Through the mouth of a 4 year old

I remember about this time last year walking to the mail box with Rebecca and asking her about what she'd learned in Chapel class at preschool.

R: Joseph in Evil.
long pause...
M: Do you mean Joseph in Egypt?
R: Oh yeah...

Fast forward to yesterday morning...

A friend is dividing her hastas and daylillies and before her husband simply mowed them all down, I asked if I could have some for one of our neighbors. The kids and I showed up at 8:20 AM and came home with lots of beaufitul plants.

After dinner we put all the plants in the wagon and took them up to our neighbors to plant them. Rebecca, pulling the wagon, stopped at chatted with everyone she saw along the way and asked them all what they thought of the
Pasta and Bagel plants we were going to plant.

It wasn't until GR told me the story that I realized she'd been talking a lot about pasta and bagels the whole day... now I know why.

"God Answers Knee Mail"

Read on a sign outside a church along Mass. St.

Rotten Deal…

This is the summer when we must … and I mean must paint our house. We’ve had three different contractors come out to bid on the job and there’s quite a bit of disparity out there… in a nut shell here’s what we’ve learned.

We have a huge house when it comes to painting, because two of the four sides of the house are three stories. This house hasn’t been painted since it was built in 1996 and when they painted it, they didn’t paint very well (sadly this does not come to us as a surprise). Cedar trim boards should be primed, then painted and hung. Ours were simply hug and painted, so we have an issue with boards and siding needing to be replaced because of dry rot. Benjamin Moore Paint seems to be the paint of choice. A good paint job should last 9-10 years.

The third guy came today and here’s how they all faired… today’s guy was $2,000 less than Friday’s bid, $1,000 less than Monday’s bid and $2,000 more what we initially thought was a high estimate. I almost laughed out loud when I got Friday’s bid… now I’m not laughing quite as hard.

Mary, Mary… How does your garden grow?

For FHE two weeks ago, GR and I took the kids on the back deck, handed them cups and large table spoons, a bag of dirt and showed them a couple packages of seeds. They filled their cups with dirt, and then selected what seeds to plant. I encouraged them to plant three seeds in each cup and to try and spread them out so transplanting them would be easier.

We had peas, beans, pumpkins, lavender, sunflowers and poppys.

I marked each cup with who planted it and then what they planted in it. Before I got the words “plant only one kind of seed in each cup,” Rebecca handed me her first cup with a pumpkin, pea and sunflower seed planted it.All three came up and eventually it was pretty obvious which plant was which (her cup is the second from the left in the row of cups on the window sill). We kept the kids cups on the kitchen window, and everyone of them got little sprouts! We ended up with two pumpkins, two beans, three sunflowers, and five peas.

Tonight we put all the vegetables in the ground. I purchased a few tomatoes, a red and a green pepper plant. Then we put the beans and pea seedlings in the ground and decided to add the sunflowers.

The amazing thing is I still have room to plant a few more things. I planted more bean seeds, right in the garden, and I’m still trying to decide if I should plant my basil in the garden, or in the flower bed. In the past, I’ve planted all my herbs in the flower beds by the front door, but the basil gets pretty tall and bushy, so the garden might be a better spot for it.

We’re taking the pumpkin seedlings to Grandpa Bob’s garden once they get a little bigger. We planted small pie pumpkin seeds – 5-8 lb pumpkins. I read that you can grow small and mini pumpkins in large containers on a patio or deck. I’d like to try it, but so far, I’m concerned about not having a large enough pot for the root system.

A late night visitor in our garage: