curly sue

gracie got her first perm! i was explaining to her how after the curlers were in, she would put the stinky stuff on, gracie said how do you know it's stinky, have YOU gotten a perm recently? i said gracie, you only have to have one perm in your life to know and remember how stinky the stuff is! lol

she's begining to learn what women go through to look pretty!

she wasn't thrilled to put the bag on her head but she sure looked cute though!

after getting the curlers out she said it fell like a million pounds had been lifted off her head, after a million went on when she was rinsing them.

and after all that......half of it didn't even take, it's still straight on alot of her head. going back today to see what we can do.

Bombs AWAY!!!

when chris came home thursday night, he parked in his regular spot in the driveway. there are no trees anywhere near where he parks. there are bushes to the right and a garage to the left. no trees. so imagine our suprise friday morning when we looked out at the car. and witnessed a full scale artillery attack from some of our feathered friends. in the following "evidence" the crime scene photos that follow, the first one, of the front windshield it is alot clearer than when i first went out because i had to use the windshield wipers to be able to see!

in conclusion, i would like to state for the record, these birds were not flying the "friendly" skies that day!!!

Gardening in the summer

well here we are, the start of the summer, and i am already learning some things i want to do differently next year in the garden. AND i am remembering how fast this yard can get out of hand, especially with as much rain and heat as we have been having so far. however i will say i think we are doing better staying more on top of it this year than in years past. but let me share some of my thoughts. more for myself to remember and to hopefully one day help my kids. first let me state that once again, i have failed to fix the date on the camera (stupid camera) and no i did not take these pictures 10 years ago! lol

my strawberry patch. we had wonderful strawberries, but i quickly realized the patch was a bit wide and i need to revise how the future strawberries are planted. i need to put them in actual rows so we can reach them more easily and i need to mulch with straw so the don't get yucky from laying on the ground. i didn't realize (duH) with their weight they would end up on the ground. due to that, this season is over due to the moldy and yucky ones on the ground. but we did harvest quite a bit before hand.

The "orchard" we have started in the back. there are several fruit and nut trees back there with little wire fences around them. but for now i just want this picture for future reference on how it used to look before they matured!









a little closer view of the orchard trees amonst the established ones. i love my big trees. they are the most wonderful shade tree, but i will soon have to raise their canopies to allow sun to my plants!

my little peach tree. we planted it last year and we were not supposed to get fruit on it for a couple years. however these peaches did not read those rules as they are already growing.

The back of the main garden

Side of main garden. i believe i planted like 22 tomato plants. i have a few different types i wanted to try, plus my main ones.

my bush beans. much easier so far than the pole beans, we will see what kind of yields i get though. however it disturbs me greatly when it comes time to thin them to pull out completely healthy plants and just throw them out! but they did come up really well, which is more than i can say for my corn!

The corn, ohhhh my arch enemy this year! alot of the corn planted did not come up, however, i had a few rows that did well, so when i thinned those out i decided to try and transplant them in the spots the other corn did not come up. in fact one whole row is transplants. i will know later if i should have just used new seed or if the transplants were a good idea.

Ohhhhh my peas and sugar snap peas!!!! this is not the greatest year for those. this year i decided to use a trellis for them to grow up instead of string. well maybe my trellis was too thick, i'm not sure, but the plants would NOT grow up them, they kept laying on the ground no matter how hard we tried to train them up, and then i couldn't weed in between the rows, and you see it is part peas part grass in there! however we have been able to harvest a fairly good batch so far.

cucumber. well i am still not completely sure on how far apart i should have planted them, so we will see if these were too close or if i should have thinned these out as well. like the beans they came up really good. we got the fencing up a few days later than i wanted, because in those few days they grew quite a bit and it was harder to get them going up the fence. we will see how well this idea goes. last year i used string for these as well.

my melon patch. chris dug this out for me to have a seperate area for them as the vines tend to take over. my goal is to keep all vines inside this area! my melon seeds i started indoors did not survive so i got 2 watermelon and 1 canteloupe plants at the farmers market. we'll see how they do.

my potato patch! i am soo excited about that! i have red potatos, blue potatoes and white potatoes all growing. however when frankie and his friend blake helped me plant them, some how they ended up in not so straight of rows and some were coming up in the middle of rows which makes weeding harder. but i have to get in there and get it done. i just have not done it yet but when i do, you can be sure i will be mulching so don't have to do it again!

my berry row. this is where my blackberry and raspberry plants are. we transplanted them 2 years ago in the fall. we just dug them up from around the yard and put them in one place. last year they started growing and this year they have produced berries. though not too terribly big on size, they are huge on flavor. need to learn more about growing them so hopefully we can get a better turn out on the raspberries next year. the blackberries are still flowering and green but we've picked some of the raspberries so far.

the grapes! the white grapes have taken off this year! they have already reached the top of the arbor and they even have grapes growing on them! we planted all these plants last year, but we think these get more sun than the others which is why they have done so well. next to them are 2 concord grap plants that aren't doing bad. then on the other side are two red grape plants, which accidently got mowed over last year so they are not quite too big yet.

well that is all for now. i have my middle of the season look to remember next year when planning what to do the same and what not to do and maybe even some new ideas.

So far this summer

just have to say we have been having such a nice summer, that even the few bad things that have happened have not been able to spoil it. we had sat down to family game night sundy and i looked out the window, it was so neat the way the bottom was dark, then clear sky in the middle then dark again. i grabbed my camera to take the picture out the window when i realized the half rainbow in the sky! i felt like i was living in the treasure at the bottom as i am currently totally content in life at this time. i would like to always feel this way, but i have a feeling we will eventually have to join the real world again! lol

stolen identity and a rabied raccoon!

well the week had been going pretty good. we were getting alot of fun done and some of the work i scheduled. then thursday evening i went to kroger to get some things and my card kept saying not authorized. luckily i had cash for what i was purchasing, but i called chris on the way home and told him what happened, he got onto our acct and asked me (now why he even thought i would say yes, i don't know) if i bought something for $1100! i was like uhhh NO!!!! long story short (as short as i am capable of making one) someone had stole my information including my debit card and used it online to purchase $1100 from a company in ITALY!!! the fraud dept caught it right away and with in 5 minutes put a hold on my card but not before allowing the charge to go through. soooo longer story short again, we will be getting the money back in our acct once the transaction has "posted" although i think it is stupid to not have in your "system" a way to stop a PENDING transaction when it has been disputed! so we are thinking we will probably start buying alot more checks and using alot more cash cuz evidently the chances of me getting robbed vs getting my identity stolen are way less, especially since this happened about a year or so ago with chris' card!
now, onto today, chris took the kids out to pick strawberries. a friend stopped by and he and chris walked over to our lean to to discuss how to fix it and our friend said "what's that there" well turned out to be a raccoon suffering from rabies. he was slowly dying and just laying there, foaming at the mouth and quick shallow breathing. very sad. but also scary, it was just outside of our gate/fence and our dog goes over there all the time when we let him out of the fenced area. tried calling animal control but they didn't have an officer available. for some reason, call me stupid, but i would think that would be a job you would have round the clock people available for, since animals like this raccoon, don't really have access to their regular hours. but whatever. so they lady told him to use a shovel to pick him up and dispose of him in a trash bag/trashcan or dumpster. well let me tell you, we are the trashy toth's and dispose of much trash between the house and the yard on a weekly basis so we have a small dumpster and in he went. however we thought he was pretty close to the end, but as this happened this morning, as of 8 tonite, he was still alive in there. sooo sad. and no there will definetly not be any pictures for this post...ewwww!

daily life

ok, let me start by saying, i have tried to find books on the daily life of women from the depression years to the 1950's (the years i am most interested in) and there are very few to none out there that i could locate. i tried to turn to my grandmother's diaries but the entries, though daily, did not tell much about her day to day life. so i am trying to be better about this for my kids and grandkids sakes. hopefully they will not find it terribly boring, cuz let me tell ya, living it certainly is not boring! ha!

today, my first waking thought was, i have to get up and get going, we HAVE to stick to this schedule printed up for the kids. well then the lady on my other shoulder said, while it is good to have a guideline, the benefit of staying home with the kids is that you DON'T have to be so strict on times. then the other voice said louder, but you know yourself, and how easy it is to just let it all go and say forget it for today until today is next month etc.... so i compromised with my voices (there's enough fighting with the kids in this house, i don't need to be fighting with myself!) i decided to put a limit on my sleeping in, no later than 9 and that is if i was up really late the night before. AND to be really strict on the items on the list but maybe not so much on the time.

So i got up, reluctantly. today is teaching tuesday. it also was whitebean chilli for supper and ricekrispy treats for snack day. sooo gracie learned how to grate cheese and chicken on the grater for the soup, and frankie learned how to make ricekrispy treats. i also taught them about how to measure things out, how some recipes need to be exact and others not so much. ***on a side note, i just have to put it in cuz i thought about it the whole time gracie was working. frankie's friend blake was over the other day and the cheese grater was out on the counter, he said "is that a real grater thingy!?" i said yes and he goes "that is soooo cool" and went on about it for a couple minutes more, i had to laugh and thought wow, what this generation doesn't know! lol anyway i go back to .....SQUIRREL! so back to the cooking lesson. they both did really good, and did not fight at all, in fact they were quite helpful to each other, which really set the mood for most of the day. so once that was going, we packed up the coolers into the van for the cold groceries we would be getting, (we go to 3 different stores each time to get the best food at the best prices) made up some water bottles and snacks as we are determined NOT to eat fast food any more and off we went. * btw i thought my cell was in my purse and it was actually in the car chris took to work, but it was actually really nice not having that distraction. i think the kids enjoyed it too!
we stopped at jo ann fabrics first to get supplies for thursday's craft project and next tuesdays sewing lesson. they both decided right away they would take turns sitting up front, which was a miracle and wonderful at the same time!
then off to aldi's. both kids were great all day fetching things for me and learning about what kind of things we get and why. we like aldi's for the cheapest prices but they don't ever have everything we need and i really don't care for most of their produce. while there, gracie and i noticed and elderly lady with a cane, getting ready to take her cart back to the coral, gracie offered take it back for her and return with the quarter, she agreed but told her to keep the quarter. then as she finished that, there was yet another elderly lady with a cane and she again offered to take the cart back and hand her the quarter and she too told her she could keep the quarter. we laughed and i told gracie she just earned the equivelant of a 30 minute card in less than 2 mins!
then we headed to walmart, where the non food prices are the best and some of our groceries. we have also been trying to do away with the ten million plastic grocery bags we come home with and been using our wonderful LARGE aldi's canvas bags. i love these cuz hey hold alot and they are very durable, highly recommend them, they are only $1.99 a bag too! it's easy with aldi cuz they don't bag, they just put all the groceries back in your cart and you go bag yourself. however at walmart and kroger i usually forget the bags in the car, so i decided to just go with the aldi way today and told the cashier, don't bag them just put them all back in the cart. i figured i might get stopped leaving with all that in my cart and no bags, them thinking i didn't check out, so i had receipt in hand, but all he said was, have a nice day! ha! at this point we were getting really hungry, we had only had waffles before we left, but we were determined not to grab something, so we marched on to kroger, got the produce and the last remaining things there. i got as much organic as possible, but they are limited on what produce they have there, i need to plan trips to the farmers' market better until my own garden comes in. i got our organic chicken nuggets and noticed they had hamburger patties and rolls of hamburger, both from pasture fed cows. i was really excited. i knew they would be a bit more, but i thought, i am "voting" to buy and support organic, however at the check out, that tiny roll of hamburger that was not even a POUND was $6.99!!! ok, we will become vegetarians before i will pay that much for hamburger. (i returned the meat for a refund before we left the store) we definetly need to look into getting the bulk meat from local farmers!
home we went, where thankfully chris was home from work and was able to help carry in groceries. we got to talking so gracie helped by starting to put groceries away. the soup was done and calling our names! i had a bowl and chris and i headed out to the yard, started working out there til frankie came out and reminded me about their daily in the word that started in a few minutes and i had not put it together for them yet. so i came in, did that and went ahead and planned out the next two weeks lessons. then we all ate some more soup and pretty much relaxed the rest of the day. i must say, it was a crazy busy day, but it was one of the most relaxful and enjoyable days i have spent with my kids in a long time! i hope this is a forcast for the rest of the summer.
btw, adding 2 T of vineger to chilli does NOT cut down on the gas!