Last night, Sedona had her first really bad nightmare. At least that's what I assumed happened. Both my girls (as well as myself) talk in their sleep, so generally, when they make a noise in the night, I ignore it at first. Last night, a blood curdling scream had Josh and I both upright in bed immediately. Being the blind as a bat one, I scrambled for my glasses while he ran to get her. I thought she might have fallen out of bed or gotten a foot stuck in the headboard or something, but I heard her yelling, "BUG! BUG!", so I laid back down. He picked her up and she quickly quieted down (which is why I think it was a dream and not a real bug), but the instant he tried to lay her back in bed, she started screaming again. So he brought her back to our bed.
Now, both our girls slept with us for almost a year and as much as I want my space, I miss their cuddles in the night, so it's nice to have them visit every once in a while. Sedona turned on her side to face me, laid one chubby, soft hand on my arm and wrapped the other around my fingers and I got to fall asleep with sweet baby breath on my shoulder. From hearing the horror stories from the trenches, you'd think night waking is one of the most difficult parts of parenthood, but it can also be one the best parts.
She is 23 months old now and fully into the "twos", so we won't discuss some of the thoughts I had about her once the sun dawned on a new day!! ;-)
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Fresh Food
We went blueberry pickin' late last week. There is a place that's kinda on the way to grandma's that offers $1.50/pound pick your own. The best part is there are no additional fees like other places tack on. It's great. Unfortunately, we had late freezes this year, so the blueberries are more sparse than usual, but we still had fun:
Here's Sierra doing her job at clearing out the low branches:
Me, with Sedona in the back pack (she'd reach over my shoulder and pick herself a little snack straight off the bush) and grandma trying to ward off the heat:
Somehow or other, we've so far managed to completely avoid sibling rivalry. This is awesome in that our girls really do love each other as much as it looks like they do in these pictures. It's also a bit worrisome, because I'm quite certain they will gang up on us when they're older ;-)
Back at grandma's house, we made blueberry muffins and blueberry oat bars with some of the berries. Here's Sierra showing off her egg cracking skills:
Also, this weekend, I found myself with over 1 pound of green beans in the garden that needed to be used up, so I made green bean fries. The only thing I changed about the recipe is I followed some reviewer's suggestion to bake instead of fry them. They were very yummy dipped in ranch dressing. We snacked on them for the afternoon, then put the rest in the freezer. The reviews claim they freeze well, guess we'll find out. I also tried making Cookie dough filled cupcakes, which were a bitter disappointment. The recipe and reviews made it sound like if I just thoroughly froze the dough (which I did) and only baked for 20 minutes (which I did), I would get a chocolate cupcake with a gooey lump of uncooked cookie dough in the middle (which I did not). They were still tasty, but the dough cooked to the texture of a cupcake, so it's really just like regular cupcakes with chocolate chips. I suppose that's safer because of the whole "don't eat raw eggs" thing, but I LOVE cookie dough and was so looking forward to a cupcake and cookie dough in one. Oh well.
Very quick and dirty garden update----I hate early blight. Hate. It. There are extremely drastic differences between some of our tomato beds and others and in the future, tomatoes will be planted only where they can expect full sun first thing in the morning and at least most of the day. That said, we have gotten our first tomato, the green beans are growing like crazy, black beans are drying on the vine, black eyed peas were doing okay, but just didn't produce much....which is what happened last year, and I'm not sure why. Bell peppers and chili peppers are in full production now and okra looks great and like it will bloom any day now. Squash was hit with vine borers again this year. That happened right about the time I stopped spraying the Neem, so I'm thinking maybe that area needs a soil drench of Neem after this season's over (I believe the vine borers leave eggs in the soil over winter, then come up in the spring).
Here's Sierra doing her job at clearing out the low branches:
Me, with Sedona in the back pack (she'd reach over my shoulder and pick herself a little snack straight off the bush) and grandma trying to ward off the heat:
Somehow or other, we've so far managed to completely avoid sibling rivalry. This is awesome in that our girls really do love each other as much as it looks like they do in these pictures. It's also a bit worrisome, because I'm quite certain they will gang up on us when they're older ;-)
Back at grandma's house, we made blueberry muffins and blueberry oat bars with some of the berries. Here's Sierra showing off her egg cracking skills:
Also, this weekend, I found myself with over 1 pound of green beans in the garden that needed to be used up, so I made green bean fries. The only thing I changed about the recipe is I followed some reviewer's suggestion to bake instead of fry them. They were very yummy dipped in ranch dressing. We snacked on them for the afternoon, then put the rest in the freezer. The reviews claim they freeze well, guess we'll find out. I also tried making Cookie dough filled cupcakes, which were a bitter disappointment. The recipe and reviews made it sound like if I just thoroughly froze the dough (which I did) and only baked for 20 minutes (which I did), I would get a chocolate cupcake with a gooey lump of uncooked cookie dough in the middle (which I did not). They were still tasty, but the dough cooked to the texture of a cupcake, so it's really just like regular cupcakes with chocolate chips. I suppose that's safer because of the whole "don't eat raw eggs" thing, but I LOVE cookie dough and was so looking forward to a cupcake and cookie dough in one. Oh well.
Very quick and dirty garden update----I hate early blight. Hate. It. There are extremely drastic differences between some of our tomato beds and others and in the future, tomatoes will be planted only where they can expect full sun first thing in the morning and at least most of the day. That said, we have gotten our first tomato, the green beans are growing like crazy, black beans are drying on the vine, black eyed peas were doing okay, but just didn't produce much....which is what happened last year, and I'm not sure why. Bell peppers and chili peppers are in full production now and okra looks great and like it will bloom any day now. Squash was hit with vine borers again this year. That happened right about the time I stopped spraying the Neem, so I'm thinking maybe that area needs a soil drench of Neem after this season's over (I believe the vine borers leave eggs in the soil over winter, then come up in the spring).
Friday, June 12, 2009
Interesting Tidbit
I've been reading How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. It's a really interesting book that's (so far, anyway) about the physiology behind making choices and how it is that certain people can seemingly make choices on the fly based on their "gut" and get it right.
A few days ago I came across the following paragraph:
I know some people that I would LOVE to have tested for that mutation.
A few days ago I came across the following paragraph:
People with a genetic mutation that reduces the number of dopamine receptors in the ACC suffer from a similar problem; just like the monkeys, they are less likely to learn from negative reinforcement. This seemingly minor deficit has powerful consequences. For example, studies have found that people carrying this mutation are significantly more likely to become addicted to drugs and alcohol. Because they have difficulty learning from their mistakes, they make the same mistakes over and over. They can't adjust their behavior even when it proves self-destructive.
I know some people that I would LOVE to have tested for that mutation.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Always Learning
Looks like the blog updates won't be too terribly frequent throughout the summer!
We'll start with the garden:
Ollas: The ollas are still working well. The bed they are in does not get watered except through the ollas and the plants all look as healthy as the rest of the garden. The one problem I did start seeing was some blossom end rot on those tomatoes. Since I'm not seeing it in other areas of the garden, I'm assuming calcium deficiency is not our problem, which leaves us with lack of water. I had only been filling the ollas every 3 or 4 days and finding them just about empty at that time. Since researching the blossom end rot, I've started topping off the ollas every day and that seems to be working better.
Early Blight: Darn the stinkin' early blight! This is a problem every year in our area. Since this is a fungal disease that splashes up from the soil, I preventatively prune the plants as they get bigger. Typically, I cut off all the branches/leaves that are within about 12" of the soil. Then, as the season wears on, I go through once a week and cut off any leaves that are showing signs of blight (I see brown spots first, then yellow/brown rings, often starting at the edge of the leaf). I bag these diseased leaves and throw them away so I don't contribute more blight spores to the compost/soil. Every year, I start to panic about how much foliage I'm cutting off, but every year we get a good yield and very little if any fruit affected. We had a humid and rainy start to the season, which contributed to blight problems. While my Neem oil spraying has kept the powdery mildew completely at bay, it doesn't seem to be helping with the blight. Our tomatoes are in new beds that we just put in this year and I have noticed that two of them don't get sun until late morning. These shadier beds are definitely more affected by the blight, which makes sense because their leaves are staying more wet in the morning. Ideally, we would have no overhead watering (and go purely to ollas and/or drip system) to combat this, but it's so prevalent in our area that the rain alone would keep it going to some extent. Since the Neem hasn't worked, we are trying an organic spray with sulfur in it this week. I'm not holding my breath that'll make a huge difference, but thought it was worth a try for future knowledge.
Yield: Our strawberries are giving less. There are still a few berries here and there, but they either get eaten right away, or thrown to the chickens...they aren't making it in the house anymore. We got a big handful of blueberries off the bushes we planted this year, which was unexpected and exciting. We have eaten one pound of fresh picked green beans so far and the tomato plants are heavy with fruit, but nothing ripe yet. The black beans have put out lots of pods and we will those dry on the vine. Black eyed peas are fattening up in their pods and the okra looks like it will start to bloom any day now. Those are the only exciting things at the moment.
Sierra is still bugging me to do workbooks every day. On Tuesday we headed to the local library for "big rig day". It is part of their summer reading program to have some activity every week and I expected this to be a small event---maybe a fire truck and police car and that would be it. Well, it was a HUGE set up. I think they probably had one of every type of vehicle the city owns there! We got to talk to several very polite city workers about what the vehicles did and what different parts of the vehicles were for. The kids could sit up in them if they wanted. They also handed out free popsicles for everyone. She mostly chose math to work on this week, so we did lots of addition and worked a bit on subtraction. Today we read a book about tornadoes and made a "tornado" with two 2-liter bottles and a little connector. Our neighbor is an "archery in the schools" teacher and had family visiting, so he set up all his equipment and invited us over to join in. Sierra enjoyed her little archery lesson and Josh got a chance to pick up a compound bow (he was on the archery team in college, but shot recurve).
We'll start with the garden:
Ollas: The ollas are still working well. The bed they are in does not get watered except through the ollas and the plants all look as healthy as the rest of the garden. The one problem I did start seeing was some blossom end rot on those tomatoes. Since I'm not seeing it in other areas of the garden, I'm assuming calcium deficiency is not our problem, which leaves us with lack of water. I had only been filling the ollas every 3 or 4 days and finding them just about empty at that time. Since researching the blossom end rot, I've started topping off the ollas every day and that seems to be working better.
Early Blight: Darn the stinkin' early blight! This is a problem every year in our area. Since this is a fungal disease that splashes up from the soil, I preventatively prune the plants as they get bigger. Typically, I cut off all the branches/leaves that are within about 12" of the soil. Then, as the season wears on, I go through once a week and cut off any leaves that are showing signs of blight (I see brown spots first, then yellow/brown rings, often starting at the edge of the leaf). I bag these diseased leaves and throw them away so I don't contribute more blight spores to the compost/soil. Every year, I start to panic about how much foliage I'm cutting off, but every year we get a good yield and very little if any fruit affected. We had a humid and rainy start to the season, which contributed to blight problems. While my Neem oil spraying has kept the powdery mildew completely at bay, it doesn't seem to be helping with the blight. Our tomatoes are in new beds that we just put in this year and I have noticed that two of them don't get sun until late morning. These shadier beds are definitely more affected by the blight, which makes sense because their leaves are staying more wet in the morning. Ideally, we would have no overhead watering (and go purely to ollas and/or drip system) to combat this, but it's so prevalent in our area that the rain alone would keep it going to some extent. Since the Neem hasn't worked, we are trying an organic spray with sulfur in it this week. I'm not holding my breath that'll make a huge difference, but thought it was worth a try for future knowledge.
Yield: Our strawberries are giving less. There are still a few berries here and there, but they either get eaten right away, or thrown to the chickens...they aren't making it in the house anymore. We got a big handful of blueberries off the bushes we planted this year, which was unexpected and exciting. We have eaten one pound of fresh picked green beans so far and the tomato plants are heavy with fruit, but nothing ripe yet. The black beans have put out lots of pods and we will those dry on the vine. Black eyed peas are fattening up in their pods and the okra looks like it will start to bloom any day now. Those are the only exciting things at the moment.
Sierra is still bugging me to do workbooks every day. On Tuesday we headed to the local library for "big rig day". It is part of their summer reading program to have some activity every week and I expected this to be a small event---maybe a fire truck and police car and that would be it. Well, it was a HUGE set up. I think they probably had one of every type of vehicle the city owns there! We got to talk to several very polite city workers about what the vehicles did and what different parts of the vehicles were for. The kids could sit up in them if they wanted. They also handed out free popsicles for everyone. She mostly chose math to work on this week, so we did lots of addition and worked a bit on subtraction. Today we read a book about tornadoes and made a "tornado" with two 2-liter bottles and a little connector. Our neighbor is an "archery in the schools" teacher and had family visiting, so he set up all his equipment and invited us over to join in. Sierra enjoyed her little archery lesson and Josh got a chance to pick up a compound bow (he was on the archery team in college, but shot recurve).
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