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.