Presents from the grandparents

Four packages arrived in the mail on Friday. Two each for Duncan and Berry.

First, there were presents from Grandma and Papa Rog.

Then there was a box from Gram and Grandad Pocobello.

Duncan was a little disappointed that none of the clothes had Dora on them. But he recovered.

Today, they both wanted to wear a selection of the clothes to church (of course!). I took a few photos and attempted to get the kids to stand up still next to each other, but they had other ideas.

We will try to get thank you letters out, but it’s possible that this electronic thank you will have to suffice.

Getting the garden started

This is a bit of a late post on what we did last weekend but, on Monday, Duncan was struck with the stomach flu. I was up all night with him, then got sick myself on Wednesday.

Wednesday night I got up in my weakened state to get a drink from the fridge and blacked out, collapsing on the floor, but not before squishing my face with the glass I was drinking from and bonking myself on the head. I have no memory of it, as I was already unconscious at the time.

It was very confusing to come around, lying on the cold, hard, wet floor (I was soaking in apple juice). I thought I’d fallen asleep somewhere. I ended up in Urgent Care yesterday as I went to work in the afternoon and was extremely dizzy. Fortunately, my brain isn’t bleeding. However, upon learning that I sometimes have an arrhythmic heart beat, I got to have an EKG and get to have some kind of Holter device strapped to me for a couple of days to check on my heart rhythm. Fun. I also have a very low resting heart rate, which doesn’t really surprise me, as everything else tends to be low as well – blood pressure, temperature, etc. Maybe my heart is just super healthy and efficient. Or maybe that’s why I blacked out.

What I was going to post about was our seed starting adventures last weekend. We don’t have much room in the garden here, but enough to grow some lettuce, arugula, etc. So, with Duncan and Berry’s enthusiastic help, we started seeds last weekend.

From 2010-02-February

It didn’t take them long to sprout on the kitchen window sill. This is how they look today.

From 2010-02-February

The ground is still too soggy to put them out any time soon – I need to work some compost into it that’s been brewing over the winter.

As our least is up mid-August, I won’t plant anything in the ground that won’t have ripened before it’s time to move out. I left a few dozen pounds of beautiful green tomatoes on the vines in Rochester when we moved. I’m told, by the new owner, that they were delicious. This time I’ll be putting them in pots.

More updates to follow soon. Some mysterious packages from grandparents arrived in the mail yesterday that the kids really enjoyed opening.

The new tecchies

I upgraded my phone last week to the Droid. Truthfully, there wasn’t anything wrong with my old phone — and its camera is probably better than the Droid’s — but it didn’t have a couple of key features that I really wanted. I love the idea of being able to sync useful things — e-mail, calendars, task lists — between my work and home computers and have it available on my phone.

The Droid can do that.

Clearly, I’m not the only one that loves it. Duncan has been spelling and writing more and more lately, and has recently developed an interest in sending Kevin text messages. Sometimes they are random strings of letters – but sometimes he accepts my encouragement to write real words.

This morning he was quite enamored with typing on the Droid keyboard, so I took the opportunity to snap a couple of photos of his sweet, concentrating face.

From 2010-02-February

From 2010-02-February

A typical, glamorous Saturday

Weekends aren’t glamorous, but I love them.

I love my job, but the grind–of getting up and ready for work in the morning and getting everyone out the door relatively on time and the evening routine of feeding, bathing and putting to bed–gets old by Friday. There’s not much time for FUN in there when you’re focused on moving from one thing to another to keep the life machine going. (Although, some mornings I do animate a cuddly toy as it somehow gets more attention than my plain old mummy voice.)

Weekends are a blessing. There’s still stuff to get done – like grocery shopping on a Saturday morning and mowing the lawn. But there’s also time for play, time to be outside in the garden, time to color with the kids or show them how to play the Wii.

Today’s activities involved pretending to be doggies with Emma (video courtesy of the Droid phone). Sam did his best to pretend he couldn’t hear the barking.

After nap, it was time to play in the garden. I realized the grass needed a good mow and my mum felt compelled to document the occasion. I’ll spare you the video of me pushing the rotary mower around the front yard in a seemingly random pattern (it works for the Roomba) and leave you with this photo instead.

From 2010-02-February

My little bedheaded girl

0625091611.jpg, originally uploaded by JoannaBG.

0625091611b.jpg, originally uploaded by JoannaBG.

Sleepy head wakes up from a nap.

This is my attempt at testing to see if I can upload photos from my phone onto the blog through flickr. Hmmm…not going too well so far.

Hugging trees makes children sleepy

The kids have been making us a little crazy lately, so we decided to try doing something new today. We went to visit the Cumming Nature Center in Honeoye Falls.

Our plan was several-fold:

• It’s an hour drive away — farther than we’d usually go for a hike in the woods, but this ate up 2 hours of our morning while our children were safely strapped into their car seats
• It would tire them out, so they’d nap (this has been an issue since the Binky Fairy visited Duncan 10 days ago)
• It’s outdoors — and we all could use more nature and tree hugging.

Speaking of tree hugging, when I see my children voluntarily go up to a tree and literally hug it — with no prompting or demonstration on my part — I know I’m doing something right as a parent. They do get outdoors to enjoy the natural world (as much as is natural in a city) a lot more than I do and I know that’s so important for them. At least if they’re on a playground or playing in our tiny backyard, they’re outside, and children can find the beauty and wonder of nature in anything. Often it seems to be in the rocks they insist on bringing home. Or the mulch they must repeatedly put on the bottom of the slides.

In any case, we managed to all get in the car and drive there without incident. Duncan actually fell asleep a few minutes before we got there. That’s what happens when you insist on waking up befor 6 a.m. We wandered around for a while, looked at a pioneer log cabin and read some signs about how the native Irondequoit used to live and then carried the crying, dragging little ones back to the car.

We found a diner for lunch. It was the first time I sent food back to the kitchen. I ordered a roast beef sandwich and my beef was green. Yes, green. Beef is not a vegetable. It shouldn’t be green. Amazingly, we finished lunch and packed everyone back into the car — where they fell asleep on the way home. We ran errands while they slept (Kevin stayed in the car with them, don’t worry! But we were out already and just used up 2 hours’ of gas) and got home with them still sleeping. I hung out with them and read in the car for a while until they each woke up.

It doesn’t seem like much of a fascinating day, and it was a lot of driving for a walk in the woods. Next time, we’ll pick somewhere closer to home and keep the hiking short. I’m glad that Berry is finally getting old enough to take on a walk like that, as I’ve always envisioned spending so much more time outdoors with the kids than I tend to actually do. It gives me hope for future weekend activities.

At lunch, we talked about our favorite part of the walk. Kevin saw a knarly tree that he liked, Duncan liked stepping on the tree roots. Berry — well, she’s 18 months old, she doesn’t give us much in the way of descriptive sentences yet. Me? I liked the part where we walked along a stream and all stopped and got quiet enough to hear the water flowing below us. There was stillness, suddenly, finally. I closed my eyes and could feel the woods around me and hear my own thoughts, finally given the space in my head.

Even after we got home and I was trying to decipher the TV show that Berry was asking me to put on, I looked in her eyes and she seemed different to me, somehow. Maybe we’d just spent some good time together. Maybe tromping around in the woods and hearing some stillness was good for her, too.

My garden helpers

It’s not easy to find time to tend the garden with two little ones. Or do any singular activity, for that matter. They like to be involved.

Our backyard, tiny as it is, is now strewn with kids toys. The turtle sand box, basketball hoop, water table, little slide and see-saw. I love it, honestly. It makes me happy to look out the back window and see all those things for them to play with. We can’t fit a swing set back there, so we do what we can with what we have.

Even with the toys, the lure of What Mummy’s Doing is too strong. Inevitably, I get interrupted with “help,” often in the form of digging in inappropriate places — such as where things are growing. Duncan, at least, has learned the boundaries of the vegetable garden and walks along the pavers, but not in the soil. Berry caught on quickly this year, but occasionally manages to somehow fall into my garden beds and took out a pepper plant earlier this summer.

One form of “help” we’ve found that they both enthusiastically get into is watering the garden. We collect rainwater from our garage roof in plastic tubs. Kevin has grand ideas about building a water barrel, but so far we’re just using totes with lids and it’s working well.

The kids love filling up watering cans (or at least pretending to in Berry’s case) and watering the vegetables. Duncan likes watering one particular square foot of the garden which quickly turns into a mud puddle. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times I tell him it’s had enough water already, sooner or later he returns to that spot and sploshes some more on.

Explaining that the garden doesn’t need watering when it’s just rained – and everything is clearly still wet – also falls on deaf ears. It’s just too much fun. Why wouldn’t the plants want another drink? It tickles them, after all. I love him.

So here’s some shots (with my cell phone) of the two of them helping out. I will say that their participation is helpful when getting them to eat veggies at dinner. By watering them, Duncan has buy in. I mean, they’re HIS veggies. Why not eat them. I even got him to eat a raw green bean the other day – and he liked it!

The kids get cooking

I’m not the only one who likes to cook in our house. We hauled the play kitchen up from the basement and put it in Berry’s room. It was a hit with Chef Berry and soux chef Duncan. There has been corn eating, pie making and lots and lots of tea drinking. Hmmm…. where do you think they get the idea of drinking cup after cup of tea?

Keeping birthdays naturally colored

I had so much fun at Duncan’s birthday party that – as exhausted as I was – I had a hard time falling asleep last night. This morning, even though Kevin has Berry downstairs and Duncan is still sleeping, I can’t get back to sleep for thinking about it.

All considered, everything went well. It rained practically all day, then stopped for 1hour and 55 minutes of the party. Pouring recommenced at 5:55 p.m. But it worked out OK as almost all the kiddos left, a few people and family stayed and we opened presents. Opening presents took an entire hour. Were there a lot of presents? Yes. Was he totally focused on thoroughly playing with the present he’d just opened, showing no interest in opening the next one? Totally. Bless him.

So Duncan is now 3 years old. Both he and Berry have a love of the Little Einsteins TV show, so we decided to use that a theme this year. In prior years (both of them) we went for a small, family party with “birthday” as the theme. But, as Kevin says, “you’re only 3 once.”

To go with the Little Einsteins table cover, plates, napkins, party hats and balloons I decided to make a Rocket cake. There were several obstables to that.

1. Um…a cake that’s not just round? That defies my cake making abilities.

2. How do I get red and blue icing without using Red No. 40? Artificial food coloring is banned in this house (along with MSG, artificial sweetners, high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oil *).

So Kevin and I (mostly Kevin) set about experimenting with natural food colors. For Berry’s birthday, I found a bottle of natural food coloring at a local health food store.

Seelect 100% Natural Food Coloring, Red/Strawberry, 2-Ounce Bottle (Pack of 4)

But it didn’t turn the icing strawberry red. It make it…well…kinda purple-y red. The cake was good, anyway.

For Rocket, I wanted RED red.

First Kevin tried boiling down some rhubarb from our garden. Then he added lemon juice to…um…change it from a base to an acid or something. There was an actual scientific principle at play.

(Must pause here, Duncan has woken up.)

Rhubarb made a pink color. Rhubarb + lemon juice made an orange-y pink color. Crushed cherries made a nice dark red shade — but cherry red (duh!), not Rocket red.

Next I tried melting and reducing a strawberry fruit pop. According to the ingredients, those are colored with the strawberries themselves, beet color and turmeric. I guess the yellow of the turmeric is supposed to turn the purpleness of the beet color into red. In any case, boiled down a bit it turned into a murky brownish orange. Not something I want to frost a cake with.

Finally, I decided to simply puree some strawberries. Mmmm…a nice red at last. Unfortunately, when mixed into dairy-free buttercream icing (earth balance margarine instead of butter), it turned a lovely shade of pink. Since it had a bit of an orange tinge, I added our red-purple natural food dye. It darkened it up a bit, but remained quite pink. The icing was also a bit soft.

The blue (for the windows and belly) was fairly easy to figure out. Crushed blueberries. I can’t remember if Kevin cooked them a bit first. Then he added baking power (or soda) — again to do something chemtastically scientific with the adic/base composition. It made a nice light blue/grey.

To actually make the Rocket cake, I found these instructions online (they’re down at the bottom of the page). I went one step further and made a bottom for Rocket as well. Since I wasn’t about to buy Twinkies, I used some extra cake for the engines.

And here it is – the edible, melting, pink finished product. Not as good as the creations on Andrea’s Recipes (her husband made it, no less), but did I mention that it was edible?

* Disclaimer: there are some MSG-containing soups in our pantry, but I will not be buying any more after a recent declaration (I believe I proclaimed: MSG is evil! at the dining room table). Kevin still drinks soda. Ugh. And, occassionally, we eat foods with hydrogentated oil, but as little as possible.

Gardening then and now

I have such fond memories of gardening in North Carolina that I thought I should explore my old photos of the garden. I can only find photos from the first year — when I was still creating the beds. Nothing from when I’d replaced most of the raised stone beds with cement blocks. Oh well.

But it did jog my memory that I used to fill soda bottles with water to make an insulating water wall for the tomato plants. And we had a cold frame. I plan to try both of those next spring,

Most of the garden is planted this year. I still have bush beans and pole beans, maybe some more lettuce and spinach seeds to plant. And the basil will need transplanting in a week or two. New this year: straw potatoes. I’m very excited about them. I vaguely recall trying them in North Carolina, but I don’t remember how they turned out. I think I grew them the second year, so maybe I never got to harvest them.

The first year I got serious about growing a vegetable garden, I kept a meticulous gardening journal. It’s crossed my mind that I could blog about it now.

In any case, here are some photos of this year’s garden and other pics of my gardening years. It has more things planted now. I took these a week or two ago. I wanted to get evidence of my square-foot grid, even though the beds aren’t traditional square foot beds. It’s still an awesome growing method.

2008 – in the wilderness mountains of North Carolina

2001 – my little square foot container garden on my apartment’s back deck and working in a community garden down the road from where we now live

2008 – this year’s garden beds, ready to plant!