Spring in CA!

Warning: SO MANY PICTURES!

I think I mentioned a few weeks ago that our summer plans got turned on their ear when the timing didn't work out to visit my niece and nephew in Spain while we were going to be in Europe. Happily,  we discovered that they were coming to visit their mother and Grandparents in CA, so we crashed that party!

Todd flew out a few days early with Caleb and Lilyanna since that was significantly cheaper than waiting the couple of extra days that I had to with the older boys due to their concerts, rehearsals, and tests at school. On a Thursday night immediately after Nathaniel's band concert was over, we went to the Dayton airport where we hung out for 5 or 6 hours waiting for our 5:30 am flight. Incidentally, if you have to be in an airport all night before you go through security, Dayton is an excellent choice. Lovely lounge areas for sleeping!

 Or not sleeping. ;) 

We are so tired.

A view from the San Mateo Bridge. I swear fog like that only happens in the Bay Area. I love it there.

 When we arrived, I was told there were going to be some family pictures. Surprise! So, Grandma took the boys shopping for adequate clothing to wear and I went to sleep. I think I'd been awake for something like 36 hours at that point. There's something to be said for having extended family nearby. I went to sleep and the village took care of my children. It was a lovely thing.

 Nathaniel hates pictures. But the weather was so fantastic, even he couldn't master too much grouchiness about the day.

Lilyanna is ready to move to CA. She was VERY happy to wear her warm weather dresses and sandals again!

 My nephew's English is very good, and my niece's is getting better all the time, but when that fails, the universal language of gaming and technology takes over nicely. ;) 

 Do you see this grass, people?? Caleb kept taking off his shoes just to feel it in between his toes. We'd forgotten about grass here in Ohio. It's been so long.

Oh, yes, and here is Lilyanna with the orange tree in my in-laws backyard. When my father in law is feeling particularly feisty, he texts me pictures of it heavy laden with oranges. He sends it to me in February. I usually send a note back that is impolite at best.

This was taken right after my 12 year old niece tied with my 15 year old cross-country running son. We teased him about that for the rest of the trip.

Seriously. Caleb and Lilyanna are ready to pack up and move.

Sunshine! Grass! Blue skies!!

 There was a shopping day for the girls. They picked these shirts out separately and were excited to model them later. Lilyanna thinks Maite is the best!

 The best part was watching these cousins play together. They only get to see one another every few years, so it makes me happy that when they do, they are able to jump back in to friendship with one another.

Speaking of being silly together, we stayed up late one night to do this to Grandma's kitchen. ;)

Some pranks transcend language barriers nicely.

It was a lovely trip. And we are even more resolved that we need to go visit them in Spain in a few years before everyone is entirely grown up and it gets too tricky to do so!

A New Suburban Gardening Adventure!

Because we can never have too many suburban gardening adventures, right??

We Smiths now have a worm farm. Basically, it's a composting bin for inside the house and it currently has a pound of little baby worms in it as well as food scraps, dead leaves, and wet newspaper.

Todd wasn't really looped into the plans that Nathaniel and I had been making, but was characteristically good natured about another one of our schemes. 

Until he came home the other day and Lilyanna said, "Daddy! We have new pets! 500 of them! And I named them ALL Wormie!"

Bless the poor man.

The thought of 500 worms in the house rattled him a bit. 

Until I showed him how tiny they all were.  Or maybe because I showed him how contained they all were. Either way, he was okay after that and able to enjoy the idea of 500 new pets all named Wormie.

Tomorrow I will...

plant the peas and lettuce!!!  After I clean out the garden bed and add in the compost that's been brewing since last summer!

I will also make a stab at cleaning out the garage.  Because it's terrifying.

I can FEEL spring coming!  I'm all energized about doing projects and getting dirty and that's after a week of my kids being on spring break while my husband was on a business trip and my dishwasher being broken!

I'm ready to do a happy dance out in the sunshine tomorrow!!

Did I mention that we got a light box this winter for Light Therapy for all of us?  It helped.  It really did.  I could tell the biggest difference in Caleb if he used it in the morning.  But that light was NOTHING compared to the real honest to goodness SUN!!  Caleb and I are both bouncing off the walls full of energy and ready to GOOOOO!

What are your plans for Spring?

Musical Monday

Snowy weekends in February mean we need a return of Musical Monday. This one makes me think about all those wonderful seed catalogs about to come my way!!

Harvesting

This was the last of the bounty from my garden for the season.  I had no idea that Italian Parsley was so wonderfully hardy!  Since I always need it for my enormous batches of tomato sauce, I grew some this year.  It was so prolific throughout the entire growing season, that I think I'm set until next year!  I love not having to try to find fresh herbs at the grocery store in the middle of winter.

I harvested some broccoli the other day, but didn't take a picture, because I managed to completely cover myself and the kitchen in dirt during the experience.

And then there are my green tomatoes.  Last year I had so many I made pickled green tomatoes which was one of my favorite things to eat when I worked at the Princetonian Diner in college.  The ones I made were considerably spicier, and it has taken me most of this year to come up with things to do with them.  They are great tossed into guacamole, like you would a tomatillo.  And they are also yummy as a fried green tomato. 

With this year's crop, I'm skipping the pickling and just going straight for the fried.  It's so rare that I fry things that this is a special treat...which probably nobody in my family will actually eat.

Any other great green tomato recipes out there?

O Mio Pepino Caro!!

I have tried to grow cucumbers in my garden EVERY year that we have been here. They have never made it past the seedling stage.

UNTIL THIS YEAR!!!!

There are vines everywhere and today when I finally peeked underneath the viney canopy, I saw several cucumbers growing there!! They're already about 6 inches long!

I would like you to try and picture the moment:

Me: rainbow tie die shirt, jeans, bare feet, hair down and unbrushed.

My children and their friends: bathing suits, running through the sprinkler

My next door neighbor: an engineer who works from home...usually his back yard

Now you need to remember this song:



(Note: O Mio Babbino Caro, actually means "my dear Daddy". What Daddy is going to let his daughter out of the house in THAT dress?!)

Okay, do you have it all pictured?

I saw the little cucumbers and immediately burst into singing in a VERY loud and VERY operatic voice, "O Mio Pepino Caro". Which literally means, yes, "My Dear Cucumber".

I wonder what it says about me that neither my boys nor my neighbor even looked at me during this outburst...

Company-belated

Todd's sister Jenny and her newish husband, Brit, came to visit us in May. I don't know what the rest of you do when you have relatives come to visit, but we put ours to work. (Our house is not so much a hotel as a youth hostel.)

The boys had all sorts of fun jumping on their Aunt and Uncle, and we had a great time seeing Jenny again and getting to know Brit better. (Especially since he helped fuel my Buffy the Vampire Slayer addiction! AND mowed the lawn!!! Seriously, how fabulous is that?! He was standing there, so I handed him the lawn mower AND HE MOWED MY BACKYARD!!! I wish that worked with my kids...)

Here are some pictures from the brand new garden we made on the side of my deck. It was a weed patch before. Check out the pics!

This was my weed patch:
This is what it looked like when we were done (note my lovely raised asparagus bed, and strawberry pyramid and rain barrels. Love them.) :

And here are the fabulous (and silly) folks who made it happen:


LOVE YOU JENNY BOO BOO AND BRITTY BOO BOO!!!!!!

Happy Gardening surprises...

Our first Spring in Ohio was 3 years ago. Since the soil composition is different here, I wasn't sure what would grow and what wouldn't. That first spring I bought a bunch of different things just to see what would take and what wouldn't. I whimsically bought some asparagus crowns just to see what would happen. I had read in a gardening book pages of instructions for dealing with asparagus. And then I read in another gardening book to just throw them in the ground and wait. The latter is my kind of gardening, so I went with it, not knowing what would happen. I planted my crowns in different places all over the yard, just to see which soil/sun combination would work best.

And then I forgot about them.

Until this year!!! I was digging up some creeping phlox for a friend when she said, "Hey, look, you have asparagus!"

And sure enough, there were 3 spears of asparagus practically buried by weeds! I cut them and made them for dinner that night. We get more every week. In celebration, I ordered 30 crowns and made a special box for them.

Now, I just have to wait three more years for them to be edible.

I made Todd promise me that we would stay for at least three years when we first moved here. I wonder if I could convince him that a whole bed of asparagus is worth three more years.