We picked up our CSA last night, a day late because of the holiday. This is a picture of just OUR HALF of it. She said she overharvested, so we got a ton of veggies. In just out half we got: a bunch of kale, a bunch of radishes, a bunch of Japanese turnips, a 1/2 pint of strawberries, a pok choi, a bunch of spring onions, a bag of spinach and a head of green leaf lettuce. We are going to have a hard time eating all of it. I can't imagine trying to eat double that! 

My friend Liz just turned me onto the Mason Dixon Knitting blog. I want a cool knitting blog, dammit! It would be the most boring thing on the planet. "Here is a pair of pants I made. And here is a pair of pants. And lastly, ladies and gentleman, a beautiful pair of...shorts. Ha! Ha! You thought I was going to say "pants", didn't you?".

Henry is in the bath and there is a totally unforseen rain storm outside. One minute we are enjoying a steak and potatoes and corn on the cob dinner with cherry pie made from cherries picked from that very same tree in the backyard and the next minute, water is tumbling down over the gutters in great big sheets and we are running barefoot down the steps into the backyard to grab the hammock that we finished drying justthisminute currently getting soaking wet again. Craaaazy. I opened the back door and all of the windows to take advantage of the mosquitoes taking refuge from the rain in their little mosquito houses and air the place out. My house now smeels like rain. Yummy.

Little Henry is sitting on the floor naked, wrapped in a towel saying "I want to watch Blues Clues please. See, I asked so niiiiicely". Little does he know that Daddy is about to preform the weekly torture ritual we like to call "combing the hair out". I'm pretty sure this procedure is banned in the Geneva Convention, but henry doesn't know that. We brirbe him with Good n Plenty and that does the trick. Most times. With a Good n Plenty/Blues Clues combo, it should go fairly smoothly. WOuldn't it be easier if you combed it out every day, you might ask? No. No matter how frequently it is combed, new dreadlocks are formed in approximately 4.7 seconds. Oh no! Daddy has avoided Blues Clues by putting on America's Funniest Home Videos! I can hear him trying to distract the baby by saying "Look, Looko! This guy's going to get punched in the face!". Not good.

Well, I have gotten ALMOST all payment for the auction (I'm lookin' at you, mama ;)) and I sent the total to KR. All said, it came out to a smooch over $716. Not too shabby if I do say so m'self.

We have had gorgeous weather here the past couple of days. We went for a hike at Bent Creek with some other kids and finally rigged a bunch of hoses long enough to reach the back garden. Scroll for pictures. The carrots, radishes, squash, zucchini and pumpkins are growing fast! I think we finally saw a little bit of cilantro peeking up as well.

And now it is time for me to get to the grocery store and find something to go with the big and beautiful London broil Kyle is going to grill up for dinner.

Henry "watering the garden". 

Rachel, Elijiah and Henry taking a walk on the trail at Bent Creek. 

Go Sox! A pair of shorties I just finished last night while watching the LOST finale... 

We had Adella and Liz and Elijah and Kim over this morning for a picnic and to enjoy the beautiful sunshine this morning/afternoon. The kids had fun running around outside and it was nice for us mamas to (for the most part) get to sit and chat in the sun and get some color in our cheeks. When I went to water the garden this morning after a rainy few days I noticed a bunch of things coming up! Scroll for pictures below.

In good news, the mama who designed my Hyena Cart store has agreed to tweak my regular site and convert it to mostly html so I can bumble my way through doing updates myself. She said that it shouldn't cost more than $50! Now all I have to do is find a good readable book on the subject and a patient friend to walk me through some things. Yay! It doesn't really matter at this point because I am too busy to list anything new or go looking for new orders right now anyway. I'm getting used to being far behind and have been giving out longer wait times so I don't have to get overly stressed out about it.

Okay, speaking of being behind, I have to get some knitting done while Henry is napping. I really just wantd to post some garden pictures. Later gators.

Remember that picture of henry planting bean seeds? This is it! We are going to try to thin it out and transplant it soon. 

Pumpkins coming up from seed! 

Zucchini coming up from seed! 

Squash coming up from seed! 

My radishes that I planted from wee seeds! 

Cucumbers! 

Our 2 biggest tomato plants. 

Our cherry tree. I think they will be ready to harvest sometime next week! 

Henry the fireman! 

We had CSA delivery last night:
3/4 lb. spinach
1 bunch spring onions
1 bunch radishes
1 head lettuce
3 broccoli crowns
1 bunch kale

Next week...strawberries! They also had some samples set out for their goat cheese share and it was amazing. Yumma! Tonight we made3 a huge spinach salad with some awesome farmers' market tomato, spring onion, radish, garbanzos, the broccoli (which was soooo good and tender raw) and grilled zucchini, red and yellow peppers, split garlic cloves and white onion. Mmmmmmm, it was delicious! And Henry ate a cheddar quesadilla with lots of spinach sneaked into it. He's not into the salad thing quite yet. I think I am going to try my hand at my first veggie lasagne tomorow. Wish me luck.

Last night at trivia I won a kick booty Jack of the Wood shirt for a shout out question. Who was the most recent female Secretary of Transportation? Oh yes, my friends, it was Elizabeth Dole. And I rock.

The auction is almost up to $600. And I am hoping there is some final bidding going on Thursday morning. We shall seeeeeee.

Sarah finally caved and told me that with the new baby she can't maintain my site any more. Since I read the email right before I went to bed, I was up into the wee hours thinking about it. I bit the bullet this morning and emailed the woman who did my Hyena Cart to see how much it would cost for her to rebuild it to make it easier to update myself. I bet it will cost me an arm and a leg. Ugh. I thought about just going down the the Hyena Cart, but I still get a fair amount of traffic from my regular site so I don't really want to do that. We'll see. I have a ton of changes I want to make and I should really learn how to maintain it myself anyway. I need to go and get HTML for Morons or some such book.

Liz and I were in charge of the little beasties at her house this morning, so no rest for the weary. The kids actually did great, but it was still tiring. It is so much fun tosee them turning into actual little friends. I need to get some cheap frames and make Henry a Wall of Friends with cool pictures of all of them. I think we are going to take a field trip to Bent Creek for a hike on Thursday morning, so that will be cool.

Later gators.

Well, it finally happened. I was awoken last night at about 1am by a thunk and screaming. I jumped out of bed and ran into Henry's room to find him laying on the floor in hysterics. From what I can piece together from what he told me, he rolled out of bed and hit his hip on the wooden stepstool on the way down. It broke his fall so he didn't hit his head on the ground, but it didn't feel good. It took me a long time to coax him back into bed and then another 2 hours for him to fall back to sleep. Poor little man. I guess maybe we should look into a guard rail after all. He usually cuddles up so close to the wall I can't believe he fell out. Bad mama!

In other news, we finally got our last credit letter, this one from BCBS, saying that we have perfect payment history with them. Of course, when I called our loan officer to set up a meeting to submit all of our paperwork I got a voicemail message saying that she had just left for vacation until after Memorial Day. Awesome. Now I can wait until she gets back or take a chance with someone else. I am hesitant to do that since we are involved in 3 different assistance programs, all of which she is already familiar with, all of which could get screwed up by someone who doesn't know what they are doing.

As of this morning, my fundraising auction for my mama friend has broken the $500 mark! Yay!

Okay. Mr.Man needs help finding his Chicken Little movie while Kyle watches Game 7 in the Pistons series. Peace out.

Try to ignore the goofy look on Kyle's face in the background... 

Well, after 20 minutes of flailing, screaming, pinching 2 year old, Henry is finally down for his nap. Kyle's class was having and end of the year picnic today at Amboy Park, so we went by to say hello. He dropped us off and took the car back to school so we wouldn't ahve to pick him up later. That was nice, but it left me with no car to drive Henry around in to get him to fall asleep. After coming home and watering the garde, he didn't really feel like laying down quietly in his bed and going to sleep. But he did, finally.

My fundraising auction started today with great early success. If I ended the auction right now we would have over $350 to give to this mama. I am so excited about that. I made one mistake that ended up making someone able to buy a really nice pendant for $1 (oops) but other than that, all is running very smoothly. Ask me about it when the auction is over and I am trying to coordinate shipping. That isn't going to be fun. I ahve threatened all of the people who donated items that if they don't ship when they say they will I will track them down, tie them up and force them to watch The Wiggles for hours on end. No really, I did. I'll do it, too. We did get an update, though. The mama who I am raising funds for had a radical hysterectomy yesterday morning and is recovering nicely. They won't know until next week if they got it or if she'll need chemo, but they are optimistic.

More good things: Kyle had his evaluation yesterday and the big head honcho guy loved him. He got the summer school gig! He'll be working this summer! WooHoo! And they also told him that there is a good chance he will be teaching Social Studies part time next year, which is cool. Now that we have that nailed down it will be a little easier to plan summer trips. Sometime in July we are going to make the drive to Ann Arbor. I think Henry and I will be somehow making the trip to CT and VT by our lonesomes. I can't wait to see the new VT diggs.

In other news:

The hippies won The Amazing Race! Yay!

They killed Marissa Cooper on The OC! Yay!

I thought that Lost, Alias, The Sopranos and Big Love and Top Chef all had season finales, but they are all next week. I will save my ranting until then.

For now? I will leave you with a picture. Possibly the cutest picture on Earth. In this picture, there is a clue to why it was so hard to put Henry down for a nap. Can you guess what it is?

Is it bad that all I have to talk about it tv? It is May sweeps and the overindulging in season finales is in full effect. A brief run down:

Survivor. I am so glad Aras won. I was rooting for Terry for a while, but as soon as Aras became the underdog it was all about him. I hated Danielle, pth. It would have been cooler is Cirie won, but she wasn't in the top 2. At least she got a car. Shane makes me giggle, but if I had to spend more than 5 minutes with him we'd have a problem.

Grey's Anatomy. WTF? Derek and Meredith need to just get married (oh wait, he's already married) and run away to some remote island where I never have to see either one of them again. Seriously, are there more useless people anywhere on Earth? Love Christina and Burke. Love Izzy. Poor, dead, Denny. I saw it coming but it still sucked. I am glad they have a woman on the show that a stiff breeze couldn't break in half, but when Callie was walking down in her prom dress I got Priscilla Queen of the Desert flashbacks. Love George, as always. Finn. Why the hell would you invest in scary and damaged girl? HATE Meredith.

The Office. This is the most perfect show ever invented. Jim is the most perfect boy ever invented. *sigh*

Veronica Mars. Veronica + Logan = True Love 4Evah!

The Unit. I never watched Felicity, but if you told me that Scott Foley was so amazing looking under all of that floppy '90's hair, I just might have. This is one of our favorite new shows. Which means it should be cancelled shortly.

Lost and Alias (SARK is back!!!) and The Amazing Race end tonight, so you can look forward to more tv talk tomorrow. Oh, and then the much anticipated end to the season on The OC on Thursday. My life is bursting with fullness.

We finally started planting the garden last night. We ahve 2 kinds of pumpkin, zucchini, crook necked squash, radishes, 2 kinds of tomato, yellow pepper, kale and greens, and some other things I can't remember. There is a lot more to go in, too. Which is good because we got our first CSA box Monday night. It was the first box, which is always small they say, but it was still kind of funny. We got: a bunch of radishes, 2 bunches of spring onions, a bok choy, a head of lettuce and a 1/2 lb of spinach. It was kind of funny after splitting it bringing 4 radishes and 1/2 a bok choy to Liz.

We are going to see Curious George (again) today at the $2 theater. Henry has been listening to the soundtrack non stop, so I expect a lot of loud singing. I hope that doesn't detract from the plotline for the other kids. His favorite is a song about reducing, reusing and recycling. He runs around the house yelling "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". It's not cute at all. Gotta love Jack Johnson.

My fundraiser keeps on a growin'. Everyone look at my Hyena Cart on Friday and bid on something. The lottery function turned out to do something different than I thought, so it will be mostly auction. There is soap and jewelry and yarn. Lots of good stuff. Go peek. No, I mean right now. Go.

Here are some pictures of LEAF weekend while Henry is napping.

Note to self: Scheduling a 5 kid playgroup in this small space the day after being at a festival all weekend? Bad. Idea.

*yawn*

Playing keyboard on stage! 

Henry ripping it up on the Kid's Stage! 

:) 

Getting a little tired in the wagon. 

Playing toss-the-hat. 

Chasing a big bubble. 

Henry and the BIG bubble! 

Ed, aka "bubbleman"  

Henry and the "Hoop! Hoop! Hoop!" in the children's village. 

Well, the first day of LEAF is finally here! I am going to pick up Kyle a little early from work and we are going to go straight there. Unfortunately, Henry and I ahve been up since 4:30 this morning. Fun! Our electricity went totally crazy this morning. Henry woke up at 4:30 and I went in to tell him to go back to sleep and went back to bed. About 5 minutes later I heard what sounded like someone bouncing a basketball a couple of times. It strtled me, but I didn't really think about it and kept trying to go back to sleep. Then Henry yelled for me again and I realised our power was out and he was scared because it was so dark (he normally has a night light). I went in and got into bed with him and he was wide awake so we spent the next hour and change talking about robots and going hiking, etc. Then the bouncing basketball noise started again, but this time I saw that it was the electricity. Every time the noise happened, the lights would go on and off. It freaked me out and I thought we were going to blow up, but finally the power just went off again. We got out of bed and went into the living room and about 15 minutes later the power came back on for good. It was just 6am. I am paranoid that something is wrong with our wiring or something and we are going to come home from LEAF to find ashes. It wasn't storming or even raining out, so weather wasn't a factor. I am waiting for a decent hour to call Adrienne and see if it happened upstairs, too.

I have no idea how we are going to make it through this day. Henry has been really testing boundaries and wearing my patience thin all week as it is. Now with no sleep I am going to be even less patient. And we have to get everything all packed up and ready to go for this weekend. And I am back in the hole knitting wise. I was caught up for a few glorious hours and then I got pounded again. I also volunteered to organize a fundraiser for a mama on my big mama board who just found out she has invasive ovarian cancer and has no insurance. I have about 10 other crafty mamas who are donating items and I'm going to have a big fundraising event on my Hyena Cart next week. I hope we raise a lot of money, she is pretty much the kindest and most helpful person you could ever meet. I know we aren't going to make the tiniest dent in her medical bills, but at least she'll know she's in our thoughts and maybe her family (she has a big family) can eat out while she's recovering or something.

I am still waiting on the letter from BCBS before we can submit our loan application. I think I am going to call them today and whine.

Okay. I will try to come back tonight and post some pictures of what I hope will be a wonderful opening day at LEAF. Henry will be so happy to be able to run wild.

Shroomy Shrooms. 

Hey Diddle Diddle.