Hiking, Peas and Shrooms

For the past several days I have been trying to get a hold on my house. Everything seems like a blur of laundry, cleaning, gardening and cooking, and I feel like the kids and I have been left out of the picture. I have also been dealing with the 700-some pictures that I took at my cousin's wedding nearly 4 weeks ago - oh, I had planned on getting them to her within two weeks, but it has been a year since I have managed any photos on this computer (and I'm pretty sure it has a virus that makes it cantankerous), so the download of those pictures onto my computer used up all of its memory, nearly crashing it. So for weeks I have been wading through old pictures, deleting shots by the hundreds, trying to get to where the wedding photos can be edited and burned to disc and trying NOT to lose my computer. I am almost there, but tonight I really felt like I just had to get the kids out of the house, and the events ended up needing to be blogged. I miss my blogging outlet, and as soon as the wedding pictures are done I will back on more frequently, but they have been my top priority. I'll share some soon. It really was wonderful.

We're having a little soft-soled-shoe-ordering party here tomorrow (combining shipping for several friends and me will save us a bit!), so after dinner we ran to the store to get a couple of things to make Stephanie's Sweet Potato Chili for lunch tomorrow and Friday after our local La Leche League meeting. A 15-minute run to the store ended up being an hour because the kids were C-R-A-Z-Y!!! So we came home at 7:15, grabbed my home-made Mei Tai carrier and a hand-full of wormwood to help keep off the mosquitoes, and headed for the Kroger Wetlands just 2 minutes from home. It's a quick and easy hike for us in the middle of town and the kids love it. And boy did they need it tonight. It is amazing what a 30-minute hike can do just before bed. There were no absolute fits about getting washed up for bed (that has become a usual for Kane - a screaming, kicking tantrum in the bath), everyone went right to sleep, AND Kane willingly jumped in his OWN BED and went to sleep, which was one of his punishments for his absolute refusal to stop running at the store. And if you don't know Kane, he NEVER sleeps in his bed. He starts in Bella's room, either with her in bed or on their little foam fold-out couch, and works his way in with Adam, Max and me in the middle of the night.

When we got home from the Wetland (mosquito-bite free!), we went down to the garden for a quick sugar snap pea picking, loading up Bella's dress

and Kane's shirt.

I had to take pictures, if for nothing but to show my dear friend Julie that her children's clothes are right at home here with us now. Then, in the schoolyard across the road, I noticed a humongous mushroom gleaming white in the soft light, so we had to go investigate. I love fungus, but have no good field guide to ID them and no time to look online, so I'll leave you without a fun scientific name. Sorry about that. But it was a really beauty.

Of course, Max had to touch it and smell it.

Then Kane smelled it, and this was as close as I could get him to it after that...

Then it was a quick stop at one of the boys' favorite spots, the rock pile, before heading in for a late, late bedtime.

But it was a great evening, and all three are sleeping soundly now in their OWN beds. Now it's off for me to get my yummy chili in the slow cooker. Hiking, blogging and cooking - what a wonderful end to a mismatched day. I love to share these moments with all of you. There are so many to come - camping this weekend, the wedding, my niece's senior pictures... So stay tuned!

And The Winner Is...

This has taken some major consideration, y'all. Everyone came up with great suggestions for my Name My Garden contest. I mean, she will definitely be Our Bounty, Jules, as well as our Pocketbook Protector, Denise. That's why I planted her! Sarah, I knew you'd come up with a good one, and Yapashi didn't disappoint! By the way, I LOVE Roxanne - cracks me up - can't wait to see some pictures of her! Hortensia - ooh, what a ring that has to it. Classy, Mrs. Boo Radley. Emily, I love the meaning of Beziwit, and love that it is an Ethiopian word. And don't you worry, I'll probably be pawning off extra harvest on you all summer! And Eric, my dear PITA, although all were ingenious, I have to say Bird's Eye is my favorite of your names - you had to remind me, but I do remember cooking "bird's eyes" for you when I was little :-). When it comes right down to it, I really wanted to go with something with a great meaning and a good feeling. Kind of like naming your baby or a new puppy - the name has to fit when you are looking at their faces. Well, I have looked at her face, and knowing in my heart that she is a "she" (I mean, come on, a male can't offer such fruitful bounty!), and after conferring with the fam, the big shout-out and virtual hug just have to go to.... drumroll, please.... Mrs. Boo Radley!!! It was such a close race, but Hortensia spoke to me and told me that is the name she wants in big black letters over her gate. So Hortensia it is! Right now, Hortensia is a fortress, as tonight's low is to be in the very low 30s - ARG! Way after the expected frost date for our area, and of course after I have all my tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, brussels, kale, cukes, etc. etc. planted out. AND after I moved all of my indoor plants out to my front porch and my herbs are all on the back deck... Big fat sigh. So tonight it took me 2 hours to find enough supplies to fortify my babies to keep them safe. But everyone should hold out for the night, and bright and early tomorrow morning I will have to take it all down and hose down my flower beds. It will all be worth it, even though it will be a late night preparing for Adam's return from a 5 day business trip to sunny Hollywood. He won't get here until 2 am, but the kids and I have a big Welcome Home party planned for him for the morning.

And my goal is for him to come home to a house with at least the important rooms nicely cleaned. So, while the brownies are most cruely smelling up the whole house (it would be noticed if they read "WE *heart* APA!," instead of "PAPA," in our fancy all-natural sprinkes on the top, wouldn't it...), I will be cleaning the counters and straightening the living room, waiting for our beloved Papa to get his rear home! I miss him! Thanks again for all of the name suggestions everyone!!!

Auto Reply

I feel like I need to set up an auto reply for my life. It would go a little something like this:

Until further notice, Leslie will not be functioning at full capacity. Blog posts may be few and far between thanks to a temperamental computer that needs completely wiped clean and started fresh. Photos will not be updated at Flickr regularly (see above comment about stupid virus-ridden computer). Due to the garden in the back yard, which is the size of a small house, many tasks will not be completed until well after autumn harvest and canning/freezing is DONE. If you happen to live close enough to stop by, you are always welcomed, but do NOT expect a clean and tidy house for the next, oh, 17 years, give or take another child or two. And while Leslie is trying her hardest to stay impartial to what others may think about her shortcomings (which are probably all self-imposed and unrealistically imparted onto unsuspecting friends and family), she may be constantly apologizing for all above-mentioned issues, even though she is thrilled with where her life is. What she will NOT apologize for, however, is dishes half-done if it means nursing a cranky 1-year-old, or piles of mail unsorted if it means listening intently to a 3-year-old's in-depth 10 minute story, or bag-mountains of clothes and items to be taken to the storage unit if it means looking up the answer to a random question of an ever-curious 5-year-old.

If I could only record that and have it start off every conversation, every meeting with friends, every entry into a room 15 minutes late, every time my door opens to family or friends, maybe I wouldn't always feel like I'm falling short. I'm sure, with just that simple explanation of our everyday trials, most would never think all the things I think they do. Maybe my nerves wouldn't be quite as frazzled from not keeping up with the standards I keep for myself - standards that are not at all appropriate for a home-all-day, homeschooling group of Mama and 3 children under age 6 in a house with no maid, no usable storage space, no play room, no spare room to hide all of the embarrassing piles of stuff in, and a Papa gone 6 days a week from around 11 a.m. until around midnight.

Enough of the wallowing! I am going to go take my B-vitamins, brew a cup of chamomile and get to rearranging my living room space. But since my computer has finally let me upload all of my recent pictures off of my camera for the first time in 2 weeks (YAY!), I want to share a picture of our new "addition."
Out with the old:

In with the new:

Isn't she beautiful? What is surrounded with the orange fence was last year's plot, now planted with peas, beans, onions, lettuce and strawberry spinach. She still needs her walls secured against our friendly neighborhood deer and rabbits, which should happen tomorrow morning, but for the most part she's done. And I have to brag, because Adam and I did the entire fence in two days with a big 2-man auger, which means I am incredibly sore today... I think she needs a name. All suggestions are welcomed. Heck, let's make this a contest! Out of the whole handful of you who check these ramblings occasionally who haven't given up on me ever posting again, I challenge you to come up with a good name for my garden. Anything that beautiful deserves a fitting name, don't you think? Her name will be voted on by my panel of experts (Adam, the kids, and me :-)), and the winner will receive a big ol' virtual hug from me and a shout out on this very blog! Woo-hoo! Help me exceed my expectations (I'm thinking I'll get 2, maybe 3 comments). It's easy to comment, even if you never have before. Just click on the part right at the bottom of this post that tells the number of comments, write what you want to say, choose your identity (Name if you don't have a blogger account) and hit Publish your Comment. I know there is family out there who has never commented before but reads the posts. So bring on the name suggestions!!

Slow Day

Today has been a slow day. Not a planned slow day, but a forced slow day. And sometimes those forced slow days are exactly what we need, even if we don't want to admit it. Last night I came down with a healthy case of mastitis - a breast infection for those non-breastfeeding folk who may read this. Nasty things, breast infections. Fever, aches, shivers, flu-like symptoms along with swelling, redness and pain at the site of the infection. And all of this after one of those off-days that I have talked about before - this one including, but not limited to, dinner that I had worked on all day burning. But sometimes an infection is our body's way of telling us to slow down. I have been working overtime lately with this year's garden. I'm expanding it about three fold, which means tons of digging, planting, planning... I do get a lot of help from my little digger, though.

He earned his own little-man sized shovel after working so hard with this regular one. I do love this springtime activity. Planting rows of seeds in peat.

Anticipating, watching, until that first little sprout raises its frail self out of the soil and toward the sun.

Watching my little cucumbers turn from this, just days after they sprouted...

to this, just 9 days later (pardon the flashiness of these pictures - I despise flash, but wanted you to see how they have grown!).

Look at their little cucumber leaves popping out between their sproutling ones. My babies are growing up...

But as much as I love all the work that goes into my gardening, I have been a little obsessive about it. So even though I really wanted to be out there digging today, putting my peas, strawberry spinach, and the rest of my onions in the ground, I couldn't. And I think that's just what I needed.

Today, then, was spent hanging out inside, reading library books, watching a big truck and a cat documentary, and setting Maxwell up with his new bed. He is making an early move into the mattress-on-the-floor stage, just like his brother did. When Kane was about 18 months, I tore down his crib one afternoon in a fit of frustration, after my third attempt at getting him to sleep only to have him pop up the second I tried to lie him down in his crib. After I got the crib torn apart, I put the crib mattress on the floor, laid down beside him, and nursed him right to sleep. Max is to the same point. If I put him in his crib, he wakes up every half hour to an hour. He has been in his new bed for two hours now, happily sleeping away on a double mattress on the floor. We spent some time this evening, with the soft light pouring through the window, sitting on the edge of his bed looking for birds. Looking for birds is his favorite past-time, and once he sees one, he doesn't let it out of his sight. My big boy, sitting on his bed watching for birds out his window. Sticking his sweet little toes up on the unpainted sill, telling me all about the "BIR!" that he saw - his first blue jay. Is it a little soon to start his birding Life List? And while he slumbers on his new bed, and his brother and sister do the same on Bella's bed, having fallen asleep to Max Lucado's wonderful book You Are Special on CD (I love the library!), I am going to do a little bit of knitting while relaxing in my bed with a cup of Echinacea tea and a hot compress on my nursey. Maybe tomorrow I'll feel well enough to plant the peas, onions, and strawberry spinach. Only a good night's sleep will tell me if this infection is going to budge yet. Happy April Fool's day - I've never been any good at the fooling thing. I always feel too bad for fooling someone, because I don't like to get fooled :-). Hope your April is full of SPRING!!!

How Does My Garden Grow?

Wonderfully, for having started it way late! A wonderful friend of mine passed a bunch of heirloom seeds off to me because she had a possible buyer for her house and didn't want to start a garden only to have to leave it. Of course, as things usually go, the buyer fell through and she is now staying in her gardenless house, although I have given her first dibs on all of my extra harvest! I am way behind, having planted a month or more late, but I'm getting my first small harvests, and it's exciting! I am super-duper proud of this garden for two reasons. One is that I am giving my family wonderful, fresh, organic produce straight from the ground it is grown in. You can't get much better than that. The second reason is that I just decided to grab the bull by the horns and do it, and I have done it successfully and kept it up very well. Adam was reluctant and doubtful about it, but I think I have really kept up to my end of the bargain. I put a lot of work into it, and made sure he didn't have to weed-eat around it, and it is all mine. There have been a couple of times that he willingly volunteered some help when he was out there with me, but I have really worked hard at making this garden something to be proud of.


Here is Bella holding our first Costata zucchini squash!









Here is a baby Costata that will be ready in a day or two !








Our pea plants didn't do well enough to produce an entire meal at once, but Bella just loves to pick a few when we're in the garden and shell them to eat her 6 peas!





Our butternut squash and lemon squash are, of course, taking over the entire garden. I love going down there and seeing how much they have growing and having to redirect their course each time they try to consume my carrots or beans. And I love this picture, because Bella uses her feet (and always has since babyhood) as a gorilla does, so she is pointing at and moving the flower with her foot.



I just adore the color of a butternut squash flower. A good friend told me once she could have a garden just for the beautiful flowers, never mind the wonderful harvest of fruits and veggies you get! I have to agree.




And I love getting to teach the kids the difference between the male and femal flowers. A garden is a wonderful teaching tool, from learning about basic botony, to worms, compost, and bugs, the kids have a living field experiment that we get to explore every day.



I also love the difference between the whopping butternut flowers with their deep schoolbus yellow and these dainty, sunny lemon squash flowers.











The kids even get to learn all about pests, like the beautiful eggs here that will turn into nasty squash bugs. The problem is that I just love bugs, so it's always hard for me to have to get rid of the pesty ones. But the thought of losing my Costata plant to a few measly bugs gives me the strength to do what I must.











And speaking of colors, check out the blooms on my scarlet runner beans. I love that they so perfectly match the orange construction caution fence that keeps my garden from being deer/bunny/woodchuck food.









You simply cannot be in the garden looking at these flowers and feel grouchy!