May on the farm

Delightful as ever!

Mother's Day 2010: Japanese maple

For Mother's Day I asked for a day of gardening without primary child care responsibilities. I love gardening with Tristen, but it's easier to make headway on projects if Chris is on duty.

Saturday, we picked out a Japanese Maple for our corner. On Sunday morning, after Chris and Tristen made pancakes (Brenda's recipe!), Tristen and I headed out to dig up the sod while Chris procured a truckload of mulch. By the end of the day, we had turned the soil, amended it with compost, planted the tree, and sunk a few pieces of old drain pipe in the ground. We've since planted the pipes with tufts of scotch moss and surrounded them with bluegrass. By end of summer, we'll have a rockery to keep all the mulch from sliding onto the sidewalk. I'll plant some lobelia and other ground covers, too.

Almost four

Tough week. He looks perfectly calm here, but this week he has disrupted naptime at preschool, peed himself on purpose, taken down an entire produce aisle at the co-op, thrown an oven mitt in my soup (it splashed all over me -- and yes, Beth, the mitt was one of yours), and been defiant nearly every way a little boy can be. It's different than when he was a toddler and would throw an occassional tantrum. These days it feels more like he's on a deliberate, personal mission to push us to the brink of insanity.

Nature bracelets with Tristen and Ruby

Ruby came over on Friday! We made bread dough, read books, went to Cloud City, walked the neighborhood, and made nature bracelets (which we've been doing since Tristen was two)! TOTALLY FUN.

More birdbaths

I think my birdbath fetish may be winding down. Does everyone who wants one have one? Eric and Fred took the blue leaf one. Another wound up at our preschool auction.

Some may be "gifted" to random lawns throughout Seattle -- under the cover of darkness, of course.