How can school shoot a hole through summer's official tide while still being in the 90's outside? I'm still thinking of garden ideas, feeling like I just had a baby and it's still spring. Does this time-space formula get worse with each passing year? So, in order to maintain the chaos of information I am needing to record for my own sake and that of my family, I'll just pull up some snippets of our fleeting (now gone) summer. I'd say it has been a good one!

Here's my pasty-white children at Easter time getting ready for festivities at Grandma Cozy's. I was then homebound hiding from the world with a newborn, but as you will see in the next picture, the mutts did actually go out in the sun--and kid #1 and kid #3 turned delicious chocolate. Yum!



See! Chocolate.



More Chocolate. And wifebeater. With stains. And a buzz. The Mister cut his curls, which was tragedy #5 this summer.



Here with our two adorable Vanillas with their Chocolate Siblings. We finally blessed that baby boy when he was a ripe and chubby four months old!



Give it to me ladies. Aaaaawwwwwwwww....{sigh}.

Okay wait. This was end of summer. Let's go back. Remember pasty-white but still turning green Easter pic at the top? This was Memorial Day this year (AFTER Easter)!



Can you blame me for STILL thinking of garden ideas? The garden had a late start this year, what with all that rain, snow, and tragedy #1 and all.



Brrrr!



Here's a peek at the annual work party in the backyard (June I think?). I was still hiding a little, but you can see our garden boxes from last year, as well as a big DEAD rectangle where we tore up some more grass for MORE garden. I kept telling The Mister when he was having garden dreams last winter: "Ummm, you know I'm going to have a newborn right?".

But then we went to intensive care without insurance (more on that later) and decided: "Let's just try to grow more food and save some money."



I did manage to can some apricot jam. Gorgeous right?



Here's some old friends. As it would happen, we all had babies within about a month apart. We had some good lunch dates where a million kids were running around. I love these ladies!



We checked on the bees early in the spring. The honey was clear and sweet.



We pulled out this section of free-floating hive. Look closely and you can see the detailed architectural perfection. Each comb is staggered on the opposite side, so that it doesn't collapse as easy. Seriously amazing.

Oh, and one of our hives went AWOL and flew away. Lame!



I tried to be better about weeding this year, but my garden got most of my attention. At least the daughter and the neighbor girls harvested a beautiful flower pizza before all weeds went loose.





See the inner tubes. What with this wet spring, Mellow Wood Pond has been enjoying a full season to the point of neighbor kids coming to float around in the backyard. I have no problems as long as NOBODY DRINKS THE WATER.



Bake sales and cleaning the office with me this summer means Rainbow Girl earned $54 this summer. I, on the other hand, ate inventory and am getting fat{ter}.

yay :(



Aaahhh....




Legos! We are going nuts over them throughout this whole house.



Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday the water comes on and there's a good chance that Isaac will be found with his little buddy "No-one" = Owen.



And lastly, two years in a row the renowned local opera company has had a show featuring this guy. It's so cliche of what some seriously out of touch theatre man thinks will swoon the ladies right? I can hear every gay man's heart breaking a mile away when I see it. Ha ha!

July 31: Tomorrow is the month of August. The month of family birthdays, end of summers, the cringing at school supplies stocked in every store. It's the last moment to squeeze in our last late-night affairs with outdoor movies and popsicles, all the while dreading what the months of farm chores and play have done to our math skills AND our morning skills.



The Mister and I are on different body clocks, by which I mean that he is a wake-up-and-go guy, and I steal a few hours from the night to increase productivity of my day. That is my preference, and I fight it; but this summer I gave in to it. It's summer! I had a newborn, we had movies in the park, sunsets at 9:30 and middle-of-the-night feedings. But what with my expanding gut not getting smaller even though it's no longer housing offspring, and the impending doom of school schedules and homework, I felt an experiment rising to put me back on track. This August I am implementing a simple plan. Four elements that start with the letter S, to keep it simple and do-able. Think about joining me if you are in the same boat, as any extra support is welcome.

SALAD
SCRIPTURES
SEVEN
SLEEP



Here's the rules:

SALAD-A-DAY*
In an effort to avoid the annoyance of calorie counting, and to help curb my sweet-tooth, we're going back to a raw green salad a day. It might be a breakfast spinach smoothie, or steamed cabbage for dinner, or a big fat salad for lunch. But EVERY day we're getting some greens. For extra inspiration in the salad department, click here.

SCRIPTURES*
"Bridle your passions, and I'll feel you with love". I completely recognize along with celebrations and parties, food helps avenue my stresses about parenting, motherhood, beauty, etc. For whatever HOLE we have that food often fills, I will be trying to fill instead with some holy word instead.

SEVEN*
Try to eat dinner every night while still in the seven o'clocks. 7:30 pm would be ideal. In tandem with this is the hope that I don't eat for at least 3 hours before going to bed. Because I'm nursing, and I don't want my plan to fail, I'm allowing myself ONE PIECE OF FRUIT between dinner and bed-time. But that last meal is taking place before that clock hits 8!

SLEEP*
The irony of this rule is that I am now writing this at 10:42 p.m. But it's still July technically, so here goes. GET TO BED EVERY NIGHT BY 10:30. My reasoning behind this is that most avenues to good health should require a sleep plan, and that lots of good intentions to make better health changes are derailed when we lack sleep or are extra tired. Late nights also pose temptations to snarf some sweets.

Also note: one last movie in the park in August so I'm allowing myself a couple of nights to break the rules...but definitely they will need to feel like exceptions and not routines.

That's it! So that is my plan for August. I'm hoping that once I've laid this groundwork, I can add to it with a more consistent exercise routine.

Won't you join me?

As a girl who has loved having a blog because it helps sorting out my head, the recent silence of my tapping fingers was surprising. I thought I would need to sort out my lessons and thoughts, but instead it has been a quiet period of reflection. For now I have a little perspective, and the thick summer air still holds the posts about all of the women who helped me overprepare my home, kitchen, closets, and suitcases before baby Giddy arrived two days past his due-date.

How just hours before his arrival we had a family home evening talking about when we lived with God before we came to earth, and how our new little brother was soon to make an astronaut-inspiring journey through space, time, and my birth canal. How we cradled a doll and reminded everyone how to hold a baby. And how I loved seeing the light go on in my five-year old's head as he asked about God, and how could he be his father, and his daddy's father? And how when I went to bed that night I thought "Sheesh, even my dang garage is cleaned out I've been nesting for so stinking long...and of course this kid is coming now because we had a spiritual family tune-up".

For now, those stories await a future harvest like my late plantings of garden corn. At the moment, it is enough that my baby is home, is safe, is healthy....and beautiful!

Photo Credit Filter Photography.

I think this biological clock thing is real. With my oldest on the precipice of puberty, my last "baby" grown up and not giving me kisses, I am finally starting to understand what all those grannies have been telling me for years as I frustratingly wrangle little mutts: "Enjoy it! They will be gone before you know it!"

With a big fat baby living amongst the tiny NICU crowd, I gasped in panic at the thought that my investment of love, calories, nausea, and fatigue would be gone all the while ripping out my heart with its departure. But instead, my baby lives! I love to hold him, to squeeze him, and proclaim: You're a little person!



I love him so much that I'm even over the fact that this is the most unflattering picture of my gut. Where in the heck is my waist? But guess what, I honestly don't care right now. My garden will get it off eventually, and that joy on my face is real cause my baby lived.

Good Night Planet.

There's so much I NEED to update on the blog, mostly for my brain's sake. But first off, no transition jealousy! In fact, we might have a little too much love going around here. Here's Buddha Boy loving on baby...

Coming home from the NICU and with the little guy on oxygen meant that for the first 3 weeks of his life, Gideon had a tube across his face and was connected to a machine. While the weather has evolved from spring to winter, and back to spring again; while the earth has celebrated royal weddings and hunted down number one terrorists; while Japan has recovered from tsunamis and nuclear meltdowns and the American South has been blasted with tornadoes....I have heard of these major world events in passing while I personally experienced my major current event of returning the oxygen machine. I could finally rock and sway my baby while walking to another area of the house.


During these three weeks I think I was away from the house less than two hours. Indeed it has been a small world for me right now, and not in the way of seeing an old friend during your Disneyland vacation.

There's an intimacy and a reveling that occurs between a mother and her offspring. With all the investment of body, pain, and sleep, you begin to revel in the minute details of your primo current event.


The way his fingers asymmetrically curl in his little fist.


The waiting for my favorite baby trick of getting a kiss from little toesies.


How I've googled more weird things with this baby than my others. Like the times when I nurse him laying down, if:
* my right "side" is super full
* baby is lying on his left side
* his left nostril drips milk
Basically the fire hose of milk unleashes and his nose compensates for lack of esophageal drainage. p.s. it doesn't bother baby

And how his lips appear to be little blisters, or super chapped. Basically evident that he is getting a wicked latch and getting the job done at the breast.


How my kids take after The Mister of the House who has a deceptively HUGE head. Narrow in the face, but on the side it keeps going for a mile. In certain angles I stare at my kids head and start to go cross-eyed as he appears to be a cone-headed alien from SNL.


How the DNA war was won by The Mister of the House. While it's clear that this baby is related to his older brother, I feel the need to proclaim that it's apparent I have made no genetic contribution to this child.



How when I place my hands under his arms and pick him up, he gets mile-long cleavage.





This is how we grow 'em in Mrs. Olsen's garden! Yum!

...the pigs and chickens got some new neighbors!

Last week, while still detoxing from hospital baby trauma, we had some exciting developments on the farm. Betty, our miserably pregnant goat, surprised us all by birthing triplet baby kids. Unlike last year's birthing, we didn't even aid (or even cheerlead) the birth. The Mister went in the back to check on the animals, and 3 little baby goats were scrambling for their first steps.



Little Rainbow Girl got stuck hanging out with the goats for a couple hours to make sure all the baby goats were nursing from their mother. Because one thing is for sure, Mrs. Olsen already has her own kid to feed, and didn't want to be stuck on bottle duty with a furry kid.



Wait a second...how did that get in there? Only machinistic institutions tag human kids. Who did that?

Back to the furry kind...



Betty on the lookout. Our other goat, Millie, tries to head-butt these baby's against the wall. What is her deal? But seriously, she is asking for it. Betty will quickly put her in her place.

Later in the week, we tackled (by "we" I mean The Mister) our new farm project of 2011. Here's a hint...



We ordered these back in February/March, and they finally arrived! There were 2 packages of bees, each 3 pounds. Nothing quite like hearing the pitter-patter of thousands of bees getting dumped into their new home. I was a little nervous.



Our neighbors got a hive last year and harvested 16 pounds of honey. We'll see how productive these guys are...and if we happen to get 30 pounds of honey, we will be more than pleased (and possibly so will anyone getting Christmas goodies this winter).



And lastly, our rooster. This guy's got it out for Rainbow Girl. He has attacked her a couple times while she was unawares, flying and pecking her knees and causing her to bleed (through her clothes. punk!).



So I've got his number:

it's

1-800-HEAD-OFF

happening later this summer.

I'm sooo tired. And I just realized that Easter is just around the corner. I wanted to repost a favorite Easter recipe in case you are looking for a meaningful activity to do with your kids this weekend. This was originally posted in 2009. Please enjoy!

This Easter Weekend we made Resurrection Rolls with the kids.   With young and curious kids, I find myself walking a fine line between creative visual lesson about the resurrection and a morbid presentation on cannibalism.  I have faith in all faithful parents that they can walk the line and keep it as an awesome (and reverent) tradition for your kids.  If you are fretting that this recipe comes a day late, no worries there's always Family Home Evening to catch up on.  Here's a peek into our Easter Fun.























Read from accompanying scripture, such as John 19:38-42 and John 20.

VARIATION: If you want to represent the quiet awakening of the resurrection (and build more excitement and tension for your kids) then start your recipe in the evening:
PREHEAT OVEN TO 450 degrees
PREPARE ROLLS AND PLACE IN OVEN
IMMEDIATELY TURN OFF OVEN

In the morning they will be cooked and ready to go with your Easter Brunch.