Birthday

Wonder Woman is having her revenge.

6:30-8:30 breakfast, clean kitchen, read to kids
8:30-9:00 piano lesson
9:30-11:30 make 14 pints of jam with Aunt LoLo. 80 pounds of peaches are FINISHED, we processed the last 10 pounds this morning.
11:30-1:30 get kids lunch and naps, check e-mails, start black beans for dinner, start load of laundry, sweep
1:30-2:30 weed yard (I heart my scuffle hoe)
2:45-3:00 make a cake with the kids
3:00-3:15 sweep
3:15-3:30 read to the kids, sweep (What? They kept eating graham crackers!)
3:30-4:00 piano lesson
4:30-5:00 piano lesson
5:00-6:00 get dinner ready, frost cake, help Yard Man get started on a project, sweep again

I'm finding that the problem with getting that wonderful "Second Trimester Burst of Energy" is that I am filled with an itchy desire to get everything done, and a horror of everything I've left undone the past few months.

We spent the evening celebrating The Meemster's second birthday. Yikes. She's still the yummiest thing around (although she'll worriedly yell "No! No 'asty!" if I ask her if she's delicious and could I please have a bite?) We had the sweetest sugar-bomb of a blue cake I've ever made, we had presents, we had a blast. Miss Mimi? Happy Birthday :)

More Work in the Yard

We're waking up from a too-long hiatus on our front yard work (something about getting fired and being pregnant and starting a new company and being pregnant and building the new business and....and....well, we kind of really REALLY lost steam on that particular set of projects.)

The Burly Men from my family came over yesterday, and discovered (like so many before) that we are not on top of dirt. Our house is actually built on a pernicious blend of baseball-sized rocks and clay, with the exception of trucked-in dirt from generations of previous owners trying to make this yard into something that plant life can thrive in. Just add our dirt on top!

The Burly Men blasted a huge hole in the ground to plant our poor fig tree in though. Hooray! They took a vine maple down to the ground- vine maples are the worst weeds we get. If you miss one when it's small, they are impossible to pull up, and sprout new branches like a green Hydra. They marked where the flower bed will run along the wall, and started pick-axing that dirt and shoveling it into a wheelbarrow to add to our dirt piles in the back. Oh, they also found the drainage pipe I most awesomely forgot to tell them was located directly under where they were so manfully swinging their pick axe. Luckily, the awesome Wonder Daddy is now a pro at fixing and and installing drainage pipes, and we had a scrap piece of pipe that fit in perfectly. (Have I used the word "awesome" enough in this paragraph? Awesome.)

We have five yards of dirt coming on Saturday, so we WILL get the flower beds dug out and hopefully get the veggie beds built so that by Saturday night we will be buttoned up for Winter.

Left to do:
1) Weed. Umm, remember that hiatus? Shameful. I am full of shame. One big ball, soon-to-be-sneezing, shame.
2) Build garden beds and dig out about a foot to fill in with good dirt
3) Dig flower beds out to make way for beautiful rock-free dirt. Not clay.
4) Dig in manure to existing dirt
5) Shove dirt around the yard and level it all out, fill in beds, etc. We have 2 or 3 yards in the back too, that will probably get pulled out to the front as well.
6) FUTZ! Is that a word? It's what I do. Planting, sowing seeds, "fluffing." You know, stuff I can reasonably do during nap times or with the girls in tow. I have rose bushes heeled in in the backyard that need transplanting, bulbs, etc.

(Well, actually I intend to use the girls a LOT for number 1- I am the proud happy owner of a new scuffle hoe, and I figure if I hoe and rake, the girls can do all the bending and put the weeds in the bucket! My belly does not allow for so much bending any more, at least not without a lot of complaint.)


Oh my heck, we might actually have a yard soon. We've been living in a mud pit/construction zone since we started our "2 or 3 weekends TOPS" project last February. As a reminder, we simply intended to uncover the existing wall, and build beds out front. How we ended up with construction crews, back hoes, concrete trucks...well, that's life isn't it?

Gonna eat me a lot of peaches...

"Moving to the country,
gonna eat me a lot of peaches...

Peaches come from a can,
they were put there by a man,
in a factory downtown.

If I had my little way,
I'd eat peaches every day...

Millions of peaches,
Peaches for me
Millions of peaches'
Peaches for free"

--Presidents of the United States, "Peaches"

So how'd I do on those lyrics? I can probably gurantee (yes, with one exception Aunt LoLo) that my middle school staff lounge was cooler than YOUR middle school staff lounge. We had copy machines. We had mondo rolls of colored butcher paper. We had....A Presidents' poster hanging on the wall. That's the kind of art work you choose when the drummer's mother is the school secretary!

Aunt LoLo and I were considered "hall passes" in school- if the hall pass was already taken, you could grab one of us to get through the school corridors without getting in trouble. We spent lots of time in the staff lounge running copies for teachers and the yearbook staff :) (Oh man. I'm getting nostalgic! Our high school reunion is this weekend...more on that later!)

So, in spite of the fact that I spent yesterday morning running around town trying to get an ultrasound, and the rest of the morning curled up in a ball of agony and defeat on Aunt LoLo's couch, using up every tissue I could find, drinking all kinds of hot liquids, and moaning quietly to myself whenever I thought they'd forgotten just.how.sick.I.was (because this head cold....it's a bad one), after the kids had taken their (puny! 1 hour!) naps, we threw everyone in my monster of a car and hit the road. We had peaches to buy, first off, and left that fruit stand a hundred pounds heavier than we came. Twenty pound boxes of Eastern Washington peaches for $11...that's a steal, right?

The rest of the trip...well, we hit 2 thrift stores, watched a shoplifter get wrassled down and handcuffed by 3 employees before the police showed up, and made a tour of the nearest asian market we could find. Dinner was so late that the girls went straight to bedtime routines after we cleared the dishes!

Aunt LoLo told the kids we had to get back in the car when we realized what was happening outside the store- she then told the kids that there was a cranky man. Yeah, and when the police showed up, we said the cranky man needed a time out. In jail.

8:00 this morning found us all together again, staring down 2 hot water canners, and 60 pounds of peaches ready for duty!

We ended up with:
26 quarts of peach quarters in light syrup
4 pints of peach jam
3 pints of peach butter
8 and 1/2 pounds of peach quarters in baggies to be frozen (we can make jam later, or just smoothies...or pie...or.... yum!)

About 20 pounds of too-green peaches are waiting for us to work on next week, and we're expecting an order of 40 pounds of apples to come in soon for apple sauce and apple butter. Then we're wondering, should we get in on a bulk order of tomatoes for canning?

September is for CANNERS!

Things Not to Say to a Pregnant Woman

A collection from over the years:

• I'm sure the extra curves are just muscle (but that's a sweet thought, right?)
• See this weight spike here on your chart?  That's the day you split the bagged salad with your friend you were just telling me about.
• Before your ultrasound appointment, please drink 4 glasses of water.  No bathroom breaks.
• You're 4 months pregnant?  Oh my goodness- you're not even showing yet!
• I'm sorry- your ultrasound appointment was on Monday.

So here's a funny story.  Mimi has a cold, and hasn't been sleeping well.  Now I have the cold and haven't been sleeping well. However, we got our whole family out the door by 7:30, dressed and breakfasted, dropped Mimi off at my sister's to play, and pulled into the hospital parking garage by 8:15.  At the check in desk, she says "Oh- I see your appointment was on Monday."  "Hmm...she told me Thursday."  "Oh really?  Let me check something."  So she proceeds to check us in and sends us down the hall.  

After filling out all our paperwork, and waiting about half an hour, the medical imaging receptionist comes over "I'm sorry- since you don't have an appointment, we might be able to squeeze you in at 10:30 (It was 9:00).  Maybe."  Hmm...if I don't have an appointment, why did they check us in?  And since you weren't even OPEN on Monday, why did someone schedule me for that day?  And since you always give reminder calls, why didn't I receive one?  "I really don't know dear, I'm very sorry- there's a direct line to scheduling right there next to your elbow."  

SO, we'll go back next Wednesday...and please, please never tell a pregnant woman with a full bladder, a horrible head cold,  and very, very little sleep "I'm sorry, your appointment was 2 days ago, we just forgot to ever tell you that."  

I'm pretty sure all I need is a bath and a little carton of Dibs, and I'd be a new woman!  

Cleaning Day and Smoke Monsters

Ernie's project from "Tuesday is Craft Day" I love the marker-stamped eyes, they're so...alluring! I nicely asked her to draw me, and to draw my body, and she looked at me blankly. "But Mom...I don't know how! I can only draw heads and legs, see?"

Today is Wednesday, which means today is "Wednesday Cleaning Day" for school. The girls were in charge of wiping down all the windows, which I thought was fitting since it was THEIR chalky handprints all over the glass. Ernie switched the laundry for me and lugged a full basket up the stairs- I'm going to miss when the girls fight over the chance to help with the laundry. Ernie started the dishwasher, too. I swept up and did the dishes, folded and put away laundry, and supervised.

I am out of my mind bored with the 15 books we found for school reading, so we picked up some longer ones on our weekly excursion. I was hoping for James and Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl, thinking it would be a nice companion story to all the peach canning that's been going on around here, but it wasn't on the shelf. I found a storybook-sized book though, by Mr. Dahl, called "The Minpins." It's all about a good little boy named Little Billy who always does what his mother says, and stares out the window at the forbidden-to-him "Forest of Sin" while his mother periodically calls to him from the next room asking him if he's being good. He sneaks out the window and into the forest, and is chased by the most fearsome, smoke-snorting, nightmare monster you ever dreamt up, and it's getting closer and closer, and he can feel the smoke on the back of his neck and he's running faster than he ever has before in his life and....I stopped reading and told Ernie we'd continue the next day. Oh the look on her face was completely priceless- she thought I'd lost my marbles. With a horrified grin and a brittle and cheerful voice she quavered "Oh Mommy, that story is....funny!" So we read a nice pop up book about kittens playing with yarn, and who can ever guess what the yarn will be, and they make a blanket and fall asleep under it. We DID continue the story the next day though, and he climbed miles high into a tree and discovered little people with heads the size of peas, the Minpins, and today's story time was much less tense.

Tomorrow's school schedule is up in the air. When we'd normally be finishing up breakfast and getting ready for school, I'll be at the hospital getting our ultrasound. Umm....wow. Does that mean I've finished half the pregnancy? The pregnancy that still hasn't quite sunk in? So in, like, 4 or 5 months we'll have a BABY. Yikes. Any guesses what that wonderful technician will tell us?

A Beginning

Along with the rest of our area, Ernie started school last week. We're doing Kindergarten together, and having such fun!

Our daily schedule is fairly easy, but it helps us to have a schedule. I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I can NOT believe the difference it has made in Ernie's moods to have this schedule set up, and for her to know that every morning she will have her mother's undivided attention. I've been home with her all her life, but I was surprised how much this has changed her outlook.

In the mornings we get breakfast going, and I clean up the kitchen while the girls finish up. While I shower, Ernie does her daily chores- brush teeth, brush hair, make bed, and get dressed, we use some really cute cards to remind her what to do, and simply can't remember which blog I printed them from. (If anyone knows, I'll add the link- there's a boy set in blue and a girl set in pink, and they're just adorable.)

When everyone is all set, the girls and I meet up in the school room (you know, the Smurf-colored one) and do our circle time. We always start with the song "I Am a Child of God" and have an opening prayer, then we pick stories and songs. Each month has a theme, and the stories and books and songs are based around that theme.

• September: End of Summer/summer fruits
• October: Halloween/Squash/Apples/Harvest
• November: Thanksgiving/Pilgrims/Fall
• December: Christmas
• January: Winter, preparing for baby
• February: Valentine’s Day/Baby
• March: Spring
• April: Easter
• May: May Day
• June: First Day of Summer

Each day has a special activity attached as well

• Monday is baking day (this lends itself well to math lessons, as well as working on motor skills and taking turns!  Last we went blackberry picking in the backyard and made blackberry ice cream.  Mimi's berry bucket is on the right.)
• 
• Tuesday is crafts day
• Wednesday is cleaning day (If school is at home, we better be working on more than just the 3 R's!  I want them to learn to care for their homes, and to learn that having a home is a privilege and a blessing)
• 
• Thursday is painting day
• 
• Friday is music day

The activities are also tied to the monthly theme, and to our stories and books.  This is where we bring in skills that need to be worked on- penmanship, math, spelling, etc.  Every day has outside play time as well, rain or shine- they're learning to love a little bit of rain!  (No, I'm not a heartless beast- I wouldn't send them out if it's miserable.  But what's a little sprinkling of rain to girls with slickers and rubber boots and great big imaginations?)  

Make it Blue!

(Quick note to Aunt LoLo: I know what picture you took of me that night. Please, for the love of my dignity, note that this is a NICE picture. Very nearly flattering. Right? You wouldn't even consider posting a picture of me, would you? Of course not. Phhhbt)

My dearest loveliest twin sister knows that I am, for all intents and purposes, insane right now. So when I asked her if she wouldn't just LOVE to come over after her kids were in bed and help me paint the playroom blue...of course she said yes!

(It might also have been because she's had to look at a half yellow-half blue room ever since she moved back, because we had the fellow who painted the ceilings last year do the "cutting in" for the walls, but we never got around to painting them. Yeah, it was a classy look- this blue is almost identical to painters tape, everyone thought we had tape stuck to our walls all year long.)

The room is now the most beautiful shade of sky blue. Like the deep blue of a perfect sky on a summer afternoon, when you can't even believe anything natural could be that color, but it is. And my back playroom is THAT color. Yes, I adore it!

I've put 2 or 3 coats of KILZ primer on the window sills, and still need a few more coats to get good coverage (they appear to be untreated wood- they're simply soaking up as much primer as I can throw at them. Few more coats and I will WIN this battle!) The wood trim will ultimately be a bright shiny white like the front rooms of the house we painted last summer.