8 1/2 months!

Baby E is now 8 1/2 months old, has 4 teeth, sits up, feeds himself cheerios, babbles with consonant sounds, holds board books and turns the pages, combat crawls, and charms the pants off of me every day!

Here's a picture from Mother's Day when we went to the "beach" at NARA Park in Acton.


And here's a picture I took of Baby E when I got out of the shower one day. I put him in his crib to play while I showered, and I guess he was so pooped he decided to take a nap. He takes after his mommy with the ability to sleep at the drop of a hat!

So, I used to think D was a bit of a (blanking on the word I really want to us) freak because he didn't want his picture anywhere on this blog, but the Baltimore Sun recently grabbed a picture off of my friend Wendy's blog and now it's all over the place (it's a picture of our friend holding Wendy's baby). So, any of my blog reading friends (if anyone still has this in their RSS feed/google reader), I now think it's wise that the only pictures of Baby E on here don't show his face.

Here's one last picture of baby E's little hand...


And what would my blog be without garden pictures.... here's how it's looking this year...

A rhododendron the deer didn't entirely eat.


This year's tomatoes...SunGold and Green Zebra


A caterpillar on my little ornamental tree...I hand picked 252 of them off the tree and didn't even make a dent.

The left side of the front of the house after I planted a new spirea and D spread mulch. The right side is still a disaster.

Garden Flowers and Bugs

Black Eyed Susans (Rudbeckia) and Bumble Bee

Dragonfly on Hydrangea Leaf

Hummingbird Clearwing (Hemaris Thysbe) on Bee Balm (Monarda)

Cherry Cheeks Daylily

Grasshopper on Daylily Twice As Nice "Orange Velvet"

Frog Behind Daylily Stella D'Oro

A Shout Out to our Tomatoes

So, I was checking on the analytics of my blog today because I like to see how many reader I have and where they come from. I had a whole bunch of referrals from a site called http://www.insideurbangreen.org/ so I visited the site to check out how I got on there (most of my referrals come from blogs where I have left comments...I had never heard of this site). There, in the July 6th post, was a picture of my tomato plants and a link to this blog. Check it out here.

And here's a picture of the tomatoes from July 9th. We enjoyed the first red tomatoes when we returned from vacation on July 14th.

The tomatoes just keep growing!

Tomato plants today, 6/27/08

And 2 days ago (June 25th):

And here they are on June 1st:

Here they are when first planted on May 17th:

The tomatoes are the Burpee Super Sweet 100s variety of cherry tomatoes. I bought them in 4" pots at Parlee's Pine Hill Nursery. They are grown in a self-watering container with the "Tomato Success Kit" from Gardeners' Supply. I highly recommend all of these products/companies based on my experience...just waiting to see how those cherry tomatoes taste!

Another turtle and perennial garden

I found another turtle laying eggs in the yard today. It's another spotted turtle momma.

The perennial garden is coming along nicely and blooming. The blooms are coreopsis, achillea, lamium, heuchera, salvia, cat mint, veronica, and dianthus.

Perennial Garden

Remember the perennial garden we planted last fall? We purchased the plants from Bluestone Perennials as a planned starter garden. This is what it looked like when D planted it in September:

And this is what it looked like on May 13th:

And this is what it looked like on June 10th:

Can't wait to see what it looks like when more of it is blooming! I would recommend Bluestone Perennials without reservations to anyone who is looking for mail order plants. They have a great selection, good prices, and the plants are doing very well.

Peony

A Busy Weekend

What a busy weekend I had for a 6 month preggo. On Friday afternoon I weeded the front flower beds. They look awful because of the lack of flowers, deer-eaten shrubs, and dying bulbs, but at least they're weed free now. Our goal is to pull out or trim down the remaining mature shrubs and then shrink the size of the beds by planting grass. The beds are just so big that they're unmanageable.

On Saturday morning before a thunderstorm I quickly pruned the "azalea hedge" on the right side of the front door (can be seen in the pictures in this post). It's actually 3 very large azaleas that had been pruned into a hedge. I very much prefer naturally bushy azaleas so I hacked the things back like crazy. D had hacked the back of the "hedge" last summer to get it off the house, and there's some nice new growth from that. So, the bushes will be ugly all summer, but by next spring they should be looking good (and much more in proportion to the size of the other plantings).

On Sunday D and I did some more gardening. He pulled out all of the deer-eaten euonymous from around the lamp post. It looked really bad, and last year we had considered pulling it out, but never got to it. The deer made the decision to get rid of it very easy. Below are some pictures of just how bad it looked.

Now, since the front of our house is looking like such a mess (it's a work in progress), I decided that we needed at least one part of it to look good, so I decided to do a little bed around the lamp post. At the nursery I choose a Sarah Bernhardt pink peony, a mountain sage (perennial salvia), a coreopsis 'moonbeam', and a creeping bellflower (campenula birch hybrid). I was going to get a clematis to climb the lamp post, but couldn't find one I like, so I chose a couple of morning glories for this summer.

I defined a bed area in the big pile of dirt and planted the plants with some cow manure and Cockadoodle Doo fertilizer (chicken shit pellets). I also moved some alyssum D's grandmother gave me last summer into this area too. D then picked up some nice dark brown mulch, and I finished off the little garden. Now all we need to do is grass in the rest of the dirt. I'm pretty happy with how my new lamp post garden turned out.

This weekend also marked the near completion of the master bedroom. On Saturday our furniture was delivered, we bought a celing fan, and we finally bought a mattress. On Wednesday night we'll sleep in the finished bedroom (the only other time we slept in that room was the night we closed on the house a year ago). When the whole bedroom is complete I do a blog post of the "reveal." Check out this post for what it used to look like. The transformation astounds me!

This weekend we also looked at nursery furniture and a car. This time the Honda CRV. Unfortunately I was too beat on Saturday afternoon to take it for a test drive. After looking at it/sitting in it, it's still on our short list along with the Subaru Forrester and a Volvo V70 wagon. We wish that Toyota still made a Camry wagon--if they did we would buy one in a heartbeat. D's 1998 Camry has 200K miles and still runs like a champ!

And, the weekend was not all work and no play. On Sunday am we went to church at 8am (D's been going since March, this was my first time--8am is completely killer for me) and I met the couple that D runs into at the country store after church each week. They are a super nice couple who live in a nearby town and have been doing lots of work and gardening at their house. We sat and chatted with them for a while and I ate my 2nd breakfast. Then, I rushed out to meet my friend Karen (a friend I met through the newcomer's club last fall) for my 3rd breakfast of the day. I'm starting to make friends who live nearby which is a huge plus. All of my other friends live a minimum of 1/2 hour away or as far as across the country!

That pretty much wraps up the weekend, though I'll post tomorrow about the wildlife that visited us on Saturday. Oh how I love living in suburbia!!! (seriously, I do)

Mother's Day Flowers

Our local NPR affiliate has a special fundraiser for Mother's Day where they'll send a flower arrangement from a prestigious local florist to anyone you choose in exchange for a healthy donation. Much as I would love to support the radio station (especially since I won a trip to Cuba from them in 2004), neither I nor D ordered flowers from them.

Instead, on Saturday morning, I went to my favorite local grocery store and picked up 10 peach colored petite roses for a grand total of $4 and turned them into the lovely arrangement above using flowers and greenery from our yard. I filed a teapot (Johnson Bros. Olde Britain Castles pattern) with oasis and added white french lilacs, white dogwood blooms, pink dogwood blooms, and lots of lilac leaves, along with the roses. The lilac leaves were a little droopy, but I decided they would do.

I decided this was a pretty nice Mother's Day arrangement for $4! I added a few more flowers to it on Sunday afternoon when D's grandma brought a few stems of Spanish Bluebells. Their light purple color was the perfect compliment to the peach, white, and green (too bad I don't have a picture with them included).

My belly--19 weeks

Today D and I went for our 2nd ultrasound. This time it was a Level II ultrasound which means that they take much more time and really study each of the baby's parts including the heart, kidneys, hands, feet, legs, arms, and brain. They also take measurements of the head circumference, femur, and cerebellum. Based on all of this, they confirmed what they thought based on my first ultrasound--I am actually 19 weeks pregnant when we thought I was 17 weeks. So, instead of having a due date around October 2, 2008, it will be more like September 20, 2008. So, I'm just about halfway through my pregnancy! Also, the baby looks perfectly healthy and has a nice strong heartbeat of 150 beats per minute.

As of my OB visit last Thursday, I had only gained 1lb overall, but I gained 5lbs between my March appointment and my April appointment due to the end of my morning sickness. D and I measured my waist circumference this weekend and it's 39 1/4 inches. I wonder what it will be right before I deliver!!! (Keep in mind when looking at the picture at the top of this post that I have a 40DDD chest, which is why my belly doesn't look very big).

Speaking of delivery, this past weekend we went to visit our newest nephew who made his arrival on April 11th. LAV (his initials) acted like a perfect baby and slept almost the entire day when we were there. Of course, he kept his mother up most of the previous night, and while we were visiting he had someone holding him the entire time (I didn't want to let him go). His older brother BZV (initials again) is 2 and was very funny. He loves his new brother, but wishes that he knew how to talk already!

Since LAV's parents are moving at the end of June (my brother-in-law has a 2 year surgical fellowship in Virginia), they dug up some plants from their garden for us. So, on Sunday I planted some of their lily of the valley around a little dogwood that came from my parents yard. I also planted one of their peonies (originally from D's grandparent's house), and 2 daylillies. An orange California poppy and a purple coneflower from my sister/brother-in law's garden will get planted as soon as we remove a stump from the perennial garden. I love plants with history! I still have the descendants of a spider plant that I propagated from my friend Wendy's plant 10 years ago, kalanchoes made from cuttings of a plant my friend Clare brought to my apartment 6 years ago, and I rooted some ivy that was in my bridesmaid bouquet from my friend Darci's wedding. My plan is to give Darci some of the ivy for her 1st anniversary.

March Showers Bring April Flowers

I know it's supposed to be "April Showers Bring May Flowers," but it's been so warm here that the flowers are all blooming! The weather is predictably unpredictable and while it was in the 20s overnight last week, today was about 80.

In the past week all of the flowers I planted last fall have started blooming! The tulips were the first to poke through the ground (a full 2 weeks before the daffodils), but the daffodils bloomed earlier (as they should). Now we have daffodils, tulips, vinca, forsythia, and azalea all blooming at once. This is the azalea in front of the house:

And, I am very pleased that it looks like all of the daffodils and tulips I planted last fall have come up and are blooming or ready to bloom. I'll get out my garden journal and check exactly how many of the ones I planted came up, but it really appears to be all of them. This is great! I now can highly endorse the Naturalizing Daffodil Mix from Park Seed and the Perrenial Tulip Mix Super Sak from Breck's.

So, to review the Naturalizing Daffodil Mix from Park Seed I would give it an A. The bulbs were large with probably 25% of them having 3 sprouts. I think in the 2 bags of 50 I purchased there were maybe 2 bad bulbs (and there may have actually been more than 50 in the bag). There is definitely a mix of colors, shapes and sizes. Some are large all yellow singles, some are white and yellow singles, some all yellow frilly ones, some light yellow and white frilly ones, and some small yellow with orange centers. I'll complete my review next spring when I see how many come back and to what extent they multiply in one year.


For the Perrenial Tulip Mix Super Sak I would also give a grade A. I planted 59 bulbs last fall and I thought I counted 61 tulips sprouting in the flower beds (but I must have miscounted). These bulbs were also very large and if I planted 59 that means there was only one bad bulb in the bag. I was happily surprised that the deer didn't eat any of the tulips because they seem to have eaten just about everything else (see this post). The tulips that have bloomed so far are yellow/orange, red, and orange/yellow. There are about 40 that haven't bloomed yet so there may be other colors as well.

Random Thoughts (Again)

At lunch time today I headed to Whole Foods to pick up a dessert for a BBQ we are attending tonight. On the way there traffic was blocked by a turkey crossing the road. up where I live this wouldn't strike me as odd, but down where I work it was really funny to see. There it was, crossing the street in front of the courthouse and it made me laugh hysterically!

I still have an aversion to sweets, especially chocolate. I walked to Starbucks after lunch today and picked up a grande decaf iced mocha. I started sipping it and thought, "man this is sweet" and almost went back into Starbucks to buy a milk to dilute it. I didn't buy the milk, just took the drink back to the office. It's 2 1/2 hours later and I still have 1/2 of the mocha left (unheard of in the pre-pregnancy days). I guess I didn't have to be concerned that having chocolate today would bring my sweet tooth back.

On the way out the door this morning I took a walk around the yard to see if anything was blooming. Three daffodils looked about to open, and some of the vinca (which the deer chewed to bits) has started to grow back and bloom. It's supposed to have gotten into the 70s today so I'll bet that I have more daffs blooming tomorrow--and I wouldn't be surprised if a couple of the tulips bloomed too.

Oh Happy Day!

It's a miracle--spring is finally coming to my neck of the woods! On Sunday there was a robin hopping around the backyard, and only about half of the yard is covered with snow!

I went out into the yard looking for daffodil shoots but I didn't find any...hopefully soon! I also assessed the damage from the deer--they chewed the Euonymous like crazy so I'll have to cut that back, and they also chewed some of the rhodedendrons, yews, and all of the vinca.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! 2007 was probably the best year I've ever had. I married the best guy in the whole world, and we moved into our cozy house with a beautiful yard. Hopefully 2008 will be a little less busy than 2007, but equally great.

I took some pictures of a project I did a few weeks ago and hadn't gotten around to posting them (I now have a backlog of things to post). For some relatives for Christmas I put together baskets of amaryllis bulbs. I had meant to do them in November so they would be close to blooming when I gave them for Christmas, but time got away from me.

The bulbs are from Park Seed. I ordered lots of daffodil bulbs from them in the fall and was really impressed with the quality. When I saw they had all kinds of varieties of amaryllis, I had to order some for gifts. I've always liked amaryllis, but the ones you can get in "kits" at the store don't always turn out so well. I ordered 4 types of amaryllis: Mambo, Liberty, Christmas Star, and Baby Star. Then I found some perfect baskets to plant them in at the Crate and Barrel outlet.

To plant the amaryllis, I consulted the instructions that came with them, and also some tips from P. Allen Smith's website. In addition, I used these instructions on the tags I made for each gift. The best trick I used was putting a coffee filter in the bottom of the nursery pots before adding the soil--that way no soil falls out. I also wrapped the pots in aluminum foil before placing them in the baskets.

For the tags, I used pictures I grabbed from the Park Seed website, and wrote a description of the bulb and instructions based on the Park Seed website description and P. Allen Smith's planting tips. Add a little scrpabooking paper and some ribbon, and voila! Gift tags!