Happy Father's Day

Daddy, we love you. You are the best!

Whether you are picking apples:

Playing monkey:

Picking out my clothes:

Watching me while mom teaches:

Keeping me warm:

Sharing your favorite chocolate cake with me:

Not letting me get water up my nose:


Teaching me how to shave:

Or just being you:

Happy Father's Day to the Best Daddy in the world!

We love you.

Garden Lesson

We haven’t posted lately. . . .this little garden of ours has been consuming all of our free time (not to mention we misplaced our camera in our gardening wagon for about 10 days). Now granted we don’t have a ton of free time, but what we do have goes to the garden. The other day we had a particularly big gardening day! About every other day we go to Nana and Papa’s to water the garden. . . it gives us a chance to check in on them and take a look at what’s happening in the dirt. I have to say this garden thing has been a great idea. It has given everyone a chance to talk about something other than the same ole’. It gives me something to do while Thee runs their football-field-of-a-yard. And it is a great learning tool for my little investigator.

On this particular day, we discovered someone or something had been in our garden. The tops of our tomato plants had been eaten off, and our little detective immediately went into investigation mode. I showed him the tomatoes in question. He responded, “It must’ve been somethin’.”

I pointed out the tracks in the dried mud…He looked up to the right and put his finger on the corner of his mouth ( I kid you not) and said, “Some guy’s been in here.”

I said, “What about a deer?”

He answered back, “Me solved mystery!”

We then proceeded to weed our little plot and try to discern if the eggplant had sprouted. We clearly identified the carrot sproutlings, but we’ve given up on the eggplant …we’ll buy that at the farmer’s market.

We also recruited daddy (on his way home from work) to help us put up a fence. In general it was a great day, and there was very little t.v.

As Thee and I were sitting under the shade tree at the end of our day, I asked, “ So what have you learned about gardening?”

He said, “The corn growing. It really growing. The sun burns you. The shade is cold. Me sink in da’ mud. . .Mommy save me. And hawks.” (There are some hawks out there along with a ton of other birds.)

“Anything else?”

“Me a Jedi Knight!”

Every time I am feeling like I am some kind of mother, I am brought back to reality.

Reality lesson for today: Yeah, mom the gardening is good, but it will never compete with Star Wars.

*editor's note: these picture are from about two weeks ago. Our garden has progressed greatly since then. Watch for new posts.

There's dirt under our fingernails, and life is good!

Hello, All. I’m a little overdue in posting…sorry to all of my followers (I know you are out there Rhea Ann, my one and only)!

Well, first let me start with a little update on the “no t.v.” experiment. It lasted seven hours until “sugar lips” (that’s what I call my beloved when I would really like to call him something else) came home from work. His response was, “You’ve got to be kidding” He is always “in” when we are talking theory, but he just can’t seem to make it to the actual “in practice” phase. I must admit, I also had thirty-six on-line Composition II research papers to grade over the last week, so I was definitely weak and backsliding. However, that is not to say that our week was just one big, lazy veg-out session. Oh, no. We have been busy, and the television has gotten a big rest.

It seems that the gardening troll has arrived. We planted a big garden at Nana and Papas: tomatoes, cantaloupe, mini pumpkins, yellow squash, zucchini, corn, carrots, egg plant, green pepper, zinnias, snap dragons, and cosmos. Oh and cucumbers too…

We began to plan our front porch display:

I contributed to my crafting stash, with lots of fantastic ideas for darling tops:

I purchased a stove top espresso maker with the goal of creating the perfect home made latte. . .

Thee discovered “Hostess little white donuts”:

And I finished my first, of many, little pencil holders for all the special people in my life. Watch your mailboxes!

The Great Experiment

Okay, I admit it I'm not perfect. I let my child watch television, and not just educational television. He watches Looney Tunes, Johnny Quest, Scooby Doo and, and we already know -- Star Trek. Now, it is not that I advocate this t.v. watching. Oh no. I was the one counseling friends and family members on how bad television is for young minds. I was so proud of the fact that my little Thee didn't watch television for the first two years of life -- not much at least. And then as I started online teaching and Thee got more intersted in the mesmorizing moving pictures, the enticing music and the constant action, I realized that I could get more done with the television on. Its presence in our day has taken over like a noxious weed. We have it on constantly. Grades are due today, and after today...that's it. NO MORE T.V.!

We've got big things planned for the summer: a garden at Nana's and Papa's; weekly trips to the zoo; a vacation on the lake in Minnesota; walks to the library; nightime concerts in the park with a picnic basket; and lots of cooking and crafts.

When I was a kid we had one television in the living room, and it was never on during the day. When we came home from school we turned it on to watch cartoons, but then it went off after snack. We had more important things to do. Television was something you turned on when there was nothing else to do. It was an inferior activity as compared to being outside, playing with friends, making brownies. Of course, the programming and technology was a bit different. We had three channels, one of which didn't come in very well, and we were always "fussin" with the antenna to get Channel 3 to come in. We even tried balls of tin foil.

Today, if the television is off, everybody around here thinks it's broken. Why would you have the television off?

Publishing this on the blog will help us with this little experiment. We will do weekly updates on our Great Experiment and track our results. I think that Thee and I might do just fine...I'm a little worried about Daddy. Yep, Daddy has to participate too. Thee thinks it should apply to the computer as well. I agree, but I thought we better keep it simple and I was afraid, Daddy might leave us if I took away all electronic media. So here we go.

The Real Meaning of Mother's Day

I am an internal optimist. Every holiday I think, maybe it will be different this year. Maybe I will get a thoughtful present that wasn’t purchased from what they call the “impulse buy” section of the convenience store on the day of the holiday.

Thank God for my mother...


She took my little buddy out earlier in the week and let him pick out a charm for my bracelet and made sure I had a card to open. They wrapped it up in polka-dot paper and even added a little purple flower on top. It was darling. They hid it in the armoire, and little Thee spent all week checking on it to make sure it was still there. He wouldn’t let me get within three feet of its hiding place in fear that the surprise would be ruined. God, I love my mother – and isn’t that what this whole day is about—loving and appreciating your mother? She always comes through. She always makes it all better – every time—no matter what. I love you mom, you are the best!

Today is May Day!

We celebrated the big day with little baskets of goodies on doorsteps and an ole' fashioned round of ding-dong ditch -- Some lucky few got hoppy new friends. We followed the lead of the saltandchocolate.blogspot.com who directed us to http://www.purlbee.com/purl-frog/2007/6/14/the-purl-frog.html. Enjoy your day and stay hoppy!

Where have all the good donuts gone?

I am a self proclaimed donut connoisseur. I remember when donut shops were everywhere, and eating them for breakfast wasn't considered a mortal sin. There was Mr. Donut with the best chocolate cake donuts that had just a tad of a coffee taste -- they were "mocha" before we even knew "mocha"-- and they were dipped in glaze.

These shops were teeny tiny and people sat at a counter on stools and ate the freshly coiffed delicacies while they drank coffee, kept warm in glass pots on a burner. They didn't serve anything else: donuts, coffee, milk in mini cartons and orange juice -- that was it.

I remember a local shop, Dippy Donut. They had a great sign on the wall in the shape of a donut with a mirror where the hole should be. Around the donut was painted, "The object of a life should be to keep your eye upon the donut and not upon the hole." Their donuts were bigger than Mr. Donut, and they had a cherry cake donut, like no other -- that's cherry dough, mind you, not just a white cake donut with cherry frosting.

And then, of course, there were bakeries, actual bakeries that made their own baked goods (and fried goods in the case of donuts). You could walk in and order a "home-cut", and they knew what you were talking about. That's the kind my dad would always get: homecut. I used to think, "That must be a grown up thing to do. When I am grown up I'll understand the logic of ordering a completely plain donut, but for right now I'm going to go ahead and do the childish thing and order mine complete with frosting and sprinkles." I love the fact that my dad ordered homecut donuts and would drink coffee from a thermos when we went on weekend drives in our Volkswagen camper. I love the fact that we had a Volkswagen camper, but that is another post entirely.

Now, as I have "matured", I've never had a hankering for a homecut, but I have craved a maple frosted with peanuts -- a variety reserved for the much older generation a bakery employee once told me: "We only make a few of those these days. Most of the people that like that kind are dying off."

Dying off like the penchant for donuts in general, I would suppose. Well, I am happy to say that I have passed on the donut gene to my son. He loves his donuts! Sometimes even before his mommy can get him fully dressed in the morning. . .

Fried Dough Live On!