Oh the places they'll go!

I was clearing the dinner table and baking cookies. I walked into the kitchen and moments later returned to find:

Note to self: Do not leave an climbing, curious 1-year-old unsupervised.

Because I clearly didn't learn my lesson, I went to get another load of laundry to add to the to-be-folded-tonight pile and I found:

So behind on so many things I want to post in this blog. For now, this little glimpse of my baby and laundry piled to the sky will have to do.

A daring move.

I let Ellie wear panties to bed tonight. I'm praying like mad that tonight isn't the first time in a month that she wakes up wet. Good girl, Ellie!

Why I love August

A garden in ruin, thank you wood chuck. Decapitated broccoli and cauliflower, a mysterious destruction of one pole bean plant, but not another. And a days happy harvest.

I don't want to start out whining, but I'm going to anyway.

That little devil.

That evil, awful, covetous little animal.

I'm sorry, but I think there is plenty of food in this town for a woodchuck to munch on other than my broccoli. I mean LOOK at it. Broccoli plants are supposed to be (and were) tall and leafy with little broccoli growing protected in the crooks of the stems. Now where will the broccoli grow if they grow at all? Why on earth did the woodchuck eat it from the top down, do the same to the cauliflower but also pull their roots up, steal my ONE ripening tomato and nibble off one side of the brussel sprout plants? Does it have a gas death wish?

I can't really do anything about it today. We live in a village, so we can't just shoo it. We borrow the plot from a neighbor who isn't using it, so we can't just go make whacky changes. (A friend just sent me a message via Facebook and told me to try moth balls. Tomorrow, I'm moth balling the whole lot. Not that will save my broccoli tonight...) But that ends the whining.

Anyway, since I discovered gardening and gleaning and all that grand stuff, August has become my favorite month. If you want to eat your own preserved food any time later this winter, August is the month to think about it. Right now, I'm freezing beans every day. I will probably be doing squash and trying something with beets.

But my favorite August activity thus far has been blackberry picking with my kids. We have been stalking blackberry bushes, getting enough each time to make a small batch of jam. (And I am a quasi giddy idiot over that jam. Don't stop by unless you want to fondle the jar, admire it's beautiful color, etc.) The kids LOVE berry picking. We've been going every couple days. I drive very slowly, with Raffi singing his silly songs on the radio, letting them sit in the front seat so when they spot a bush out of all the brambles along this particular road, we can all jump out and pick. It has been so fun and so rewarding. The berries are delicious, organic and free. It teaches my children the origin of food and that you can survive from the land in a pinch. It also teaches them that while the grocery store has food of all stripe year round, there really is a time and a season for all things.

And it gives them happy summer memories and jam for the cold winter days to come. :)

What I learned in the last two days

1. Potty training is possible. I'm happy to announce that Ellie is potty trained. A dash of sibling rivalry for the toilet mixed with a bit of maturity, loads of praise and of course, five Polly Pocket Princesses (in order, Belle, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Ariel and Snow White) and she gets it. No accidents in five days. Tells me every time and she's been dry through the night for a week. Fare thee well diapers...for her anyway...

2. Childproof caps should really be labeled "child resistant but barely." All I have to say is if my 1-year-old can wrangle the lid off a bottle of infant's Motrin with no effort, the caps should be rethought. Fortunately, there was only about two doses left in the bottle and he dumped half of it on his shirt, but I called poison control anyway. They were oddly nonchalant. He's fine. In fact, he was particularly happy all yesterday.

3. You should never ever pre-judge what you will or won't do as a parent. Because right now, I am drowning in Disney Princess love (which I actually think is kind of cute) and managing a budding Transformer addiction. Fortunately, I lived in the 1980s with a brother and cousin in LOVE with Transformers, so I'm a bit more up to speed on the whole Autobot/Decpticon battle than your average housewife. My mistake was letting Jack know I knew anything about Transformers. Now, he follows me around asking who is who and what is what and geeze Mom, could you make this guy back into a plane? (Sure, right after I change Snow White's dress for the fourth time.) My children were never going to watch TV and they were not going to be given toys marketed by major movies/TV shows and they were going to play with very charming and educational wooden toys. Yet, here I am. Oh well. They're happy.

4. I hate quilting. Alright, hate is a strong word. But I thought I learned my lesson in 1997 when at the University Ward in Reno, Nev. we made quilts for a year as part of a stake requirement for a humanitarian project for Kosovo. After about 10 quilts, all we would have to say was "quilt" and the young ladies would RUN away from any Relief Society project. Here I am 12 years later -- having sworn off quilt tying, I might add -- at the helm of a massive RS project that includes making quilts. As we are looking for volunteers to piece together fabric that had been collecting dust in our church closet, I offered to do NOT ONE, but TWO. Quilting requires a great many talents I do not possess. 1. Infinite patience. 2. Time. 3. Insane attention to detail and last, but certainly not least, 4. Math. It should not take a woman three hours to plan two quilts, measure fabric and cut out 44 perfect 8x8 squares. OK, maybe it should, but I would prefer not to be that woman. I'm the person who sits with a calculator and a pencil and a piece of paper with my tongue sticking out going, "OK, um, area=length times width. hmm. but there is no way I need to cut out 300 squares." And then an hour later I realize, "Oh, wait, I need to divide that by 64 square inches, not 8 inches. How silly of me." Honestly, I am a JOURNALIST (or was) NOT a math goddess. However, in the spirit of service and trying VERY HARD to conjure up the mental image of a foster child loving these quilts, I press on. And as I was a foster child for a brief 5-month period of my life, it is not hard to imagine the quilts being loved. I will prevail.

5. Women can do hard things. (PETA fans please stop reading here.) I was putting my baby down for a nap today when I heard knocking on my door which I simply assumed was Ben Bacon trying to find Jack. Turns out it was his mother looking for help getting rid of a bat hanging in the doorway to her baby's room who she was trying to put down for a nap. I walked outside just in time to see Kelly and Patty, her best friend who lives down the block, wielding shovels and staring at the road. They pointed to the still-moving but not flying bat. Honestly, they gave it a chance to fly away and its odd behavior of keeping daylight hours and refusing to fly led to the use of the word "rabies." With a cat, two dogs and 12 children between the houses at the time, the bat earned a death sentence. We mulled over what should happen to this bat, hoping for someone to come speeding up the road and end its (and our) misery. No such luck. I offered to put it in a bag and just let it die (not nice, but not bloody, either.) "No, the best thing to do is kill it quickly," Patty the brave one said. Kelly and I knew we couldn't do it. So, Patty piped up and said, "I've had five children. I can kill a bat." And though she was a nervous wreck (and Kelly and I just babies about it) she whacked the bat. It was then properly disposed of and we had to explain to some weepy girls why letting the bat hang around was probably not the brightest idea. Women can and did and will continue to do hard things.

Even quilt.