Because Pretend

That's something Lily says. These pictures are from earlier this month. Rebecca brought over a few dress-up things Evie had outgrown. I was excited thinking Lily would get into it, but for some reason Lily was loathe to try them on... I swear I didn't push it - Go figure - one of those random 2-year old things. She finally put this on one night for Grandpa, with her happy meal crown from when we went to Yosemite. (Possibly her one and only happy meal considering we never go to McDonald's and when we got it she threw it up.) 

Anyway, just wanted to record a few funny things Lily's been saying:

"Because pretend" She sometimes feels she needs to clarify that something is pretend to me. She's got the concept of pretend down to a degree. We took her to Toy Story 3 a couple weeks ago and she was a little scared at first, but I think it was mainly due to the big, loud, darkness of the theater. I actually think it was the least scary of the 3 Toy Story movies. The other night we watched Tarzan together and she cried when Tarzan was saying goodbye to his ape mom when he was planning to leave for England, and then again when the Leader/Ape dad died she cried and said "Where's my Dad? Where's my Dad!?" (Mike was in the other room) It was so sad and cute at the same time to see these empathetic tears from my baby! I felt kinda bad, maybe she wasn't ready for Tarzan. She wanted to watch it again, though.

"Mom, I hear the crickets!" Every night if we're outside :)

"Mom, the dog is ruffing!"

"Ah-Ga!" meaning echo - whenever we get into a somewhat echo-y place she shouts this out. 

"Round and round we go. Nobody stops. Nobody knows!" ...That is so true.

"My birthday is coming next week." or "Guess what, Isaac/Evie is coming to my birthday party next week." That started immediately following her 2nd birthday party and is regularly repeated. I've tried telling her her birthday will not come for another year, so now she just says: "My birthday is coming 2 years ago." She can hold up 2 fingers, now and say: "I'm 2 years old!"

To her dad as she was eating lunch: "Monkeys go: Eee ee - Aah aah - Ooo Ooo! What does that mean? That doesn't mean anything."

As we were driving back from going to the beach and dinner last Friday we told Lily we would give her a bath when we got home. Mike was playing at going to sleep on the floor with her while I was in the other room. Mike said when he looked up ~ pretending to wake back up ~ Lily was making for the door... She turned around and told him: "I don't have time for these, Dad! I need to take a bath. -- I don't have time for these. Come on, Dad!" -So don't know where she got that line! I honestly can't imagine a situation where the phrase - I don't have time for this - would have come out of my mouth. So funny!

Seeing Red

 

In a happy ripe tomatoes way! Finally!  We've had a few tasty Matt's Wild cherry - aren't they adorable?

 

I think so - as much as tomatoes can be adorable. But, I am finally seeing more signs of ripeness in some of our other varieties. I've been watching this big guy from the beginning:

 

He's the first tomato I spotted growing on our plants and grew just huge. I picked him as soon as he started to ripen because I didn't want to come out and see holes in him and regret not having picked him. So he's waiting on our shelf until he ripens some more - high enough up so that Lily won't snag an early bite. She would.

So excited!!! If caterpillars don't stop us we'll be rolling in ripe tomatoes this year! I think we'll have to do some canning!

Our back lawn is looking better too. Grass has never grown so well back there - too much shade, dogs running paths through it, or broken sprinkler systems to blame. My brother Andrew fixed the sprinklers and Mike and I threw down some grass seed earlier this summer and it was started to look pretty good! Then we tried some fertilizer with weed control to try to get rid of the weeds....that didn't work. It killed a few weeds, but left most and also left some large areas of dead brown grass! We were pretty bummed after all our efforts to make it nice, but we planted some more grass and have been watering and mowing and it's already looking good again! Can't keep us down for long - ha ha!

Green Growing Things

So I know I've been behind on updating, but I have at least been taking photos roughly every 15 days. I had this hankering to do a sort of time-lapse view of my garden growing. (Not so cool as if it were a daily thing, or even if I'd bothered to take the photos at the same time of day, but there you have it.) Can you believe how much things grow in just 15 days!?

Beginning with June to mid August

 Side Garden View 1

Side Garden View 2

Tomatoes along the fence

Our garden is doing pretty well. There are lots of green tomatoes and we've had a few Matt's Wild cherry ripen enough to eat. When I say a few, I mean it...enough for each of us to have one to taste, well actually Lily had two - so it's technically one more than a few. That taste made me excited for more, and the fact that Lily liked it - even more excited! Anything that gets that girl to eat something healthy is exciting! Just hoping they make it to ripen! - more on that in a second...

We've also been eating zucchini, of course - that's something anybody can grow easily and plentifully! And spinach, carrots, and some green onions. The regular onions are growing well, and I also picked my first pea pod and got my first taste of my own garden peas! Peas have been my favorite straight-from-the-garden-thing since my first taste of my Grandma's as a kid! I planted more when I put up my trellis, and am hoping they thrive, because it's still a relatively small amount of peas. You can bet next year I will be devoting more space to them (given that we are still here or somewhere we can have a garden). The potatoes were a disappointment, but overall our garden makes me happy.

When it isn't giving us nightmares, anyway...

Green things have been growing in our garden, but not all of them are desirable. I'm not talking weeds - I'm talking creepy crawly caterpillars. So just the other day I discovered a tiny brown caterpillar on some of the tomato plants that are growing in pots behind our main garden.

Well, worms and most bugs have always grossed/freaked me out. Ants are fine as long as they don't bite me or invade my house. I kill spiders no problem, but only because the thought of them crawling around loose somewhere in my vicinity scares me more than just squishing them. Mike kills spiders, but sometimes he just catches harmless spiders and bugs and lets them go outside. I've never even liked to play with roly-polies. I remember as a kid not even wanting to touch the page if there was a picture in a book of something I considered disgusting. Sometimes I do think about how bugs are God's creations too, and feel a little bad because really they may be just as important and loved by God as I am, so when they are doing their thing outside I usually just leave them alone, but if any bug is on my turf - I don't have too much sympathy for it.

So anyway, I got a rock and a twig or something like that to pick that little caterpillar off my tomato plant, because no way was I going to touch it with my bare fingers... I just couldn't squish it - ew! But I didn't want it eating up my garden so I tossed it over the fence rock, twig and all. At least I tried tossing it - it was not the greatest throw because of my squeamishness - so that sucker is probably right back where he started from this minute. Anyway, the reason I was back there in the first place was to check out a few tomatoes that were starting to turn red. I looked them over and found the bottoms of all the red ones were rotten - bummer. Then, as I was looking for more bad tomatoes to pick off, I noticed a green tomato that was half eaten...and next to it - something that made me jump back in fear and disgust and sent a shudder all through my body. I ran into the house - to get my camera of course. These are the best pictures I could get, because my disgust at the sight of them would only let me get so close. But just so you know - these huge green beasts were fatter around than my thumb and much longer than any of my fingers. That was a good sized tomato you see pictured there. Click to Zoom. Ew.

Ew.

 

Ew!

I don't even want to know how close I got to this guy while taking a picture of his friend in the first photo - I didn't notice him at first, but I know he made an appearance in Mike's dreams that night after Mike did the dirty job of disposing of at least 5 of these tomato eaters.

Thank goodness I have a wonderful husband who spared me of the task, and the nightmares! I think if it were up to me alone I might have just let them have the tomatoes....(or done something stupid and ineffectual just because I didn't want to touch them). Here's hoping they haven't infested the tomato plants on the other side of the yard and that they don't show their ugly heads around here again!

Good day

Today was good. Lily entertained herself in a couch fort for an unbelievably long time which helped me get some chores done around the house. Seriously - whenever I checked on her to make sure she was still happy under those blankets and pillows she ordered me back to what I was doing - it was great! Then a little later she climbed up on her stool in the kitchen and helped me make zucchini bread. She stuck it out through the whole process - I was amazed! She put the carrot pieces in the chopper for me, and helped me mash some bananas (though not very much because she started eating them), she helped me break some pecans in pieces, counted scoops with me and assisted pouring in other ingredients - and she put cupcake papers in all the spots in the cupcake pan. She was in such a good mood the entire day. (And so cute in her little apron cooking away!) It made me feel like I just need to let her help me more! I think I want to make Gak together or some kind of homemade goop she can play with - she'd probably love it. Anyway, a good long nap gave me a chance to meet several of my nap-time goals including exercising and showering -always a good thing :) I always have more goals than I can hope to accomplish in the time I have, but I felt good about what I got done today. I've been trying to make exercise a priority as I have never done my entire life - time to change that. Tonight I made BBQ chicken pizza for dinner - kinda experimental - but it turned out delicious. I gotta celebrate getting dinner on the table because I haven't been so good at that lately! Trying to change that too :) Not everything about today was perfect, but it was so nice overall - wish every day was so simple and happy :) It was one of those days that make me feel so glad to be a mom. Such a good job!

Kinda nice

So not worrying about a camera or getting pictures is pretty nice. Not that I'll leave it behind once I get it back. I really enjoy taking pictures and regret not having more from when Lily was a tiny baby. But it was really nice just kicking back at the beach yesterday with my family. Yeah, there were a few moments I wished I'd had my camera, but mostly I just enjoyed the sound of the ocean and the wind on my skin. Watched the sun go down over the water, and there is never a better feeling than a hot shower after playing in the sand at the beach!

Out of Sorts

So my camera broke the other day. It just stopped working. I tried charging it 3 separate times in different outlets, but it just kept turning off the second I turned it on. It's funny how something like that could put me so out of sorts for the day yesterday. Especially since we have two cameras and it was not the nicest of the two - it was just this was my camera - my little pocket one that Mike got me for Christmas and that I take almost everywhere because I love taking pictures! and when I'm without a camera I seem to miss the best photo opportunities! Not that my camera was the only thing on my mind. It just didn't help... It was one of those days yesterday... But, I called Kodak and it's still under warranty, and I found the receipt!  So I shipped it out last night in the hopes that Kodak will repair or replace it and not claim that I'd dropped it or spilled liquid on it - I can be such a skeptic, especially to big businesses who I think are probably more concerned with their bottom line than being fair to one little customer. But I'm trying to have a little more trust, and anyway it's worth a shot because the cost of shipping is like $10 bucks versus the cost of a new camera.

A little story from my day yesterday: My memory card ended up inside my printer. I took it out during my phone call to Kodak and had - distractedly, trying to get it out of Lily's reach - set it in the printer paper tray. Later, after an hour sorting through old receipts - I found my proof of purchase, my luck was changing!!! I scanned it and went to print it and the paper stuck midway through. 'Stupid printer,' I thought '- this camera warranty thing is cursed!' I pulled out the jam, but the printer light just kept blinking. I opened and closed it, cleared the documents in the queue, unplugged the connection, and it still wasn't working. I looked inside and saw this little tag hanging down that said 'Kodak'. I thought: 'What!? Is this a conspiracy!? This is an HP Printer what is that Kodak tag doing in there!?' Then it dawned on me. Yes, folks - that's how my mind works sometimes. I am embarrassed to admit it, but it was also too funny not to share.

Another story: I decided I would use our other camera and take a couple of quick photos of Lily after her nap - since I happened to dress her in a little outfit I'd made that I hadn't gotten any great pictures of. (The only picture I had was of her crying at her cousins birthday party in it when she was feeling pretty rotten having missed her nap and being sick.) Anyway, I haven't made Lily much in the way of clothes so I figured I should get a picture of it. I fixed her hair all cute to match and just as we headed downstairs I got a phone call. My mom wanted me to look something up for her online that she couldn't because she didn't have the internet out visiting my Grandma. I get off the phone with a dilemma - do I look that up and call her right back, or take the pictures first? It won't take long to look it up and I don't want to keep her waiting. Just as Lily and I head out back with me still on the phone with my mom - Mike gets home from work. I am always thrilled to see him, of course, and so is Lily, but as she runs excitedly up to him she notices dangling from his arm in a plastic bag - ice-cream! Well, I am normally as thrilled to see ice-cream as Lily was, but she hadn't had lunch yet and I was on a mission to secure a picture. Mission terminated. Lily jumped excitedly up into her booster chair as she never will do for a meal, but the second she comprehends that she cannot have ice-cream until after lunch.. "Lunch - YUCK!" she jumps back down, and since I am in her path and she's mad...kicks me in the shins! Time out. No happy pictures happening here. Well, not in that moment. I couldn't help but think: 'Was this outfit cursed too?' Of course not. Things calmed down a little bit later (thanks largely to my wonderful husband) and I snapped a few happy pictures of my ladybug. Made this to cover a stain on the front of the shirt with some old polka-dot fabric my mom had lying around. It was just in time for Isaac and Audrey's big bug Birthday bash :)

Birthday bugged

Ice-cream happy, but before my camera has the time to focus...

YUCK!

 YUCK is right.

 Dad is the best!

Happy Again

Those last three were from us goofing around later that night. I love my girl - don't think she's always acting out. She's a really good kid. :)

Anyway, my camera is out for repairs. I'll let you know how it turns out, because it was really a great little camera for the price and sometimes took just as good or better photos as our expensive Fuji one. I hope they will fix it!!!

Spinach Salad

I've never been much of a salad lover... I mostly always prefer it with no dressing. Salad dressing grossed me out for most of my life. There was nothing very appealing to me about that funny smelling stuff that'd been sitting in the fridge for who knows how long. Thousand Island? --A mixture between ketchup and mayo and pickle relish essentially...on lettuce? No thank you. I prefer to just wash lettuce and eat it wet with salt and a few toppings.  I never liked spinach either because I was only introduced to the cooked variety.

Well, as I've gotten older I've found myself liking more and more things. Something my parents always told me would happen that I never believed! 

...Still don't think I could stomach Thousand Island, but fresh spinach is great, and a friend in Colorado opened my mind to trying dressings with this delicious salad she made. So so good! Anyway - this is pretty much the only tasty salad I know how to make...so, before I share this recipe, I am making a plea to anyone who reads this blog: Please share your salad recommendations and recipes with me! I need to add more vegetables to our diet and we have access to garden fresh spinach!

Skagit Salad

Ashley Cox

1/2 cup cashews
1/4 tbs. bacon, cut into bits
1/2 or a little more cauliflower
1 bag of fresh spinach

Dressing:
1 green onion, chopped
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp. celery seed
1/3 cup water
1/4 cup wine vinegar or red vinegar
2 Tbsp. Dijon mustard
1 cup salad oil

Toast cashews in a Tbsp. of butter until lightly brown. Fry bacon, cut into bits. Break cauliflower into bite-size pieces and blanch in boiling waters for 3-4 minutes. Combine dressing ingredients together. Then add spinach to bowl - top with cooled cauliflower, bacon, cashews and dressing.
 
Note: Half the amount of dressing is more than enough. I've substituted carrots cooked until just tender and cooled for the cauliflower or left it out altogether. If you add the green onion separately you can save some of the dressing for later in the fridge. Just be sure to date it and don’t hang on to it too long and gross out your picky eaters! :)

Beef Roast

I remember making a slow cooker beef roast shortly after I got married that turned out so bland! We don't eat a lot of beef so I don't know if I have made another in about 9 years. Well, Mike mentioned a while back that a beef roast with carrots and potatoes sounded good, so I tried again the other day. I looked at a bunch of recipes online, but none of them really sounded like just what I was looking for. I did not want it turning out tasteless again. So I made up a recipe of my own. It turned out really good so I thought I'd share it with you all :)

Beef Roast

Ingredients
2-4 lb beef roast
1 large onion chopped & sautéed
Butter
Olive oil
Grizzly Joe’s Original Gourmet
4 carrots
3 russet potatoes
1 c. water
1 pkg onion soup mix
½ tsp beef bouillon 
¼ c. Worcester sauce
dab Balsamic vinegar
1 tsp distilled white vinegar
¼ c. BBQ sauce (Sweet Baby Ray’s)
(If I'd had beef broth I'd have skipped the bouillon and substituted broth for the water.)

Directions
Sprinkle Grizzly Joe’s seasoning liberally over all sides of roast. Sauté onions in olive oil and butter - set half aside and add half to crock-pot. In same pan, brown roast in olive oil, add to crock-pot. Peel and chop potatoes and carrots and stuff around the roast, sprinkle the rest of the onions on top. Mix water and remaining ingredients and pour over roast and vegetables. Cook on low for about 6 hours.

Summer Days

 So classic. 

I love catching a little sunshine in a photo. 

Lily can't get enough popsicles. Probably because we don't let her have them very often. It just doesn't seem to make much sense to have one of the few things she eats be so non-nutritious. But you can't be nutritious all of the time. The ironic thing is when she gets her little hand on a popsicle - she really doesn't end up eating much of it. Most of it just melts away while she hold onto it, grinning. I think she likes the idea of it more than anything - toddler status symbol?

Brrrrr!

You can see Mike just adores his little girl! :)

I'm Lily!

 

Lily has recently become very sensitive to her sense of self. She's Lily. Anything else you might suggest is contradicted in the most scornful tones! 'I'm not ____, I'm Lily!' 'Not cute' 'Not a girl', 'not a baby' (which makes mom kind of sad), 'not a doctor', not a bunch of other funny things I can't remember, and today 'not normal'. Ha ha.

 

Lily has been quite a bit crankier than usual the past few days which I am hoping is due to the fact that she's been sick, and not to the fact that she's 2 years old. If it's the latter - we have a long year ahead of us. So you know I'm not being too harsh with any of the following statements I will preface them with the fact that my daughter is one of the number 1 loves in my life, and I genuinely like being her mom - most of the time... Sometimes she can be pretty aggravating and I have the desire to just get as far away from the sound of her whining as I possibly can. Of course, I can't just leave her alone to possibly hurt herself, and if I did just completely ignore her I'd feel guilty and sorry for the poor darling within a few minutes and be back in the room trying to make her happy again. OK - so that wasn't so harsh. Sometimes when she's clinging to me while I'm washing dishes I am just longing for the day when that phase will pass. Seriously I will have no sentimental longing for that outgrown habit to return, because she pushes her way in-between my body and the cabinet determined to squeeze into a space that is not there - so that I am forced uncomfortably away from the sink and she is forced uncomfortably into the cabinet drawer handles pointy ends - whining and crying louder the entire time. She really can't stop it soon enough! Just so you know Lily, if you read this in the future: every kid gives their mom some kind of grief, and that doesn't mean you love them any less! A habit I do miss that has been repeated over the last couple of days is rocking her in the glider chair! My sweet baby! She is getting too big for it to really be comfortable, but I love to cuddle her so!

I just feel at a loss sometimes about how to deal with a wall of No's! And that shift from asking me for something specific to freaking out when the very thing she asked for is being presented to her! There is no reasonable approach to take with a person who is acting completely unreasonable! Most of the time when she freaks out - I just ignore it, figuring no response can't be very encouraging for her to continue acting that way.... She's a pretty persistent kid, however. And she's so smart! She's already got down the trick of asking another adult if one says no. Well now that her temperature is back to normal I must be feeling less sorry for her, because I found myself giving her a little attitude crackdown. When the whiny crying voice comes out I am meeting it with counting and timeouts. Let's just hope she gets the connection and I don't waste the effectiveness of the timeout.

She's a good kid - don't get me wrong! I know she's just trying to assert her independence and find out where we'll draw the line. We'll find out together.

On a lighter note: We've been taking Lily's temperature so often over the last couple of days she's added it to her vocabulary. She says it 'temper-picture.' Last night her dad's 'temper-picture' was '40 dollars.' 

Another thing I know I'll miss is how Lily always seems like my baby again when I pull her onto my shoulder and wrap her up in towels after a bath. She always hugs me and usually says 'I love you mama!' I just bought her some new towels - we've been using the same hooded baby ones since she was born and they've gotten far too small...but she looked so like my little baby again wrapped up in them I've been having a hard time letting them go. Oh well, new memories to make coming up!

It's not because I'm not nice

You know how there are some people who are just perpetually rude? They always seem to give you attitude or be in a bad mood. Those servers in restaurants who seem to give you the attitude shift the second you ask for 'just water'. People waiting in lines with grumpy distant scowls who practically startle at being smiled to... And people you have to work with on a regular basis that always leave you with the impression that they consider you about on the same level as scum in-between their toes. 

The assistant in our pediatrician's office is like that. I dread talking with her, but she is on the front lines and typically the person you speak to first. She always makes me feel like she considers my questions and concerns idiotic and a complete waste of her time. Sometimes I think about giving her a piece of my mind! I mean, it's not like there aren't other doctors we could go to - and she should give a little more consideration to customer service or just common courtesy! I think about enlightening her to that effect...but I never do. My parting comment to her condescending half-smirk as we left the doctor's office on Friday: "Have a good weekend!" as cheerful and genuine as I could make it. 

I mean - who knows what she's dealing with in her everyday life? I hate when people judge others without knowing the least little thing about the other person's life, or side, or what struggles they are going through. It happens all the time, even amongst people who think they know and do love each other very well! Everyone has some inner turmoil (- that may be almost impossible to share). And usually rudeness has nothing to do with the person on the receiving end of it and everything to do with the person who is dishing it out (from their life's baggage). Quite likely they have something entirely unrelated to you on their minds and don't realize how they are coming across. Not that I don't think there are appropriate times and places to throw a little attitude back at somebody...I just think in most cases it doesn't better the situation... And you've got to keep in mind that there is a lot more that you don't know than you could possibly imagine! I'm not perfect at it, but I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, and try to base my firmer opinions on first hand experience rather than someone else's account. Maybe people won't always give me the same consideration, but at least in these kind of situations there is some comfort in knowing I was as nice as I could be. And there is some hope that maybe someday - after so much niceness is dealt out - that that chip will melt off her shoulder in her future encounters with me! One can only hope.

How my garden grows!

So I'm a little later than usual with a garden update, but I did take some of these photos at the beginning of the month. It was worth waiting to post because a lot more interesting developments have happened this past week or so.

August 1st I pulled up our first carrot - to see how it was doing, and to give a couple others that were crowded around it a little more space. We never thin them out very well... I just have a hard time pulling up healthy plants before they've even had a chance. Lily tried it out, but I think Mike ended up eating it. He said it tasted like a carrot.

Our tomatoes have grown as high as the fence and there are tons of green tomatoes hiding in the bushiness, still no ripe ones yet!

I finally put up a trellis for my peas and went ahead and planted some more while I was at it. Hopefully they will grow! - no pods in sight so far. Mike also got around to planting our strawberries in the ground. We had been considering building a special box for them, but they'd waited long enough and were literally dying to get out of their pots. They are looking much better now. We only have so much time for gardening so we do what we can. We are not weed-nazis or anything. I can say we certainly don't have green thumbs, but we like to try.

I don't think our potatoes are going to work out. >Insert sad music here< We read that once the potato plant flowers and dies off they are ready to harvest. Well, they had flowered, and some of them were not looking too good - so I decided to dig around in the worst looking pot. I suspected that particular one was rotting because there was dark water leaking out around it's base, so I figured it was better to check if there were any potatoes in there before they rotted too - if they weren't already. This was our harvest: 

Three dinky potatoes none bigger than a cherry tomato. And some nasty shmear of stinky white goo at the base of the root. I did take a picture, but I will spare you. (Yuck.) I don't think our buckets had enough drainage and out soil is rather clayey. I've been hesitant to water very much or to not water...but the soil was much too wet and I think it had too much plant material in it to decay, and now I'm afraid to even check the other ones. Next time we try this I think I will put more holes in the bottom and add straw to the soil like another gardener suggested.

We were getting so much spinach! Our spinach leaves were so big and curly and full of holes from bugs or snails eating it that we couldn't keep up with it, and didn't much want to - it still tasted good fresh picked, but it didn't look very appealing hence - we weren't eating it. So we ripped half of it out to make room for some basil and cut back the other half practically to the ground to see if it would grow some more. Success! We enjoyed a lovely spinach salad this evening with some friends.

Mike finally uprooted that big onion we'd been growing for years (that looked kind of like a huge dandelion fluff in the corner of our garden). He collected at least a few hundred tiny seeds from that one blossom head.

 
We let a few of our zucchini grow big to collect seeds and I picked one of them yesterday. We've never let one get this big before and have never had the seeds seem fully developed either. This one is the size of a long skinny watermelon and sounds hollow when you knock it. I'll cut into it tomorrow to see if the seeds are fully mature. Mike weighed it on our bathroom scale and it was 10 lbs! Here are a few pics with Lily to give you an idea of the size, plus the cuteness factor. :)

Lily gets so silly when I'm trying to get a picture of her with produce. What's that about!? J/K :)

Last time Lily first, pretended, and then took a real bite of a raw zucchini...and while I was taking these photos she actually tried to take a bite of this monster! I really have to watch out! - She also teasingly rolled it off her lap while sitting on the bench (I caught it with my camera-free arm).

A little while later she was riding it down to town (She loves playing horsey).

 
She was cracking me up! She even started making faces for me, before she ran off to chase butterflies. She doesn't usually play up to the camera. She even stuck her tongue out at me! -  I got some fun photos.

Before she ran off...

Lily loves to chase butterflies while I water the garden. Major plus to living with my parents: Use of the backyard!

Already?

This morning felt chilly like fall was in the air. It's only August 9th for pity's sake! I'm not ready for the summer to be over, and this weather makes it feel like it's coming to an end too soon! I read in the paper that this has been the coolest summer in San Diego for 77 years! Weird. Well, apparently I dressed too warm this morning because it's already heating up. Hang in there summer! 

One of the things I love about this area is that even when it's cold it doesn't get that cold. I used to think I'd rather be cold than hot because you can always put more layers on - but you can only take so many off. I'd lived in the South and in the Midwest growing up and going to school and had my fair share of snow. Then I experienced winter in Boulder, CO. Not too bad weather-wise over all because the sun comes out so much, but when it got cold it was bone-chilling cold! One night as Mike and I walked from where we parked our car on campus to his painting studio a few yards away - I seriously thought I was going to die. I knew right then that fancies aside - I would never have made it as a pioneer! I had layers topped with a warm coat and a warm scarf wrapped around my face, but the air was so cold it was freezing all the moisture in my mouth and making me choke and struggle to breathe! I haven't had much desire to live where it snows a lot since. Not that I want the opposite extreme. That's what's so nice about this area. Mild temperatures and the beach! I do love seasons though - we kinda miss that here. The explosion of color in autumn leaves... And it's so lovely to watch the green creep back over the earth in the spring so gradually you almost miss the transition from the dull brown of late winter. Suddenly everything is so green and alive...and you appreciate it much more than if it had been green all along. Everything is clean and new too -- here, for the most part, plants are kind of in the same state so they tend to be duller and dustier than they'd be if they were reborn every spring. I do so love the long gardening season, though! If you find a place with a nice balance of weather that's also highly affordable please let me know! We're still open about where to settle down.

Make It Stop!

Time that is. -- It goes by way too fast! My niece Evie is starting kindergarten this year, and before I know it Lily will be in her shoes! (I'm not ready!!!) I was thinking this morning that one major thing I had to get used to about being a mom was adjusting to so much change. Quick change. The minute you think you're getting the hang of things - something new happens. And I'm not just talking about 2-year old mood swings, but they are a doozy! I fear to suggest anything these days, because the answer half the time will be: "No, not (whatever I just said) !"

Sometimes I feel like I'm developing more patience, and other times - not so much. I've gotten pretty good at keeping a straight face and letting teeny tantrums roll over me like water off a duck's back. There is no reason to them - so that is really my best reaction. They pass, again with no rhyme or reason, and my girl is sweet as pie most of the time. I know it's just a phase that soon will change.

Children develop so fast, and we as parents are in charge of helping them be ready to meet life's challenges. We have to be one step ahead, but I usually feel like I'm barely keeping up! I can't think of any other job that could stretch or strengthen me in so many ways. I'm so thankful that so many things just come naturally so it doesn't all rest on my shoulders! Sometimes, I just wish I could slow it down! I really love this age tantrums aside. It is so fun to hear the things that come out of my 2 year old's mouth and look at the world through her eyes, to cuddle and comfort her. I can steel myself to a life of change for all of that. Wouldn't want life to become stagnant any way!