sarahmichelef

Didy ou miss me? Did you even notice that I was mostly offline for two weeks?

Yeah, didn't think so.

The last weed in July TRex and I were in Maine with my maternal family as well as samueljl , relentlesstoil , and MC. Having them there was awesome, because then instead of just me and the kid we had our own little mini-commune. 3:2 is an awesome parent-to-four-year-old ratio. We didn't get to pull the "Big Love" joke on any meddling old ladies, though.
( pictures )

We were home for 36 hours or so and then drove for approximately ten gajillion hours down to the Midatlantic so Grandma could pick up TRex and the two of us could stay in DE with Josh & Jacy and help out with three-week-old Cora. Which was also fun, and we got more sleep than I had expected. Oh, and I got an awesome dress for the wedding we're going to over Labor day weekend!
( cutecutecute )

Last week C said to me, offhandedly, "we're going berry picking on Sunday if you want to come" and I said sure, thinking you know... an hour, maybe two, bring some berries home, and then later we could go play minigolf like TRex had decided we needed to for Father's day.  (Because Froggy does, you see.)

I forgot who we were going with. C had said that they were picking at 11 so I called her to find out the details at about 10. She said, "We're leaving in 15 minutes." I asked, "Where in the hell are we going that it's going to take 45 minutes to get there?" The answer, it turned out, was Coulter Farms in Lockport. Rather than her trying to give us directions, we decided just to meet at their house and follow them.  The plan was that B was going to meet all of us there having gotten there on his bike (the long way... because it may be far but it's not 60 miles from here to Lockport!)  It ended up being us, C&B and the kids, 2 sets of their friends (4 parents & 3 kids) and B's sister and her husband. We picked (and ate) oodles of strawberries and sugar snap peas, and ate nearly as many as we picked I think (like you do). And then we rode the tractor to another set of fields and picked and ate some more. All told I think we were at the farm for 2 or 2 1/2 hours.

And then it was decided that we needed lunch, so we followed C again, this time to
Brickyard BBQ in Lewiston, were fortunately there was seating on the patio because the five kids who were there were going a little crazy running around. We were there until about 3:30... TRex fell asleep in the car on the way home and M and I took advantage of the chance to get some major trimming of trees and shrubs done (including him up on the garage roof cutting back the neighbor's maple tree that was serving as an ant superhighway). And then we had salads for dinner, which included both strawberries and sugar snap peas. Of course.

We put in our gardens yesterday. We'd broken up most of the soil with the hand tiller over the past week and then hit Lowe's yesterday morning to pick out plants. We already had tomatoes and a couple of sad bell peppers that we'd started in the frankengreenhouse to transfer over to the veggie patch.

TRex declared ages ago that she wanted polka-dot plants - we had some in our annual bed last year and they fried because we didn't realize how much shade the neighbors' pine had given the back yard until it was gone. Hers is much more shady, though, so they should do fine there. She wanted pansies again but we couldn't find any, so we put in some impatiens (which I cannot find a useful link for) and some orange marigolds along the very front where they'll get the most sun. The white blooming groundcover is montana sandwort that we put in 2 years ago... the second one (which was in the opposite corner) died after the first season; that one is going to take over the whole bed eventually, which is fine - it's very pretty.

My annual bed has red petunias and yellow/orange celosia which I will insist on calling "fire plants" because that's what the blooms look like to me. Those alternate around the edge... I am completely haphazard in my plant selection and placement, and yet it always comes out OK. I really do just go into the garden store, buy whatever appeals to me on that day, and go with it. So I was going to fill out the rest with marigolds but then we had more good tomato seedlings than we had room for in the veggie garden (which has 4 tomato seedlings with marigold friends, a hell of a lot of huge garlic, the two bell pepper plants that sprouted successfully, and I put in 3 zucchini seeds yesterday) so now there are marigolds and 2 tomato plants back there as well. Did I mention that the center of this bed is daffodils and some other late-blooming perennial whose name I can never remember?

We are for sure expanding the vegetable patch for next year, probably to include some herbs. M is quite obsessed with growing chives. We just didn't want to bite off too much this year.

In other news, we bought M a new bike and TRex a tagalong bike yesterday. She was terrified of it at first, but now all she wants to do is tool around the neighborhood on her trailer bike.  Her legs are JUST BARELY long enough to reach the pedals - it's a 20" wheel and the charts all claim that those are for kids 48" and taller, which she soooo is not (to say nothing of most of her height being in her torso).  But she can hang on and pedal when we need her to help get moving from a dead stop, so it's all good.

One of the gigs as March for Babies Ambassador Family is to do media - including live tv!  TRex and I went down to  WKBW this morning to tape an interview for a health segment to be aired tomorrow, we think, and then to be on AM Buffalo with Stacey, the MoD division director.  

I think I didn't make a complete idiot of myself, told our story including compelling lines like "they said they might stand me on my head because there has to be something to that gravity thing" and "as long as possible turned out to be about 5 hours".

TRex was a bit cowed by the whole thing... I had warned her repeatedly that it was going to be a "listening time" and that she really REALLY shouldn't interrupt and for the most part she didn't.  When we were talking about her gross motor delay in the health segment interview I said, "she gets PT to work on her strength and so that she can keep up with her friends" she busted out with "Yeah, like LARA!  But now I can run as fast as she can because I have fast running shoes!"  When I gave her the chance to talk about being ambassador family during the live bit ("what does it mean to be the ambassador family?") all she would say was "I get to ride my bike..."  But later she saw that they were showing a picture of her and she piped up, "Hey, that's me!"  Mostly she sat there and petted the present she got from Linda Pellegrino, the host - a Sleeping Beauty DVD.

So... if you're still thinking about donating, here's where to go.  We are less than $100 from our original goal (but I bumped it last week when we got within $250) - this year will almost certainly be our biggest year to date!  Or you can donate to marajade648  at this page.

I will try to get web video of one or both of our appearances so you can all laugh at me.

not filtered because there is stuff that will amuse multiple categories of friends... and copying & pasting from my other blogs, 'cause I'm too lazy to write things twice.

( my bits )

( trex's bits )

My mom got TRex some post it notes with various shapes on them for Christmas.  Tuesday night she colored in a shape for each of us and stuck them to our backs.  (She did it again last night, too...)

So the whole evening, M had a post-it declaring him to be a square on his back.  And I giggled every time I saw it. 

Isn't she cute?

Have Fun Stormin' the Castle was a lot of fun.  Guaranteed way to make TRex happy: take her to a dance class.  She loooooved it.  And hey, it gets M to dance, too, which is hilarious for the rest of us. 

1. Stop talking about politics for a moment or two.
2. Post a reasonably-sized picture in your LJ, NOT under a cut tag, of something pleasant, such as an adorable kitten, or a fluffy white cloud, or a bottle of booze. Something that has NOTHING TO DO WITH POLITICS.
3. Include these instructions.
Mostly this will amuse my SCAdian friends, but pretty much everybody likes a picture of a cute kid, right?

There was a freeze warning for last night, so we wanted to finish up digging out the vegetable garden plot before the ground got nice and hard.  Lucky for us (read: me) it had rained a couple of days this week so the ground was pretty soft and the sod-cutting was MUCH easier than last weekend.  We got it all dug up and nicely loosened and then M helped me schlep one of the compost bins out to the plot and I put approximately half of its soupy, fragrant, disgusting contents into the garden plot and mixed it all up.  So now we have a plot that's about 6x3 and ready for some veggies in the spring.  We'll put in the garlic next weekend, probably.  I wanted to give the compost a bit to get less stinky before we started digging in it again.

I have convinced M to turn on the heat.  It was 55 degrees in the house this morning and that is not warm enough.  Tuesday we are getting three more estimates for new furnaces - with natural gas prices projected to be up by like 50% this winter, we figure it will pay for itself in savings in about 3 years.  Yeah.

Oh, and for the latest in TRex hijinks, go here.  It's funny, trust me.

Anniversaries.