something went horribly awry with our carrots!!

they are hysterical looking! well, they tasted good, that's what's important.

here's a close-up of my favorite one:

haha!

maggie had a good night after all

no midnight pooping. whew! she maybe even nursed a little less. she didn't sleep lying across my back like the other night anyway.

today was another hot one! what a summer. we went to hendrick's head with some friends and went swimming. nina's first swim in the ocean! it was cold, but not painfully so. she was so brave! even maggie went in up to her neck. she really liked being at about waist level though, she's never been able to walk in that depth before, usually water is up to her ankles or over her head. she particularly enjoyed sitting in water up to her neck and playing tea party. she'd shriek with delight/cold whenever she sat down, but she really loved it. then they both rolled in the sand, what a mess in the car... oh well, i gave them a bath outside in their wagon when we got home and it was all good. who knew wagons could have so many uses?

but i am TIRED! so i think i'm going to bed now. maybe first i'll have a little more of the gazpacho i made from the last of the houses' cucumbers and some of ours (and store bought--i mean, world garden grown--tomatoes.) it was yummy!

we have rediscovered the video camera

so, here's a little video! it's a song and dance they learned at story hour.

oh bounty of the garden!

today i made tzasiki (wow i bungled that spelling, that's what happens when blogspot's spellcheck offers me no suggestions. anyway, it's a greek cucumber/yogurt sauce) from a cucumber from the houses' garden! they just live up the road, their garden is practically my garden. the world is my garden, that's my new slogan. now all of the stuff i buy at the grocery store comes from my world garden. broadening my definitions to bring success to me, that's what i'm doing. :-P

no, really, i have harvested a tomato, quite a few snap peas, 2 green beans, some cilantro (a teeny bit), and 2 cucumbers in the past several days. bounteous indeed!!! tomorrow i'm gonna grab some basil for the pizza. woot.

lovely day with the girls today. did a trolly ride (maggie asked if she could ring the bell, and nina and their friend james followed suit). got gummies (lobsters) at ornes before that, and ran around on the library lawn. then did some more swimming. maggie didn't nap, so she fell asleep pretty promptly at like, 7:30. then she woke up at 9 ish and farted, so we'll see how the night goes... if there's a poop, we'll be up for sure until that's taken care of. only my children could pass gas at night and send a shiver down their mother's spine. oh harbinger of what's to come!

i jest. kind of. it's just that maggie, and nina at maggie's age, seems to save up poops for bedtime. we'll be nursing, she'll start to close her eyes... all serene... almost asleep!.. and then, "toot!" and i know it's all over. in a few minutes she's wide awake, "i have to poop!!", headed off to the bathroom, and re-energized from a nice poop. i can be certain it'll be at least a half an hour from that fateful fart until she's asleep. do they save them up for bedtime to buy time? is that even possible?

we dissected squid on saturday!!

wow was that cool. it was me, nina, yvonne, marily, and henry and renee. nina and i each had our own squid, because she didn't want to share any of the cutting up with me. our tools were a pair of scissors and a pair of tweezers. the specimens were ordinary calamari squid, ordered from restaurant suppliers (i forget their "scientific" name). nina did a great job following along with the instructor for about 3/4 of the class (which lasted for over an hour). only at the end did she lose interest and start cutting off the tentacles. well, she'd been asking when could she cut off the tentacles from the beginning, it was just at the end when she started to lose interest that i told her to go ahead and have fun. poor squid ended up pretty well diced!

after that we looked at the aquarium for a while, pet some sharks, held some starfish and hermit crabs at the touch tank, and then hung out at mom and dad's house with the crew. it was a fantastic weekend!

the girls had a great time playing balderdash on saturday (and sunday, by popular request!). i was partners with renee and she was hysterical. my favorite was one from the movie category. the movie's name was "hambone and hellie" and renee came up with 'two boys find a pig, and train him to eat bacon. the movie ends sadly when the pig eats himself.' i almost pulled a muscle laughing so hard!

one time renee tried to use "pee" in an answer, and maggie laughed and laughed. (i managed to get her to change it to "pea"). maggie kept asking renee to say pee for the rest of the night. ah yes, the potty humor lives on. ("what's the german word for pink? fart!" maggie came up with that one tonight).

2 flower girl dresses down, 1 to go

woo hoo! i got to work on maggie's today while the girls went to play with the mosses. now just a little more work on laura's cousin's dress (she's the 3rd flower girl), and they'll be done! of course, i'll put a picture up, but not one of the girls wearing them. just the dresses on hangers. it's going to be too difficult to keep them clean if they try them on.

so, henry and marilyn are here with the kids, the girls were sooooooo excited to see them. we've been counting down the days for a week! maggie seems to have really taken to yvonne, which is great because she rarely goes for people. i saw her sitting on yvonne's lap earlier. she barely even sits on nick's lap! what a break for me!

we harvested 2 cucumbers today. i think it's funny that i wasn't planning on planting cucumbers (art gave me 4 plants because he only wanted 2 but they came in a 6 pack. such a nice neighbor! i have to check and see how the tomatoes i gave him are doing... i wonder if he has tomatoes yet? i have one that is ALMOST ripe!) oops, where was i going? oh yeah, i wasn't even planning on planting cukes because they give nick heartburn, but they're thus far my most successful crop. and it's good because nina devours them. maggie leats them too, but not as much as nina.

oh, and we're finally growing an orka! what i thought was an okra was actually a flower bud, which sat there and did nothing for a month, then out of the blue flowered, and then the petals fell off and there was a super soft, tiny little okra. i really love seeing how all of these veggies grow. now if i could only get enough to eat...

the plagues really hit today

first it was mosquitoes. swarms and swarms of mosquitoes. we went outside to play in the morning, as usual, and i ambled over to the garden, coffee in hand, to see how my amazing cucumbers are doing (we've picked 2 so far, pics to come of course!). well after about 5 second of staring mournfully at my pumpkins, which are not and will not do anything, i noticed like, 20 mosquitoes on my legs! ick!! i brushed them off but more were coming. i called over to mom who was with the girls on the swingset, and they were starting to get attacked too. we had to run inside!! i even put my coffee down it was that bad. i have no idea what happened... we don't have standing water anywhere, but they were all in the grass, in front and in back. not so bad at mom and dad's house, but still a few by the pool when normally there'd be none. SO strange!

some friends i talked to today didn't have mosquitoes but did have big problems with deer flies. mom and dad had about 20 flies of some sort in their house too.

and upstairs i keep find little fruit flies or fruit fly like things in the bathroom sink.

THEN, we had severe thunder storms this evening. water leaked into the basement through the trap door at the bottom of the chimney. well, leaked isn't really the word, more like poured. but actually that kind of worked out for us--nina is really scared of the thunder, but you can't hear it so much down there, and we all got so wrapped up in mopping up the water that we missed the worst of the storm.

now everything is calm, knock on wood. ahh, summer!

you know what 2-year-olds think is funny?

potty talk!

almost-5-year-olds also find it pretty funny. these two really crack each other up. highbrow life going on here!

well, the other day nina was writing in her diary, and asked me how to spell "apple."

A-P-P-L-E, i said.

"mom!!" said maggie "no potty talk!!"

i started to explain that the letter P was ok to say... but then i gave up. shades of meaning are lost on 2-year-olds.

also dangerous is serving peas for dinner (pea... pee... pee-pee... pee-nis... so many possibilities, such edifying dinner conversation).

oh and my all time favorite: "maggie, do you want butter or jelly on your bagel?"
maggie: "i want fart on my bagel!"


edited to add:
as i was hitting "publish" on this post, nina called out "mom, maggie is calling me 'winnie the pooh-pooh!'" if only she'd use her powers for good instead of evil!

and, after i hit publish, i saw that this is my 400th post! wow!! yay me!

family fun day

today we had a family fun day. after church (which maggie slept through, even my trip up to communion!), and social hour (nina likes this even better than sunday school, which we skipped this week on account of the beautiful weather. last week, when we didn't go to church, nina cried. "we're missing the food!" she wailed. "it's ok snoogy," i said. "we'll go next week and get the food." "NO!" she cried harder. "they'll have different food next week! they have different food every week! it won't be the same!" poor girl. but she's right, they do get some good stuff at social hour. how many times have we been surprised by a full breakfast in the past year? probably at least 5, and it's not like we go every sunday. they probably average one full breakfast a month. spectacular!)

i digress!! so after church the moss family came over, and we enjoyed an afternoon of swimming, water balloons, chili, canoeing, and smores over the fire pit. boy were the girls wiped out!! this was our second straight day of smores--we had some yesterday with anna.

it was a fantastic summer weekend. highs were in the upper 80s, and the pool hovered right around the low 80s. ahh!

aahh summer!

it's so hard to remember to keep up with the blog in the summer! we are so busy every day, either running around, going to the beach, railway village, on a trolley ride, or playing with friends that i am just too tired at night to type.

so let's see, what have we been up to?... well, oma was here. here's a few pics of her and the girls:





we had a wonderful time with her!!

now maggie has crawled onto my lap and fallen asleep (at 3:15!! the nap is getting later and later, i wouldn't be surprised if she dropped it soon. you know, just as nina goes off to school). see this is why i never get any blogging done!! well, more later!

a bunch of catch-up thoughts...

busy busy! at least we're not sick, right? and once i get out of the habit of writing every day or every other day, it's so easy to get out of the habit. then i have to do one of these awful catch-up bursts. oh well, c'est la vie!

first: i dug up a few of the potatoes (of course the garden update is first!). they looked great! they were small, about the size of golf balls, but not even a touch green. they were further below the soil than i'd thought they'd be, about 3 inches down. so that's good! even so, i hilled the plants with more soil, so as they grow (if), they won't push out of the dirt and turn toxic green. also, we roasted them with some store-bought red potatoes, and they tasted like... potatoes! ahh, sweet success. i'm back on top of the world, potato-wise.

second: nina read a few pages of her barbie book aloud to me, nick, oma, and maggie this evening. she's really getting to be a good reader. she got words like "pretend" and "silver." not common at all! the smaller words can be harder for her, which of course makes sense, when words like "so" and "do" don't rhyme, but "bear" and "chair" do. english!!

three: the other day, in the car, maggie was telling oma that she wasn't oma (i think that was it anyway). and oma replied, "i am too!" and maggie said, "you're not two oma, i'm two!" haha! funny kid.

four: ever since we saw the circus, nina has been swinging from the rope we hung up under her balcony and calling herself miss jasmine. she usually dresses up in one of vanessa's or my old dance costumes when she does her routines. she calls maggie miss desiree, which was the name of the woman who directed the horses at the circus, but is of course confusing. well i'm glad we did the circus even though it was so hot that day, it obviously made a big impression on nina.

five: last night nina didn't go to bed until like, 8:45, at which point maggie woke up. she didn't go back to sleep until almost 10:30. all i want is for the girls to both be asleep by 8:00 on monday so that i can watch the bachelorette in peace. is that too much to ask? apparently. that's also why i didn't get to blog last night. maggie was flailing all over oma's bed (she's on the pull-out couch in the family room, so we were sitting on that to watch the bachelorette) for half an hour, half falling asleep, half waking up. i was glad nick and oma got to see how ridiculous she can be, because she'll do that at night sometimes, flailing around the bed for 45 minutes at a time, falling asleep and waking herself back up, rolling around, thrashing, keeping me awake... it's a wonder i function as well as i do!

well i think that's all i can come up with for now, but i'll be back on later if i think of anything else.

and i thought my potatoes were doing well...

but now i think they're not. see, you're "supposed" to hill your potatoes with dirt. but when you plant them too close together, at the edge of your bed and right next to the cantaloupes, you might not have enough soil or space to do this. and you might just say to yourself, well i'll just put some soil around them and some grass clippings and hope for the best.

wrong! apparently this means you don't get very many potatoes, and the ones you do get are green and poisonous.

fantastic! i'm not sure what to do now... hill them this late in the game and hope to save them? dig a few up and see what's going on under there? burn the whole darn garden?!

who knew that potato leaves and stems were also very poisonous? so are pepper plants and tomato plants. my garden is full of more poisonous things than edible things. is this a sign?

on the other hand, i gathered quite the large handful of green beans and snap peas today. definitely going to plant more green beans next year, and more peas. and i'm going to try potatoes again! only this time i'll not put them so close to everything else, so that i can actually get some potatoes from them. well, live and learn i guess.

the grand opening of the children's garden was today

wow, it is so cool! we actually didn't get to see much of it because they didn't let anyone in until the ribbon cutting ceremony, and there was a bunch of stuff before that (mostly the girls running around the gardens, there were some speakers we didn't listen to, including susan collins). there were face-painters, and the girls got butterflies painted on their arms. they have never had their faces painted, they absolutely refuse. i think maggie's more following nina's lead on this one, but who knows, maybe she's anti-face-painting in her own right too. time will tell.

anyway, we'll have to go back to the garden soon to see all the cool stuff in the children's garden. we did notice the big-leaf area, and true to name there were some big leaves there. neat!

we all had cupcakes and lemonade inside the children's garden after the ribbon-cutting, then maggie was really tired so it was time to go. both girls napped (nina might be coming down with something), and then bernadette came over for a swim. fun day!

after dinner, we went to the tennis courts because nick and i really miss playing tennis. beth had the brilliant idea of bringing the kids bikes so they could ride around on the empty court. it worked! at first the gilchrists were there playing so the girls kept to the side between our court and the fence, but when they left they had the whole other court to run and ride on. it was so fun to play tennis again!

oma is here (and we've been super busy)

oma arrived on sunday (the 4th of july!). it was a super, super hot day (we're in the midst of quite the heat wave right now), and mom and dad and i took the girls to the common for some small town 4th of july goodness. i made them flag t-shirts to wear by sewing the flags that someone handed out to us on memorial day to some white t-shirts. so patriotic.

after some nice cold lemonade, music, and craft-browsing there, we went home for a swim and a nap for both girls. then oma and nick got in, there was general merriment, and we saw the fireworks. again, nina loved them, and maggie kept asking if they were over. but, she liked them. we watched them from the DMR again, only this time it was packed! summer's in full swing.

yesterday it was so hot that we lounged by the pool all day. and THEN we went to the circus! it was so hot i think we might have bailed on the idea if i hadn't bought tickets yesterday at the common ($2 off in advance!). i'm glad we went though, the kids really really liked it. nina was amazed by the clown's magic trick and the tightrope walkers (no safety net! i was nervous and would definitely have preferred one). maggie liked the pigs (one oinked/snorted/grunted at the proper spots during old macdonald. it was funny).

ok, some animal outside was just making some very, very bizarre noises. first i heard a lot of thrashing in the woods, and i had a feeling it was the deer trying to get to my garden (and here, another blog post devolves into gardening... sorry erik, but keep reading, i'm going to get back to the girls soon!). well so nick got the flashlight and we saw a small animal's glowing eyes. probably a raccoon. we tried to scare it off with the flashlight and by whispering angrily (don't want to wake the girls). then nothing for a few minutes. then we heard this god-awful sound, like a goose and a bear going at it or something. with hissing, there was some kind of wild hissing too. we got the flashlight again and didn't see anything. but then, a few minutes later, i head the thrashing again and KNEW it was that damn deer. so we got the flashlight out again and i was right!! it darted between the edge of the lawn and the garden. i yelled at it to stay away from my garden, so hopefully that will take care of that. crap, i really need a fence!!

enough of that then, back to the kids and the busy. so the circus was yesterday, and today it was horribly hot again, so we did the railway village in the morning (too hot!), and then the pool for the rest of the day. the pool has never been this warm i think! soooo nice.

the heat is a lot for dear maggie though. in the car on the way home from the railway village she said "mama, my hair is wet! how did it get wet?" and i tried to explain sweat to her. poor sheltered maine girl! she doesn't care much for sweat.

and nina is just swimming like a fish all day in that pool. it makes her hungry too, the other day she at an entire grilled cheese sandwich for lunch, and then half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. and you know she snacks all morning, so it's not like she hadn't eaten in hours. either a growth spurt, or all that energy she burns up in the pool, or both. whew!

we harvested our first carrot today

nina, maggie, and i went out to the garden at about 4 this afternoon because i'd decided that the carrots must be ready to harvest, seeing as i'd planted the first batch of them 3 months ago.

yeah, not so much. unless 2 inches is as big as they're going to get? hopefully no. lesson here: planting carrots early doesn't necessarily translate to an earlier harvest. or at least, me planting carrots early doesn't equal early harvest. apparently it does work for some more gifted gardeners.

the good news is that we are getting about 6 green beans and 4 snap peas per day. not enough for a dinner, but enough for the girls to munch on outside. good enough for me! next year i'm going to plant more green beans and more peas, since thus far they have been the most successful. the plants are loving this heat though, so hopefully i'll have more success to blog about in the future.

i can't believe i didn't take a picture of the carrot before we ate it! the top looked lovely anyway. and it tasted good! well, nina and i thought so. maggie just chewed hers up and spit it out (what's new0.

one quick photo of our little swimmers

we ran out of space on the memory card, so this is all we got. and unfortunately, we don't have any pictures yet of nina swimming without her life jacket. but since all of a sudden, she swims without it more than she swims with it, it shouldn't be too hard to get one soon.

at least you can see maggie floating along by herself. she's so independent in the water, little legs bicycling under the surface, bobbing along. too cute!

as i promised a long time ago, potato flowers!

they're really quite pretty! maybe i should plant them in next year's flower garden too (if there is a flower garden next year, but i'm dreaming!)

our little nina is quite the artist!

she did this all by herself (it's the wonder pets). first she drew them out in pen, then she colored them in. isn't it so good?! she's quite the little artist for not-yet-5!