Oh, just humor me here. I’d like to remember those sunny days in the garden.
My neighbor called this a mock rose. I’m not sure if that’s right, but suddenly I see them all over town. Strange, I don’t remember ever seeing this flower in the yard before, so it either took a while to mature or I am totally spacing buying it last year.
Lots of blueberries this year. Still hoping to make it to a you pick place though. We go through at least 20 pounds a year… probably way underestimating that.
This cool flower has an awesome story. We were eating at Word of Mouth Cafe and exploring the little garden during a long wait (quite common there). I was explaining plants to Tuesday and the care taker of the garden was so impressed with our interest that she insisted on pulling this up to give to us for our garden. So very sweet, we treasure it!
Yay! Our little paw-paws are going to make it! Check out my DIY slug solution, copper tape right around the trunk. I forced myself to pull of the one fruit I found developing. It’s a must do with very young fruit trees in order for them to focus more energy on growing bigger and stronger instead of producing fruit. Also note: Yes, I have not been a perfect weeder this year. The belly gets in the way!
Tuesday makes sure I don’t get to try many of these:
Which might not be such a bad thing… I bit into one, took a look at it and had JUST missed a potato bug crunching in my mouth, EWWWWW. I’m trying some natural solutions now so hopefully they don’t all get munched up before we can eat them.
Our peonies blooming for the first year. This frilly lady…
And her understated friend. 3 more varieties still to bloom. We picked them out last year from Adelman’s. It was so hard to choose, but some day when they are all filled in above the rock wall I think they will be just stunning.
I was going to take it a bit easy on the yard this year, seeing as how I’m due in the summer and worried about keeping up with it all. I couldn’t resist a whole bunch of tomatoes, and then I needed to fill up some spots with annuals. Then I decided annuals were so much work that I planted a few new perennial borders… and on, and on. I really do think I’m done planting now (unless a Rose De Berne tomato plant falls in my lap, I couldn’t find one this year). So it’s going to be mostly upkeep: dead-heading roses, preventive treatments against pests, pruning, thinning, and of course, weeding. I also must not forget to water the plants on the porch. I’ll keep you updated on my progress. For now the sweet smelling rain has me indoors; organizing and sewing. I’m not complaining. Much.
Celebrating crafts, kids and the everyday through photographs.
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This fall I was looking around for a dance place that would take Tuesday before 3, since her birthday wasn’t until January. The regular studios said they were too strict for a two year old, and I was looking more for fun. I found the YMCA’s program and we’ve been so happy with it. She goes once a week for a little half hour class. At first there were too many kids so they separated the classes and she ended up with just seven in hers, a perfect amount. Her teacher is the sweetest thing and Tuesday loves dancing. Midway through the program she had her “I don’t want to go in there alone” moments. It was strange, because she had done so well. But we just left the door open for her and she walked into class whenever she was ready. She got over that and has been pretty excited about dance ever since.
Of course that was taken up a whole new level a few weeks ago when she got to get into her costume, make up (done by grandma) and get her picture taken for class. I was at my baby shower (will blog about it soon, it was so awesome it deserves its own post) so my mom and Bill took her. Bill has three boys, so he got quite the kick out of all the poofy skirt, eye shadow craziness.
I’d say she was enjoying herself. I wasn’t planning on putting much makeup on her, but after my mom did (Tuesday’s request: 50 pounds of make up please), I acquiesced and I have to admit it was a big part of making her excited about dress rehearsal and recital nights.
I rarely put any make up on so the lipstick I dug up was from my wedding… 5 years ago! Tuesday had fun picking some blues from a palette with tons of colors that I got talked into at Sephora a year ago.
These are the poses she came up with for my camera (before the recital).
Hahahaha, I love them. They totally crack me up.
After this we took her and dropped her off at 5:15. The show didn’t start until 6:30, and we didn’t get to pick her up until intermission an hour later. I’ve never just dropped her off somewhere before so it was quite a shock to me how well she did. The night before, rehearsal, the parent helper said she had to be taken to the bathroom three times! And there were no parents helpers the night of the show, but she did totally fine. She squealed with glee when I went to get her from her teacher, dangling a little cellophane bag in my face and exclaiming that it had, “two crayons, two balloons, and TWO CANDIES IN IT!!!!”
She got to see her grandparents and was so excited that her nana brought her the cutest little mini bouquet. She wanted to go sit back down and watch all the rest of the dances. After everyone she asked, “can we watch more dance?!?!”
Here’s the one picture I got before I realized it was silly to try and take pictures, and I should just enjoy the under 2 minute routine.
I’m keeping her in the summer dance program, mostly because the class is at the exact same time and I’m trying to have some continuity to her days through the summer/baby arriving. It will be all about dance this summer, as the only show I’ve deemed appropriate from birth is So You Think You Can Dance. That’s right, I don’t own a TV and won’t let Tuesday watch anything (save a few Thomas episodes when she’s sick), but I am down with SYTYCD. She loves the routines, and does some nice interpretive stuff on the floor in front of our projector, it’s quite cute.
Now I realize that this post was almost entirely for me and the grandparents, but man, I just can’t help it. I should tack on a little bonus and dig up pictures of Bj and I in our dance classes! -
My computer completely crashed. My hard drive fried and I had to start from scratch. That means I (and by I in these instances I almost always mean Bj) had to format my hard drive. You should know what formatting means if you have a digital camera because formatting is the best way to clean off a memory card after you import photos (simply deleting them leaves you with a messy card and can cause problems). When you format a hard drive on a computer you’re left with a computer like you’d get new. It’s empty, it has none of your applications, preferences, files, photos, or anything else on it. Does that sounds scary? If you don’t back up your computer it should scare you!
I’m not trying to brag here, but I’ve got a pretty good system in place for not downloading crap, keeping myself from getting viruses and generally being very responsible with my computer. Still a legit program brought my computer down because of an incompatibility that I hadn’t addressed. A tiny little over site (I have to calibrate my monitor for printing with pro labs and the software was out of date so it set off a chain of events). Really your computer could crash at any time, and statistically will crash, probably before you want it to.
So how do I have a sweet little picture of a baby up there when it should be in computer file wasteland? I BACK MY STUFF UP AND YOU SHOULD TOO! I admit that my system is maybe a bit of an over kill, but I do have other people’s memories to worry about. Here’s what I do (basically, because the technical stuff is all Bj): I have external hard drives sitting right behind my computer, plugged in and my time machine is constantly backing them up. Then they back each other up. One of the drives is extra large and has everything on it one more time (redundancy is the key, you must assume something will fail you). Once a month that extra large drive goes to a safe deposit box (really any where off site will work) and another comes back in it’s place. This is because I feel if someone came to steal my computer they’d probably take the drives, and if there was a fire, everything would be toast, so I want something off site. That’s my system. It seems crazy, and it actually took me a while to make myself put it into place. These things do take time away from taking pictures, scrapbooking, sewing, etc. Now that it is in place though it is pretty easy to keep up. Of course re-installing programs, and putting everything back onto the computer when it crashed was a lot of work (a couple long nights for Bj), but it is so awesome that everything I was working on is right at my finger tips again (the only thing I don’t back up is my desktop, because it’s a temporary holding place for me, so I do loose a few things if I have things only there, but usually they’re copies of files).
So I can not stress this enough. If you have all your photos on your computer, and mail messages, and files and applications, and heck phone back ups, you need to be backing up! There are online sites that can help (you up load your stuff to a cloud) if you have a smaller amount of data. Find something that works for you and make it a priority. Trust me, if this can happen to me, it can happen to you.
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