day with friends. Oh yeah, it was good!

I've been bad.

2009-07-09T12:08:00.003-04:00

Hello Mr. Bee. Thanks for finally showing up and helping out in the gardens!

The procrastination bug hit and it hit hard. Sorry bloggie friends. I've been taking pictures. I've been keeping an eye on my little garden. I just can't bring myself to sit down and do five minutes of writing. Bad Bee...bad.

Things have been pretty good around here. We are going on one full week with sun out. Finally. We have had so much rain and so many grey days that I began to wonder if we were turning into Seattle. Our weather is so much nicer now. It's still kind of cool out and I don't think we've had a day over 83 yet. Perfect, if you ask me.

The kids have been enjoying their summer vacation so far. We've taken in some movies. We've been on some long walks. We've done a lot of jam making. We've had some trips to the Farmer's Markets and they have been going through our board games one by one and they've been giving them a whirl.

We had a really nice 4th of July weekend in New York. We got to see fireworks over the Hudson River and it was so cool that we all had to have sweatshirts on. We are on a countdown to go to Florida to hang out with Nana and Papa. Tim and I are still trying to figure out what to do for our tenth wedding anniversary. I think we will celebrate while we are in Florida because Nana and Papa can keep the wee ones.

*****************************************************************

So, what was I saying about procrastination? Here I am typing this up on the next day. I couldn't get it all done yesterday. Of course, it's hard to do anything when Tim is working from home. Don't get me wrong, I love having him around, but our routines get all out of whack.

Everything is growing nicely in our garden. I was fretting for no reason about my tomatoes. I am so glad that I didn't yank out all of the plants. They are all covered with tomatoes now. Whew. Experiment worked. I'm very happy. Now I need to figure out if these tomatoes are going to need to be preserved with a pressure canner or if I can do them in a water bath. Of course, if Tim makes his wonder pasta sauce, we'll be using the pressure canner.

On to the pictures:

My patch of beets. I need to plant some more this weekend so that I can have another bunch of them in the fall. I will be pickling these babies.

Tomato patch number one. There are a line of onions growing behind these too. I don't know if they are getting enough sun though.

A couple of the tomatoes on the first patch. Interestingly, we planted these a couple of weeks before the second patch, but found tomatoes first on the other patch.

Our pepper patch. I'm really happy that we have a whole bed for peppers this year. There are three tomato plants at the very end that one of our neighbors asked if he could plant. The pepper plants are all covered with peppers and/or blossoms.

Ancho peppers

California Wonders

Tomato patch number two. These plants are up to my shoulders...so big!

This is the very first tomato I found. I think the whole neighborhood heard my sigh of relief.

A friendly little bee helping pollinate. Thank you little bee.

Our two yellow squash plants.

Our three rows of potatoes. I need to go out and hill those bad boys up soon. You can also see a couple of brussel sprout plants that were dropped down...they are still waiting for a permanent home.

Our cucumber vines finally found the trellis, thanks to Tim. They have gotten huge in the last week.

Hello there Mr. Zuke. I wish I had more of you growing this year but we'll be happy with you. Next year we'll make sure we get it right.

Nancy's broccoli looks much better this year. I still don't really care for broccoli.

That is all I have for now. I would like to say I've had a busy summer, but honestly, it hasn't been too busy yet. I'm waiting to hear on some test results and that will hopefully clue me in to what is up with me and then I can work at fixing my extreme tiredness and general yucky feeling. Until then, I'm going to enjoy our abnormally cool July and watch my kids have fun. Who knows, I might actually finish knitting Tim's scarf too. It's only taken me three years.

I hope everyone is enjoying the summer and everyone's gardens are blooming!

Frustration

2009-06-24T10:13:00.006-04:00

Frustration is growing over our tomato situation. I was out looking at them yesterday and came in the house disgusted and called Tim. I had decided that this weekend I was going to yank out every blessed plant and go get new plants, or at least hope to find a nursery that still had some tomato plants around. He calmed me down and talked me out of it (for now).

This is tomato patch number one. As you can see, the bushes are big, green, and beautiful. This plants are covered with blossoms but not one tomato. I don't get it. I have to go out and tie them up again but each time I'm out there tying them up I am wondering if I'm wasting my time.

This is tomato patch number two. Again, the plants look very healthy. They are getting really big. They too are covered with an enormous amount of blossoms. I thought I had seen the start of one tomato but it hasn't gotten any bigger.

Some blossoms. They start all nice and tight like the one at the bottom and then they open up and the top ones look like they are about to be done...but no signs of tomatoes.

Some more blossoms. Again, they are nice and tight and look like normal tomato blossoms...but look at the middle where the blossom petals have kind of turned brown, there is a stem looking thing sticking out. Is that normal? I don't know.

Another group of blossoms. Each and every one of our plants has groups of blossoms like this. If only they would start showing signs of actually growing a tomato. Another thing that concerns me is the stem that each blossom is attached to. If you look just above each flower there is a crook. Those crooks are very fragile and will sometimes break with hardly a touch and then I have a blossom in my hand.

So, I'm not sure what to do. It breaks my heart to yank these beautiful plants out of the garden. They appear to be insanely healthy...but not producing. Is it the weather? We've had two to three weeks of grey, rainy, chilly days. This is our first week where we've had two days of sun in a row. Maybe after a week or so of sun I'll start to see some progress. I'm running out of time where I'm going to be able to get replacement plants. When we went to the nursery a couple of weeks ago to replace them, their plants looked terrible. They were big and leggy and not many leaves. Their blossoms looked just like mine do. I guess for now I'm going to let them be and keep tying them up. If they don't produce, I'll be buying a lot of tomatoes at the Farmer's Market...which by the way opens tomorrow! I can't wait!!

Now, as far as the rest of the garden goes, it looks great!

The cucumbers are starting to get big and are reaching for the trellis. They also have quite a few blossoms on them.

A yellow squash blossom. It looks like I am going to end up with two yellow squash and hopefully a zucchini plant. It was supposed to be two zucchini and one yellow squash, but it's becoming apparent that I have two yellow squash. I'm not too sure what to do with yellow squash as far as preserving, but I do know they are pretty kick ass in stir fries.

A mutant yellow squash. Nancy called these the twins. Interesting.

At least the flowers are growing nicely and making the garden area look pretty.

The astilbe looks magical. I love these plants.

Zinnias. I think these are right on top with the gerber daisies as being favorites. I love the shading of this purple one.

And last but not least:

How cute is this? Aidan lost his other top tooth on an ice cream cone the other day. I have to take lots of pictures of him with his two teeth missing before his big boys grow in. I want to remember how cute this is. There will be no more lost front teeth in this family...well unless there is some accident but I'm going to hope that doesn't happen.

Drama!

2009-06-15T19:39:00.005-04:00

I know, I know. I've been a bad blogger again. Last week was pretty much lost to me being sick so not much go done. I am feeling slightly better so I've been out in the gardens and getting more done around the house.

What's been going on? Well, Aidan officially graduated from Kindergarten. We spent the day at Knoebel's and had way to much fun. Grandma showed up and surprised Aidan and then spent the day tagging around with us. We will be planning another trip there soon with Brian hopefully. It's such a neat old fashioned park in the middle of the woods.

Aidan with his diploma.

After Knoebel's I got some sort of stomach flu and was pretty much out of it the week following. I was trying to keep up with things around the house and did alright, but then I was bummed out because it was like a week lost and not one of my goals was touched. I finally felt better this Sunday and was able to get a lot around the house.

Today I was able to get the grass cut and three loads of laundry done. Laundry. I am so very proud of myself. I have hung out all of our laundry for two months so far with only the very occasional dryer usage (like today when a surprise thunderstorm flew in right after I had hung a load of towels out). It saved us 24 dollars on our power bill last month. Our power bill is neat because it compares our power usage to other homes in our neighborhood and we were waaaaay over on the green side using a LOT less power than other homes around us. That made me smile. We are doing something right.

Ok, let's get to the gardens. Drama. Tomato drama. Let's recount our tomato story. Last year I purchased a couple of heirloom tomatoes to eat at the store. They were delish. I looked up online to see if we could save the seeds and then plant them this year. I did everything that it said to do. I planted the seeds early this year and I was delighted to see them sprout and grow. We planted them outside when the temps warmed up and we've been waiting. We have 26 plants growing between the two separate spots. We've given extra ones away because we had a lot left over and we couldn't let them just die. Here comes the drama part. There are no tomatoes yet. Most of the plants are covered with blossoms. But no tomatoes yet. Some of the blossoms have dropped off. Some of the stems that are holding the blossoms seem weak and kind of bend. Nancy and I were looking at them last week and she said that it didn't look like they were going to produce. Damn. We made a plan to go shopping for tomato plants to replace them and then when we got to the nursery, their tomato blossoms looked just like ours do. Huh...maybe ther's nothing wrong with ours. I spent yesterday online looking at what might be wrong. Pollination? I don't know. I read somewhere to shake the plant to help with the pollination. I must have looked like a fool out there, but at this point I will do anything to save these babies. Today I think I saw one teeny tiny little green ball on the side of a blossom. I will be watching it like a hawk over the next few days to see if it grows.

Tomato patch number 2.

Lots of these, but no tomatoes yet.

The rest of the garden is doing great. We harvested a bunch of Swiss chard last week and I sauteed them up and oh my...we were fighting over it, it was so tasty. We've also harvested a couple of heads of buttercrunch lettuce. Yum.

Bed number one. Red leaf lettuce, broccoli, kohlrabi, zucchini, lemon balm and marjoram.

The pepper patch. They are getting big and the California Wonder peppers have blossoms on them already. Something is eating the leaves on one of them though. Must research that.

We have two zucchini and one yellow squash growing. All are covered with blossoms and the starting of fruits.

Cucumbers. We are going to have a ton of cukes. I didn't think my seedlings were going to take and grow so I bought some more. Mine did take and are growing well, and now we have double what we planned on. I see pickles in the future.

I also have beets growing (which I think Patchy got into today because I found some pulled out today...bad dog) and I planted a bunch of onions today. I'll try and post some pics of those tomorrow.

I've been a maniac making jam lately. I took my canning class and have been cranking out strawberry jam like crazy. I hope to have enough to get us through the winter. I just need to get the boys to stop eating it all.

Patchy is waiting for his ball to be tossed to him. I don't know how I managed to get a shot of him while he was licking his lips. The kids were laughing pretty hard at this last night. The picture right after this was of him in the same position but his tongue wasn't out. So I was flipping between the pics really fast for a good giggle.

Connor sailed through third grade and is moving onto 4th. His final report card was all A's and his teacher said he is "very creative and enthusiastic". I don't know how she can nail him like that by just talking to him on the phone every two weeks and "seeing" him on live lessons. I guess his powerpoints and his stories must have left a good impression on her.

We've been doing a lot of this lately. Sadly, we are almost out of our grass fed beef. I have an email to our supplier and I'm hoping we can get some more soon.

Last, but not least, a friendly little helper on my lettuce. This little guy was very content crawling all over the leaves.

I hope everyone is doing great and enjoying their summer and their gardens. More to come soon!

Must see this!

2009-06-11T14:01:00.002-04:00

One year blogiversary.

2009-06-03T13:38:00.006-04:00

One year ago today I started this little online journal for my gardening notes. As gardening season is starting to swing into full motion again I'm sure it will be busy through the summer. Keeping up with this blogs has had it's ups and downs. I love to post pictures and keep notes so that I can remember things down the road. It's been a lot of work too though. I honestly don't know how some of the bloggers that I love post daily. Where do they find the time to put words into sentences and not make it boring?

This blog has been a mish mash of everything in my life with no real direction...kind of like my life. It's more than just a gardening blog. It's kept up so that my family can keep tabs on us and the kiddies. It's here so that I can practice writing. It's here to remind me of things. I am not going to say that I'm going to nail down one direction that it's going to go with. I am more than just a gardener. I have a lot of interests. I have a lot of things that I want to learn. I'm a mom of two boys that continue to grow and amaze me daily. I like to do crafts (again with the finding time issue), I like to read. How do I pick one of those things to blog about? I realize blogs that focus on one thing and go with it do better, but I can't just pick one thing like food and devote a blog to just that. Eventually things just creep in that aren't related to food. I can't run seven different blogs, each devoted to one topic...so I will continue to use this place to blog about everything in my life.

Today, being the first official day of summer vacation from home schooling, I am going to put out some goals for myself for this summer. I know that I have a large list of things I would like to accomplish this summer and I'm not sure I will get to them all, but I might as well write them down and then I know what I'm working towards. So, here goes:

Summer Vacation Goals:

1. I want to learn how to build furniture. I am going to start with a nice, sturdy bookcase.

2. I want to finish knitting Tim's scarf.

3. I want to keep our garden well and thriving...more weed control this year.

4. I want to make summer fun for the kids.

5. I want to sew.

6. I want to make my first quilt.

7. I want to organize/declutter every room in our home (basement included).

8. I want to learn how to crochet a granny square.

9. I want to eat locally, organic if possible. I want to eat clean.

10. I want to find a good book and lose myself in it.

11. I want to continue making changes in our lives/home that are more earth friendly.

12. I want to start researching farming seriously.

13. I want to use my pressure canner and not be afraid of it.

14. I want to learn how to make soap.

15. I want to find natural homemade alternatives for home cleansers that really work.

Hmmm, I think that is all for now. That's enough, right? I think I can achieve a lot of these things and it should keep me busy through the summer. It's funny because I asked both Connor and Aidan to each pick one thing that they wanted to learn to do this summer. Connor answered that he wanted to learn how to build a gun ship and Aidan (while he was walking through the kitchen) said he wanted to learn how to make an aerosol can of spray oil. I guess I need to sit with them and help them each pick a skill to master. Maybe a language? Or a form of art? Knitting? Cooking? We'll figure something out for them and then help them on their way to learning some new skill that will help them out.

So, here I sit on my first day of Summer Vacation, chilled by the cool damp air and I'm pleased. We have another year of schooling under out belt. I'm not going to lie, it was harder this year and only because of one event. That event is over and will not be allowed to happen again. We will relax and have fun over the summer. We will get our share of sun and fresh air and farmer's markets in. We will travel to Florida and spend a week enjoying the fun in the sun and the family. We will live each day like it's the last and do things that we want to do.

I hope everyone else is gearing up for a fantastic summer. I am hoping that I will be more regular around here, but make no promises. I'm probably going to try and update the look of my little spot in the blog universe...but not today. Now, I'm going to go dig out a blanket, curl up under it and read a magazine.

Current pictures of our garden and the kiddies. Better pictures will follow now that I have a little more free time.

Visitor tonight.

2009-06-01T20:50:00.001-04:00

Visitor tonight.
Originally uploaded by busybeebiz

Quick post to show Aidan's tooth finally coming out. It's been hanging on for a couple of weeks now and tonight's dinner finally coaxed it out. He was thrilled, and then scared that he had swallowed. Alas, he had not. If you look closely at the piece of chicken on his fork, you'll see the tooth stuck to it. It was so funny. Now it's on it's way to resting under his pillow. I just hope that the tooth fairy doesn't trip on the god-awful mess in their room. Of course, Aidan's answer is "she flies".

One day left of school. Kindergarten graduation on Friday at Knoebels and then I hope to be back to my regular posting of my bloggy blog.

Playing.

2009-05-21T14:02:00.003-04:00

View On Black

Playing with pictures on Flickr. I have lots to blog about but I'm buried in finishing up school and preparing for a block party. I will post updates of garden soon, I promise!!

Check this out!

2009-05-13T10:01:00.002-04:00

The Story of Stuff. Watch the 20 minute video. Eye opening. Thankfully we have been making small changes and trying to live a more sustainable life, but this shows how much more work we have to do. We will be making some more adjustments around our little house in the city.

Gardening news.

2009-05-11T19:08:00.004-04:00

A nice weekend at home was had by all. It was a much needed weekend to get things done around the house and thankfully we had decent weather. The gardens are slowly starting to take shape. I would say we are about 70 percent done. Tomatoes and peppers are all in and ready to go. We have two zucchini and one yellow squash planted. Six cucumber plants are in and ready to climb their trellis. We have Swiss Chard and Buttercrunch lettuce getting nice and big. Nancy planted some broccoli...and I think that is it.

Still left to do: plant some beets and green beans. We have some extra space so are trying to decide what to do. The kids want to grow pumpkins this year so I'm looking for a spot that they can sprawl out on.

Cucumbers...one of the plants has a blossom on it already. On the other side of the trellis is lemon balm.

Ring of broccoli around the sundial.

11 tomato plants that we planted two weeks ago. They appear to be growing nicely. Going to have to start tying them to stakes pretty soon.

I know you can't see them, but there are 15 more tomato plants planted here. The night after we planted them we had a wind storm and all of the Maple seeds landed all over everything. I will need to get them up so I don't have a lot of Maple trees growing.

Our pepper patch. Six green pepper plants, 4 "rainbow" peppers, 4 Jalapeno plants, and 4 Habanero plants.

Swiss Chard and Buttercrunch lettuce.

That is about it for now on the gardening. I'm hoping that next weekend I can go flower shopping. Not much else going on around here. Like I said, it was nice to have a weekend at home and stick around to do things that needed to be done. We are buckling down to try and get school done for this year. All of us are looking forward to some time off from the books. Although, little do they know they will be working on little things.

I guess I will sign off with a couple more pictures from last week.

Some pretty purple poofs that are blooming. I'm not sure the name of them, but will ask Nancy...she knows all. =)

These are blossoms on the Dogwood that we planted in the front yard a couple of years ago. It makes me smile when I see this because when we move, we will have left something pretty behind.

I had to take this because I am usually the one cutting the grass. I guess since it was Mother's Day and I had already done most of it that Tim came and offered to finish it up. What a guy.

This picture is from our trip to the Dairy Farm last week. Connor had to do a report on local and natural resources. We went out to the farm and saw all of the animals and got some fresh milk and ice cream. The kids had so much fun and were so cute watching all of the baby cows and ducks. We all decided that we want to live on a farm. Maybe after Tim is done with his school and settled into a firm job, we can buy a little farm and have some animals. I already know that I want chickens and sheep.

I think that is all I have for now. It's going to be another busy week. Tim is taking a vacation day tomorrow to finish his last school project and then Connor has his yearly checkup on Thursday. I'm also excited because Thursday night is my first of two food preservation courses. Now let's just hope that my tomato plants actually produce tomatoes.

I hope everyone has a fantastical week!!

Quick Post.

2009-05-10T21:10:00.002-04:00

It was a very busy weekend and I have a few pictures to post and some gardening to write about, but I am beat. I will just post a quick post to share a picture that I took with my new camera. Tim got me my camera for Mother's Day. He's the best!

Underside of one of my Gerber Daisies.

I hope I will have time to do a post tomorrow, but I'm not going to promise anything right now. We are trying to finish up school and then I will have all summer to play.

Waiting.

2009-05-05T22:19:00.001-04:00

Waiting.
Originally uploaded by busybeebiz

Waiting for the rain to stop so that I can hang out laundry again. I had to break down and use the dryer because I had not done laundry in a week and a half because of rain and we are looking at having rain for the rest of the week. While I'm waiting, I'm playing with my new camera. Me thinks I'm in love.

9 years ago today.

2009-05-02T06:55:00.001-04:00

9 years ago today.
Originally uploaded by busybeebiz

This will be a short and sweet post because I have way too much to do today. Our baby turned 9 today. It seems impossible that it's been nine years since we brought this little bundle of joy home.

He was the best baby ever. He was always smiling and happy. He got into everything. I tried to find a picture I had of him doing his favorite thing when he was little. He would roll through on his walker, find a bookcase and proceed to unload any shelf within reach.

Connor is an amazing little boy. He's so easy to please in every way. He's very adaptable which is good since we've move a lot in his short nine years. He'll try anything to eat at least once. His favorite food is sushi. That's pretty impressive. He is always willing to help when I need it or if one of our neighbors needs help. He's crazy smart. There is no pulling a fast one on him. He is incredibly imaginative. He and his brother can sit for hours making up stories and acting them out with their legos and Star Wars figures. He goes into his own little world and becomes whatever he's playing.

Another one of my favorite memories about Connor was when he was learning to talk. He made up his own words so he could be part of the conversation. Please used to be "wheat", as in "Can I have a Popsicle, wheat?" He used to say his "tr" as "f"....so truck was, well, you know. One day driving he was behind Tim in the car and pointed and said, "Look, it's a dumb f**k"...pointing out the window to a dump truck. I think Tim about drove off the road. It was funny.

Connor has now lived 6 years with type one diabetes. He's been a trooper about it. It wasn't easy being diagnosed at three. He had to get multiple shots daily. It took him about a year to get used to that. It was a very long year. Now he wears an insulin pump and counts his own carbs and enters his numbers by himself into his pump.

He is fiercely independent but at the same time is the biggest cuddle bug I know. As big as he is, he still wants to curl up next to me where ever I am and get cuddled. He has told me that even when he's a "cranky teenager" he'll still want to cuddle. What more could a mama ask for? It's been a lot of fun watching him grow. Now Tim and I sit and watch him and try to figure out what path he will take in the future. He loves Science. He's very creative. He's extremely smart. He's a great director. He loves to make movies. He adores animals. He could be anything. Whatever he wants to do, we will support him 100 percent.

We love you Connor. I hope you enjoy your special weekend.

Finally.

2009-04-26T20:41:00.005-04:00

I can finally write a post about gardening.

Here is a pictorial display of my day. It started out earlier that I prefer on weekends, but the sun was up and the birds were singing (loudly). We got up to find that we didn't really have anything for breakfast so Connor jumped on the chance to make something. He pulled out the children's cookbook and flipped through the pages. He found one for something called the "Grab n Go Breakfast cookies". He looked at me and figured I would say no to cookies for breakfast but I surprised him and told him that he could make them. They were made with whole wheat flour, oatmeal, a little brown sugar, blueberries and cherries and almonds. He did such a great job on them. I let him do the hole shebang. I was taking care of the dishes out of the dishwasher and hovering around but he read the recipe and followed the directions. He cracked the eggs and used the mixers. He was so very proud of himself when they were done and they were delish! One cookie was filling enough to hold me until 12:30.

Connor serving up a mighty tasty cookie.

After breakfast I ran to the grocery store for the weekly goods. I was in a foul mood when I left but driving to the store and looking at all of the beautiful tulips and daffodils up made me feel better. I felt much better after I got a bunch of these babies for my front porch:

I love Gerber daisies and they sure put a smile on my face after I got them.

I came home and hung my first load of laundry out on the line and then planted the daisies. Tim was a sweetie and took care of the groceries. I think part of it is because he likes to see what I brought home. After daisies were planted there was a ferocious water gun battle. Sadly, my towels on the line took a few hits but the insanely hot temps and crazy breezes dried them right up. The day progressed with 4 loads of laundry, all of which dried free of charge and energy outside. I was very pleased. I was telling Tim how zen like it is to stand in soft grass hanging up yummy smelling clothes with the warm sun on my skin.

I would say around 2 Nancy and I went to one of our local nurseries to have a peek at what plants were ready to go. We picked a few things up and some organic fertilizers. When I got home I did something pretty stupid. In the middle of the 92 degree afternoon sun I decided that I was going to plant some of my tomatoes. Uh yeah, it was hot. I did get 12 of them planted and I hope they are on their way to being healthy tomato producing plants. This year we are going to try something to attempt to cut back on the weeds. I'm not sure if it will work, but I'll try anything to not have weeds like we did last year. Tim and I laid down a bunch of newspapers and then soaked them. On top of the soaked newspaper we put some peat. I think I'll have to go out tomorrow at some point and put a little more peat down. I was too hot and exhausted to do anymore with the tomatoes.

Weed control, I hope.

One of twelve tomato plants put down into the ground today.

Nature's pest control along the edge of the patch.

Finished (for now). I will put a little more peat on it tomorrow.

I then played with the water while I was watering. It felt really good at this point.

You would think that gardening would be done after that, right? Nope. I had to go save those hostas. That was a mission of mine from yesterday. So, as hot and tired as I was I got Nancy and we went over and pulled a bunch of them up. They didn't get planted into the garden yet, but will in the next couple of days. Right now they are in a couple of buckets out front waiting for me.

Lots of hostas to be split up and spread around in my front garden that rarely sees any sun under the cherry tree. Now I was ready to come in for the day and shower and start to relax.

After I was showered and cooling off, Tim made us a cocktail. I'm not sure what it was called but it was OK. It was orange juice, a banana, lemon juice and some tequila blended with ice. I don't know if I would make it again but it was refreshing and cool.

And that brings us to bedtime. Tim read a chapter of Ender's Game to Connor and Aidan and I did a couple of I Spys.

The I Spy master.

Now the kids are in bed and I'm sitting here while Tim is watching some crappy Sci Fi movie that he tivo'd last night. It's horrid. I'm going to sign off and go put some lotion on the sunburn and get ready for school tomorrow.

Yay for actually getting things done today!

Slacker.

2009-04-25T19:08:00.003-04:00

Yup, that's me. I've been slacking on my bloggy blog for a while. It's not like I mean to do it, it just happens. We've been busy. Sometimes (most of the time) when I have too much to do I freak out and shut down. Take today for instance. This is our first reallllllly nice day of weather this year. It was in the 80's. I had such grand plans of cutting the grass, weeding 7 different garden plots, planting grass seed, trimming bushes out front, planting some more hostas, doing laundry, cleaning house. It turns out that plans are all they were. I got up early and went to an estate sale with Nancy and was home by 10. I got home and Tim was laid out on the couch. He has pink eye. It's gross. It made him grumpy. Not fun. The kids had been looking forward to the warmer weather to go out and play with their water guns. That is what we did. By the time we got out there for the water battle, it was too hot to cut the grass and I just wasn't feeling the weeding. Oh, but we did release our butterflies out into the big scary world. I can mark that off my list. Wait, that wasn't on my list.

I guess tomorrow I'm going to try and knock off as much of that list after I get my weekly shopping done. It's supposed to be really nice tomorrow too. I'll get up first thing and go food shopping. No, actually I think I will get up and cut the grass first thing. Then I will start a load of laundry and by the time I get home from shopping I can hang a load out. I'm very proud of myself for hanging laundry out. In the last two weeks I've saved 5 loads from the dryer. At first I felt kind of weird about hanging our clothes out because no one in our neighborhood does that, but then I thought "screw it". When have I really cared what people think. Ok, so yes...I know what I must do when I get up in the morning. Won't my neighbors love me for cutting grass first thing in the morning on Sunday.

Next week is going to be a busy week. If Tim ends up working from home because of his pink eye, that is going to make it tougher. We are in the final weeks of school and we are dying to be done with it. Connor decided today that he wants to double up on his lessons so that he can get done sooner. Little does he know that I have workbook sheets for him to work on all summer. =) He was excited though to get an invitation to be in Gifted Science next year on top of his Gifted Literature. I sat down with him and told him he was going to have to do labs and report his findings and be part of a research assignment and he was all for it. We are pretty proud of him. Aidan is doing great too. His teacher did his benchmark testing last week and said he was progressing fine and was doing great with his reading and writing. This has been a tough year so I will be glad when it's over and I'm hoping next year will be easier. We have gotten into the swing of things with me teaching both of them and Connor is getting better at working on his own. That being said, we are all looking very much forward to a little bit of a summer break.

I think that is all I have for now. I have to do some planning because next weekend is Connor's weekend as he turns 9. We are taking him to a gem show and then we are letting him pick out where he wants to go for dinner. He has chosen Red Robin. Well, he chose Chuck E Cheese, but that was ruled out. He's chosen Mississippi Mud Cake for his cake, so we'll go to dinner and then come home and have cake. Sunday I think we are going to take the kids to Claws and Paws. It's a "zoo" that is near us. I'm kind of scared to see what it's going to be like, but the kids will enjoy going for a drive and seeing some animals.

I'll leave you with some pictures from last week:

My hostas are up. I love the heart shaped leaves on this one. I'm going to "save" some tomorrow from certain death down the street. A couple of doors down they are getting ready to tear up the yard and put in a parking lot. Last year they had the most beautiful hostas surrounding their tree (trees been cut down). The new owner of the house is just going to destroy them. I will not stand for that. I have a nice shady front yard that they will be welcomed into. I just have to figure out how to dig them up without getting caught.

This is rhubarb. I've never seen it come up fresh in the Spring. When I planted it last year it was a plant and wasn't going through it's bloom. I've been fascinated watching this. It looks so alien.

Last weekend Connor fed a butterfly out in the yard. We were going to let them go last weekend but then saw that the forecast called for lows in the 20's and that was too cold for them. We took care of them indoors for another week.

This is from today. Aidan got brave and decided that he wanted to hold one and release it. He did an awesome job. All of us tracked the butterflies as they finally tasted their freedom. I think most of them ended up on our neighbors Lilac bush.

I knit a new dishcloth. I've been in a crafting hold pattern lately. I'm trying to finish Tim's scarf (almost done) and I'm nearly done with my needlepoint. I needed something fast to whip up and I needed some new dishcloths. Voila. I'm pondering attempting a quilt. I found out that there is a quilters association in our area and one of my friends is the incoming President of said association. I might take the quilting plunge.

The kids and I found this mama bird yesterday on Nancy's front porch. She was very tolerant of us. The kids were so excited. They ran in and called Tim at work and wanted to call Nancy at work. I didn't let them bother her at work but as soon as she drove into her driveway they were out the door to take her to show her the bird.

Here are the boys from last weekend and our hike. We had a delightful time with Jeff, Heather, Miss Mess and Max. The place we hiked at wasn't that great but it was nice to get out in the fresh air, have a picnic and catch up with good friends.

And last, but not least:

Patchy. You see all that stuff around him? That's his mess. He fell asleep in the middle of his toys, his shredded paper, his dismembered stuffed animal and his peanut butter jar. It's like having another child to pick up after.

I hope everyone is having a great Spring weekend and I hope that I can get back in the swing of things and post more than once every ten days.

Smile for the day.

2009-04-16T15:01:00.003-04:00

A good friend of mine had this linked on their chat. It is amazing. And sorry for it being to big. I'm trying to figure out how to fix that. I might have to wait for the great Timbo to get home.

Big day!

2009-04-14T18:32:00.004-04:00

After checking on our little cocoons every day we were very happy to see that two of our butterflies emerged today. I found them out around 11:30 this morning and the kids were so excited. They have been monitoring them all day. At one point I was down on the treadmill and both of them came running down the stairs excited that the butterflies were fluttering around.

This is how a good part of the day was spent by these two. =)

Waiting for his wings to fill up and get stiff.

Stretching his wings out for the first time.

I guess he got hungry. I hope they like fresh oranges.

This picture pretty much sums up my day. Butterflies, knitting, school books, and my trusty computer.

I think that is all for now. You may go back to your regular programming (week).

Lack of gardening posts.

2009-04-12T21:05:00.003-04:00

Sorry guys. I haven't really posting any gardening posts because it's still too damn cold to garden. I'm listening to The Prairie Home Companion right now and the local station just said "Tonight lows around 20". Ugh. When is the warm weather going to stay put?! Spring teases us with one nice day and then goes right back to snow and cold, windy weather. Boo.

My indoor plants are starting to look kind of sad. Next year, I will know not to start my seeds so early. I actually have green beans that have grown already in their little pots that are waiting to be put out. We planted peas a couple of weeks ago outside and I haven't seen anything yet.

I guess my biggest problem right now is that I am trying to push the season. I need to sit back and enjoy what I have now. The warm weather will be here soon enough. I just need to somehow keep my tomato plants alive and kicking.

Hmmm, what else is new? Not too much. The kids have off from school tomorrow. I'm not sure what we are going to do yet. I guess it will depend on how warm it gets. I know that I have to make some bread tomorrow. Did I mention that I got a new bread book? I don't remember if I've mentioned that. I'm dying to get into it and start making some bread. First read through and I'm slightly intimidated, but I will look at it as another experiment. I did attempt a loaf of English Muffin bread last week and for some reason it would not rise. I think it was too cold in the house. It finally rose a tiny little bit and I threw it in the oven. It tasted really good, but it was really dense. I made a couple of loaves of bread last week and made pizza dough for our Friday night pizza night and with all the kneading that I've been doing, I'm going to have Popeye forearms.

I'll close with just a couple of pictures from last week:

Patchy turned 2 this week. He's still the best doggie in the world.

We did have one nice day last week where the kids and I played outside for a couple of hours.

The kiddies outside of The Bullfrog Brewery where we had a fine dining experience with some friends!

And last, but not least, this is for Laurie. Look at what I learned to do. =)

My first attempt at serious crochet. Not too bad. I ended up doing several of these for coasters around the house and now I'm ready to branch out into bigger and better.

I think that is all for now. Nothing really exciting going on around here. Next weekend we have a hiking trip planned with some friends from NY. I hope that it's warmer! I also hope everyone has a great week.

Perfect Spring day.

2009-04-05T19:30:00.003-04:00

Today was a perfect sunny Spring day. It started out kind of chilly but it finally got up to around 62 and nothing but sun and bright blue sky. It was a nice change from the last couple of days. I spent the day running errands yesterday and it was so cold and bitter and rainy. Yuck. Today made up for the last couple of icky days though. The sun was actually up bright and early and we were able to get up before 8. That is usually unheard of on Sundays.

I got up and made a batch of pancakes and Tim finished up his school project and took his exam. Aced it, of course. Then Tim and Connor took a nice long walk along the river dike. Aidan and I spent the time in the basement going through bins and trying to get organized. We sort through the Spring/Summer clothes and weeded out what won't fit them anymore. Let's just say that their cousin Bryson is going to be getting a nice big box of clothes soon. We also worked on a lot of laundry. I only do laundry once a week now so that I don't have to think about it during the week. I have too much other stuff to do than to worry about laundry. I got the load of whites done and then a load of towels. I threw the towels in the dryer and started it. I then pulled the door open and stopped the dryer. I had a little conversation with myself. Self...I said, go upstairs, go outside and string up the line. Hang those towels out in the bright sun and cool breeze. You can save at least one load from the dryer. So that is what I did.

Ahh, crunchy towels right off the line.

Tim and Connor came home and then the kids and I ended up spending 2 and a half hours outside. Aidan drew a big racetrack on Nancy's parking lot and they had their scooter/bike races. They dragged a bunch of toys outside and just had a blast. During bath time tonight, I was noticing how cute they were with little pink cheeks.

Now it's almost bed time. Connor has it in his head that he wants to listen to A Prairie Home Companion so I have to get their radio set to the station and then they will be going to bed. I think I will do the same thing, go to bed and listen.

The only other exciting thing going on around here right now is that we are waiting for butterflies. We got 5 little caterpillar pupa on the 20th of March. They were so tiny. The kids have had so much fun watching the inch around and grow bigger and bigger. We kept the cup on the big desk in the classroom and we kept tabs on them daily. They finally made their little chrysalids on Friday and now we are waiting for them to emerge as butterflies. We have to get sugar water and some flowers ready to feed them when they come out. I hope that by the end of the week our temps are warm enough so that we can release them out into our yard.

We got these little guys March 20th.

They got huge. This picture was taken March 30th.

Turned in chrysalids on April 3rd.

Oh, and then there are also these guys:

our 30+ tomato plants that are waiting to go outside and get planted. I've been putting them outside during the day to acclimate to the outdoors. I would have liked to have planted them today but we are forecast for possible snow in a couple of days. I hope we don't get any. It's Spring dang it...keep our temps warm.

I hope everyone had a good weekend and have a great week.

Binghamton.

2009-04-03T21:48:00.002-04:00

I was shocked to see the news today. Quiet, little Binghamton, NY all over the news. When Tim and I got married he was living in Johnson City going to school there. I moved up there when we got hitched. We lived there for two years. Connor was born there.

It was a nice enough town. Moving there was a culture shock for me. I had pretty much grown up in Central Florida. I often marveled at the local news in Binghamton. Instead of the home invasions and murders of where I grew up, the news was about someone retiring after a certain number of years...or news about the bridge being redone or something. It was quiet. When we lived there, I didn't particularly care for it becuase I was used to a bigger city and much more things to do. We moved to back to Florida and stayed there for three years. Then one night I had a dream that we back to Binghamton.

We didn't ultimately end up there but it got us back up into the North East. We often go up to Binghamton to see friends. We have a lot of good memories there. It's sad that it's in the news for such a terrible thing. Unfortunately, with the economy the way it is and more and more people finding themselves out of work, I fear what happened today will be something we see more and more of. I know Binghamton is a great town and the people in that area will pull together and get through this.

Oddly enough, we had planned on going to Binghamton tomorrow for a rock and gem show for Tim and we had decided to not go before this happened. Tim has a school project that is due on Sunday and now with the shooting I'm glad we had made that decision. It's going to be a zoo there with every news station swarming around.

We'll be back to you soon Binghamton. Who knows? Tim might end up back in your school soon enough. My thoughts are with all the families affected today.

Excited.

2009-03-31T13:51:00.002-04:00

Last weekend I signed up for a two day class at our local dairy farm. Have I mentioned how much I love love love our dairy farm. We get fresh milk that is completely free from growth hormones. The kids love to go because the farm lets wee ones wander around and look at the animals. And the ice cream...oh, the ice cream. Well, the farm is going to have a food preservation course to teach how to can and freeze food.

We canned last year. I think we were pretty successful with it. We're still alive. We did have the one unfortunate event with the tomato sauce but that will be remedied this year with the pressure cooker. The pressure cooker. Can I just say that thing scares the hell out of me. I think I'm going to let Tim use it the first time.

Hmmm, what else is new? I've been feeling icky and yucky for the last couple of days. I don't know if I'm fighting a flu bug or something but I feel achy all over and my tummy doesn't feel all that swift. I feel like I could sleep all day. Thankfully the sun is out today and that is helping a little bit. It's still kind of cold out though. I'm seriously ready for some warm temperatures.

Oh, I know what I need to do. I need to get on the kids and have them write back to their pen pal. Sorry Brian. It will be in the mail soon.

I think that is all for now. This was kind of a random post. Hopefully I'll have a more thought out one next time. =)

A nice Spring day.

2009-03-28T20:18:00.001-04:00

Treasure hunt 3-28-09
Originally uploaded by busybeebiz

This is going to be a short post because we are going lights out in 17 minutes for Earth Hour. I just wanted to post a picture of what I got today in my second day of going to tag sales and a community sale. Let's just say that I left the house with 26 dollars and I came home with a ten still in my pocket.

I also got to work out in the garden today. We got some manure put down into one of the garden beds and I planted two rows of sugar snap peas.

The only other thing that I did that I'm excited about it I signed up for a two night course of food preservation. I'll see if I can find a link to it later, but I need to go get kiddies in jammies and everyone's teeth brushed before it goes dark.

We did Earth Hour last year and the kids have been excited to do it again. Last year we all piled into our bed with flashlights and made shadow hand puppets on the walls and ceiling. We told scary stories and then we all passed out asleep. I'm hoping the sleep comes fast tonight to the wee ones, but I have my doubts.

We have no plans for tomorrow, so I'm hoping I can post more tomorrow.

Time...

2009-03-24T09:09:00.004-04:00

Where does it go? We have been all so busy that I am having a hard time trying to sneak posts in.
We spent a lovely weekend in Olean with Tim's dad and new mom. It was an action packed weekend of going from one event to another. Laurie graciously offered her home to us again and I'm looking forward to going back over and start working with her on a garden. I have to do some research on her growing zone. It's much wetter and grayer there than it is here.

Speaking of weather. Spring, hello? Where did you go? Waking up to 18 degrees this morning got me to grumbling again about our weather. The sun has been beautiful and the skies so blue, but it's been so flipping cold. We had to go out and get Tim a sweatshirt this weekend because I stole his jacket.

The cold doesn't seem to be stopping the crocuses from popping up. It's just keeping me from putting any of my plants out. All of my peas have officially died now. Note for next year, don't start them in January. Nancy did clean up one of the garden plots over the weekend and if the temps break 50 in the next couple of days I'm going to go plant a row of seeds. I know that they can go out while it's still cool out. Thankfully my tomatoes seem to be doing great on my dining room table. I'll be glad when I can reclaim my dining room table though and the grow lights can go back down into the basement.

Ok, back to the weekend. After a long ride over to Olean we took advantage of an empty lot across the street from Laurie's and had a baseball game. It was great fun, even though it was chilly out. The kids got to burn a lot of energy that had accumulated in the drive over. Patchy played first base for us and Aidan pretty much made up the rest of the bases. Grampa had to do a lot of running around to herd him back into the "field". Both Connor and Aidan are pretty good at the bat. Connor has a very good pitching arm on him, but needs to get over his fear of getting hit with the ball when he's catching. It's kind of funny to watch. That and his running. We laugh every time we see him run. He puts his head down and kind of shakes his head when he's running. I don't know where he's learned to do this, but we are going to have to put him on a track and show him how it's done.

Perfect pitch.

Keep your eyes open!

After that we went to a couple of fund raising functions. We enjoyed some most delicious Lebanese food at one of them. It makes me want to try my hand at some of that cooking.

Sunday was a fun day. We went to a maple farm. We were lucky enough to be there on a special weekend. There were a couple of different demonstrations going on. It was fun to walk through the woods and see all of the trees tapped and the sap running like water on some of them. We went into a barn like structure where they were boiling the sap down. The place was filled with smoke/steam that smelled so delicious. I know they were talking about how they produce it but between me trying to keep Patchy behaving and Connor from wolfing down little cider donuts I missed a lot of it. Then there was a demonstration about how the Native Americans happened to find out that the trees had a sweet sap in them and it showed how they harvested the sap from the trees and used rocks that had been heated in fire to boil the sugar. I think my favorite part of that demonstration (besides the warm fire that was burning) was tasting the maple wine. We asked where we could buy some but apparently the guy makes it in his basement and he wouldn't cough up an address. I immediately came home and googled it though and have found a couple of recipes. Me thinks I'll be trying my hand at that.

Connor checking out one of the taps.

Aidan waiting for the tractor ride up the hill.

Enjoying the view from the wagon being pulled by a tractor up the hill.

Maple smoke/steam made this tin punch lamp look really neat.

The color changes in sap from one season of tapping.

My new favorite coffee mug that I got at the farm. It doesn't have a handle. It has a hand cozy and when you hold the cup, you cup it in your hands to keep your hands cozy. LOVE it!

After that we went back to the house and had an amazing dinner cooked by Laurie. This is the person who says she doesn't cook. She did a pretty good job. =) We got home late on Sunday night and yesterday was spent running around town. I had to run to the dentist to get some paperwork filled out for the kids. I had to go to the dairy to get some milk and cream. I think we are going to do an experiment and try to make our own butter. Then I had to go find out where I'm taking Connor tomorrow for his PSSA testing. Then, last but not least, was food shopping. Oh, and a couple of loads of laundry, make dinner, clean the kitchen. Yeah, I went to bed beat last night. I feel pretty good today. Today we Connor and I are going to do some last minute studying for his tests and then I have to get a backpack ready with snacks and a book. If he finishes his test early he has to sit quietly while everyone else finishes. This should prove interesting. At least the Warrior book set from Nana and Papa showed up yesterday. Thank you Nana and Papa for the books for the kids. They were thrilled with them. We read Aidan's book last night at bed time.

I have a bunch of pictures to post and I'm trying to how to link them from my Flickr account. I've done it twice and I don't see the pics in the post. I'm going to have to play with it some more. If I can't figure it out, I'll have to go back to the laptop and just load them directly from there.

I hope everyone is having a fantastic week! Thank you dad and Laurie for hosting our little family and providing a weekend of fun. Can't wait to do it again!

My Day in Pictures.

2009-03-18T21:30:00.001-04:00

My Day in Pictures.
Originally uploaded by busybeebiz

This will be a short and sweet post. This is my day in pictures. I was up super early and Tim dragged me outside to see how pretty the moon was in the early morning light. Of course, I had to run in and grab my tripod and camera and try to get a decent picture. Someday I'll have my nice camera where I'll be able to get really closeup shot. Then it was a full day of school. In our classroom my desk faces a big window into the back yard. Connor and Aidan stood at this window for 20 minutes watching two cats hunt down squirrels. They were so into it. They were hoping to see a cat score a squirrel. There were two cats out there. The orange cat was on the ground hiding behind their wagon and the black cat was up on top of their fort watching and waiting. Once in a while the squirrels would get complacent and come back into the yard. One of the squirrels almost met his maker. The orange cat would have gotten him if I hadn't screamed in horror as the cat jumped out at the squirrel.

After the drama in the back yard, Connor had his final junior great books live lesson where he presented his powerpoint on Ethiopia. He did a really good job. He read it a little too fast, but he did good research and put together a nice presentation.

Aidan did some math work and then went and played with his legos while Connor and I discussed matter, mass, volume and elements. He made something and asked that I would take a picture of it to put on my blog. I had to take a couple of pictures because he didn't like the perspective on some of them. He is so my child.

Then the kids and I wandered out into the yard for a bit to enjoy 60 degree weather. While I was out there, I found this weird looking thing growing up out of the ground. I couldn't figure out what it was. I thought maybe it was one of my carrots from last year that wasn't pulled and that it just started to grow. I don't think they can do that. I then remembered that I had planted rhubarb there last year. I was happy to see it come up again. I hope I didn't hurt it by digging around at it while I was trying to figure it out.

The only other thing major I did today was make another batch of granola. It is so tasty. It has oatmeal, flax seed, pumpkin seeds, honey, cinnamon and walnuts in it. The kids love it.

So that about sums up my day. I'm ready for bed. I got three new books today so I think I'm going to curl up in bed and read until I fall asleep, which is usually only about 5 minutes.

I hope everyone is enjoying the lovely spring weather!

Busy day!

2009-03-15T18:53:00.004-04:00

So yesterday after I finished posting about my garage sale finds Nancy called and asked me if I had made an offer on the living room set that I loved. I had not. I didn't even ask how much it was because I assumed that it would be too rich for my blood. She told me that she had stopped back by the house again and asked about it. He had one offer on it but was willing to take another offer. The offer was low low low. I called Tim to find out if I should run over and make him an offer. Tim had not seen the set, he had only heard me rave about it. He said sure. I hooked Patchy up and we walked two blocks over and caught the guy just as he was leaving. I asked him if he had sold the set. He had not. He told me to make an offer. I offered him 50 more than his previous offer had been (thanks Nancy for finding out what it was) and he took it. I wrote him a check and made plans to pick it up today. Tim came home and called his friend to see if he could help us pick it up with his truck. Unfortunately, he was sick and not able to help us.

That brings us to today. I let Tim sleep in until 10 and then we walked over to survey what we could do. We were pondering renting a uhaul truck for an hour and moving it. It ended up that we carried the pieces home. I think I can safely say I got my weight lifting done today. We got it home and set up and I'm so happy with the set. Tim loves it too. It's something that we would have picked up in a furniture store, just a couple thousand dollars cheaper. Yay to garage sale finds!!

Our new living room set. Not a great picture but it shows the couch and love seat. I'll try and get a better picture later.

After grabbing a quick lunch we head out the door again. We walked into downtown and watched the St Patrick's day parade. It was so beautiful out today. We had such a nice time. It was nice to feel the sun on my skin again. Of course, I had planned on working in the garden but we opted to go to the parade instead. The boys had fun and came home with so much candy that had been flung at them.

I love kilts!

Impressive!

Waiting for more candy and picking up what they could.

Patchy was not impressed. He fell asleep on Tim's boots. He was anxious at first because there were a lot of people, but he settled right down and got comfy (and dirty). He did excited when the SPCA went by with some of their dogs. he was happy to see some other dogs.

After the parade we came home and then went to the Hillside Dairy farm. We had decided that we wanted to have some ice cream. Apparently everyone else had the same idea. That place was packed and the poor girls behind the counter were frazzled. We love going to the Hillside and think we will make a monthly trek over there for an ice cream cone.

The kids checking out the chickens at the farm.

I did get my tomatoes outside for a little bit today. It's supposed to be in the 50's all week so I'm going to start putting them out during the day to get them used to being outdoors. I think I can take down my grow lights soon. I have to replant Tim's haberneros again. I had three jalapenos come up but the ancho and haberneros didn't sprout. Boo. I hope I have enough time to sprout them and get them outside. If not, I may be buying some at our local nursery.

Well, I better go get stuff ready for school tomorrow. Connor has a report to write about Ethiopia and he has to tie it to his Junior Great Books story he read last week. That will take him a while tomorrow. I better look at his schedule and do some shuffling.

Today's treasures.

2009-03-14T15:24:00.004-04:00

I went on my first adventure going to tag sales. Nancy and I mapped out four places we wanted to hit and were on the road at an ungodly hour (7:45 am). I had 32 dollars in my pocket. The first place we went to was packed. It was inside the person's home and there were so many people inside it was hard to move around. There was a ton of stuff for sale but nothing I really wanted/needed. I did spend 25 cents on a big bag of crafting sticks, you know the ones that look like popsicle sticks. I figure I can use them for the garden to mark what I put where. I did also spend 1 dollar on this set of three metal bowls. Pretty good score.

my new bowls

The next house we went to was interesting. Again, everything was inside their home. This time though, everyone who was living there was smoking. It smelled terrible. I would think that if you are wanting to sell your stuff, you shouldn't be smoking around it. It was awful. The people were kind of creepy too. The third house was just a couple of streets over and there wasn't anything special. The last house was another score for me.

The last house was actually right around the corner from my house. They had a gorgeous sofa and love seat. In the past I have always said that I could never buy a sofa second hand (basically because of the smoking house situation), but this set was gorgeous. It was well taken care of and looked really pretty. I didn't even ask how much it was though. I'm guessing they probably wanted a couple thousand dollars...which is a great price for a sofa/loveseat, but we are trying to save money right now. This is what I did pick up:

A very large, very well maintained area rug. How much you ask? TWELVE DOLLARS! It was funny because Nancy and I were both looking at it and she actually paid for it at the garage sale. When we got home I told her that if she hadn't bought it, I was going to and she sold it to me. Thankfully we didn't have to drive very far with this on the roof of our car. It was pretty funny. I love the rug. It looks so nice in our living room and Patchy loves it too. He now has something he can grip into when he's running around here instead of sliding around like he usually does.

All in all, I had fun on my first adventure out into tag sales/estate sales. I'm not really used to looking through other peoples' stuff but it's a feeling I'm sure I'll get used to. I'm also happy that I came home with 20 dollars still in my pocket.

When I got home the mail was delivered and I got my little measuring cups that I had ordered of off Etsy the other day. They are sooo cute. I'm trying to figure out where to put them so the kids don't break them.

How cute are these? Oh yeah, they are cute!

So that sums up my day thus far. The sun is shining today and the temps are slowly creeping up. I think sometime this weekend we are going to prep one of the garden plots and plant some pea seeds and hopefully transplant the few plants that I have growing.

Tim just head out the door with the kids to take them to the toy store. Aidan has a gift card burning a hole in his pocket. I'm going to go enjoy the peace and quiet. Have a great weekend!

Sluggy Sluggerton.

2009-03-13T11:25:00.005-04:00

That is how I'm feeling today. I don't know if I'm flirting with another stomach flu or what, but I just don't feel like doing anything today. I will eventually but for now I'm just going to play with my Photoshop.

I've decided which camera I'm going to get and I'm bummed because it's going to take FOREVER to save for it. I'm going with the Canon EOS 40D. I have two lenses picked out and now I just need to wait. Those of you who know me, know that I am not the most patient person. Thankfully I will have gardening to distract me. Interestingly enough Nancy told me yesterday that one of the local nurseries that we shopped at last year asked if she or I wanted to work part time through the spring. Hmmm, maybe that would help in my camera savings...although knowing me I would be spending my paychecks on plants. I'll have to ponder that a bit more.

I'm kind of excited about tomorrow. I'm going with Nancy to some garage sales and an estate sale. I've never really been one for going to them, but I'm going to consider it a treasure hunt and have fun. I am limiting myself to 30 dollars cash. I'm looking for some vintage dishes and bowls. It's supposed to be nice out tomorrow too. Maybe when I'm done treasure hunting I'll work out in the garden beds and clean them up a bit. I think we are a couple of weeks from putting things out, but I'm dying to get outside.

Not much else going on over here. School is running smoothly. Connor is taking his PSSA tests in a couple of weeks and I think he's ready for them. We are planning a quick trip next weekend. The birds are back and singing. I know, that was random, but I really enjoy hearing the birds at 4:30 in the morning. They always sound so happy. The kids had a lot of fun last weekend on our fossil hunt and are asking when we can go again. Actually, I think Tim found a crystal cave that we are going to venture to soon. Pretty soon we'll be able to hit the hiking trails full force again. We were going to go last weekend after the fossil pit, but it was so muddy and we were all covered in mud from just digging for fossils. I can't even imagine how bad it would have been if we had hit the ten mile trail. It was really wet.

So, yeah, this is a pretty boring, random post. I think I'm going to go make a cup of tea and work on some knitting. I'll leave you with a couple of pictures of impending Spring.

Tulips starting to peek through the surface.

My new shamrock. I had to get Martin a little buddy. I actually got two new ones. One of them has red leaves. I love Shamrocks!

I hope everyone is having a great day/week/month. Oh, and yes Brian...you should start your tomato seeds NOW. =)

Daily show TONIGHT!

2009-03-12T12:08:00.001-04:00

Cramer is going to be on The Daily Show tonight. It should prove to be entertaining after this. Have I mentioned that I love Jon Stewart? Yeah, I think I have.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

In Cramer We Trust

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Economic Crisis

Camera question.

2009-03-09T17:12:00.002-04:00

For those of you out there in the blogging world, I have a question. I am finally going to get myself a digital slr camera. I'm saving money for it and hope to be able to purchase it in a couple of months. My last two digital cameras have been Canon Powershots and I can safely say that I will be purchasing another Canon. I really like the ease of use and the quality of the pictures. The question is which model should I be shooting for?

The Canon Rebel XSi? or the Canon EOS 50D? I've been doing some research and I'm leaning towards the EOS because it seems to be a higher grade camera. I don't want to "settle" for the Rebel and then want the EOS in another year. I don't want to be dropping down that kind of money.

Is there anyone out there that could maybe lend some support into my decision making? Of course, I know that I'm going to be researching various lenses as well. Like I don't have anything else to do, right?

I ♥ Jon Stewart!

2009-03-05T12:22:00.001-05:00

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

As Promised.

2009-03-05T11:13:00.004-05:00

A gardening update. My little baby seedlings are growing into fine young adults. I have transplanted all of the veggies into bigger pots and they seem to be doing ok. I have had to move them out to the table that I have in my kitchen which thankfully is under a very large window.

My flowers are all (except for my sweet peas) still in the seed tray. A couple of my zinnias have kind of withered up. I guess they should have been transplanted. They grew up pretty fast though and I have seeds still, so once the ground thaws out, I'll plant some more seeds out in the garden.

My kitchen garden. They are patiently waiting to go outside.

My zucchini. I am very happy with how these little guys are looking. I can almost taste the zucchini casserole and zucchini bread now.

30 tomato plants. There are 15 red and 15 orange heirloom plants growing here.

A little mater. I'm cautiously optimistic about these tomatoes. I am so curious to see how big these plants get outside. I will be shocked and amazed if they grow into full size shrubs that produce fruit. Fingers crossed.

Some green beans. There are four plants in that one pot and three of them are dying. I was trying to figure out why. It then dawned on me that when I transplanted them into bigger pots, some of the roots were kind of ripped out of the dirt. Ooops. I guess I need to use a more tender touch. Again, these grew pretty fast and I think once we can plant outside, I'll throw some more seeds into the ground. We are going to plant these babies out where our potato patch was last year. I have plenty of room to work with. The question is, do I really need all that many green beans? Although, I have been loving eating my dilly beans that I canned last year. They are PERFECT on a salad. Yum.

So, now we just wait until this shows some warmer temps. I can only hope that it's around the corner in a couple more weeks. I'm tired of the cold. Oh, that reminds me. I need to research if the time changes on Sunday. On our city calendar it's listed as changing on Sunday. Didn't that change? I guess I'll have to go figure it out. Yay to longer days though!

I'll leave this post with a couple of cute pictures. The first one is of Patchy. Yesterday he put his front paws up on my legs and stayed like that for about 2 minutes. He was watching the crazy squirrels in the back yard. As I type this right now, I'm watching 8 different ones race back and forth on the power lines, into the trees, into the rhododendron and on the to the fort. They are crazy. Patchy enjoyed watching them too.

Patchy

This next picture is of a bird we've seen recently out on our front tree enjoying some suet. I thought it was a woodpecker, but now I'm not so sure. I'm going to have to dig out our bird book and see if I can figure it out. For now, we just call him zebra. =)

Zebra...woodpecker?

I hope everyone is gearing up for a warm Spring.

Handsome little devil.

2009-03-03T20:21:00.001-05:00

Handsome little devil.
Originally uploaded by busybeebiz

This is a test of my using Flikr. I've been playing around over here with some of my pictures.

Quick Post.

2009-03-02T20:38:00.003-05:00

This is just a quick little post because I'm getting ready to get into bed and try and warm up. It's been way to cold today. At least we didn't get all the snow that others around us have. I'll grumble about the cold and the wind but at least I'm not out shoveling snow right now.

I wanted to post a picture of the cake that Tim and I made for Aidan. Now, history on this. We had a hamster up until two weeks ago. She died peacefully in her sleep and honestly, we weren't that sad to see her go because she was mean. Aidan had said that for his party he wanted a hamster cake. When he had made this request, Rhino was still alive and he was watching dvds of Hamtaro. So, he had hamsters on the brain. After Rhino passed we asked Aidan if he wanted to change the theme of the cake. I was thinking maybe he would change it to Kirby or Bolt or something that is relevant to what they are watching/playing right now. Nope. Aidan just said, "Let's make a dead hamster cake". Voila.

I made the cakes on Friday. It was a fiasco. I made four round cakes and the 13x9. I sprayed all the pans and thought it would be ok. Every single one of the cakes stuck to the pan and broke as I tried to ease them out. We, at this point, also realized that I should have made 6 round cakes so that the hamster would be taller. So, I redid all of the cakes. We crumbled up the broken cakes and fed them to the birds. This time I put parchment paper on the bottom of each pan and they came out beautiful. I was beat after all of the baking though. 12 cakes in one day is a bit much.

Saturday morning Tim got up and pieced the cakes together. I made a huge batch of buttercream frosting and he stacked everything up. He carved the shape and then covered it with frosting. Then he covered it with fondant and painted it with edible paint (corn syrup and food coloring). All in all, it was a great success. The cake recipe was very tasty and moist.

I think that is all for now. I promise I will do a gardening post soon. I got a bunch of my seedlings transplanted into bigger pots and now I am in a holding pattern until spring. Oh Spring, where are you?

Six years ago today...

2009-02-26T16:53:00.012-05:00

We brought this little guy into the world.

Yup. Aidan turned 6 today. Where does the time go? I've spent the last couple of days going through six years of pictures. I've picked out some of my favorites. There are a lot of them. It was a lot of fun looking through the pictures and remembering all of the places we've been. One thing that is constant in all of the pictures though is how happy the kids are.

He was a thinker even just days old.

Connor was very happy to be a big brother.

They spent a lot of time together.

Checking out how handsome they both were.

I think it is safe to say Aidan was teething in this picture with the drool coming out of his mouth.

Aidan always loves being outside.

In one of his favorite places to be, Nana's pool. He is counting down the days until he's in it again.

How cute was this kid?

Aidan rocked the Chucks.

It was amazing how many pictures I have of Aidan with food all over himself. No wonder Corky loved him.

This is the face we call the "angry monkey". Aidan didn't get upset all that often, but when he did he always brought out the angry monkey. We still see it from time to time.

Out exploring again.

This is the "don't mess with me look" that he pulled off from time to time. Too bad he was too cute for it to work.

What was I saying about food all over him? I don't know how he fell asleep in his highchair.

He loves picking apples and pumpkins. Thank goodness we moved up to the North where we can do so.

As Connor and Aidan get older, they still are best buddies.

Maybe I'm biased, but I think these are the two cutest kids around.

Aidan always loves to help me in the kitchen. He's my little sous chef.

He's also very much into the arts and crafts. Here is stuffing a sock monkey tail. Look at that determination.

Even though he looks happy here, he is not really a snow child. He likes to go in it for a very small amount of time and then gets fussy and wants to come in. Perhaps he is a true Florida boy.

We are so lucky to have this little guy in our lives. He truly makes us smile and laugh all of the time. He is a happy, easy going, adventurous, dare devil, artsy, craftsy, warm and tender hearted little boy. He loves his big brother and Connor does a good job pretending to tolerate him even though he knows he really loves him.

RIP Rhino

2009-02-22T11:05:00.002-05:00

Our evil hamster is gone. Today was cage cleaning day and she was curled up in a ball. Tim took the lid off and she didn't attack (like she usually did) and he poked her with a stick. Nothing. I was in the shower at the time and he comes in to say, "We have a problem". He then tells about the passing. He then went to tell the boys. I heard the feet running down the hallway to go look. When I got out of the shower, I was happy (and maybe a little concerned) that the boys weren't sad to see her go. Connor was singing, "Ding dong, the hamsters dead". He is a tender hearted kid usually. Aidan wasn't too upset. For the last week he's been begging us to feed it to the snake. I think it's safe to say there will be no more hamsters in this house. I can't even begin to say how much money we've spent on that beast.

Here's the funny part of this...yes, we can find humor in everything. Aidan is having a party next weekend. We asked him what kind of cake he wanted. He wants a hamster cake. We were going to build a cake into a hamster sitting on his hind paws holding a nut. Now Tim wants to make a dead hamster cake. I'm trying to talk Aidan back into a Kirby cake. I guess I have a week to try and figure that out.

RIP Rhino...although I'm sure she's headed to hamster hell.

Note to self.

2009-02-18T08:16:00.002-05:00

Yes, it's another note to myself.

Dear Self,

Next time you take your driver's license and credit cards out of your wallet and put them into your camera case (I did this for the hockey game) make sure you put them back into your wallet before you attempt to go food shopping. Imagine how silly that would be. Oh wait, you don't have to imagine. You were a dumb ass and went to the store and spent a good 45 minutes strolling the aisles looking for good healthy eats for the week. You stood in line. You unloaded your entire cart in an organized fashion...you know, like you always do with all the boxes together, all the produce together, all the frozen together, etc. The cashier starts to reach for your first item and you open you wallet only to realize it is empty minus all the other crap you carry around in there. You uttered a bad word (thankfully the kids weren't there), you turned a brilliant shade of red, and you unloaded the groceries back into your cart in an orderly fashion. You drove 20 minutes home, grabbed your cards and drove 20 minutes back. Did you learn your lesson? I hope so...if not, read this message again frequently and learn from your mistakes.

Thanks,
Self

Now what?

2009-02-17T21:28:00.003-05:00

This blog is called Busy Bee's Garden Experiment. An experiment it is. I think I've planted my seeds too soon. They are getting so big and I'm going to have to re-pot them all before they can go outside. Next year I will know not to plant so early. I will admit though that we have had so much fun watching them grow and get bigger.

zucchinis, peas and green beans

zukes!

zinnias

foxgloves. These amaze me because they start out so tiny and get to be so big. I can't wait to see them bloom.

This afternoon after school I caught the boys playing a game together.

They had quite the Stratego battle going on. It's awesome that they are less and less interested in TV these days. Connor has started a new book series that one of his bestest friends that he likes to hang out with reads. The Warrior series. It's about warrior cats. We've been reading it together and Aidan is still my little lego buddy. Who needs that dumb ol TV anyway? Well, I do, but I tivo everything and watch it when I can.

Not much else going on over here. Waiting for spring to show up so that we can head outdoors!

How did I spend Valentine's Day?

2009-02-15T20:44:00.003-05:00

With my favorite boys of course.

We took the boys to a hockey game. I absolutely love to go to hockey games. I have for a long time. The kids...not really ready to sit through full games. This is the second time we've taken them to a game and they get bored really easily. I guess they didn't inherit my love of the sport. Maybe when they are a little bit older. They actually said they enjoyed going to the baseball games more. Huh? Talk about boring. I take knitting to baseball games because I'm so bored. I like baseball games for the Guinness and sitting in the sun. Hockey...it's fast, it's exciting and there are fights!

We were treated to a fight pretty early in the first period.

We ended up leaving between the second and third periods because the boys were getting restless and the Penguins were losing. They weren't playing that great and I was getting frustrated. It worked out nicely though because we beat the exiting crowd and didn't have to wait an hour in the parking lot trying to get out.

I suppose we'll just have to wait until they are a little bit older for them to appreciate the sport. I was hoping this year we could take them to a Buffalo Bills game in the fall. I haven't been to a NFL game before and would love to go. I don't think our kids would sit through a full game. I guess we'll wait and see.

Photo Friday.

2009-02-14T12:41:00.005-05:00

Er, I'm posting on Saturday, but I took them yesterday and then ran out of time to post.

My babies.

Christmas cactus that bloomed a little late.

These are off a plant that I grew from a cutting from Tim's Aunt Mary. The cutting is from a plant that was his great great grandmothers.

Zucchinis

Peas and zucchini

Heirloom tomatoes

Zinnias

Spring weather.

2009-02-11T21:55:00.003-05:00

It got up to 65 degrees today. It was so nice to be outside without a jacket. Unfortunately it's not going to last. By the end of the week it's back in the 20's and 30's. Oh well, today was a preview of spring.

My seedlings are getting big and now I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to re-pot them before they can go outside.

zinnias

I ordered more seeds today. Tim asked me what I wanted for Valentine's Day and I told him gardening stuff. So, I ordered seeds for jalapenos, haberneros, and poblano peppers. I was only going to order those but I wanted to justify the shipping price so I also ordered some seeds for some flowers. I ordered marigold seeds (for pest control), flowering tobacco, and some bee balm seeds. I am going to get two more seed started trays and I'm going to be good to go. I can't wait until I can get out and dig some compost into the ground and get these babies planted.

In other news, Rhino busted out of her new cage the other day so she is now in her third cage. She was trying to chew her way through her cage this morning so now she is in Chopstick's old cage. I don't think she's very happy with us right now because she likes to climb and can't. I'm going to have to find her some things to play with in her cage so she doesn't plan a massive revolt.

Looks can be deceiving. She looks so cute and cuddly but in reality, she's pure evil.

That's pretty much all I have for now. Now I'm going to be waiting for my seeds to come. Patience. Ugh.

Look what I found!

2009-02-10T10:56:00.004-05:00

I planted seeds on Saturday afternoon. Today is Tuesday. Three days later and I have seeds sprouting! I love planting things and seeing them actually grow. I have peas, zucchini, zinnias and asters sprouting up already.

Baby Peas

Little Zinnias.

I planted 12 little cups of each of these: cucumbers, zucchinis, sugar snap peas, green beans, red heriloom tomatoes, orange heirloom tomatoes, foxgloves, shasta daisies, asters, zinnias, envy zinnias, and sweet peas. I also have planted some hot peppers: cayenne, santiagos, and hot portugals. Tim is going to order some haberneros and I'm sure a couple more mouth burners.

Now, for some cute little nose pictures. Last night while I was laying in bed watching TV, Patchy came up and snuggled. I couldn't resist snapping some pics of his cute little nose. I'm amazed that he continued to lie there and not move while I was taking these. He was almost asleep. He's such a good boy.

Such a kissable little nose.

It went above 40 degrees today!

2009-02-07T18:02:00.003-05:00

We are having a warm spell. When Aidan and I were out shopping it was up to 49 degrees. Could Spring be around the corner? Do I dare hope? What did the warm weather get me in the mood for? Well, besides shopping....I got some seeds started today.

Look at the score I picked up at Lowes:

2 seed starter kits and a bunch of seeds! $71 worth of gardening goodies

I came home and immediatly got to planting seeds. I will post later tonight or tomorrow what I planted. I'm supposed to be making dinner right now but no one is screaming that they are hungry yet, so I'm getting a quick little blog in.

We also put together a new home for Rhino. Aidan and Connor both made honor roll for the second nine weeks of school and they got to pick rewards. When I was little and made the honor roll (didn't happen that often =) ) my parents always got us a small treat as a reward. I was thinking that they would want a new video game or a new movie. Aidan wanted to get Rhino a new home that was roomier and had more fun things for her to do. So, here is Rhino's new crib. She loves it. She usually sleeps all day and is up all night, but since we put her in her new place, she's been running all over the place playing on her wheel and sliding on her slide.

Rhino's new home thanks to Aidan.

Back to the seeds. They are all planted in their little cups. Tim and I dragged our grow light set upstairs from the basement. I decided that it was too cold on the basement floor to germinate anything and I didn't really like the idea of getting heating pads to put under the trays so we just brought it upstairs. Our dining room is now devoted to our seeds growing for a couple of months. There is enough room under the lights to start two more trays if I decide to. I'm excited to see what comes up. One tray if veggies and one tray is flowers and then the little one is hot peppers for Tim. He has already told me that he's ordering his own seeds for his peppers. I think he's turning into a pepper snob.

lights set up on the dining room table.

So, I'll come back in a little bit to post what I planted and how many days it says it will take to germinate.

Anticipation.

2009-02-04T14:55:00.004-05:00

It was funny. Yesterday, mid-day, Tim emailed me a message with the subject line of "something useful". I opened the message up only to find a link to a 23 qt pressure cooker/canner. Huh? I wanted one of these last year and he didn't want to spend the money for it. I jumped on the opportunity and ordered it from amazon and even with free shipping I got it delivered today! Color me one excited little bee.

I think we shall name her Queen. Because when I see it I hear "Under Pressure" by Queen. Yes, I'm a dork and I name all things. It bugs the heck out of Tim.

here she is...I don't think I put her together properly. Yikes!

I unpacked it and started flipping through the instruction book and now I'm a bit scared too. It's a little intimidating. I'm going to have to really read the book and not just thumb through it. I think Tim changed his mind about the pressure cooker after we spent an entire day working with a ton of tomatoes only to lose them all. That was a bummer. Not this year.

We've been discussing our garden this year. We know that we want tomatoes, potatoes, zucchinis, cucumbers and beets. Oh, and I'm sure we'll have boxes of chili peppers all over the place too. I am thinking that next month we'll be bringing up the grow lights and starting our seeds.

Oh, there is nothing like thinking about gardening in the middle of the winter. This has been a long, cold, icy winter. I look out into the back yard and long to be out there with the sun beating down on me and working in the dirt. I can't wait. I think the starting of seeds and taking care of them as they grow will help the winter hurry on out of here. I'm kicking myself though for not planting any bulbs in the fall. I was so busy that I completely forgot about it and now I'm going to be sad when everyone else has amazing spring flowers coming up and I'll have nothing. I will plant bulbs next fall.

Not too much else going on over here. We are half way through the school year. The boys are doing fabulous. Connor has discovered that he LOVES geometry. We've had a lot of fun learning that and playing around with it. Aidan is writing almost as neatly as I do and is reading small books to himself now. We got everything done in January that we wanted to do. We got both of our credit cards PAID OFF. We are sitting pretty right now planning for summer festivities and gardening.

I hope everyone is staying warm and happy.

Friday Fun!

2009-01-16T19:05:00.004-05:00

I did the dreaded deed today. I did something that I don't like doing, but did anyway. I took the kids to Chuck E Cheese. The germ factory. Why? Because they've been doing really good in school lately and Connor rocked his endocrinologist appointment and well, they've been whining about it for a while.

It wasn't as bad as I remember it. Of course it was partly because it was at lunch time and most kids were in school. They basically had the whole place to themselves with just a couple of pre school wee ones running around.

Connor on a Star Wars game.

Aidan showing great determination and patience.

A happy duo.

Aidan in his fave place. He spent most of his time up in the tubes.

This was actually a really neat thing. It was a roller coaster simulator that they rode three times. Connor got scared on the last one and I jumped in to finish off the ride and got off the stupid thing with motion sickness. I must be getting old. Nah.

The kids were great. They didn't throw a fit when I said it was time to leave. They didn't fight or argue. They actually thanked me when we were done. I will almost admit that I had fun. I'm just not sure I'll tell the kids that. ☺

So, it's crazy cold here and we are going to spend the night in front of the fire and watch some movies I think. Nothing major planned this weekend. It was supposed to be our clean up the outside weekend but not when the high is 12. Too cold for me.

I hope everyone has a faboo weekend!

Blogging bug hit.

2009-01-14T13:43:00.003-05:00

I guess the time and energy that I put into this blog is paying off. Connor has decided that he wants to start and run a blog. I say go for it. He actually wants to write? Who am I to stand in his way? I think it will be good for him and he's so excited about having one. Aidan wants one too and I told him that if he is reading by the end of kindergarten, he can start one too. Until then, he can guest write on Connor's.

What else is new? Hmmm...Not too much. We got the closets 90 percent done last weekend but then both Tim and I came down with the kids' colds and couldn't finish. It will be added to the weekend list for the upcoming weekend. This weekend we are supposed to work outside and pick up a bit. I suppose how much we get accomplished will depend on what the temps are. They are supposed to be brutal.

I'm also happy to report that one of our credit cards is officially paid off! This is big news. We are very happy. We are very close to paying off the other credit card as well and then the only debt we will have will be the student loans. Wahoo. This is pretty exciting. We've worked hard at this goal and it was so nice to pay the one off.

Not too much else going on. The kids are trucking along in school. Connor just did a reading benchmark with his teacher and he did awesome. I knew he would. He had to do three timed readings to see how many words a minute he can read. The first one he did was 130 words, the second one he did was 156 words and the third reading was 133. Why the difference? Because on the first and last reading he was reading with such emphasis and drama that it was taking away from his numbers. The second one he just read straight through after his teacher mentioned to just concentrate on reading. After it was done I had to explain to him that while it was awesome for him to put such feeling into the reading and how it made it fun to listen to, he needed to just read on tests like this. His teacher did say he was reading at an advanced level and that made me feel good.

That being said, it's time to get back to school with the wee ones. Hope everyone is having a great week. Hopefully I'll be able to get some pics up again...it's just that there isn't much going on right now.

Dear Winter,

2009-01-12T14:39:00.002-05:00

While I enjoy the snow and we have fun playing in it, I'm over you. I'm tired of being cold all the time. I'm tired of the grey skies. I'm ready to start playing in the dirt again. I'm ready to see green grass and bright flowers again. I mean really, must you be only 13 degrees on Friday? I have to go out first thing in the morning when it will be likely 0 degrees out to take Connor to his endocrynologist. I would much more prefer it to be warmer. Let's get the rest of your snowing done and bring on in Spring. Are you listening Mr. Groundhog?

Yours,

Busy Bee

Planning.

2009-01-07T14:46:00.003-05:00

Call me crazy, but I like to plan things. I am a list maker. I like to have everything organized.

We are starting to make our plans for our year. We have a ten year anniversary celebration/trip to plan. Tim mentioned a trip to Ireland which I would love, but not sure if we are going to pursue it. We have a lot of little things around the house to work on. We have hiking trips to plan and maybe even a camping trip.

In the past I have used notebooks to write everything down and then I'll put my notebook down not to be found for a month or two. I figured since I have this little bloggie still up and running that I could do some planning here.

We have taken a weekend trip already once this month so I know that we won't be going out of town again for at least three weeks. This weekend coming up we are planning to work on the closets in our bedrooms/classroom. A while back I had the crazy idea to change everyones' bedrooms around but never got around to switching around the closets. This weekend it will be done. The following weekend will be outdoor pickup. Crazy, I know, to do it in the middle of the winter, but I think the scarecrows can come in off the front porch.

Oh, I just thought of something I have to do in the next week: send Aidan's DS to Nintendo for some warranty work. Self, remember to print off the Fed Ex label and send it.

After those two weekends are knocked off we are going to each weekend hit a room and super clean it. I mean tear everything out of counters, pulling things off of shelves, scrubbing everything and doing touch up paint work.

So, there we have it....the month of January is all set up. I know this year is going to be a good year and I'm excited!

Now, I'm off to take care of two weebles with sniffles. Too many weekends away has finally caught up with them I think.

A good way to start out the new year!

2009-01-04T17:16:00.005-05:00

How you say? By spending the weekend with good friends that you don't get to see very often. We packed up the crew and drove over to CT to spend the weekend over there. The kids were very excited because they haven't seen their friends since last summer. When we got there the house was swarming with girls. They apparently had been up most of the previous night preparing for a "show". I was laughing when they were getting ready to start, Jenn said she needed another beer. I knew then what we were in for.

Future American Idols?

Connor and Aidan hanging out on the stairs, I think amazed by all the girls in one place. Scared, perhaps?

After a third set, things started to turn sour and the boys were lining up on the couch to start taking the girls out.

After the show, the girls all left with their parents and it was left to being just our family and Samm's. The kids all had fun playing on the wii and then all disappeared so that the adults could have some fun. We tried to get them into bed at normal time, but that did NOT work. Finally around 11:30 we had to split them up. If we hadn't I'm certain they would have stayed up much later. As it was, they both woke up at 7:30 wanting to get back to playing.

When we got up we were treated to a family of deer eating in the back yard.

baby deer getting ready to do some munching

The rest of the family showed up for breakfast after some more food was put out. The kids and I had fun watching them.

They all played together and then we had to get on the road. The boys were not happy and have already made plans to go back (they think they are going back next month...I don't think it will be that soon).

Proof that fun was had by all:

Connor passed out on the way home. He never sleeps in the car.

Aidan zonked out too. It was a quiet ride home.

It was funny too becuase we weren't home an hour and Nick, a neighborhood friend, came over and played for two and half hours. Now Aidan is so over tired he's cranky. Me thinks he will be in bed early tonight.

Tomorrow we start school back up from our winter break. I'm hoping it will be a smooth transition back. I'm hoping to keep up with the bloggie but I'm not promising anything right now.

I hope everyone had a great weekend and a good start to the new year.

Hello 2009...

2009-01-02T15:12:00.003-05:00

I hope you will be fine. I'm a poet and I don't know it. Ok, enough.

2009 came in uneventful, which is a good thing. We took the kids to see Bedtime Stories on New Years Eve and then we came home and attempted to stay up to ring in the new year, but three of the four of us were asleep by 10. Oh well, the year came in without us.

New Years Day we played games, watched a movie and burned a couple of candles that Debbie had given us. They are bayberry candles and there was a note with them saying that it was a Colonial custom to burn these candles on New Years Day for good luck...so burn them we did.

box of candles...they smelled really good.

Fired up...ready to go! Sorry, couldn't resist. Sorry mom that the candle stick holders aren't polished. I had to scrounge around to find them. I also notice that I need to dust the bricks on the fireplace. Another thing to add to my "to do" list.

A blury picture of candles and fireplace burning. If I could find my tripod the picture would look better. Another thing to add to my "to do" list.

This brings me to my "to do" list. I have to much to do on my list. I'm not sure where to start. I know better than making resolutions because I never keep those. I will put some goals out there and work very hard to make these goals.

My first goal is (as usual) is to lose weight and get healthy.

Second goal is to make sure we get done with school on time and have fun doing it.

Third goal is to at least once a month find a new state park and hike it with the family.

Fourth goal is to organize the house.

Fifth goal (which should be third) is to start some serious savings.

Short term goals, and I mean I want them done by the end of this month is to clean up around the outside of the house. Finish moving closets around. Get the big bookcase down into the basement. Read my book club book. Lose 10 pounds.

Books. I'm trying to read three books at once and it seems none of them are getting read. I have to read Sense and Sensibility for our book club this month. I'm trying to finish Half Assed and the Beck book. I don't really have time during the day to read and when I try to read in bed at night, I end up falling asleep after two pages. Not looking good for me.

Gardening. I know, I know, that was what this blog was supposed to be about wasn't it? I have two see catalogs waiting for me to look over. I have started thinking about what I want to grow this year. I know for sure there will be tomatoes and beets. I have been loving my pickled beets that we stored, so I need to double how many I grow this year. I don't think I'll be doing radishes or carrots. Potatoes I think are a go again and of course zucchini. I would like to try some melons this year and maybe a pumpkin or two. I need to figure out when I should be starting seeds downstairs. Add that to my "to do" list too.

Lots to do. This should be a good year. I'm hopeful. It is looking good for Tim for keeping his job after the takeover. We are a month away from having our credit cards completely paid off. We are looking to get a "new" used vehicle...one that is a little bit bigger for our growing boys and dog. We will celebrate being married ten years this year. I think that alone is pretty awesome.

Ok, Aidan is waiting for a hot game of Perfection and is getting impatient. That, and I have to go make soup for dinner because Tim just called and said he was so hungry he was ready to eat his hand. I am going to scoot out of here for now.

Happy New Year to all!

THANK YOU!

2008-12-31T11:00:00.005-05:00

Perfect little snowflakes on the car window.

I've been trying to figure out how to express our gratitude to Dad B and his new lovely wife Laurie for extending their offer to come over and spend the holidays with them. It boils down to this: I can't really put into words how grateful we are. We had such an amazing time with you guys.

Laurie, thanks for letting us stay in your home. You didn't care that we have two very active boys and a dog. You opened your home up to us and let us stay there. I hope we left it in good condition. I think we did, but one can never know.

I would also like to thank Laurie's amazing mother. You included our family in everything and made us feel like we were part of your family. Tim is still raving about the stuffed grape leaves. I'm going to have to look up recipe to make some, but I know they will be no where near what yours were!

I would also like to thank Aunt Mary and Uncle Terry for an amazing dinner before we left. It is so nice to hang out with you guys. Like I was saying when I was there , your home is like home base for all of us when we come into town.

Melissa, thanks for watching the boys for us. I know they had some good quality Aunt Melissa time. It was great to see you again!

Dad, thanks for being a great dad and a great grampa. The boys had a lot of fun shooting darts around the house with you and Laurie. I won't post the video of you and Tim dancing with the Wii....although it's really hard not to because it's a great video. =)k

The boys sporting their new night vision goggles. These things are really cool and I think Tim is playing with them more.

Connor flying down a hill in his Star Wars inflatable jedi cruiser. He was so scared to go down the hill in this and then after he went down once, he couldn't stop. I don't even know how many times he trudged up that icy hill to ride it down again.

Tim and Aidan shared a saucer down and then Aidan wanted his independance.

My boys climbing the hill for the umpteenth time. Patchy was so happy to be let loose and allowed to run. He's smiling in this picture.

Last, but not least, I had to show a picture of what was in Uncle Terry's front window. I can't even explain how awesome this is. It's funny because a couple of years ago we tossed around the idea of getting one of these for Tim's dad. Tim wsn't too keen on the idea. I'm glad someone got one. I don't think Aunt Mary is as excited about it. =)

New member of family

2008-12-28T16:46:00.004-05:00

This will be a short post to introduce a new family member. His/her name is Rhino.

Rhino making him/herself at home on the wheel.

Tim and I decided that the kids were at a point where they could take care of a pet of their own. Tim had a hamster when he was growing up so he felt pretty good about the decision. I have a couple of memories of hamsters that friends had. One of those memories was that their bites hurt! This hamster is named Rhino. Yes, it's after the hamster in Bolt. Connor and Aidan managed to pick a hamster that looked a lot like the one in the movie.

The ride home from the store was hilarious. Rhino came home in a little cardboard box that had little tiny holes around the top and a little handle on top. After we got him I had to run into Barnes and Noble not thinking about the fact that hamsters like to chew cardboard. I don't think I really knew that. I was freakishly fast in Barnes and Noble and we were driving home and we were having fun watching Rhino's nose peek out of a hole. Then we would catch glimpses of his sharp little teeth. Half way home I hear the cardboard tear. The little bugger was chewing his way out of the box. Thankfully we had picked up a plastic hamster ball at the store. While driving, I'm trying to get the hamster ball out of the box and get it to Tim who was now holding a piece of paper over the ever growing hole that Rhino was chewing. We got the open end of the ball up near the hole he was chewing and we watched him (while driving) work his way out of the box into his ball. It was so funny. I think they picked out a hamster on steroids.

A blurry picture of Rhino's escape route.

So we have Rhino placed in his lovely little home out in the living room and we are sitting here listening to him run and run and run and run on his little wheel. Life is good!

Playing

2008-12-22T21:53:00.003-05:00

I'm laying here with Frank(my laptop) and watching Princess Bride and decided to play around with photoshop a little bit. I'm a little irked because when I transferred everything to Frank I lost my favorite font that I used on my pictures. I'm also not too happy that I have for some reason lost the function of cut and paste in blogger. I don't know if this is a blogger issue or a Vista issue. It's annoying though. I'm going to try and figure it out. Oh, and another thing. When I was blogging earlier the first paragraph ended up all underlined and I had to go in and edit the html. Thank God Tim was here because I don't know what the heck I'm doing.

This is a picture that I took out my airplane window coming into Philadelphia when I flew home from Florida. I thought it was really neat how it was all grey and cloudy except for the main center city.

I still need to figure out what is up with my cut and paste problem.

Cookies part two

2008-12-22T13:10:00.009-05:00

I have a few minutes to blog while I'm waiting for Connor to write his descriptive sentences. I was able to finish my cookies yesterday. Again, when it was all done I questioned whether or not I would do it again next year. I remember last year when I was done saying that I was not going to do it again.

The first cookies I tackled were the lemon coolers. A single batch makes only 2 1/2 dozen. I doubled the batch so that there would be enough for all the tins. Even with it doubled it only made 3 1/2 dozen. The recipe says to use 2 tbsp of dough per cookie. I did that for the first dozen and a half. I could only fit 6 cookies per sheet and the first 6 that came out all melded together. I was not happy and grumbled a lot. For the rest of the dough I just made them into 1 tbsp drops and was able to fit a dozen on the sheet. If I do these again next year, I will make them smaller. I have done these lemon coolers for a couple of years because they are one of Tim's favorite cookies.

Lemon Coolers

After the lemon coolers came the Almond Crisps. Again, this recipe only made 2 1/2 dozen so I doubled the batch. With the batch doubled it still only made 2 1/2 dozen. I don't think I'll be makng these again. Although Aidan had fun putting the almonds into the dough. Some of the cookies ended up looking like alien heads.

Almond Crisps

By this time it was time for a beer.

Yes, I bought this bear soley because of the snowman on the front. And it was a tasty beer.

After the beer I was left with one type of cookie to make. The chocolate Pixies. These cookies are one of my favorite cookies ever but I guess because it was the last cookie in a long weekend of cookie making this batch bombed. I think I made the balls too big when I put them on the sheet because every single one of them melded together and looked like crap. I was slightly bummed but realized that I had enough cookies to fill the tins and didn't really need them.

Ugly Pixies. They taste great but aren't as pretty as I like them. They are just sitting on the counter now while I figure out what I'm going to do with them. They are either garbage bound or freezer bound.

While the pixies were baking Tim went to deocrating the cutout cookies. The kids helped out a little bit but they were more interesting in eating the frosting than actually frosting the cookies. Aidan loved the way Kirby turned out so at least he was happy about that.

Pretty little trees.

Kirby and some candy canes. These cookies are awesome too. They are soft in the mouth but firm to the touch. And they look so cool. Thanks Tim for painting them. I don't have the patience to do stuff like that but Tim really gets into it.

These are the soft molasses cookies from yesterday that I forgot to post the picture of. They taste way better than they photograph.

The finished product. All bundled up and ready to go. I don't even know how many dozen cookies we baked. I kept track of it when I was baking, but can't find my paper right now. When I do, I'll let you know (really just to let myself know so that I know how much to bake for next year). Yes, I'll probably bake them again next year. There is just something nice about being inside where it's warm and looking out my kitchen window and seeing the brilliant white sparkly snow and smelling the cookies baking. I hope we'll still be here and that I'll be baking for the same people for a third year in a row.

Well, not only has Connor finished his descriptive sentence, he's read his story, written his draft of a descriptive journal entry and is now typing his final draft into word to be sent to his teacher. We have a Science lesson to go and a Math lesson. Back to the books.

What was I thinking?!

2008-12-20T18:59:00.006-05:00

What was I thinking that I could make 8 different kinds of cookies in one day after a week of being laid out because of my back?

Let's start with the beginning of the day. I slept in until 8 and Tim slept in until 9:30. He earned it after a rough week. We all went outside and played in the snow for a while. It was crazy cold out (14 degrees) but we had a lot of fun...up until I had snow go down my neck.

Tim was launching some pretty big snowballs. Luckilly, this one didn't hit me.

Patchy had a lot of fun catching snowballs.

After frolicking out in the snow for a bit, we came in and the kids had hot cocoa (thanks Deb for the super yummy Raspberry cocoa) and Patchy had a bath.

Not a particularly happy dog. He's a really good boy getting baths though. We don't have to wrestle with him like we did with Corky.

I don't know if you can see it in this picture or not, but when Patchy's fur is wet and in the process of drying, it looks like he's crimped it. It is so funny and cute. He's the softest dog I think I've ever seen. I really thought when he lost his puppy fur it would get more coarse, but it has stayed so soft and cuddly. He smells much better now too.

While Tim was bathing Patchy, Aidan and I were starting our cookie day. The first dough we made was the sugar dough for the cut outs. They had to chill for a while so we got those done so we could throw them in the fridge. I didn't get any pics of the cutouts yet. I will get them tomorrow after the boys (and yes, Tim is included) do all the painting.

Aidan is a great helper in the kitchen!

I got this lego timer for Aidan when I was in Florida and it has become a favorite fixture in our kitchen. Aidan is my lego maniac!

Better Than Store Bought cookies

After the dough was in the fridge, we started working on the "Better Than Store Bought" cookies. It made six dozen cookies and they are tasty. After this batch was done, we made a batch of Peanut Blossoms. It was supposed to make 4 dozen, but only made three. I might have to make another batch of them tomorrow.

Peanut Blossoms. These were Aidan's favorite cookies of the day. Soft peanut butter cookies with a kiss on top.

The next batch of cookies we made were the mocha mudslides. These were Tim's favorite cookie of the day. I kept catching him sneaking them.

Mocha Mudslides

Once the mudslides were done, I made the dough for the Soft Molasses cookies. That dough had to chill for an hour so we dragged out the sugar cookie dough and started rolling it out to cut. We made candy canes and trees and the kids each made a couple of their own creations. Aidan has a huge Kirby ready to paint tomorrow.

Once the cutouts were done, I baked the molasses cookies (will have pics tomorrow) and then made dinner. I will have to finish the last three cookies tomorrow and decide if I have to make any more. Tim keeps telling his friends at work that I'm going to make them cookies so I'm probably going to have to make a couple more batches. I should make Tim make them.

That about sums up my day. A good day I think. We are supposed to get up to three more inches of snow tonight so that will be fun. My day tomorrow will be finishing the cookies and I think Tim is going to take the kids shopping. They each want to get me a present. They are so awesome!

I hope everyone is having a great weekend!

SNOW!!

2008-12-19T12:35:00.004-05:00

Three inches. That is what our ruler said at 11:30. It started snowing here at 9. Not too shabby. It's 2 right now and I just checked again and it's at a little over 5 inches now. The snow has turned into raining ice right now though. Thankfully, our awesome neighbors shoveled our sidewalks and used the snow blower in our driveway. My back thanks you! I made him a batch of cookies as a thank you. I hope he'll go inside and dry off and enjoy some warm cookies.

I love little baby pine cones when they are nestled in snow. When I have time, I think this will be my winter banner.

Patchy loves the snow. He was leaping through it and pushing his nose down in it. He's funny though because when there is a layer of snow he loses where he does his business. Usually he has one spot in the backyard where he piddles. He's killed off all the grass there and that is his spot. When there is snow on the ground, he forgets where he's going and he just piddles anywhere. Watch out for the yellow snow.

The fort in the snow. The kids love to climb up there and launch snowballs down.

Connor was ready for some serious snow missions. And yes, he had a hat, he just didn't have it on when I took this.

Mid snow angel. He wanted me to help him stand up and I started to pull him up and felt my back pull a little bit so he got dropped. He didn't drop that far, but he got some cold snow up under his jacket and the cold made him jump up faster than I could have lifted him.

Aidan loves to taste snow. He's also is wearing the very first scarf that I ever knit. That was my learning project. I didn't think it was still around but we found it today when we were digging out snow boots. He loves it but still wants me to knit him a black scarf with a Kirby on it. I'll have to finish Tim's scarf first.

Yes, I got hit with that pile of snow.

All in all, today is a great day. We are inside now watching the ice rain outside and looking at the beautiful white snow plastered over everything. Tim had mentioned taking the kids out to the dike for sledding when he's done working. I guess we'll see how thick the ice gets. I don't think sledding on ice is too much fun.

Aidan has a monopoly game all set up so I guess that is what I'm going to go do now. I have to make a pizza dough in about an hour, so he'll get an hour of monopoly time.

I hope everyone else is having a great day!

Cookie preview

2008-12-18T12:35:00.003-05:00

Yesterday Aidan and I scoured the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion book. We have compiled a list of eight different cookies that we are going to attempt this weekend. I think all of them we have made at one time of the other, but we still had fun looking through the book and deciding what to do.

The list of cookies are: Chocolate Pixies (this recipe is one from Tim's paternal grandmother), Monster Chocolate chip cookies, Peanut Blossoms, Almond Crisps, Mocha Mudslides, Lemon Coolers, Soft Molasses cookies, and then sugar cookies for cut out shapes.

Every year we make up cookie tins for our neighbors and Tim's team and I was worried that this year because of my back problem that I would not be able to do it, but I am happy to report that I am slowly regaining mobility. I've just made up a list for Tim to go to the store and get all of our supplies. I told him to make sure he has his phone with him because I can see him now, lost in the baking aisle. The cashier is going to know what is going on when he goes through the line with 4 big packs of butter and 15 pounds of flour and assorted sugars and chips.

I think it's going to be a perfect weekend for cookie baking too if the forecast stays the same. We are under a winter weather watch. They are saying that starting tonight and through tomorrow we will have between 5 to 10 inches of snow and ice. If it doesn't ice, then it could be 12 inches of snow. I can't think of anything nicer than being in our warm, cozy home with the smell of cookies baking. I'm sure Tim will take the kids out sledding if we do, in fact, get that much snow. I don't think my back will be up for it yet, but he's already been talking about getting a snow tube for the kids to take over to the park.

So it appears I have a herniated disc. I've been doing some research on it and basically I'm going to have to slowly get back into moving around and not stress it too much. I found some exercises to strengthen your spine and I will start doing those probably over the weekend. I'm also going to get back to doing my Wii Fit. There were a lot of balance and core exercises on that and I think that will help me. I don't think I'm going to be able to hit icy sidewalks on dog walks for a while. One slip and tug on my back and I'm going to end up in bed for another week. I have been able to get out of bed today and do a couple of loads of laundry and sweep the floor so I'm pleased with that.

That about sums up today. If all goes well we will have a regular cookie factory humming here on the weekend and I'll try to get some pics of my little helpers.

Cat

2008-12-17T14:12:00.004-05:00

We have a feral cat that is in our yard every day looking for unsuspecting squirrels and birds. We can pretty much tell what time of day it is when we see him slinking around in the back yard. The other day he/she did something I had never seen before. (S)he followed a squirrel up into the kid's fort.

We are still debating what to name this cat. Connor wants to name it Mittens, after the cat in Bolt. Aidan wants to name it Mark because, well, I don't know why. Me, I want to name it Killer. We've yet to see it get any prey but we have a lot of fun watching him/her.

The fort. It will get some work done on it in the spring. You can see our lovely compost next to it.

Killer on the prowl. Watching and waiting.

Note to self.

2008-12-17T13:32:00.002-05:00

Self, when you get into the car to go food shopping with your kids and you feel and hear your back pop, you should get out of the car and go back in the house and lay down.

I should have done that but I didn't. I figured I would be ok to drive to Wegmans, shop the whole store for a weeks worth of groceries, drive home and then unload heavy bags. Half way through the store I had problems walking. My lower back was screaming pain and pain was shooting down my left leg. I grit my teeth and kept on going. I called Tim as I was driving home to tell him that my back was out again and that I had concerns about carrying the groceries inside. He told me to leave them in the trunk until he got home. A couple of days earlier and that would have been fine but on Monday it was 60 degrees out and I didn't want anything to go bad in the trunk.

Fast forward to today. Wednesday. I have been on my back since Monday afternoon barely able to get up to go to the bathroom. Thankfully Tim's job is flexible and allows him to work from home. He's been great in making sure Patchy gets outside for his duties and making sure the kids are fed and happy. I am getting tired of laying down all the time. I have things to do and places to go. I get to feeling a little bit better and get up to make dinner. Then I'm back at square one. Tim has told me not to move out of bed today and I'm trying really hard to do that.

I'm glad I have Frank. He's the only thing that is keeping me sane. Who is Frank you might ask. Frank is my new laptop. Tim got me a beautiful 17 inch screen laptop and I've named him Frank. I've been working on getting my things transferred off of the old computer and onto Frank. All has been pretty good so far. Photoshop is up and running. I'm trying open office instead of Microsoft office and that appears to be a good program. My camera program is on Frank. My skype is up so that I can video call my bro and parents. The one thing that is giving me the most headache is my stupid Itunes. What a pain in the arse. I'm trying to transfer my 5000 + songs, videos, books, podcasts over to the new itunes on Frank. I figured out how to get most of it over but am having duplicates show up now. I'm trying to figure out whether to go one by one and delete the duplicates or just uninstal and then reinstall. I think I only have the capability to have itunes transferred a couple more times and then I'm stuck with it on the old comptuer. I suppose since I have nothing else to do while I'm in bed I'll just play around with it for a while and do it manually.

The kids are doing well. They have inherited the other computer and they will use that as their school computer and gaming computer. They are very happy with that. They also enjoyed doing school in bed yesterday. I guess a change of scenery was fun for them. They are also being very helpful with me being down...that is until they forget that my back is out and they come in and jump on top of me. Ouch.

Not too much else to report. I will post some pictures on here pretty soon. I haven't really been out taking many pics lately. I have to play around with my photoshop some because some of my settings on the other computer were lost in the transfer and I'll be danged if I can remember how to do a couple of simple things. Again, I have plenty of time right now to play around with the program.

I'm hoping I'm back on my feet for the weekend. This weekend we had planned as our massive cookie baking weekend. I've been trying to figure out whether we are going to do our cookie marathon and make tins up for all of Tim's team or not. I guess we'll see how my back is on Saturday.

Interesting fact. I just had to look up and make sure I was spelling whether correctly or not. Usaully my spellcheck will pick up mis-spelled words, but for some reason it's not...something else I will have to look into...Anywhooo, I couldn't remember if it was spelled whether or wether. It is spelled whether. A wether is a castrated sheep. Yikes.

Ok, I'm going back to either my Itunes or my photoshop. I hope all is well in the world out there.

Winter blues?

2008-12-10T15:07:00.004-05:00

Tim and I have been doing some research on the science of winter blues. We felt a bit of it last year because of the short days and the fact that basically we don't see the sun from the month of November until around May.

I have a friend Tracy *waving hi to Tracy* who lives in Seattle. She mentioned that she had a special light on her desk at work that she flips on to help her. A light therapy of sorts. I looked at the light that she has and they run between 150 and 250 dollars. Tim got to thinking that we could probably DIY one ourselves.

He was doing research last night and found out that the color blue helps lighten your mood. Not just any blue though. It has to be an LED blue. The wavelength of the LED blue is the same blue you would see in the sky mid day on a sunny day. It triggers something in your brain.

We are going to try an experiment. We are going to get some blue LED lights (they are in all the stores right now because of Christmas) and we are going to do a light sculpture and put it up in our classroom. I want to see if it helps us.

Take today for instance, it is a really dark gray day. It has been dark here for a couple of months now, but today it is oppressive. I have all of the curtains in the house open but our house is still really dark. How does that affect my mood? I want to hibernate. It is three o'clock in the afternoon and I want to sleep.

I used to be quite the night owl. I used to be able to stay up late at night and get up early in the morning and still have tons of energy. With the short days (it's dark here around 4:30 in the afternoon) and very little sun that has changed. I find it harder and harder to get up in the morning and by 6:30 at night I'm ready for bed. I will crawl into bed just after 8 after I've put the kids to bed and I'll fall asleep. That's all well and good, except that I'm then up at 2 am becuase I'm not used to going to sleep that early. My sleep cycle is all messed up. There have been studies done about this. People in the winter sleep more and eat more carbs. I though Tim was joking when he said that, but he found and article. When I can find it, I'll post a link.

So this weekend, we are going to go out and make ourselves an LED blue light sculpture and we are going to see if it helps our moods. I'll keep you posted.

Realization.

2008-12-09T13:30:00.004-05:00

There has been much discussion around here lately about Connor's work habits in school. I've been working with him for a while to stay focused on his work when he's doing it and to not pay attention to what his brother is doing. A lot of times I will get Connor started on his assignment and then I will work with Aidan. Connor will do his work for a few minutes and thenhe will start paying attention to what Aidan and I are doing. Sometimes I will get Connor started on a project and then run to do something and come back and find Connor not doing what I left him doing.

On a whim today I went into the basement and dug out my book of all my school stuff. I looked at my report cards from grade one through grade four. Every single grading quarter of every single year (yes, 16 times) my teachers put that I needed to work on my work habits. I needed to start paying closer attention to my work and not pay attention to others around me. Huh. Looks to me that Connor is a normal 8 year old. It appears he is behaving just as I did when I was his age.

Ambien

2008-12-07T13:11:00.001-05:00

Ambien is a drug for those who have problems sleeping.

Meddle

2008-12-06T18:29:00.001-05:00

Merriam Webster definition: to interest oneself in what is not one's concern.

How Nancy saved my life.

2008-11-15T11:32:00.004-05:00

Before I write this all out I want to first thank Nancy for my bag of trail mix that she gave me with my flying goodie bag.

Now, sit back while I retell my flying story from yesterday. I flew to Florida to help my mom take care of my dad while he recovers from a pretty nasty surgery. I was pretty stoked to find round trip tickets to Orlando from Scranton for a decent price. My flight was from Scranton to Philly with a two hour layover and then from Philly to Orlando. Easy enough right? That's what I thought.

My flight was due to leave Scranton at 12:45 pm. Tim dropped me off at the gate around 11:10. I gave myself plenty of time to get through security and to find my way to where I was going. Granted, Scranton's airport is small, but I have never been there. I find my gate and there is this nice older gentleman waiting there. I walk up and he says, "You know this flight has been delayed, right?" Uh, no, I didn't know that. The board said the flight was still on time. He said it was delayed until 2 pm. I got nervous here because I knew that my connecting flight was leaving at 3:50. I mentally did the math. Ok, if the plane leaves at 2, I should be in Philly by 3 and I will still be ok. The gentleman, Jim, I think was his name then called USAir to confirm the departure time. When he called the delay was still there, but it was only delayed until 1. Great. No problem. I settled in and did some knitting on Tim's scarf. 1 o'clock came and no one was there yet. No guys at the desk to board us. No plane. Uh oh. 1:15 comes and the USAir guys come and say that Philly is backed up really bad. Our flight was now delayed until 2:02 or 2:48. Long, nervous story short, we left the ground at 2:48. I was sure I was going to miss my connection. The flight was in a small prop plane. SMALL. It only seated 37 passengers. They had let another lady catch this flight because the 2 o'clock flight that was due to be leaving was now pushed back to 5. She boarded...we were all seated and nervous with the size of the plane. Before they close the doors, the guy from the counter came onto the plane and told the lady that she would have to get off the plane because of "weight issues". Uh, hello? How embarrassing is that? And should I be worried that there are weight issues on a plane? The flight was pretty good considering. It was a really smooth takeoff and landing.

Landing. We landed at terminal F in Philadelphia. We landed at 3:40. My flight was due to leave 3:50 from terminal C. I had to take a shuttle bus from F to C. I stopped ever so briefly to see if by chance the Orlando flight was delayed and I would have any chance of catching it. I really didn't think I would. Orlando was pretty much the ONLY flight that was on time. Really? I got off the shuttle at 3:48 (flight leaves at 3:50) and I RUN through the terminal to my gate. I made it. I flashed my boarding pass and got on. I was the last person on.

This should be a happy ending right? I was going to land in Orlando at 6:26 and Andy was going to pick me up and then we were going to drive over and see the last ever night launch of the space shuttle. Oh, please keep reading.

I am on the plane. I am panting because of a hard run through a long terminal. I'm sweating because I had a sweatshirt on. There is a line of about 25 Indian people (all family I'm guessing) trying to figure out their seats. The overhead bins were all full and I wasn't sure where I was stashing my carry on bag. I really didn't want to have to check it and have the chance of losing it. The family must have been at it for a while because the flight attendant had pretty much lost her cool (and she was really cool) and was yelling that they just needed to find a seat and sit. They were trying to push by me back and forth. Whatever. I was tired and glad to have made it on the plane. I scoured the open overhead bins and found out some jerk had thrown their backpack up there when they very well could have put it down by their feet. I squished it over to a side and slammed my carry on up there. I found my way back to my seat. The very last row on the plane and there was a dude in my seat. Come on. I showed him my ticket and he said he had traded with one of the Indian guys so he could be near his family. The poor guy was 6 foot 2 and not happy that the guy had told him that it was an aisle seat he was trading with. So, he scooted over and was now squished between me and another tall, little larger person. Ok...everyone is seated. Doors are closed. We back out of the terminal and taxi to our runway. Ready for lift off. Going to fly. We wait for about 20 minutes. We figure that we are waiting for an ok from the tower. It's all good. Just get us in the air and start serving drinks.

Twenty minutes go by and the pilot comes on and said "Folks, we have a problem with a heat sensor on the outside and we've tried to fix it and can't. We are going to have to turn around and go back to the terminal and have maintenance look at it." Everyone groaned. We all whipped out our cell phones and called and texted our frustrations. So,we turn around and go back and sit for another half hour and finally the pilot comes on and says "Folks, we are going to have to exit this plane and get on another plane in terminal C24". It took about 15 minutes for everyone to grab their bags and unload off the plane. We all poured out into the terminal and went to the next terminal. There was no plane there yet. We all stood around for what felt like another half hour. Some people were smart and went and got shots to drink and food to eat. I was not one of those smart people. I was not going to wander off too far and then miss the flight. Remember that I had thought I would have a two hour layover in Philly and had figured I would get lunch while I waited and instead I was running trying to catch a flight that wasn't really going anywhere. I had not eaten anything all day, except for some of the trail mix that Nancy had made me.

We finally are allowed to board the next plane. From what I gather, it went smoother this time and the very large Indian family was able to find their seats with no problems this time. I guess it was good we had a dry run. We took off from Philly at the very same time we were supposed to be landing in Orlando. I was not going to see the space shuttle. Oh well. I've seen a night launch before. I would survive. Around 7:47 the pilot comes over and says, "Folks,it may be a good thing that our flight was delayed. In about 8 minutes the space shuttle will launch and if you look at about 10 o'clock, you might be able to see it." 7:55 rolls around and we hear, "The space shuttle has launched. Look out your windows and you should be able to see it. There it is. Well, there it goes behind haze. You can't see it anymore.". At this point I was thinking about how in a movie when they show everyone come to one side of a ship, it flips over. Everyone was leaning over, coming across the aisle to look through minuscule fuzzy windows looking for the space shuttle. I was expecting the airplane to flip over. And I was thinking to myself about the pilot, "You shitbag, if we had left when we were supposed to we would have been able to get to the coast in time to see it in real life...don't tell me it was a good thing we were late". I was getting testy at this point.

Thankfully, for as full as our plane was and for as many children who were on board it was a smooth flight. I think the airline gave out free drinks because I saw everyone getting booze and no cash being passed around. I had planned on getting a rum and coke but by the time they got to me I just got a water because I knew if I had a drink I would probably get sick. I'm also thankful that I had downloaded season one of Pushing Daisies for my Ipod. That kept me entertained for a long time. I think I'm most grateful to Nancy though for my little bag of trail mix. I also want to thank Andy and Diana and Sydney, Bailey and Bryson for coming out three hours later than planned and picking me up at the airport.

I had hoped to have a really cool shot of the space shuttle to post in my blog today, but alas, I do not. I do have a picture of what I think is the light off of the wing. I had handed my camera to the nice guy next to me to try and get a shot of the space shuttle, and I think he got the wing. I might post that when I get home.

So now, I'm sitting here glad to have finally made it and hoping that when I fly home on Saturday it will be a smoother run.

Two weeks ago.

2008-11-07T08:10:00.008-05:00

Breathe. That is what I'm trying to do after a very busy three weeks here. One week was a trip to NY for the Sheep and Wool festival, the next week was Dad B's wedding, and then last weekend was GOTV weekend. I think today is Friday and I'm just starting to feel normal again. I will cover the wedding in this entry. It seems like it was such a long time ago, but it was only two weeks ago.

We drove over to Olean on Thursday. We were supposed to be there at 4 for the rehearsal. We left here at 10:30 and should have shown up around 2:30. Becuase of construction on the highway, there was an additional hour tacked on to our drive. We checked into our motel at 3:30. We had to change into our nicer clothes before heading to the church for the rehearsal. Thankfully the church was only 5 minutes from the motel. We unpacked the car and literally threw off our clothes and put on our dressy clothes. It looked like a bomb went off in the room with the clothes just thrown everywhere. We made it to the church in time and the rehearsal went smoothly. The boys were a little wild because they had been in the car so long, but considering that they were good.

Connor and Aidan trying to be good at rehearsal.

After the rehearsal we had a fabulous dinner where the kids finally met up with their cousins. They have been waiting since June/July to see them again. It's so cute when they get together too because they always act like no time has passed and they pick right up where they left off.

Friday was kind of a free day for us. We hooked up with Jennifer (Tim's cousin) and her girls and we all went to Pumpkinville. It was freezing that day but we had so much fun. The kids got to ride Andy the pony and we did a huge corn maze and then did a very cold hay ride. As cold as it was out, the kids played with the water pumps more than anything. It was neat because it reminded me of my Grandma. On her farm there was a water pump that we always used and the water was always so cold when it came up.

Connor, Autumn, Danielle and Aidan at Pumpkinville.

Connor cutting through the maze.

Connor playing with the water pumps.

Aidan too. Man, it was cold that day.

This picture was a 'had to take' picture. We have a picture of Connor when he was about 6 months old with his little baby head sticking through the same cat. I'm going to have to somehow scan that picture and get it on here too. He's a little bit bigger now.

After Pumpkinville we went back to the motel and crashed for a little bit before heading out to two separate parties. While we were napping we had the pleasant surprise of Melissa showing up with one of Tim's old high school buddies. We haven't seen him for about 8 years so it was nice to see Tim. Yes they are two Tims. They hung out for a little bit and we found out that he's going to have his first child in about four months so that was exciting news. After Tim left, we went to the parties and that about wraps up Friday.

Saturday was the big day. The wedding was at 4 so we had the morning to kind of laze around. Connor did some school work and Tim worked all morning on his best man speech. Then we all got dressed and to the church at 3. I was worried about the kids behaving themselves for so long. We had an hour to wait before the wedding and then the wedding lasted about an hour. Connor did a fabulous job. He was so well behaved. He sat through the whole wedding and didn't move a muscle or make a peep. Aidan, on the other hand, is another story. He was mad at me because he didn't have a tie. Connor had one but he didn't. We tried to find him one but couldn't. He was not a happy camper. He pouted through most of the pictures. He used a whole stack of donation envelopes and wrote I love yous all over them and then crossed them out as to say he doesn't love me. I think he eventually got over it though. The wedding was beautiful. Dad and Laurie looked so nice. I'm still amazed at how perfect Laurie's hair was. Gorgeous! There was a lot of picture taking afterwards and then we headed over to the reception.

Handsome boys before the wedding.

This would be after the wedding. Wrestling on the church floor. I guess the fact that they were well behaved had to fizzle out sometime.

This brings us to the reception. It was packed. The band was awesome. The drinks were fabulous. We all had quite a few. The food was yummy. The drinks were good. I think I mentioned that already. The kids were pretty good. Connor was hungry by the time we got there and he was grumpy because the food was taking too long, but once we ate he was fine. Aidan took a couple of swings around the dance floor. Connor was too "embarrassed" to do so, but was happy to sit at the table and play his Nintendo DS.

Connor and his Aunt Amy.

Connor and his Aunt Melissa.

Connor looks so grown up here. He and Danielle had fun hanging out together.

Aidan letting loose on the dance floor with Aunt Melissa.

It was a long night but we had so much fun. Tim did a great job on his best mans speech and then was able to relax afterwards. The kids both said around 10:30 that they were ready to go back to the motel, so we left and Tim caught a ride back with his sisters. I really thought he woudl stay a lot longer, but he was back within the half hour. It was funny because when he got back he knocked on the door and all I saw was his forehead. I guess he was ready to come home too. I have the best picture of Tim five minutes after he got back but he won't let me post pictures of him on the blog. Dork. I did get permission from everyone else to post their pictures.

Sunday morning was a brunch for the whole family. We were all really tired and honestly I was more intent on getting our room packed up and making sure we had everything before we left. I got some really cute pics of Grampa and Laurie with the kids but haven't asked them if I could post it or not...so I won't. We left Olean around 1 (in time to listen to the Bills game on the way home...they lost). We got home and then the next week was a blur getting ready for GOTV. I'll write about some of that next time I get a chance to use the computer. The whole time I've been sitting here writing both kids have been bugging me to use the comptuer so they can play Spore. I suppose I will finish up here and go start my 8 loads of laundry. Ack.

I hope everyone is doing well and I hope Dad that you are feeling better. Get well and get out of the hospital. Mom sounds like she's about to crack. =) Oh, and thanks Andy for taking care of mom. I'm pondering if I should make a trip down there to help.

Sad day.

2008-10-20T20:04:00.001-04:00

This will be short. It's a sad day when your 8 year old son has to buy a size 8 men's shoe. Sad, sad, sad. I'm going to go drown my sorrow in a beer.