The Garden...

Bubba and I couldn't really be called gardeners. Quite frankly, if it were completely up to Bubba, we'd have grass right up to the front door...he'd mow it once a week and not look at it again until the next time it needed to be mowed. I'm a wish-I-was-a gardener. I LOVE to read about them...visit them...look at them...PLANT them...but then I just sorta want them to grow and leave me alone and look pretty when I want to look at them.

But I WANT to be one. I WANT to have one. I sorta have this little dream in my head that we could use a garden to be more self-sufficient one day. To those of you who know Bubba and his aversion to things that are now growing or ever have been grown in or near the ground...STOP that giggling...this is MY fantasy...and you never know, we COULD save money growing green beens, snow peas and lettuce...My fantasy really DOESN'T include Bubba EVER eating eggplant, squash, beets or any type of green except iceberg, I promise. But I digress.

Anyway, for the last two years I've had a pretty good (if I do say so myself) little garden. Last year there was a little herb garden in the back under tree house part of the swing set and we had one 4' x 4' other little square foot garden of...well, can you guess??? That's right, green beans.

Also for the last about 5 years Bubba and I have been saving up for some outside stuff for the house...we wanted planter beds in the front...we still want a patio cover on the back and Bubba wants the sun-shade screens and I want honest to goodness outside funiture...heaven SAVE me from the sling back beach chairs that I keep buying.

This year in spring, my dear sweet Bubba, the one who would rather MOW than bother, purchased for my pure joy, stone planter beds for the front of the house. They weren't much to look at in the beginning...I did take pictures of the yard all covered with stone and dust but I can't find it right now.

I REALLY should have taken these pictures about 2 weeks ago when the Cosmos weren't all gray and spent...still look at my glorious garden...



Here are some more pictures of those cosmos...every single one of them grown from cast off flower heads...Not thinking too clearly, I'd been dead-heading directly into the garden. It rained the entire time we were in Colorado seeing the new baby and when we got back over 40 new cosmos plants had grown. I only saved about 20 of them and of that 20 we lost a few to replanting...but MAN do they bloom. It's funny because the little potted plants that they came from really only had 2 or 3 flowers at a time. These plants from seed went CRAZY. At the height of their bloom, a couple weeks ago, I counted 13 on just ONE plant...Now they are a bit spent...we haven't been dead-heading and it's been dipping into the 40s at night, so the leaves have lost their light green...but they are still so pretty...



The extra blooms on flowers from seed seem to be a running theme in my garden this year because these two marigolds ALSO came from seeds. I swiped (with permission) a couple of dead flowers off my neighbor's marigolds (again, little piddly things) and look what they have wrought. I've personally never seen such a bushy marigold with so many blooms as this first one...the second one is smaller...we transplanted it when we transplanted the cosmos and it had a harder go of it...but it still is bigger again by half of the parent plants...



I also discovered that natural remedies work in the garden, too. When I got my planters I KNEW I wanted to grow roses...and not those overblown knock-out roses that everyone grows. Nope, I wanted real and true, cut-em-at-a-five-leaflet roses...more tea roses than hybrids, but if they had the right shape and smell I wasn't terribly picky. The lady at Lowes practically CALLED me a fool and told me I'd better stock up on anti-fungals because once the summer hit I was going to have to dose them every week or so for black spot. "Hmmmm," said my California-city-girl self, "We shall see."

Well Ms. Lowes-lady was not entirely wrong. We did get black spot...and on my favorite peachy rose, too. But it didn't happen until the end of September. When I saw the black spot, I cut that sucker right down to the ground. I'd already been using Peppermint Castile soap and water mixed in a spray bottle for aphids...that works great. I didn't have any commercial anti-fungals but I did have Oil of Oregano in the house (great anti-fungal and all around big dog sickness buster in natural healthcare) so I put a dropperful into the half-full bottle of Soap/Water mix and sprayed everything down really well. And then I kept checking. I'd noticed a couple leaves that were infected on two of the other roses and had sprayed them too, but hadn't cut everything off of them.

Anyway, here is the original rose. It is working beautifully on re-growth, no black spot to be seen...and there isn't any on any of the other roses anymore...no aphids either...I love it when I manage to do something that works...



And here are just some random shots around the garden...be warned...you might see a kid or two..(or ehem, three, if you are counting)



Anyway...so hmmm...guess I at least LOOK like a gardener this year...as long as you don't look at what became of LAST year's gardens...



Just SAD...

See ya around...

TOG Weeks 8 & 9 Review...FINALLY

Well it took nine days JUST to do the review. I KNEW we didn't cover it the first time well enough. We'd been a little scattered both the week that we did 8 and the week that we did 9. I found MYSELF not remembering stuff. So anyway...the board REALLY helped.

For those of you NOT doing TOG, the curriculum has list upon list to check off already IN it. So I don't want you to think this is a failing of Tapestry itself. It's just me.

Those that know me, know that I'm something of a recovering clutter bug. I tend to strew things about me. I read, a few years ago, that this was a very common personality type and that it was not due to laziness, but more to the visual learning style. Apparently some people need to be able to SEE their stuff to find it.

There are SEVERAL major cracks in that theory for me. The first being that while I do tend to strew stuff around while I'm in the midst of a project and that helps me find stuff...I have always had a hard time putting stuff back, which makes it IMPOSSIBLE to find stuff LATER. Plus, in all other things I'm pretty kinesthetic and have to TOUCH things to learn them. Still I AM a Reader (with a capital "R") and get a lot from that medium, but I don't remember much from T.V. so I'm not sure how that falls on the visual spectrum...Bubba is visual and he can remember all kinds of stuff from T.V... Beanie is visual and as long as I don't MOVE my stuff, if she has seen the pile she can find stuff in it. All that said, if this is a valid reason for me to be completely flighty, I'll take it and use it to my advantage wherever possible.

WHAT is my point? Oh, yeah. Those check lists don't help me most of the time because they are tucked away NEATLY inside my big binder, so I forget to check them off. The board fixed all that. It was an ever present reminder of what I still wanted to accomplish. Excellent teaching tool, white boards...who knew? (Hush up, every one of you!)

So here is the white board all checked off...a couple got crossed out because, while we did go over them, week 10 does a better job, so they'll be there again...



And here is Beanie, standing in front of the (nasty-new-laminated-glarey) map where she found and marked the 59 items that were on the board. Note the Yangtze River...Note that the (nasty-new-laminated-glarey) map does not have this MAJOR landmark on it, anywhere that I can find...so *I* drew it after both Bean and I looked for what seemed like FOREVER. Note, I am not a cartographer, nor do I play one on television...I was merely a crabby mom with a dry erase marker...so, NO, it's probably not accurate...



Oh, one other thing. This picture is to the Grandmother of my children...
Oh Mommy-Dear...."QUACK"



See ya around...

Interesting Verse

I thought this was a wonderful verse. And very apropos for my parenting of small children.



My words would be something along the line of, "NO, I do not WANT that polly pocket, I WANT you to get your naked self into the bathtub!"

See ya around...

Forts and Surries...

I LOVE not turning on the T.V. I LOVE telling my children, "NO, you cannot play on the computer." I LOVE when they are bored to offer them nothing but a quiet place to sit and think of something to do.

It produces this kind of stuff...here is their HOUSE/CASTLE...



And here is their carriage (I think it is more of a surrey, on account of the fringe on top, of course)



I think I'm going to ignore my children more often...

la la la la la la la-de-da-dah...when I take you out in my surrey...when I take you out in my surrey with the friiiiiinnnnnnge.on.top.

See ya around...

So What's New with Tapestry of Grace???

Well I'm so glad that you asked. In the 21 weeks since I GOT Tapestry of Grace...we've taken off about 6 weeks due to summer and fun and vacation...which leaves us at 15 weeks of actual school. Several of the weeks were SO full of information we took several weeks to complete ONE week of information. So here we are at the end of week 9 and we are taking NOT QUITE twice as long to do a week as is scheduled...And you know what...I DON'T CARE! We are having a blast. Learning stuff at our own pace...and even the little girls are getting in on the act.

I was having a hard time pulling everything together for a final unit review so I dug out my board this week. Week 10 is the end of the unit, but it doesn't look like it's going to take two weeks to do so I need to get it together.

Here is the board for weeks 8 and 9...


I've been checking stuff off like a wild thing. There is nothing quite so lovely as REMEMBERING to review stuff with your kids. You'll just have to trust me...I am the QUEEN of forgetting to review things because those things slip MY mind.

Anyway, by the end of this week we will have reviewed or RE-learned (if necessary) all the stuff on this list and next week should just be a piece of cake...As I've said, there isn't a ton of stuff there...And then on to a new and wonderful section of history.

There are still a few struggles that I'm having with Tapestry. Honestly there is so much potential that I have a really hard time scaling it down. We had one week (week 7) that took us 4 weeks to get all the way through because I decided we'd read EVERYTHING in both the Upper and Lower Grammar. Because I read MOST of the upper grammar stuff into the MP3 players...I knew that JUST the upper grammar readings that I had recorded were almost 4 hours, and that didn't count the individual readings and picture books that we were reading.

Weeks 8 and 9 have been much better as far as scaling back, but because we dropped a few readings, I'm finding I'm having to do more general lecture than I did, because when you read IT ALL, all the words and objectives are there somewhere. Oh well, the general lecture doesn't take NEAR the amount of time ALL the reading did, and Beanie is happier with a little less...she was getting a little overwhelmed, understandably.

So I'm still a fan. A little wiser perhaps than I was...but I still love it. We are ALL learning so much.

As for other stuff, I want the girls to WANT to learn to cook so we are having a dessert Friday until the end of the year. I kind of decided it on the fly, so this week wasn't particularly healthy or homemade; we had boxed cupcakes with canned white frosting that we colored with food coloring. But we sure had fun making them...scratch that, we had fun snitching them at every step. We were lucky to have any cupcakes to eat...



Until the inevitable happened...(um, yes that IS fingerprints in the frosting...they are SHAMELESS!!!)



TOTALLY shameless...


See ya around...

Wasp Identity SOLVED...

So I hadn't even LOOKED UP that wasp that we found last week. Some homeschool mom I am. But I've been inventorying all my books for the last couple of weeks and came across my National Audubon Society Field Guide Stash (they are AWESOME for any of you interested in that sort of thing). So I started looking through the wasp section and sure enough...there it was orangey golden legs, golden body with the lower half of the abdomen a shiny black...Great Golden Digger Wasp.

Here is a MUCH better shot than I got of it...

Found here


Found here

From 09.2008.Pics

And here is the one that I took...I wish that I'd taken some while it was in the jar so you could see the markings...but now you can compare side by side, maybe I'll get a chance to crop and enlarge this a little later, but for now...

From 09.2008.Pics

The weird thing is that these are usually farther north than Texas...many of them on the upper east coast. I know I'd never seen one and I'm one who would look. We've had a cicada killer wasp every single summer EXCEPT this summer. Sadly our new planters must have destroyed the nest and they haven't come back...those are fun to watch.

Found this picture of a cicada killer wasp here

From 09.2008.Pics

Now that I know what it is, I'm sad that I was so quick to get rid of it...sounds like they are the northern version of the cicada killer in their habits...but this one was MUCH smaller than the cicada killers we've had in the past...one year we had one that was EASILY over 2 inches long...the Great Golden Digger was maybe an inch...still big, but the big cicada killer looked like it could carry off the children.

So there you go, your nature study moment...

See you around...

Soccer Joy...

Well, I set about taking pictures of just mine this week. Because Bubba is coach, we usually get there a few minutes before the team shows up, which makes it a little easier. Once those other kids get there, ya just can't keep the little biters out of the shot.

LOOK at how much fun she is having. This is Bear's face the ENTIRE time that she is on the field. She LOVES this game. She is constantly egging her sisters to play with her...and I believe that the cones are becoming a permanent fixture in our back yard. And if Bubba plays, well, then they are all in 7th heaven...



Bear especially...



I managed to get these at the game. You'll notice that she's not exactly smiley when made to sit out. Sadly, there ARE other girls on the team and they all deserve a shot at GOAL-SCORING-FAME...so she'll just have to learn to sit there...and make her momma laugh from afar...



See ya around...