Spring...ish

Spring has come to Oklahoma! Or...we thought it had. These pictures were taken the day before yesterday. Blue skies, happy birds, flowers blooming...well, we'll ignore for the moment what happened yesterday (snow!) and just enjoy these, shall we?

Here's a pair of finches on one of my feeders. It's hard to tell from the back-lit pictures, but they're purple finches. I've got lots of purple and red ones this year. It's really funny to see the males fighting over the feeders!

It's hard to get a good picture through the front window, but I tried.

My daffodils are in full bloom.

I just love these cheerful little flowers!

Point of interest: a female downy woodpecker has been visiting our feeder. Some woodpeckers do eat berries and such...but more perplexing still is the mockingbird! I haven't managed to photograph the mocker, but it's pretty funny to watch because he's HUGE. Much too big for the feeders!

Now, please stay tuned for today's pictures of Timothy building a snowman. ::sigh::

What I did over my summer vacation

There is really no fast way to catch up on months of blog neglect. Especially if you are like me and can't for the life of you figure out how to flip pictures so that blog readers don't throw out their necks turning their heads to look at the pictures. But I digress.

I decided it would be easiest just to post some random assortments of pictures. And by the way, my use of the word "vacation" might have been a little sarcastic. Moms don't get vacations. They don't get sick leave or overtime, either. I tried standing in the living room with a sign demanding fair treatment, but no one even noticed, so I gave up.

First off, I grew some things. These are peas. The best peas you'd ever hope to eat. And I grew them. If you want your kids to eat vegetables with enthusiasm, try having them help grow them. Amazing!

I also spent a lot of time cleaning bunny cages, brushing bunnies, carting bunnies outside for play time, trying to catch bunnies when they sneakily opened their cages and escaped into my kitchen, and made disgusting oooooing and aaaaahing noises over how cute they are. Knit sleeps on his back with his giant furry feet in the air, but I haven't caught it with the camera yet.

My children also spent a fair amount of time communing with Knit. They know better than to get too close to Purl. We're fairly certain she descended from the rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In other words, she's slightly evil.

Then my friend Kat, known among certain circles as "Kat the Enabler", taught me to dye yarn. It was fun. REALLY fun. Here is some sock yarn I dyed. I call it...Hubba Bubba. Am I dating myself? I loved that gum!

At some point, this creature adopted me. Her name is Maura. She weighs all of five pounds, has only three working legs, and is The Boss. When Maura meows, you listen. I find that letting her run the household saves a lot of unnecessary worry. Plus, my children obey her far better than they obey me.

As you can see, I grew some more stuff. These were my herbs somewhere mid-summer. The small tomato plant below has since made a play for domination and taken over the front yard. I should really take a picture, because I'm not kidding. One day, my house will just be the big lump covered in tomato vine. However, I'm not complaining because we've had LOTS of tomatoes.

Kat was involved in this activity as well. She taught me to spin. I've always wanted to learn, and I'd been saving for a wheel. For my birthday, Mom, Dad and Pawpaw conspired to get me my own wheel. I also need a picture of that. Because this is apparently the only part of my wheel that I photographed. Odd.

And then I grew some stuff. This is a heap of mixed greens. It was delicious. We ate pretty well this summer, considering my garden tried to kill me. (It gave me poison ivy that landed me in the ER. Twice. And no, I wasn't trying to grow poison ivy. It's a long story.)

I would like to say I grew this, but I didn't. The birds did. I have very helpful finches.

I made some pickles, using my grandma's recipe. My cucumbers didn't do very well, but my cousin donated some cucumbers to the cause. I enjoyed making them, even if the smell of the brine caused Timothy to walk around with his shirt over his face for an entire day.

So, that was my summer vacation, the highlights. Yes, I realize I turned into a hippie. I didn't mean to, if that counts for anything.

How does my garden grow?

In the last blog before my long absence, I promised pictures of what was left of my garden. Well, here they are! The basil was (and IS!) still going strong. The purple basil we tried this year was a huge success, but as always, the lemon basil (planted from last year's leftover seeds) was my favorite!

I'm a little perplexed that out of all the zinnia seeds I planted, I ended up with only pink ones. Once again this year, we have resident praying mantises that like to hang out on the zinnias. I think they might be the sons and daughters of the HUGE one we had last summer. They are all fairly small, and none of the pictures I've taken have been clear enough to show anything but a bunch of leaves and a green blur.

The marigolds are gorgeous right now. I might be the only person in the world that loves the way they smell! They seem to be the only thing that didn't get attacked by little green worms this year.

Last, my garden's crowing achievement! The first ripe cherry tomatoes! Since this, I've picked about a dozen in the last week. There are lots more on the vines, if the sun stays out long enough to ripen them! I also have three more tomato plants that have lots of tiny green cherry tomatoes on them, but whether they'll have time to ripen before the weather turns remains to be seen. The geese all started flying in formation awfully early this year. I hope that doesn't mean we're going to have another hard winter!

SO.FAR.BEHIND.

Since it's been so long since I've added any new pictures, I thought I'd start with some random miscellaneous ones. In no particular order...Chris and Timothy on the porch. No idea what's up with Timothy's eyes in this picture! I couldn't see that they were rolled back in his head in the teeny little screen on the camera.

Next, we have Gabe and Boris. Oh, the indignity of it all! About half a second after this picture was taken, a Nerf football landed squarely on the hood of my car, causing Boris to launch himself about ten feet up in the air out of pure shock. He landed casually and went back to licking himself. THAT is the picture series I wish I had.

I promise, we did eventually mow, but this little field of clover is proof positive that I'm rubbing off on my husband. Every year, we have such a lovely crop of clover in April and May, that I beg him not to mow it. It smells wonderful, and sometimes in the full moon, I like to go out and roll in it like a dog. Don't tell anyone that, ok? Anyway, this year he didn't mow. And he commented that he was getting a little attached to our clover field. Then a homeless guy came knocking on the door, offering to mow our lawn. Chris took the hint and mowed down the clover.

Here are my hollyhocks. I love them. So do the bees.

These are my other hollyhocks. The bees and I love the pink ones, too.

Taking time to smell the roses

When the roses bloom at the Tulsa Rose Gardens, I could happily live there. Sleeping under the stars, smelling the roses, bunnies and squirrels all around...on second thought, I could happily live there but for the squirrels. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a squirrel now and then. But Woodward Park, which surrounds the roses, has a population that is a little extreme. At times, you can be sitting and enjoying nature, and suddenly notice that there are thirty-seven squirrels around you, they have you surrounded, and they're staring. Eryn, I'm sorry. I probably should have included a disclaimer earlier that there would be creepy squirrels in this post. Anyway, the roses are heavenly. I couldn't stop taking pictures of them.

Timothy wasn't exactly Mr. Cooperation for this trip to the park. He heard "park" and thought "playground", so he was a bit disappointed. He was also fascinated by the fountains, and in constant danger of falling into them. I posed this picture and then warned Gabe to hold onto Timothy for dear life. In retrospect, that could've caused further mayhem, since Timothy weights only fifteen pounds less than Gabe, and they both could've ended up in the water.

These three roses were growing on the same rose bush. How is that possible?

I love it that Gabe is old enough to enjoy going to a "park" that doesn't contain a playground. If he's not careful, he's going to grow up to enjoy nature as much as his mom does.

I'm not sure how this picture happened, but it's my new favorite picture of my kids. I was trying to pose them, and Timothy wasn't cooperating (shocker!) so I think Gabe was actually getting up to move closer to Timothy so I could take the picture. The posed picture that followed wasn't nearly as much fun as this one. I want this one framed and hanging in my living room.

Another "please don't let your brother fall into the fountain while I'm taking this picture" pose.

For those who haven't visited this particular park and rose garden, it's modeled after a traditional English rose garden. It has several tiers, and each one has neat paths, water features, topiaries, and lots of roses. If I only had a helicopter, you could see it all.

Don't you just want to bury your face in these? I'm sorry for the recent obsession with flowers and gardening. I would like to promise that this is the last such post for a while, but my hollyhocks are starting to bloom, so I can't.

This is one of my favorites. Isn't that a perfect bloom?

Not to be outdone by the roses, the water lilies are also lovely right now. Gabe pointed out that they smell as good or better than the roses. I pointed out that if he didn't stop leaning so far out to sniff them, he was going to end up giving some poor frog a concussion when he landed upon it.

So, if you're stressed out, I would recommend a trip to the rose gardens. It always makes me feel better, as long as I pay no attention to the Hitchcock squirrels!