Adventures in Mama-Land

... is NOTHING when you see them spread out in a garden! Next year, I'm going to aim for something like 40, at least!!! This is basically what they look like, lost in the mulch. Plus, the really nice dramatic pinky kong coleus you see in the upper-middle were an impulse purchase at Plant World. Hopefully, I'll manage to clone and nurture a few more of these through the winter. I am definitely using the windowsill propagators to coax a whooooooole bunch of them along. Anyway, guess what we're eating? Well, starting to eat...! Here's a picture I took a few days ago. Since then, the garden has produced two edible yummy-red strawberries. It took all I had not to pick any and eat them the last two days (Shavuos). Tomorrow, first thing, we're heading out and those strawberries had better be there!!! Garden high: ~ Too many to count, including petunias that I grew from seeds with such lovely pastelly flowers and a delicate candy fragrance Garden low: ~ Continued ...

But anyway, it was not that memorable:  Superstore chicken, roast tatoes, carroty mushrooms in winey sauce.   Hoeing beds tonight in the children's garden... unfortunately, it was real WORK, not enough useful adults to help out, so it wasn't much about the kids this time around.  Nice cool evening, though, and v v cathartic work.  YM really threw himself into it, perhaps to make up for his general Gameboy badness this week.   (he just bought it on sunday and last night at bedtime claimed he had no idea where it was... yeah, right... it had been charging all evening, then vanished at bedtime???)   Anyway, in the morning - surprise! - it was miraculously "found" in his dresser drawer.  I told Ted I'd deal with it, and when I came out, asked him to hand it over, thinking I'd take it away for Wednesday, give it back on Thursday.  He did it pretty agreeably; I was surprised.  But then, ha ha ha, talking to Ted later it turned out ...

Well, you didn't ask, but another mama (with one boy, about 5) asked me the other day how I can possibly stay so calm and deal with all the things that come up in this life of ours with kids. With four children, and being a bit older than some, I guess I'm sometimes seen as some kind of expert, and since I'm not running around screaming and my kids are generally well-behaved and reasonably clean (guess they don't look close up). My "snap" response is always "you should see my friend with 8 kids", which sounds snarky, but I do mean it with all my heart. How could four possibly be any kind of burden when there are mamas with 7 or 9 or 13 or more? Everybody's response to that one, by the way, is a little sad: "well, when you have that many, they're basically raising each other." I hate that line, by the way. If it happens that the older kids are able to nurture the younger ones and sometimes care for them independently, well, wher...

Supper: Salmon, Spinach & Ricotta patties (is there a more elegant word for patty?)... with parsley and dill from the garden. "Sauce" is just sour cream with parsley and green onions from the garden (& salt & pepper)! Here's the front perennial bed... it's actually looking like something - a little bit. This week's most beautiful surprise has been the irises "borrowed" from the torn-down bulldozed house across the street. I transplanted them as a huge flat chunk of shoots waaaay back in March. The asian gardening lady assured me they were lilies - well, they're not. My mother said she could tell by the fan shape of the clusters that they were irises, and she was right. As irises have been emerging everywhere in the neighbourhood over the last two weeks, I have been kind of dreading their appearance, fearing they would be exceedingly common-looking; either yellow, or purple... but I never dreamed they would be BOTH. I didn't choose the...

Well, actually, I'm going to leave out the words and let the pictures do the talking... dare I be optimistic that our garden doesn't look totally poopish (yet?) this year??? But we met our friendly neighbourhood raccoon pest last night, out marking his territory in our back yard and the neighbour's... looks like he's a vicious one (ok, the raccoon, NOT the neighbour). So now I'm scared that he's going to dig up my lettuces and go after the strawberries, etc. The neighbour says the two things they hate are ammonia and human urine. We have ammonia; we have urine... this can be arranged. Anyway, a picture says a thousand words, so here are 30 pictures:

How could you ever live in a house if somebody died building it? Or, like in the World According to Garp, would you consider it "pre-accidented" and therefore, extra-safe?

How could you ever live in a house if somebody died building it? Or, like in The World According to Garp, would you consider it "pre-accidented" and therefore extra-safe?