We were watching Brother Sun, Sister Moon last night, which scared Lucy is so many places (she doesn’t like feverish people, or strange looking crucifixes, or lepers…).  The frolicking in the fields was a bit more 70s than I cared for, although Samantha enjoyed pointing out every flower, bird and dog (=sheep).  When the crowd came and they opened San Damiano, Lucy said,

“I want to go to church with flowers.  And ducks.”

Me too, Lucy, me too.

Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?  Nearly a month, actually.  If you’re still checking, I’m impressed.  There has been a lot going on, including my going offline for weeks at a time and some serious writer’s block.  But here’s the update.

School ended, thank God.  Everyone survived.  Summer is hot, hot, hot.  There will be not trips to the zoo any time soon, membership or no.  The goal is for everyone to survive the summer.

We’ve been keeping busy.  I can’t actually remember what happened right after school got out, but we spent some time at Craig’s parents’ house (mostly in the pool) and then came back to spend a day canoeing with Theresa and her friend Paul, and then a day of rapid laundry and packing, and off to Bunkie.  For nine days.  If you don’t know where Bunkie is, it’s in central Louisiana, near Alexandria.  It does not have its own Wal-Mart.  That tells you how small it is.

So we were on the outskirts of Bunkie, LA, helping to facilitate a leadership retreat for some of the finest Catholic youth of the Baton Rouge and Lafayette Dioceses.  It was really good (I think there are some pictures attached in some way I don’t understand to Craig’s Facebook page…or maybe he can see them but not share them…I don’t know) and we had a lot of fun and great prayer experiences and spent time with wonderful people.  The down side was the ridiculous number of chiggers and mosquitoes (which I am still scratching) and the two poor baby sitters who were left with my attached baby most of the day.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  There’s only one danger with attachment parenting – they might actually become attached.  And Samantha definitely is.  So that was hard on Samantha, me, and the two patient young ladies who volunteered to spend their week watching the facilitators’ kids.

Also, the camp is run by the Department of Education, so we had school lunches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a week.  On the last night, vegetables were brought out as snacks.  I have never seen teenagers attack bell peppers and carrots, watermelon and cucumbers like that before.  The cookies were abandoned.  The granola bars, abandoned.  The Big Cheez-its were not abandoned, as they apparently complimented the vegetables.  This should tell you something about the nutritional content of school lunches.

[I have been told that the nutrition in school lunches “balances out” over the course of a week – sure, sometimes it’s pizza, but sometimes it’s meatloaf.  That only worked for our week if all the students were pregnant and needed 80 or so grams of protein a day, but only needed one serving of vegetables per day.  Over the course of the week we had corn twice and carrots (overcooked and drowned in sugar) once, plus the lettuce for hamburgers and tacos, which I don’t count.  I do not call eating French fries at least one meal a day balanced.  But I digress.]

So we were happy, after another two days at Craig’s parents’ house (for meetings and a youth group softball game – which we won!), to return to our garden and our kitchen.  We had pizza with chocolate bell peppers, a tomato, and basil and parsley all from the garden for dinner tonight.  We’ve also had two yellow squash now, a couple of other tomatoes (including a beautiful Cherokee), and delicious purple beans which have all been eaten raw.  There weren’t really enough of them to cook, anyway.  I have battled slugs in the squash/melon patch, and finally have plants large enough to survive their onslaught.  There are now beautiful yellow, black, and white caterpillars eating my dill plant, but the thing was taking over the garden, so I’m letting them go to it.  They don’t seem to be bothering anything else, and Stephen Locke says they make pretty butterflies, although he couldn’t remember which kind in particular.

Meanwhile, Lucy has taken to singing made-up songs with repetitive words, which is pretty funny, and she is writing beautiful letter “L”s and upside-down letter “U”s.  Samantha continues to learn new words to say, and to mimic whatever Lucy may be doing.  They both swim fearlessly with floaties now, which is great except we have to make sure Samantha doesn’t get near the pool without them, because she will jump in and expect to float.

In case you were wondering, the pooping on the potty seems to have been a fluke on all accounts.  There have been no repeat attempts.  Two steps forward, one step back.  Or something.

I have tried to update my reading list, but the plug-in is on the fritz, so that will have to wait.  I’m busy with several sewing, framing, and card-making projects, which will hopefully be posted when they are done and/or delivered.  There are pictures, I just have to sit down and put them up.  I should really get Craig to work on that part I guess…

So for the rest of the summer we have a week planned with my mom’s family in Florida, and a week in North Dakota (actually, a weekend in North Dakota and the rest of the week driving there and back), and another weekend in Bunkie for Taylor’s wedding.  After last week’s experiences, I, for one, will be wearing eau de bugspray with my bridesmaid dress.  I’m still scratching.  And then the rat race starts again.  If, of course, you consider it ever to have stopped.

Well, it finally (and I mean finally) happened.  Lucy pooped on the potty today.  Samantha only beat her to it by three days.  Yes, Lucy is 3 1/2, but we decided early on that we would not force potty training, but let it happen in Lucy’s own time.  At some point I made a foolish prayer for patience, and God has his own way of answering it.

It took a little longer that we were hoping.  She has a strong will-she’s been physically ready as far as we can tell for a long time, but always claimed that she wasn’t big enough yet.  But today she dissappeared into the bathroom, shut the door, and a few minutes later was shouting, “Mommy!  I pooped!”

Which usually does not bring joy to a mother’s heart, but today, it was wonderful.  We’re going out for ice cream as soon as Samantha wakes up from her nap to celebrate.

So there is some faint hope that I will have no one (or at least only one) in diapers before the next baby arrives.

And no, that doesn’t mean we’re pregnant.  Yet.  But hopefully that’s only a matter of time.  🙂

Meanwhile, Samantha hates her diapers, and urinated on the floor three times today.

You win some, you lose some, and some get, uh, “rained” out.

Well, five years ago today I was sharing a bath with my brand-new husband in romantic St. Francisville.  (Sorry if that falls in the TMI category, there is a reason, I promise!)  We had neither den nor nest for sleeping, nor little else except the Buick.

Tonight I was giving a bath to two beautiful little girls in our own house (sort of – I hesitate to call it “ours” until the mortgage is paid).  What a difference five years makes!

My dear husband, by the way, is canoe-camping with his Justice Walking boys.  You romantical-types may feel free to send him shaming emails, but it was an honest mistake.  He didn’t forget the date, he just made all the camping plans without ever once looking at the date he was planning.

At any rate, I think all this calls for some chocolate cake from Gambino’s.  Who’s with me?

But seriously, I did want to thank all of you who were there for us five years ago, and all the rest of you who have supported us since then.  We could not do it, I’m pretty sure, without the help and prayers of all our friends and family.

And one of these days, I’m going to get around to planting the sunflowers that little morning rain shower promised!  Somebody remind me early next spring!

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mommies out there.  I hope you have a peaceful, love-filled day.  Here’s a Lucy quote to brighten (or not) your day.

Lucy: “Tell me about the chickens.”  (By which she means, the slightly gory story of how a chicken goes from the farm to our table.

So I do.  And I ask, “Does that make you want to eat a chicken?”

Lucy: “Yes!  I want to eat a chicken.”

Me (prepping her for the *eventual* move to a farm): “Would you like it if we raised chickens and killed them and ate them?”

Lucy: “Yes!  I want to kill a chicken!”

My grandmother lives on in this child.  Although, I’m not sure that she butchered chickens with quite this sort of relish.

Anyway, Happy Mother’s Day!

Lucy has been waiting, oh, about two months for the kettle corn man to re-appear at the farmer’s market.  I don’t know if we just missed the weeks he’s been around, but we haven’t seen him there in a while.  But today, there he was, and the popcorn was purchased, and nibbled around the rest of the market and back in the car.  And as we were driving down Magazine on the way to the grocery store to finish our shopping, in the midst of proclaiming the delight brought on by the popcorn and retelling the story of its finding, Lucy cried, in what must have been her best revival voice, “Thank you, Jesus!”

I said, “For the popcorn?”

Lucy: “Yes.”

Me: “Oh.  Good.”

Ok, it wasn’t quite that dramatic, but those are direct quotes.  And she was really excited about the popcorn.  We had a terrible day yesterday (whining nonstop from waking to sleeping), so I think that helped make up for it.

Lucy: “You sneaky little sister!”

as Samantha climbs on top of her in bed

It’s funny the positions you can be put in by little ones.  But it just shows why I prefer to do my grocery shopping early, when the store is empty, even though we usually don’t do it that way any more.

Samantha has added a number of words to her vocabulary lately, including cracker.  And she really likes crackers.  So when we went down that aisle on Tuesday, thank God at about 8:30 in the morning, she got very excited, and started shouting,

“Ca-ca!  Ca-ca!  Ca-ca!”

Happily, I’m not the only one with these sort of experiences.  Craig’s parents’ neighbors have a daughter right between Lucy and Samantha – she’s about 2 1/2 now.  And Jasmine’s dad took her to the store one afternoon, and she started shouting, all through the store, and could not be bribed or threatened to stop, “Daddy, I suck!  I suck!”

When he got out of the store (swearing that he would never bring her shopping again), he realized that she had gotten her hand stuck in the cart.  She was trying to say “stuck”.

And thus the running jokes begin.  Anyone care (or dare!) to share similar stories?

For once, the pause in posting wasn’t my fault!  Last Saturday Craig put insulation in our attic, and bumped something that killed the electricity in the room with the computer.  So that was finally fixed yesterday, when Craig was home in the morning when it was cool enough to get up in the attic again and fix it.  But now we’re functional again, anyway.

We’ve been busy in the garden, and I’ll have to put up some details and pictures sooner or later.  But the exciting thing, we realized last night, is the variety of foods we’ve had this week.  Almost all of which Lucy has at least sampled.  Many of which are things I’ve only started eating recently myself.  Here’s the list, at least what I can remember, from the last week:

radishes (and their greens) dipped in vinegar

head cheese

frog legs

sushi of various sorts

her first icee

fava beans

I think those are all the interesting things, but I thought it was an impressive list for a three-year-old.

The beans have come!  It’s garden time, and my first order from Seed Savers has come in, and is already in the ground.  Well, not all of them, but nine Flor de Junio, and nine Tejano beans (I only ordered the Flors, apparently the others were lagniappe) are in their appointed squares.  Prior to their arrival, we already had onions (some green ones we rescued from the compost pile and some seeds which are just coming up), orange, green, and “chocolate” bell peppers, jalapeño and Anaheim peppers, basil, oregano (which over-wintered) lemon balm, dill, chives, parsley, orange mint, salad greens (some of which have already bolted and been removed, including the bacon-flavored one, whatever it was), and several types of tomatoes.  The daffodils and tulips are bloomed out, and the iris are in full bloom now (some yellow and some white, with some white and purple on their way).  I put in some morning glory seeds in pots in hopes of getting them to climb the play ground the porch posts.  The orange tree is blooming (I wish I could send you a smell of it – it is amazing!) and the jasmine is almost there.  All the berry bushes (ok, they’re not bushes yet, they’re sticks) have new growth, so in two years, if nothing goes wrong, we will have berries, too!

And there is a dove nest in the tree-bush near the garden.  She’s sitting, so I’m looking forward to hearing the babies chirping soon.  Apparently the eggs take about two weeks to hatch, then another two to leave the nest, and then they might even reuse the nest.  I’m pretty excited about all that.

We’ve also had one big, black snake behind the shed, and more cats than we can keep track of coming through.  I found one tabby tom-cat sitting in the stroller we had left out a couple of weeks ago.  It looked ready to go for a ride.

Lucy wants to plant potatoes and other food, so her square will be turned up from the tulips and daffodils, now that they’re bloomed out, but we’re not quite sure how that is going to work yet.  And Craig built a worm farm, so now all we need is manure and, well, worms.  The garden shop nearest us doesn’t sell them, so I have some searching to do.  Which means I should probably get busy before the girls wake up.  Happy Spring, everybody!