VeganMom...stumbling through life

Monday, May 26, 2008

Dwarf equisetum in the rock garden

Oriental poppy buds: soon it will be full of gorgeous orange flowers

We had a wonderful long weekend, with lots of good family time and lots of good weeding time. Mark got a lot of pruning done, too, so the garden is in pretty good shape for the moment. There are still plenty more weeds for me to pull, but I already have over half of the gardens weeded, which is good for the end of May. The bindweed is vicious this year! I'm so glad it comes out easily, but there is more than usual, and it grows so fast I need to stay on it.

Our baby robins all fledged and left the nest on Friday and Saturday. I spent lots of time roaming up and down our block doing "ground checks" to make sure none of the babies were stuck on the ground and vulnerable to cats. We have a couple that I am feeding outside that I can't yet get near that I was worried about. L and I did our ground checks to ensure that everyone was safely up out of reach by dark. It seems so quiet and empty out front now. I'm hoping for another clutch soon!

This afternoon we went to my parents' for a cookout. Food was good, but since it was so windy and muggy at that time, we ate in the house. When we left there, we went to the new Menards store. We needed some odds and ends and hadn't yet been in the newly opened store. It's huge, but since they were closing early today, we only had 20 minutes to grab what we needed and get out. When we returned home, it was so beautiful, we stayed outside until bedtime.

L. chatting with Grandma Carolyn

M. chatting with his parents

While M. worked out on the patio on his daily blog entry, I pitched the hot-pink baseball, so L. could practice her batting. My eye-hand coordination is really not good, so it's always a mystery where my pitched ball will end up. It makes batting practice more exciting. ;D L. got her first major injury of tonight while batting. She swung at the ball, missed, and the bat kept going and struck her in the back of the head. It really hurt, and she sobbed. I felt horrible for her and even more horrible, because I had to work really, really, hard not to laugh. It looked pretty humorous, and it is so something that I would do, but she would have been very sad if I had laughed aloud at the incident. I managed to keep my laughter inside, but I still felt a little guilty about it. She rested with an ice pack on her head for a little bit and then was ready to get back to practicing.

The second injury occured after we were in her room and settling down for reading time. We're currently reading book 1 from the Trixie Belden series, which I loved as a child. M. let her pick out a light bulb called a "party bulb" from Menards (yeah, I left them alone for a couple of minutes at Menards--that's what happens). I was reading and wasn't paying attention to the fact that she had a bandana in her hand and was going to use it to unscrew the very-hot light bulb that was currently in her lamp. She screamed "OW", I looked up, saw what happened, and started to run to the medicine cabinet to get the aloe gel. She reminded me, as her little finger was burning, that we had just put an aloe plant in her room the day before, so we pinched off a tip, applied it, and it felt better. It was a hard night for my baby girl!

The big aloe plant that I keep in the kitchen, for my many burns and mishaps, had 'babies'. Last weekend, when we repotted plants, I put each of the babies in a pot, so the girls could each have one in their rooms. I like to have at least one plant in every room, and those are practical, easy and fun. It turned out to be useful right away.

With nine days left of school, Dej will no longer be attending Parker (the regular high school that she attends in the mornings) other than just going in to take her final exams. She will continue with afternoons at the International Academy. I look forward to telling the very long and enlightening story about the police state that is called Parker High School, but it will have to wait for another day. I am actually fairly relaxed at the moment, and I don't want to get my adrenaline going by revisiting that story.