Planting and Pulling

proud gardener

Beautiful weather, in the 60s today and NOT RAINING, miracle of miracles. So I stopped on the way home from Mar’s school and bought two basil plants, and two more packets of flowers – why not? can you have too many flowers, at $2.27 a packet? I planted the basil, and then lots of lettuce, spinach, onion – lots and lots of onion seeds – hope they do well and Malvia will eat them with us – and carrot seeds. Crossing my fingers on this whole seed thing. I don’t really trust it but thousands of years of farming has got to mean something. I can’t kill every seed. Surely.

Then I felt inspired to pluck up those nasty thistle weeds from the back corner garden patch. I have no idea what they’re really called but they’re terrible! And they were HUGE and terrible, which is a bad combination! The saving grace is that they were not flowering, yet. An entire black garbage bag of the nasty things.

 

Ugly Awful Thistle Plants

We’ll see how excited I am tomorrow, when my back registers its opinion of planting and plucking…

Drowning in Desserts

Cheesecake nilla wafers

Testing image insertion… Ok, the librarian in me rises up, so let me say that this image is from

www.toughmuffin.com/?p=144

And you should definitely go there to look at this recipe because aren’t these fabulous? My niece’s 30th birthday party is coming up this Friday, and I’ve promised to make desserts. I’m super excited and of course planning lots and lots and lots of desserts and no one will eat them and my husband will tear his hair out. I can say this fairly certainly because it’s happened before.

But anyway, so she likes strawberry flavors but not cake, which rules out the famous Finney Family strawberry cake. Finally strawberry cheesecake occurred to me, only since there will be about 100 people at this party, all dressed as rock stars and performing karaoke, small desserts seem a necessity, so I thought of tiny cheesecakes in a muffin tin, and then saw this. The downside is that the cookie gets soggy if you make them too far ahead of time.

Hmmm. So many desserts, and really, let’s be honest, so little time.

I’m also making caramel-chocolate brownies and rice krispie treats, because just about everyone eats rice krispie treats!

Mothers

So today I was in Costco with a friend, who was looking for a sticky fruit leather snack that her 3 year old is addicted too. She was up until 1am last night working on a silent auction for her church, and had to pause in front of each thing to think about whether or not her family would eat it. I felt horrible, because my allergies have really kicked it up a notch this week, so we were a pair of sad sights. I needed 25 bananas for a meal my church is doing with the homeless. No sticky snacks to be had – Costco apparently doesn’t sell them anymore. Lots of bananas though.

Working on getting end-of-year presents for the teachers at my youngest daughter’s preschool – sent the mother in charge of room mothers an email – she fired one back saying, I can work on this after 9pm tonight – she’s also very active in her church, has three children, husband travels a lot, also running thirteen other projects on the side. . .

Mother’s Day tends to be rather sentimental, and I try to stay away from those cards with the soft-focus picture of flowers and a sappy poem inside. Because mothers, most of the ones I know, anyway, are not softly focused and sappy. They have to be sharp – with database upon database in their minds – what snacks their sons will eat, what their daughter’s best friend’s stuffed animal is named, the names of the people who live two doors down and – hallelujah! – have a kindergartner the same age as their daughter!

The mothers I know are always running, always in a hurry, many times because they are on missions of kindness – perhaps a Mission from God, as the Blues Brothers said. I always thought that “It’s a Wonderful Life” was a remarkable movie because it was a man who made the decisions that Jimmy Stewart makes in the movie. The movie would have been invisible with, say, Donna Reed in the lead. To give up college so a beloved brother could go? How many women have done that? To pour all your energy into making the world a better place? We see it with new eyes when Stewart does it. But Reed’s decisions – to give up the rich boyfriend, to stay in her hometown, to live in a wreck of a house that she apparently spent every spare moment, when she wasn’t taking care of her children or running the USO, working on… those are all easily explained. She did it for love, so it must have been easy. Reed makes it look easy, until finally after what had to be years of dealing with a bitter husband she broke – “George, not in front of the children.”

And the first thing I learned as a mother was that it wasn’t easy. The baby didn’t figure out just how to eat right away. The diapers were awful. The lack of sleep was bone-crushing. The stereotypes set forth from society – the perfect house, the perfect clothes, the hair just so, the girls with bows and pretty shoes – were as tight as a vise.

And yet to my amazement there are lots of women out there doing all that, working all the time, whether they work outside the home or inside it. They learn the discipline of getting up in the morning, even though they hate mornings. They grit their teeth and practice patience when the wiggly baby doesn’t want to get his diaper on. They are resigned, or laugh, when the two year old pees on them.

They find time to run their church committees and save their schools and maintain those relationships that all the psychologists tell us are so important for our mental health. They call their mothers who are 600 miles away to tell them the cute story, so the grandmother isn’t so distanced from her grandchildren. They call the doctors to make the appointment for their mothers-in-law. They nag their husbands to eat better. They make sure that the favorite dress is washed AND dried in time for school, and the permission slip is signed, and the correct amount of money ($5, $14, a check made out to xxx for $21.50) is attached.

And it is hard. As Beth Moore said in one of her Bible studies, it is “dang hard.” No soft focus here.

And every mother I know would say, Yes, but it’s for the children. And her face will light up a little bit. Mine as well.

So Happy Mother’s Day to those miracles of nature, the mothers around us, who keep our worlds steady and secure and who every day make the world a better place. Thank you to every mother I know.

Swine Flu Insanity

So yesterday Miranda threw up all over the kitchen floor, five times in rapid succession.

Then Dan gave her a bath, and she didn’t feel hot, and she went to sleep. I kept her home from school because I didn’t want to risk anything, and she seemed pretty normal all morning. Then fought with her sister, burst into tears several times, and finally went back to her room, lay down, and fell asleep for two hours.

So Dan and I started freaking out that she had swine flu. Marissa fell asleep on the floor of my office, so we couldn’t really tell if she had swine flu or not.

After dinner, which we ate together, sans kids, I went to Meijer to get apple juice, chicken, fruit snacks (because, my logic went, if Marissa WAS sick I would let her eat more fruit snacks), apples, milk, and those nasty kid yogurts that I’m convinced are sugar syrups held together by a little bit of dairy product – again, my logic being, if my babies were sick they could eat all the nasty colorful kid yogurt they wanted, if only it made them feel better! Also fancy popsicles. Then to Blockbuster to buy The Pirates Who Do Nothing, I think it’s called – it’s the Veggie Tales movie and the girls had seen a trailer of it, and were quoting various lines from it. I have no faith that anyone can put his or her hands on me and heal me, but I do have a lot of faith that DVDs can heal. Also I bought Kit Kitteridge. Sooo this is why Dan does not like me doing emergency runs when the kids are sick because I get crazy.

When I got back, he’d given Miranda Tylenol because she felt a little warm but he didn’t know the actual temperature, so I don’t know if I should take her to the doctor tomorrow at my pediatrician’s clinic or not. The fact that they’ve closed two schools down because of one child having swine flu frightens me – I feel I have a civic duty to find out if my child has swine flu – on the other hand, I’m wondering if I’m going to be one of 350 women who feels that she has a civic duty to find this out and we all end up in a tremendous line in front of my pediatrician’s office and I or Miranda actually CATCH flu from one of the sick children.

And Dan of course is saying worriedly, “I’ve been really tired today. Do you think I have swine flu? Feel my forehead.”

Lord help us.

Maybe we got it…

Gramma Me

 

My Gramma Roberts and me, in front of my parents’ fireplace. She’s 90 years old (nearly 90 and a half!) and still living by herself in her own house. We had such a great weekend. My husband thought I wasn’t paying enough attention to her last time we saw her, so I tried to take care to sit with her outside, because she loves the outside, and my parents have a beautiful garden behind their house. It was very peaceful, and a lovely opportunity to be with her.

 

My father sat with us for a while, and told me a story that I’d never heard before – that he’d raised a pig for 4H when he was in school! He was vague about how old he actually had been – it was in Marion, he said, so sometime between 1st and 6th grade. He raised the pig to be 400 lbs, and then Grand, my grandfather, arranged for a butcher to kill it, and dress it, and then store all the meat. And he remembers that periodically they’d stop by the butcher’s to pick up a couple of packages of pork.

 

My grandmother didn’t remember much about it, but they talked a bit about Marion. My grandfather was the principal of the school out there, and supervised adding on grades until the school went through 12th grade. When he died, there were people at his funeral who told my father and grandmother that they would never have been able to go on through high school unless that school went that far – otherwise, Dad said, they’d have had to go to County, which was 20, 25 miles away. And back in those days, I suppose, it might as well have been like saying, I think I’ll fly to Paris every day for school. Or even for lunch. There’s a legacy for you, untold hundreds of children who were schooled far beyond what they had thought they could be.

So Far…

So far I’m a little frustrated with this format – I’m having a heck of a time uploading images. I thought I had it figured out with Miranda’s picture but then I cannot get a simple photo of Marissa to show on the home page for the life of me. And how dull a blog post can this be! My time might be more profitably spent continuing to do my household chores, which is a terrible thing to have to say.
Ah well, Dan may be able to fix it. Thank God for having Technical Support in my own home.

First Blog Post

This is me trying out my first blog post! And also avoiding cleaning my house so a double good thing!

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