Defensive Gardening

I picked the nephew and niece up from school and we went to pick strawberries.

Well, first we stopped at a gas station for slushies like we do every other Friday but they didn’t have any. Niece got a SpongeBob popsicle and nephew opted for nothing. Niece was literally crying beforehand over nephew’s calling the front seat but she got over that pretty quickly!

THEN we went to pick strawberries:

After strawberry picking, we came back home to light the candles and have cake for Grandma’s birthday! Jean, the s-niece and s-nephew came to help us!

That is one expensive damn cake!

The niece and nephew arrived at 6:00 this afternoon. The nephew had a 4-stanza micro-managed poem he was to complete by tomorrow with all sorts of different rhyming patterns in each stanza, a hyperbole in this one, a metaphor in that one, two things in this one, etc. It was a nightmare considering he had not done anything before he got here except for 2 lines in a rough draft that he had to scrap.

Now, was he just given this assignment today? No. Did he accomplish any of this at his mother’s house? You know, the house where his mother says, “He always does all of his homework before he comes to you guys”? No. Nothing. I have no earthly idea if he has even studied for his spelling test because we had to spend the whole night, after he fessed up, doing this damn poem.

Before the fessing up stage, though, we managed to eat supper while sending Grandma to a funeral, start on the icing for Grandma’s birthday cake which involved zesting a lot of lemons and juicing them, which led to the nephew making a fruit smoothie out of lemons, blueberries and bananas and the niece juicing the rest of the lemons from the bag to make homemade lemonade, then I finally got what I needed to make the icing, then we had leftover cream from the icing so the niece made butter! From scratch! It was amazing! Here’s our proof of all of that! Except for the poem, unless I manage to snap a picture of it along with my “parent’s signature and comment” page where I stated, “This was like pulling teeth”.

Even the seeds that the s-nephew planted 7 inches deep have sprouted!

I even picked three strawberries today!

And the blueberries are looking great! I’m not saying we can bake an entire recipe of blueberry muffins from the crop but we can probably manage to rustle up enough to top some cereal!

And the niece and nephew are just getting too damn big.

With a lot of help from the nephew and s-nephew, the garden is planted. This includes a new raised bed this year, purchased from Sam’s, and the one I built a few years ago, and the satellites. We have one more Sam’s raised bed that I didn’t put up – I may put that one up down at my new house or may wait until we cut another tree down here so we have enough sunlight – I haven’t decided yet.

We already have strawberries and blueberries on our existing plants and bushes which is very exciting! So here are the pictures of the fruits and vegetables:

Blueberries:

Strawberries:

New stuff – starting with the lettuce:

And the “big picture”:

Then after all the work was done, I may have suggested that using the water balloons I bought to blow up and use to make Easter decorations with string – well, too long to explain but I will post a picture of a finished product in a minute – but I may have suggested using those water balloons, filling them up with water, and pelting Jean and Kayleigh in the golf cart when they came to pick up the nephew & snephew – contrary to the niece’s accusations, I didn’t MAKE them do it – I just put the suggestion in their heads, then served as lookout!

Niece gets revenge with the garden hose!!!

I take it back – I’ll post pictures of the Easter craft project later.

He’s now 12. And his voice is changing. I’m going to call him Peter Brady.

Before his party, we went to the new animal shelter to drop off some dog and cat food and look around at the new facilities. Luckily we got out of there without adopting anyone!

We saw Abbey’s memorial brick:

And here is super-cute Lucy – she likes to peek out of the doggie door just to see what’s going on outside. Sometimes she goes out, sometimes she doesn’t.

Well, you can still check on the progress of my new house over at Renovating Madison but remember that while I’m doing that, I’m also dealing with crazy grandma’s house while Alan is off working or snowboarding or whatever it is he has been doing for the past couple of weeks.  The kitchen cabinets have been shifted and appliances taken out, counter cut out to accommodate a regular 30 inch stove, etc.  Now it has been primed and a closed up door has been knocked out and it just looks bigger, or newer, or cleaner, or something.

I did buy a house.  It needs lots of work so I am trying to decide if I should create an entirely new blog to chronicle the progress on the house or just put all of that here.  I think a new site makes more sense but can’t decide on a name.

Any ideas?

Aside from the house, we’ve started work on my grandmother’s house. That Frank is so fast that I didn’t even get to take a before picture of the kitchen and now he’s already gotten the cabinets moved! Since Now-Now canceled Christmas every year since 1990, I don’t think I have any pictures of the house. Maybe someone else in the family does.

Well, on to other matters. Kayleigh finally got to play with her Christmas presents and we set up a camp site in the living room.

We also got a fire pit for the patio and Matthew played around in Lowe’s during that purchase.

That’s really about it. I did make some coasters that I saw on Pinterest and managed to take “before” pictures of the house down the street.

I’ll just post the exterior for now – and will keep thinking about a new blog name for this endeavor.

Here is a picture of the niece chilling with her iPad next to the new gas logs. These things are making the heater unnecessary, pretty much!

The holidays are always so busy – we did a lot this last month and January has not slowed down yet! We undertook making a new 2012 calendar for Grandma which entailed some photo shoots all over town of the kids holding up signs listing the important events and birthdays for the month, which also let to taking pictures of whatever else we found interesting. Oh, and led to some pouting sessions in the car, refusals to get out of the car, fights over who got the front seat for each leg of the journey (but I ordered a pamphlet called “Shotgun Rules” which should alleviate this problem in the future), not to mention grumpy faces on kids, including one kid who refused to remove his stocking cap for most of the pictures.

Did I give it away with the use of “his”?

After the driveway was finished, the kids did come back and we had lots of stuff to do before Christmas and before they went to their dad’s house for the week!

We had to make cookies:

Here’s a silly photograph and if we did Christmas cards, we would use this, but we did steal this idea from a “pin” on Pinterest from Barrett Jackson. The niece is totally responsible for the sign in her mouth. Merry Christmas!

We took some picutres downtown:

And took some pictures on the playground at Royall:

Here was a great pre-Christmas gift for the niece and nephew – lanterns from ThinkGeek.com – we had a lot of fun with these!

We also went to the zoo to see the Christmas lights:

Hopefully that takes us through the end of the year!