Hibbidy-jibbidy. That's what's going on.

Look what I found on Pinterest today.

I honestly didn't know if I should file it onto my "funny stuff" board, or my "home organization" board. I mean do people actually do this? I mean real people, with kids, who have to cook and stuff. Seriously, if I tried to do this my kids would hate me by the end of the day, no one would eat. All day. I would collapse. I would call my husband in a hysterically sobbing mess on the floor. I mean, I call him hysterical on a good day, never mind trying to clean the entire house in one day. The image of it is hilarious. But also not, because it's a little bit too real to be funny.

The fly lady approach works MUCH better for me. Basically it's just cleaning up as you go. C-A-Y-G. I can still hear my mom saying that as I cook. Fly lady also has "zones" that you work on each week. I like to think my house stays pretty tidy usually, and once in awhile I give it a concentrated afternoon of scrubbing and call it good. That's reality for me. Usually. But lately it's been different.

Everything's different lately.


The whole reason for this post is to vent a little and give you all a dose of my real life.

Things I'm doing lately:
-Trying to educate my two oldest children.
-Trying to get a business off the ground, ok it's not that big of a business, but it's still something.
-Meal planning. Which is hard because I make everything so difficult by not doing things ahead of time, duh!
-Still getting the garden in and dealt with
-Keeping the house as tidy as humanly and realistically possible all things considered.
-Maintaining some important relationships, mainly my amazing husband
-Majorly cutting back on spending

This post was originally super long. I just wanted to vent about how tired and stressed I am/was trying to keep the basic things going in this household. It's funny the feedback you get when you vent isn't it? Some well meaning people will give you advice and solutions. That doesn't make me feel better, in fact quite the contrary. I just want you to pat my back and tell me I'm doing a good job!

But now I'm going to talk about missing Caleb. Yes again. Yes still. It's been more than a month since we had to say goodbye to our sweet babe. Hard for me to believe it's been that long. The pain has washed over me in a new way this week. It's been a really really hard week. Lots of tears. I try to keep myself really distracted, and so I've thrown myself into some sewing projects. It's nice to get stuff done, but I should know myself better by now.

I need to just let myself be held and comforted by the One that can offer me true freedom. It's so sweet meeting with Him. Jesus my saviour, lover of my soul. I've been so up and down and everywhere this week. Yet he is my constant. He offers me peace and rest.

This post is so scattered. I guess it's appropriate. If only you knew how scattered my head is these days. I can't begin to describe it, so instead I'll get some sleep.

More on Gardening

Ryan just bear with me, I promise I don't try to bore you to death. My poor brother likes to complain about my blogging if I drag on too much about boring domestic things, like gardens. Well I just wanted to finish talking about my garden because I kind of got cut off from my last post. I also wanted to clarify that the photos of the beautiful green luscious gardens are from last year. AND when I said the beds were 4 feet deep, I meant deep as in that's how wide across they are, not how deep the dirt is. Does that make sense? Matthew finished my second box today, so now I have two that are 6x20, one that is 2x20 and a massive one out at the farm that's about 7x30. It's the most garden I've ever had, I hardly know what to do with it. Other than go to the Farmers Market this weekend and buy more tomato and pepper plants because I didn't have my act together in April to actually plant those things ahead of time. Ok, so now that I've totally bored Ryan to death, here's some pictures for you.

This is what my one garden bed looks like right now, there is one exactly the same right next to it. Not very much happening here, but yet still so exciting. Some dill, garlic, and some random flower or something are coming up from last year, eekk!

 

Last weekend my neighbour and I decided to ditch the kids and jet into town for some trees. We came back with some great stuff. I'll start with our yard, which is this picture. The front big tree is a Shuburt something berry, can't quite remember. I also got Lilacs, Hydrangeas, a dwarf cranberry bush, and another bush with white stuff on it. I'm going to fill in the spaces with colourful flowers. My husband got rocks to intersperse into the beds, he was quite proud. Next door (which our neighbours rent from us) we got a Hawthorne, a Muckleberry plum (with pretty pink blossoms) and some cool bushy shrubberies. A Shrubbery. Thanks Montey Python. Anyways. It's been fun to get some stuff put in and get things looking nicer. Matthew and I have lots of plans for the yard and house. We want to make the pillar on our deck look chunkier and more Craftsman style, and of course we'll one day put rock instead of that ugly paper stuff with the spray painted house number.

 

This is my rough sketch of our yard 'n stuff. Don't know if you can see it very well. We want to eventually build a patio around the fire pit. The area out side our fence isn't ours technically, but man we get a lot of use out of it. We call it "the back 40" even though it's only 10 feet squarish.

 

Here's part of our backyard. You can see into "the back 40", it will have a gate going out there soon. Gates! Can't wait. That's an apple tree. Real apples, not crab apples, I'm excited to see what we actually get. I'm so excited about all the things we can grow up here now. Apparently we can even grow grapes up here! They work on different varieties of plants and make them hardy for our climate, love it!

 

Beer can chicken on our new (free) BBQ. This is a super delicious and easy meal to make when we're out in the yard all day. Our neighbours put this bbq on the curb for town clean up day, intending to send it to the dump. That is, until my wonderful hubby spotted it. We replaced our older crappier, but also free bbq with this one instead. Oh but it gets better. The next weekend we sold our old crappy bbq for 5$ at the garage sale, ha ha. So sweet!

 

And here is the number one reason why the rest of the garden isn't put in yet. He's well worth it though, don't you think. He actually really loves it outside, but he just doesn't last out there as long as the "big" kids do. His favorite thing about outside is eating grass. At first I tried to stop him, since he doesn't even eat real food yet 'n all. But he doesn't choke on it and it's almost impossible to stop him from eating it, he just loves it. So I don't try very hard anymore to prevent it. What a funny kid, love him!

 

Well friends, I'll be back in blog town in a couple days. I have tons of new pics on the computer now so I have lots to blog about. I have to do it fast because the kids change so fast and there is more fun to be had. Oh and a brief explanation about the chicks is in order I guess. Fran (from "the farm") is wonderful and lets me raise chickens with her every year, even though it means she gets stuck with most of the work. Last year she got some wonderful heirloom birds which means we could save their eggs and let them hatch instead of getting them new from the hatchery. So I got the pleasure of having the incubator here so I could take on a bit more of the work load. Let me tell you though, they aren't a lot of work at this point. It was amazing to watch them hatch, I had never seen that before. The first day I was downstairs the whole time and had half the neighbourhood over to watch. It was incredible! Now they're getting stinky and loud so I'll kick them out to the garage at some point soon. I have another batch in the incubator now, so pretty soon I'll have about 60 chicks all together, yikes! We'll take them out to the farm when all their feathers are in and they're ready to be outside. Anyhoo, that's all for now, happy spring everyone!

Gardening

More and more I realize that I'm officially old. I like, no LOVE, gardening. Ok ok, I realize that alone does not qualify me as old. I also like fruit cake, puzzles, quilting, and I'm really clueless when it comes to high tech computer lingo stuff. I've even been known to play scrabble and sequence on occasion. I never thought I would do any of these things back in the days of bikes, bubble gum, and boys. Maybe it's because I'm turning 30 this year, or maybe it's because I have a bunch of kids that I'm responsible for, I don't know what the reason, but I've been feeling really old these days. But that's not the purpose of this post at all, I don't even know where all that whining came from! Let's move on to the subject at hand. Gardening!!!

 

This is Matthew last year building my amazing garden beds for me. They are 6 feet deep (a little too deep, four feet would be perfect) and 20 feet long. There is room for two there, but we only did one last year because I was all pregnant and awkward.

 

This is a picture of it once it's all planted. I marked off squares for every two feet and loosely followed the "Square Foot Gardening" technique. It's a great book, definitely worth a read. It made weeding and watering almost unnecessary.

 

We built a two foot deep bed along the side of the house where it's sunny all day. It was perfect for peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes because it's so hot there.

 

Here we are pruning tomato plants. Meatball got to just hang out in my tummy for the whole thing, lucky guy. This is the side bed again, in case you didn't notice that:-)

 

And here's my little dancer posing in front of the main bed some time in August.

I will have to add more to this post tomorrow because it's late and I can hear a chicken in my basement which means it probably got out again. Chicken in my basement, what?!?!?!? Yes, you heard me folks, we have sweet chickys that like to escape their nice warm enclosure, so I must run. Ciao!