Weekend In Review

I came home from blueberry picking last Friday evening to find a lovely "vase" full of "flowers" that my favorite little boy picked for me and my husband kindly put in a jar with some water. Craig was home with the kids that day (I'm jealous!) and they were riding around in the driveway on bikes/trikes/tractors when I returned.

I miss them like crazy when I'm at work and always look forward to coming home to our evening routine of dinner, bath and bedtime. Sophie is getting better and better at our prayer time and doing the Sign of the Cross. She is also learning and singing along to the Adie Camp song I sing to her when I rock her or lay beside her before bed: Only You. (One of the cutest things ever.) She remembers a lot of song lyrics and loves to sing and be sung to.

Speaking of bedtime, Sophie's made some improvements from her initial going-to-sleep habits since moving to the big bed. We went from this (or the halfway-under-the-dresser position):

... to now (quite often) this:

She almost never calls for us anymore; she doesn't turn her light on anymore; and she usually doesn't get up more than once now. After we put her back in bed once, we usually check on her later to find her asleep IN bed.

On Saturday morning, Will and I drove a whopping one and a half hours southwest to Defiance to visit another new farm. It was a hot day and we walked quite a bit all over the farm, but it was very interesting to learn about how they naturally raise their animals for meat and we had a good time. More about this trip to come in a future post.

Sophie spent the morning with daddy and both kids took naps when we got home.

Sophie ended up waking from nap before Will and spent some time riding his tractor outside to keep the house quiet for him.

She and I decided to run to the library to exchange some books while Craig stayed home waiting for Will to wake up.

Good afternoon, Sleepy Head!

If Will has even a few minutes to spare outside, he will hop on his bike any chance he gets. We haven't practiced without training wheels recently though and I want to get back on that.

On Sunday morning, we packed up and headed to the beach again.

This visit was much less about playing in the sand... and much more about seeing how far out into the water we could walk (per Will's request).

Then they'd race back to the beach. :)

The other big hit was the small beach ball we brought and blew up. They both love to play catch.

The wind occasionally took charge of our tosses. ;)

Craig was just sitting on the beach snapping pictures the whole time we were playing catch so I tried to get him up off his booty. ;)

Wrapping it up for lunch.

We had a picnic lunch at one of the tables on the lakeside beach.

Sophie chooses to put every food into her mouth in the most awkward way possible. It cracks me up. She often attempts to eat her sandwiches and pancakes with the flat side squashing into her face first. Crazy girl. So it didn't surprise me at all to see her eating a pretzel rod by taking a bite out of the middle (on the side) instead of biting off of one end.

The lakeside beach is really pretty (Lake Erie) but the sand is coarser with more icky "lake stuff" washed up at the water's edge, so we mostly frolic on the inland beach across the parking lot, which is basically just a large pond with a nice, sandy beach.

You know that inspirational message to "Dance like no one's watching"? Ya. Will does that all the time. There was music playing down the beach from us and he stood up on the bench to break it down a little. ;)

So, of course, Soph followed suit.

Our little camera man wanted to take another picture on my camera.

He took these too. :)

And this one. Can't really blame him... they were good cookies. ;)

We walked out to feed the sea gulls some pretzels crumbs. I'm sure the park/resort staff would be thrilled about that. Sea gulls are so intriguing to kids though!

After nap time, we met up with Craig's family to go out to dinner for Grandma's birthday.

Newsflash!

Nagoya (Japanese restaurant with cook-in-front-of-you hibatchi grills) is a perfect restaurant to take kids to! Entertainment AND food...

...AND chopsticks!!

Craig and I tried the "cowboy rolls" as an appetizer. I loved the wasabi and (pickled?) ginger on the side.

Sophie did really well with her chopsticks. They gave the kids sets that were connected so they were easier to use. Sophie's already pretty good at using tongs at home for Tot School activities so she was very focused and interested in eating this way. She even ate more vegetables than usual just because of this new element of fun. Maybe I'll have to start serving her vegetables with chopsticks more often!

The kids were entertained with a few raw veggies that I brought (leftover from our beach picnic) and then shortly after, the entertainment began. Perfect!

They also tasted the soup and salad that are served with hibatchi dinners. (The kids split a child-size hibatchi chicken dinner.) Both kids liked the soup but not the dressing on the salad. I LOVE their ginger dressing!

The show begins! Sophie was a little scared of the big flame, but they both were very entertained with all the chopping, flipping, clinking and tossing.

Here, they were watching the cook toss pieces of food to each of us to catch in our mouths. I'm pretty sure this was Craig's turn and he's anticipating the toss. Craig and I are both pretty good at this and Will thought it was hilarious.

Here comes the famous onion tower that becomes a volcano (or I've also seen it done as a steam engine train).

Ooooh! Ahhhh!

Kelly catching food.

Grandma's turn!

:)

Will's turn! He really tried and they gave him several opportunities. Even though he never caught one, he still really enjoyed it and found it very entertaining.

Back to my in laws home for dessert...

Sophie & Celia played in a tub of water most of the evening and their dresses were drenched. Ahh, fun.

Toddler smooches. :)

A Visitor in the Garden

One evening a couple weeks ago, I was outside watering the garden while Craig was reading to Will at bedtime. I spotted a praying mantis on the wood border at the edge of the green beans and knew Will would think that was cool. So I ran in to grab my camera...

I snapped a few pics of it climbing on the leaves and then down on the ground and went back inside to show Will when I said goodnight to him.
Ha! It's looking right at me in this one!

Speaking of the garden, I think we're doing pretty well considering I keep hearing from everyone that "it's been a bad year for gardens"!

Our little plot has come a long way! These pictures were taken in mid-June shortly after my seed-planted vegetables started sprouting. I planted green beans (bush variety) and cucumbers from seed. I had no idea what I was doing and was literally ecstatic when the first little sprouts starting popping up out of the ground. Those are green beans all along the front, cucumber in the back left (to the right of the wood stick), an orange pear-shaped tomato in the back middle, and the row on the far right are jalapenos.

Here, the row on the far left are green beans (front to back) and everything else are tomatoes (Romas, "big boys", etc.).

I started my herbs with basil, parsley, cilantro and thyme and ended up just pulling out the cilantro when it looked so poor. The rest of the herbs have grown and filled out since this was taken.

Oh my gosh, it was like watching your child learn a new skill when I discovered my first growing vegetable: jalapenos! I was SO PROUD. LOL ;)

We watered and watered and weeded and watered some more. Our poor grass was brown all around the garden but you can bet our vegetable plants were green and lush. ;)

And now look how it's grown! We've staked the jalapenos, put up a wire "trellis" for the cucumbers and caged as many tomatoes as we could fit.

The beans are just starting to show up now, but I've got lots of jalapenos ready, TONS of tomatoes that aren't fully ripe yet (only about four have ripened so far) and I've gotten three cucumbers off and about five more growing right now!

Cucumbers climbing.

I had a feeling when we were planting that we might have WAY overdone the tomatoes. I think I was right. We're going to be eating salsa and bruschetta and BLTs out the wazoo here in a couple of weeks. Hopefully they stagger their ripening just a little. I did buy a food mill recently that I'm excited to try out soon for making homemade tomato marinara. And I can see about 3-4 green peppers that are growing well too so far.

Loads of tomatoes:

Jalapenos:

These are still tiny yet, but you can see about four cucumbers starting here:

And I cannot wait for these little pear-shaped tomatoes to ripen. They should be orange and taste as sweet or sweeter than cherry tomatoes. YUM! Pretty soon, the kids are going to be able to snap some beans and these tomatoes off to eat while they're out playing. :)

These were the first things I pulled from the garden last week:

And just a couple days ago, I went out to water and did a double take at what I must have missed for a little while. Did this really grow that quickly without me seeing it? It's a cucumber hiding behind the metal bars and it's HUGE!

Here's a picture Will took of Sophie and I right after I pulled the big cucumber.

And here's Will pointing out another tomato that's nearly ripe (you can't see it under the leaves - they ripen first/best in darker places).

So that's where we are so far. We're already planning to expand next year with another small plot behind the garage! :)