Because sometimes...

...bad decisions should be memorialized.
At the risk of the SPCA or the Humane Society coming after us, I'll go ahead and show you these pictures.
Nate wanted to see if the cat would like the water.

Aquakitty

It was not an altogether satisfying experience for the kitty.
I wrote before about the cat being a barometer for clear and present danger. You can also gauge the kitty's comfort level be how tightly his tail is wrapped around his body. The closer the tail, the more frightened the cat. It was tightly coiled in all these pictures.
Nate's shirt did not survive this excursion. But no kitties were harmed in this experiment, physically at least.
What's that sound? It's my mother in law I hear laughing from all the way north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Let it grow, let it grow

Listen here.

Now view the following:

l to r: beans, tomatoes (with a couple basil), peppers

basil

tomato in the making

beet

the first 5 beans
Turns out, magic beans aren't such a stretch after all.

Food for thought

I am a crafter. I try to be creative.
One of the things I like most about the internet is the ability to share creativity. Sites like ravelry, etsy, and various blogs make it so easy to gain inspiration from others or offer your support to another creative person by buying their product or giving them encouragement.
I came across these two blog posts separately, but they are about the same things. Credit to whom credit and all that. I wanted to share not because I can completely empathize with the plight, but because with the internet it is SO EASY to support the little guy or gal who is trying to share their art.
I'm not saying that we should be able to copyright or protect every little thing that comes off the needles, out of the sewing machine, etc. I'm just saying that there are a lot of resources for handmade, and it seems to be all the rage.
For the record, I think the second example I provided is much more compelling than the first.
So, if you are interested you might want to start here:

Anatomy of a trending topic

I have not read anything else on this blog, but it was linked on another I read. I thought it was interesting.
After you read that, then read post from this gal:

Just saying.

I can give you my whole-hearted endorsement of this blog, because she is brilliant and I've been following her for over a year just so that I can look at something gorgeous and original every few days.

You can see a more detailed follow-up here.

Homespun

Homemade things watch: mobile (by me), teddy bear (by G-Aunt Cecelia), quilt (by Mimi), sweet little baby (by brother and sister-in-law).

Now I think the brother is just taunting me.

Introducing...

My brother and his wife welcomed Julia Jean into this world yesterday! I can't wait to meet her in the next couple weeks. (Although I do have to wait, we got a plane ticket for me.)
But she'll be just as precious then (that's how I'm keeping myself from hopping in the car, as difficult as it is) . This is just how it is when you live far away. (I tell myself. I may or may not have cried about this yesterday.)

So, if you go back and read projects on the blog, it is "Julia's mobile," "Julia's room," "Julia's quilt."
Speaking of which, see this for updated pictures of Julia's mobile in Julia's nursery with Julia's quilt that my mom made. :)

I am so proud of Sean and Trisha. They will be amazing parents; they are amazing parents. Trisha just sent me a picture of Sean and Julia sleeping together in the chair and I couldn't help but think how incredibly blessed this little munchkin is. Her life will be filled with love, nurturing, and laughing from a lot of people. She is in for big things.

I love her already and I can't wait to get my hands on her. I'll kiss those cheeks and count her fingers and toes and sniff her head and sing her songs.

Window sill experiment

Like ANYONE in my family cares about what I do anymore now that there is another baby to watch blink, grunt, sleep...

I was going to call it a window sill garden, but let's be real here. This is a glorified 5th grade science project I'm working on. That's probably too generous, in reality it is more like 1st or 2nd grade. I provided my own adult supervision with the sharp objects.

But I digress. I'm growing things in the window sill:
One of them is a violet. I will call this the Resurrection Violet. After being neglected for 6 months (I am not exaggerating, ask my mom or Nate) it is blooming. Blooming at least three groups of blooms. It's unbelievable. Nate bought me that pot while we were dating, and I bought the violet a bit later. This pot is magic, seriously, magic.

Since I was feeling cocky, I decided to try starting two violet plants from cuttings from my healthy Resurrection Violet.
Two tiny terrariums, trigger tubers. (I just said that.)
The leaves are still green, so it's not technically dying, right?
Next experiment:
Avocado.
I have often wanted to try growing an avocado tree from a pit. I looked up some instructions and it was pretty simple. You gently poke some toothpicks in the pit, suspend it in a glass, and partially cover the pit with water, pointy side up. Change the water and if funk started to grow on the pic, wipe it off.
So here it is. The stem got super tall, like so.
I had to cut it back, but as you can see it's still growing!
I didn't put it in the window sill for a while because I was afraid the sun might fry it, but it's been growing for a few weeks, so I think we're safe.
Nate kept saying, "You are growing a TREE on our refrigerator."
In ten years we'll be able to harvest avocados.

First fruits

Er, first fruit I should say. I harvested our first onion today! It is curing in the shed right now. These Georgia Sweets sure do smell sweet.
Why yes, I did just show you three pictures of the same onion.

It is a little small, but that's ok. I don't know if we should have planted them further apart of something, but I'm ok with the size. My in-laws' onions were about this size too if I remember correctly.
This is the bed they were in. You can see that we used straw to mulch. You can also see from the lush grass growing between the beds what a huge failure that was. We are planning to pull the straw up and put down more newspapers. If it doesn't rain this afternoon we will get right on that. After Nate finishes building saw horses.

I have really come to love onions. I don't eat them plain like my grandparents, but they really add a lot when cooking. Nate thinks so too, and neither of us consider ourselves "onion people."

I also have some pictures of the teeny-tiny bean pods forming on one of our plants. I really tried to get it in good focus, but I couldn't. I'll just show you one so you can get the idea.
Ok, I'll show you two.

We had really nice, hard rains (not apocalyptic, like April) the last two nights so I think you can see how everything looks so green and lush. It's beautiful.

I have to say that it did rain hard enough for the cat to hide under the bed and shoot us looks that said "Screw YOU!" when we tried to coax him out.

I have a lot of catching up to do on here with the gardening and growing things in general. I'll be honest and tell you that there were a couple weeks where I didn't want to share what was going on because there was this time-period with gardening (I am 100% sure that it's not just one time period) where I was afraid that nothing was going to happen. So, I didn't share any pictures, and to be honest I didn't take all that many. It was just a lot of waiting. But now things are growing and blossoms and new shoots are forming. It is all very exciting. We have 1 billion tomato plants that I'm sure will produce fruit all at the same time. Then I will need to learn to can very quickly.

I will have lots to show you in the next few days with things growing both inside and out. And by inside and out I mean the house. There are no ultrasounds from this household.