She's here!

Baby E has arrived and all are happy, home, and doing quite well :) We couldn't be more thrilled with her!

2013 Garden in my absence

Near the end of last week, Little M and I made the trek home and back to Grammy's in one day, to pick up my husband (and the 2 dogs not already with me at Grammy's), so that we wouldn't end up with 2 cars with us after the baby makes her appearance. It was a bit of a long day, but so nice to see the garden and relax at home for a couple hours before making the trek back to stay at Grammy's for the long haul, however long that may be! He of course only stayed briefly, according to his days off work, but it was nice to spend a bit of time with him before he headed back home to work and keep a handle on the property, gardens, and animals.

When we were briefly at home, the garden had been without me for only 3-4 days, but it was amazing how much had changed - the green beans had come up, the newly transplanted tomatoes, peppers, greens, and marigolds had settled in nicely, and most of the squash, cucumbers, and zucchini sprouted seeds that we planted just before we left had emerged from the soil with their seed leaves.

In the time since then, my husband reports that the corn is all coming up, the green beans are filling in, and all the animals are doing well. Apparently there were even frogs of some sort calling from the pool of water in the pig's pen! I'm hoping they are still calling when I get back so we can ID them - he isn't much of a frog ID guy. What would be even more exciting (although quite unlikely with the disturbance the pigs make in that pool!) would be to end up with tadpoles in the pool. Likely won't happen, but makes me hopeful that in future years, once we have a little garden pond that isn't disturbed by pigs daily, we might have all that sort of wetland-y goodness for Little M to explore right by the house!

Ok, back to waiting on this baby to arrive and knitting a baby blanket for one of Little M's little friends whose mother recently had a baby boy...

Daily life while waiting on Baby #2...

Not much to report on lately, just hanging out at my mother in law's place on the lake while waiting for baby to decide she is ready to emerge. We've been here 4 nights, and if I consider 2 weeks late as being the last possible night, we may be here 3 more weeks. gulp. That is a heck of a lot of time for weeds to take over my gardens! A heck of a lot of chicken eggs to build up in the fridge! And a heck of a lot of time to be away from home!

My husband is staying at home, working, until I go into labor, so its lonely for him there missing the little miss and I, and lonely for us here missing him and the gardens and all. We've been keeping busy though, as we've got 2 of the dogs with us, and the lack of a real yard, fenced or not, means multiple walks a day. Whew. At least walking is healthy for the baby!

I'm not sure I'll be posting regularly until we get home after the baby is born, since really I don't have much to share from over here, since mostly all I'm doing on a daily basis is lots of dog walking, food making, and playing outside with the little miss. But I'm sure once we get home I'll have lots of weed photos to share of my overtaken garden spaces! (sigh!) Oh, and surely some baby photos too :)

Setting priorities to get the necessary stuff done!

So the mister is on true nights for the next 3-6 months, meaning 4 days a week he's leaving the house at 5 when we are eating supper, and returning at 5 in the morning when we are all soundly asleep. This means that for most of the day Little M and I  (and the dogs!) need to stay as quiet as possible. On Saturday this worked out well, we had some errands to run in town - recycling to sort and drop off at the recycling depot, and potatoes to pick and buy at the gardening store. Sunday I had grand plans of spending most of the morning outside putzing around the property. We have lots to do, but I wasn't going to care if we got anything done, feeling that keeping the house quiet was goal met enough. However, we woke up to this, which kept falling for over 2 hours in thick wet bunches!

So the wet snow falling and slightly sticking kinda put a damper on our outside plans, so instead we ended up inside in a somewhat cloudy-dreary house. What to do? While Little M occupied herself with a little game while swinging herself in the much-too-small baby swing, I decided that since we're getting down to the last (less than 10!) weeks of this pregnancy, I likely should have a master list of what I want to get done before baby arrives, so that I can prioritize the most critical items and let myself relax the rest of the time... For example, I've been spending a lot of time and energy on the new side garden space, which really isn't one of my yearly goals, let alone a goal for before the baby gets here, meanwhile there are definitely things that need to get done before baby comes that I've been putting off.... Hmmm... So time to start prioritizing my limited time and energy I figured!

I won't bore you with a play by play list of what all I need to do, but lets just say I was fairly specific, writing down small chunks of tasks that would each be easily do-able with the energy levels and time windows I typically have. By the late morning, I had my list complete, broken into sections - Garden, Property, Little M, Cleaning, and Baby, and then color-coded by month. Month, however, ended up being a bit of a mistake. There were some things that had specific months for completion - planting certain vegetable starts out, or certain baby doctor appointments for example, but for the most part, I just shoved everything else into April, although I sorted it by importance. I'm not yet sure if that will leave me feeling overwhelmed and make me attempt to get everything done, or if it will work in that I do the things I have time for and don't get done the less important things. Time will tell!

Already yesterday I did 2 of the more pressing tasks that I had definitely been putting off for much too long in favor of new garden fun chores - I made contact with a doula about her availability for our due date time window, and fixed the kitchen sink faucet which had (again, sigh), come unscrewed from its base so was requiring two hands to turn on and off. So I'll consider the list successful thus far :)

Balancing gardening & pregnancy

I'm just itching to start planning this summer's garden. I can't wait to look through my seed bins and see what is left over from past years & will still be usable, what seed was saved from last summer's garden, and what seed I will need to buy. I've got a tentative list floating around my head of what I want to change from last year's garden, and a couple of new plants I want to try growing.

The problem is, this here baby, just starting to be kicking up a storm in my belly, is due in mid-June. Now most of my more tender plants get planted out in the first week or two of June most years, depending on the weather. So regardless of whether this baby is early or late, I don't know how much gardening I'll be getting done about that time of the season this year...

I've told myself that one year of not having a huge garden is perfectly acceptable, and I know that with a newborn I won't have a lot of time to be keeping up on weeds, but I'm just still not sure what level of gardening I want to aim for this summer... There are some things that it seems like a no-brainer to grow based on planting time (for example to not-so-tender crops & the crops I just sow as seeds), however some of those crops need a fair amount of weeding throughout the season to grow optimally (onions anyone?!).

So in the meantime I'm trying to put off even looking at my seeds, much less making a list of plants to grow or putting a garden plot plan down on paper until it is a little closer to go time when I need to decide whether I'll start onion seeds or how many I'll start... Since last year we had an amazing onion crop, and I started my onion seeds sometime in March, I've been trying to put off thinking of gardening until February at the earliest. Maybe even mid-February. I figure as long as I've decided on at least the onions by planting time in early March, I should be ok. And really, I've grown onions from seed planted once the ground was workable in the spring too. Not huge onions, not a bumper crop like this past year, but a crop nonetheless. So we'll see. And in the meantime I'll try not to fall asleep thinking about the garden... :)

New Years News

Happy New Year everyone!

I'm happy to admit at last that I'm pregnant, due in June. That's why I haven't been posting very much at all this past fall/winter season, as I've been barely managing to feed my family, keep my own food down, and make sure everyone has relatively clean clothes to wear. Cleaning and most other weekly and daily activities have been put to the wayside, as has regular posting, commenting, and responding to comments! My apologies, but growing a small human in those first couple months is hard on me!

Also, besides the not-having-much-to-talk-about that comes from not doing a heck of a lot other than laying on the couch, have you ever found that when there is a huge secret that you aren't sharing yet, you just can't find much to talk about? Yeah, that's me. Can't find much to talk about even if it kills me when I've got a secret that I'm dying to share but just not quite there yet!

So, now that you know, we can move on to other things!

I'm excited to share the latest project we've got going on over here, a play kitchen for Little M's third birthday! I'm not quite as far along making it as I would have liked, although I've got all or almost all off the pieces cut and sanded. However, since her birthday is this coming weekend, complete with a sledding party with some of her little friends, I have a bit of work ahead of me to get it assembled and prettied up...