Category Archives: Uncategorized

Bad Night

I posted this last night and for reasons unknown to me it didn’t pop up on top, so here it is front and center and I’ll work on figuring out what I’m doing for next time!

It was a bad night. Two girls who did NOT want to go to sleep. I’ll spare you all the details and instead share two pictures that help remind me that they aren’t always monsters.

Clara has for the most part been an easy going baby, she’s had her issues but in general she’s as sweet as she looks in this picture. She’s scooting around on the verge of true crawling and true trouble making as she explores every inch of her world. Today the Occupational Therapist gave Clara her stamp of approval. Torticollis is doing great and we don’t have to go back she just needs to keep crawling!

Ivy’s got so much to say lately, and while sometimes I want to go stick cotton in my ears because she NEVER STOPS TALKING it’s so fun to hear about what’s going on in that head of hers. Because believe me if it’s being thought about it’s being talked about. Some of my favorite comments of her’s today:

On seeing a dead frozen quail in our freezer: Oh Mom, that quail is so nice Mom, so nice and so dead, that quail is so dead Mom. (All spoken in a nice soft sort of voice)

On the state of things part way through the Bad Night: “We going to live happily ever after, I was really naughty but now I good and we going to live happily ever after.”
This picture, totally Ivy. I’m not sure if she’s making a face or just in the middle of talking but it makes me smile to see it.

So now I’ll go to bed and hope that the monsters from tonight will disappear and my sweet baby and chatty happy girl are the ones who greet me in the morning.

Yard Work


I don’t like yard work, I think I could blame it on the child labor that was extracted out of me growing up, but I think my mom might read this so I won’t. Instead I would just like to say, (Mom and Grandpa are you listening?) That I do have SOME standards!

1) Green is good. Well unless it’s purple (creeping charlie), yellow (dandilions), white (clover), or brown (well this color isn’t good but the cow pasture from the neighbors floods parts of our yard with…umm… “dirt” and it’s brown and there isn’t much I can do about it).
2) It should be short. Unless short means that I have to mow it more than once every 7 (or 14) days, then it can be a bit longer. Or if I lose a kid in it, then it’s time to mow, but they yell really loud so that takes some serious length.
3)I want to walk in it barefoot.

Ok fine I have ONE standard, but it’s something right???
So that leads me to my problem. I have too many thistles, and since this directly violates standard number 3 I have been trying to do something about it. The problem is my lack of an other standards are making it sort of difficult. A weed killer you say… well then I would have no lawn (see standard number 1) . So I have been digging thistles, a LOT of thistles, three wheelbarrows full and counting, that kind of a LOT of thistles. Now I have about half my lawn thistle free, Horray! New problem: driving the wheelbarrow is getting difficult due to all the ankle breaking holes left from the thistle removing. This leads me to my big problem with yard work. You spend time, lots of time (if you are a certain kind of person all your time, if you are me as little as you can get away with) because it’s always SOMETHING, and what do you end up with, a short green thing you can walk across…

While I have been digging thistles, Ivy and Clara have been playing on a blanket together while storm wanders around the yard (she finally figured out it’s not a good idea to catch the thistles I throw on the pile). See…

Oh right… so what’s actually happening is that Storm is eating sticks and grass and creating lawn shrapnel all over the blanket while Clara has crawled off the blanket in search of her own lawn to chew on and Ivy found a toad.
Just after this picture was taken Storm and Clara noticed the toad and both tried to eat it.

Tomorrow I’m going to work on the flower beds!

My Husband

This is my husband He is a wonderful husband, dad, sometimes farmer, car mechanic, general fix it guy, and then he goes to work as a chemist. Couldn’t ask for more out of a guy! Now he tries to deny the nerdy chemist side of himself sometimes, but when I find something like this in the kitchen it’s hard for him to argue, he is a chemistry nerd. This is what he did when trying to figuring out how to use tomato paste instead of tomato juice in a stew. Did I mention he also cooks? And the stew turned out delicious! But when you use stoichiometry in your cooking, you are a chem nerd, sorry honey!