All You Can Eat Watermelon Buffet

Today I gave Joey all the watermelon he wanted...

He, and the high chair, and the kitchen floor, got a bath..

Surviving Zucchini Season

When life gives you zucchini....for heaven's sake make these! When you make the frosting, don't melt the butter, just cream it with the sugar and cocoa, and cut the milk to about 1 T.

Trust me, it's worth having your oven on for half an hour.

Back to the Motherland

It is so ridiculously hard for me to keep up with this! 

We made our second Colorado pilgrimage as a family of three for the 4th of July. The first one was last Christmas when Joey was just a little squirt. I'll admit, I was pretty nervous about the traveling, mostly since our high-maintenance little cutie refuses to nurse or sleep unless he's being bounced on a yoga ball. Not kidding: he hasn't done it since he was about 8 weeks old. You'd think that all that bouncing would tone my middle section...

Here we are with Justin and Shannon's family. Their kids are getting so big! I seriously can't believe how grown up Ben and Ella are. Karsten is faster and more capable than anyone with a 3 year-old brain should be. If he survives to adulthood, he's going to be a successful man; nothing can stop that kid. Ezra was staying with them for awhile while he healed up his 3 broken ribs. Ugh. (I mean ugh, the broken ribs, not ugh, Ezra. Love you!)

Here's James's sister Keri and her son Seth. Last time Seth and Joey got together Seth tried to pull off Joey's pinkie toe. I think they've patched things up nicely.

Joey loved playing with Grandma. He was very patient while she built him towers, and very thorough in knocking them down.

Here's our little fishy in a great big tub. The blue bit of rubber is his toothbrush. He hates having his teeth brushed (and bites really hard), but he loves brushing them himself.

We went to James's Uncle Dee and Aunt Marlene's house for the day on the 4th. It was fun to get together with everyone. James enjoyed waterskiing: his third love after me and Joey.  

Here they are ready to go for a dip in the lake. By dip, I mean only the feet. That was the end of Joey's first swimming experience. Next time we'll try for a warmer lake.

On July 2nd I my grandma passed away, so Joey and I ended up staying in Colorado for another week after James went home. My parents came and picked us up and we went down to Canon City.  It was really nice to go back for the first time in two years. 

The funeral wasn't very good, I'll be honest. The pastor did everything very generically and last minute. He kept calling her "young lady" (she died at 86) and went on off on quite a depressing sermon about how death is as final as a door closing, and if you don't shape up in this life, you have an eternity of fire and brimstone ahead of you. The family's only request was that he play "How Great Thou Art", her favorite hymn, and he didn't. No one was too tickled with him. It did make me grateful to  know about the Plan of Salvation!

After the funeral, it was wonderful, though. Pretty much the whole family turned out for the occasion. It was much more like a happy family reunion than a funeral. Grandpa seemed genuinely happy to see everyone and handled the whole thing so well. I'm sure Grandma loved it too.

During our stay in Canon City we went to see Theresa and Matt's awesome new house. They've fixed it up with a spiffy new coat of paint and it looks great! They topped it off with a garden and a swing with a really long rope. Matt pushed me on there so high that I seriously thought I was going to crash into the roof. It was exhilarating, and a little nauseating. Melissa and her kids came over  for lunch too. It was so fun to see them again--I wish they lived closer!

Susan Levy let us stay at her house for the whole week. Bless her! Melissa lent us her Pack 'n' Play so Joey could have a place to sleep, and it all worked out pretty well. Here's the little guy enjoying his first cracker, and his daily watermelon dose. If you look closely, you can see why the floor had to be mopped when he finished.

Joey had been very frustrated in learning to crawl for about two months at this point. Susan gave him a couple of chiropractic adjustments in his heels, hips and tailbone the day before we left. The next day he didn't get a chance to practice, since we were driving all day (another long story). The day after that, he was crawling all over the house. He's so much happier now that he can move around on his own. Mama's happier too, because he doesn't insist on being held all the time--he prefers to pull cords out of the wall, empty trash cans, and lick the floor. 

The August update is coming...

Into the Mouths of Babes

Does Joseph put everything in his reach directly in his mouth?

Is the Pope Catholic?

Do bears poop in the woods?

Yep.

(And check out those thunder thighs!)

I was expecting it, but this kid has taken it to a whole new level.

Of course he has teething rings (or 'chew toys' as James lovingly calls them). He likes them ok, I guess. Those are more suited for being smashed repeatedly on his highchair tray before being violently discarded on the floor. I'm glad we decided not to buy him many toys because he's let us know, in no uncertain terms, what he considers to be a good teething implement.

...and the finalists are...

-Electronics: cell phone, alarm clock, remote control, camera, computer mouse, keyboard, speakers...it's all the same to him.

-Wood: anything made of wood will do, hence the blocks. He'll lunge out of your arms to chew on a door frame or armrest of a chair. He'd love to sink his teeth into the headboard of our bed but he's, so far, been unsuccessful.

-Elastic Hair Bands: He'll entertain himself for half an hour by stuffing it in his mouth, hooking it around his 2 bottom teeth and pulling until it snaps (sending a fine spray of cold drool in all directions). During the past week he's launched at least 5 of them into dark corners I'm yet to discover.

-Coasters: We have a lovely set of bamboo coasters that he loves to chomp. We recently gave our coffee table away (sharp corners) so the coasters are all his.

-Granola Bars: Still in the wrapper, of course. He'll alternate between chewing and banging until the granola bar is reduced to a round blob of oats and melted chocolate in one end of the wrapper.

-Kitchenaid Mixer Attachments: The whisk one is his favorite.

-Spoons: Any spoon'll do, but his favorite is (surprisingly) his flexible plastic baby spoon. (I'm quite sure there should be a hyphen there somewhere, as the spoons are not made of flexible plastic babies.) The trick to feeding Squirt is getting the spoon in and out of his mouth before he clamps down with both jaws, both hands and both teeth. If you're too slow, don't even think about refilling that spoon until he's good and ready.

-Produce: Give that kid a whole lemon, cucumber, bell pepper, apple, you name it. He'll find a way to wrap his little mouth around it. Just don't expect to get it back without several sets of two little holes.

-The Church Chairs: This one was a bit of a surprise for me, since they're metal instead of wood. Still, when he gets tired of looking around over my shoulder, he'll clamp his little jaws around the chair until I pry him loose.

Only recently has he discovered licking. Now he's got two ways to taste his surroundings. He licks his bathwater, his highchair and your collarbone if you let him. I'm not too excited about the little tongue reaching for the handle of the shopping cart, but it's a welcome replacement to the biting while he nurses!

Garden!

Well spring certainly has taken its sweet time getting here this year. It snowed on May 31st. Seriously? Doesn't the weatherman know that's our second engagementaverssary? We were supposed to celebrate with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich picnic in the park, which is how this whole marriage thing started, but we opted to keep our bottoms dry and stayed home. But do we let bipolar weather keep us from finally being able to plant a garden? You bet your compost we don't!

A nice man in my parent's bishopric has an extra plot of land that he's not using. He said it was ours to tear up and plant as we chose. I bet he wasn't expecting us to go dumpster diving and cover his nice green lawn with our trash.

It all started when we found this library book about "Weedless Gardening". Supposedly, if you put down newspaper or cardboard and cover it with compost, it'll kill the grass/weeds and turn them into nice nutritious soil. No tilling, no weeding, just lots of cardboard. So that's what we did. We spent several days gathering and spreading and watering our cardboard farm. Then we shoveled some muck onto the beds and made grass clipping pathways. It turned out to be a lot of work, especially since the only way to transport compost was in garbage bags that had to be thrown over the privacy fence separating the garden plot from my mom's parking lot. We got yelled at by some neighbors who thought we were dumping bag after bag of trash onto someone else's property. (They couldn't see us because of said privacy fence.)

Here's the semi-finished product:

It's nice that Joseph can't crawl yet. He just sits on his cardboard box and watches us...for about 10 minutes and then he's had enough. It will be easier for him to entertain himself when he's mobile, but harder for us to work. There's an empty pool back there that's a disaster waiting to happen. I think we need to invest in a playpen.

Once we finally got our beds covered with compost, we realized that it wasn't deep enough to hold the moisture that we needed to dissolve the cardboard. That meant more shoveling and moving compost. We ended up borrowing a rototiller and tilling up 4 of the beds anyway. I'm not convinced that weedless gardening saved us any time or trouble in the end.

Here we are pilfering rocks from the river. Our cardboard kept blowing away every time there was a storm. We weighed it down with some heavy rocks (which also had to be heaved over that 7 foot over the fence).

These pictures are from over a month ago. Since then we've planted corn, chard, arugula, lettuce, beets, kohlrabi, tomatoes, peppers, green beans, basil, parsley, peas, squash, cucumbers, marigolds and petunias. And then it rained, and blew, and snowed, and hailed, and they cut down a tree and threw all the branches on our lettuce bed. Did I mention that, on the way to cut down that tree, they drove a huge truck over our peas? It'll be a miracle if we get a harvest at all.

Baby and Me

I seriously think about blogging every day. Sometimes I even make it to the website, but then the list of interesting blogs already written by all you interesting folk pulls me in and the next thing I know, the baby's awake.

Here are a few pictures. More to come soon...really.

Being lazy on the couch on a Monday. I love Mondays. James is off and I take that as my permission to do nothing productive all day.
During May Joseph went through a stage where he had his foot in his mouth during most of his waking hours. I feel like I have days like that too sometimes! Now the toe sucking has been mostly replaced with slamming and banging and generally being a little boy.
The days of relaxing in the bouncy seat are over. Now he wants to lean all the way forward and figure out how he vibration thing works

We've discovered his favorite food. I guess it's genetic, because his Grandma Affleck has been known to do the same thing with lemons.

April Fools, solid foods and Italians, oh my!

Oh, I'm just so excited to finally have this up to date! Please, please PLEASE load right! If it doesn't I just might swear off computers forever.

April's been a good, but seriously bipolar month so far. One day it's 70 degrees, the next day it snows. Joey got his first bad cold. It was so sad. If there's one thing he loves in life, it's milk, and a stuffy nose kept him from nursing like he wanted to. The only time I've seen him madder is when I tried to use the booger sucker on him (I'm sure there's a nicer name for it, but I don't know it).

On a brighter note, on the sunny days we've been spending a lot of time outside. Joey loves playing the grass, scratching at the trees and riding in the swing. The 2 year old neighbor girl loves mauling him half to death in her version of affection.

The best news of all I don't have a picture of yet, but I WILL remember the camera today...putting it by the door now...This nice man in my mom's ward has a big garden plot that is used exclusively for growing grass and dandelions. He's letting us use it to tear up and plant as we please. Awesome! We got some library books on gardening and are trying some pretty crazy ideas involving cardboard, bags of compost, and sprouting seeds in wet paper towels on a foot warmer. More to come.

Ok, blah blah blah, here are the pictures.
James and I hatched this great story to tell my parents on April Fools' Day about how a family he home teaches asked us to puppy sit their giant pit bull...but we're really not worried because Ruggles (see, we even named him) is great with kids and only pees outside. We were even going to have a giant water dish on the kitchen floor. And then we forgot to tell them. Oh well. Above is a picture of half my April Fools dinner. I made a meatloaf in two cake pans, layered them and frosted them with mashed potatoes and ketchup. It was awesome. I told James that we were having hamburgers for dessert and cake for dinner, since the hamburgers weren't quite done yet. He got a little shock when he took his first bite of meatloaf cake. True to my word, we had "hamburgers" for dessert. We remembered to take a picture only after the "cake" was gone. I think the hamburger cookies turned out awesome. The ketchup and mustard were a little disconcerning, but they tasted like frosting, honest.

This month Joey had his first experience with solid foods. Here are pictures of the first 3 times he tried rice cereal. As you can tell, his opinion of the stuff has improved.


The only hard thing is getting the spoon free of his death grip to reload. He's also learned to grab the food off of the spoon before we even get it to his mouth. So now dinner is immediately followed by a bath.

I guess you can't tell in this picture, but if you blow it up really big, you can see that he has 2 little toofers! He got one last Wednesday and the second one the next day. Our little punkin is growing up!
April was Italian party month...didn't you know? Elena (my mission trainer) came down with her mom and brother who were visiting from Torino this month. We had nice noisy party where everyone gained at least 3 pounds. Everybody had a good time, except Joey who woke up hopping mad to see all these strangers in his nice quiet house.
Elena and her family came back down for a quick visit the next week. It was her birthday, so we had some (delicious, if I do say so myself) cupcakes. Fun times. I miss Italy.
Now that Joey is basically an adult (eating cereal, sitting up, 2 teeth, how much more grown up can you get?) he let us know in no uncertain terms that he was done with his infant tub. Above is a picture from last week of him, reclining in his little whale tub, chewing happily on his fishy toy.
And here's what he does this week. He won't lean back no matter what we do. You can't see it, but he's got a death grip on the side of his tub, lest we try to make him lay back...that was SO last week!

Oh, and he wants to crawl too, but can't (much to my delight). This is my favorite stage where he can sit for a long time and entertain himself, but he can't get away and destroy the house.
Our little stud muffin turned 6 months old yesterday! No cake for him yet, but I did bake him a yam. My quest is to make him like all the things that his daddy hates (Grandma Affleck calls them the finer things in life): yams, squash, cantaloupe, asparagus...so far I've been successful. He's got his Daddy's good looks and his Mommy's good taste. As it should be.


He liked it! Now we've got another color to wash out of his clothes.

Here's a video that is definitely sideways and possibly won't even work. I tried.