The end of summer has really brought out the best in my gardens. I have piles of green peppers, more than I know what to do with. Scads of green beans, I picked enough the other day to feed 6 people when we had company for dinner. Ancho peppers dripping off the plants (anyone want some anchos?) and tomatoes that I gather by the bushel. And finally, my gladiolas have come up. The green glads are my prize and joy, but I have pink and yellow glads as well. Gladiolas are my favorite flower.

My lettuce is gone, however. And my spinach never came up. I think something ate the seeds or the very young plants. Better luck next year.

( Produce Ahoy )

Today I "harvested" a few handfuls of tomatoes, green beans, and a green pepper from the garden. I also replanted lettuce this week, since it's been cold enough here that I might squeeze another crop out before the cold hits in fall. There are many more peppers out there, but not quite big enough yet to pick. I'm pleased with all this. :-)

Among our friends, and in due date communities, and in parenting communities I frequently see people asking what to feed their babies and young toddlers. People are always talking about it and bouncing ideas around. All those questions made me start thinking about what we feed Jack, so I started keeping a log during this past week or two, and occasionally snapping a photo.

Jack has always been a great eater, but he took to solid food very well. This is what he eats at 10 months, but he's been more or less eating this way since about 8 months old. He had a good pincer grip at 6 months and always wanted to pick up his own food. So save for a few liquids and semi-solids (like soup, yogurt, etc.) he's not really spoon fed. He's been a very enthusiastic eater and has shown no poor reactions to anything - so he eats....everything. He's beginning to wean himself despite my efforts - he's just a guy who likes his table foods.

( Food for a Baby Here )

He really does eat great variety. That may not be accurately reflected here, since these were taken over the course of 2 weeks and reflect what was on sale here during those weeks. But he does try everything. A few favorites not pictured here are: cut up grape tomatoes, sliced fresh apricots, cantaloupe, cut up thin slice of cheese, the fleshy middles of cucumbers, a spear of asparagus, a piece of english muffin.

That is to say, the weather here has been crappy. However, it's helped yield a bumper crop of lettuce. This salad is brought to you by my gardens, and includes spinach, mesclun greens, butter lettuce, red leaf lettuce, and arugula. Tomatoes and carrots. My beans and peppers are not up yet, but they are coming.

This is how that wedding cake ended up turning out. I certainly would not call it my most elaborate work, but there was a lot going on last week, the bride and groom didn't have a lot of preferences for anything specific, and I did it completely for free.

( Cake Here )

I saw another church member taking photographs, and several church ladies downstairs working on decorations and food. So it was sort of like a barn raising, everyone pulling together to make a lovely wedding, and I'm glad to have helped out.

Unfortunately there is no way to disguise the fact that the church basement looks, well, like a church basement.

( Cake Here )

It was 56 degrees and sunny today here in Massachusetts. Jack and I went for a jog in his jogging stroller, outside in the sun. Though it's admittedly early, today I made the first lemonade of the season. I had extra juice from squeezing lemons and I used it to make a potent lemon icing for some shortbread cookies.

Please God, let it be spring.

At night after we put the baby to bed, M and I like to sit up, drink tea, and play Scrabble. We love Scrabble. When family comes to visit, we con them into playing Scrabble, sometimes we invite Scrabble friends over for the express purpose of playing. It's fun. Though neither of us are very good at maximizing use of points and point spaces to their ultimate potential, we're good at using every letter till we're done. Sometimes I remember to snap a photo of the Scrabble board, too.

( Scrabble Ahoy )

M wants to buy the collectors edition special dealie-o game, with the board that rotates around. I am considering getting on board with that, hmm.

The topic of lunch comes up fairly often in one community or another. People want to pack lunches for reasons of health, of cost, of convenience. Before we got married, M told me he was really looking forward to the idea of a packed lunch, because it would save him some time and hassle in his day, as well as some cash and some calories. I have always been pretty good about packing our lunches (and now just his lunch) - except for the last few months of pregnancy, during which HE packed MINE! He likes all types of bag lunches, hot and cold, healthy and unhealthy alike. For the past month or so I tried to remember to snap a photo of a few different types of lunches, to spread around the ideas. So behold, 10 different lunches that are satisfying by day, and all packable the night before, and with the use of an ice pack, are fine to be stored outside a fridge until lunchtime.

( 10 Lunches to Love )

And when absolutely everything else fails....I just tell M to take a Hot Pocket. :-)

I have piles of old clothes in the basement that I never know what to do with. They are mostly things that don't fit. But even if they did fit, I wouldn't want to wear them. They're things I don't want to donate because they are either A.) fugly or B.) mega-immodest (I donate to our churches secondhand clothing shop).

So when my mother was visiting with her sewing machine, i spent time cutting up all these old stretched out sleazy crappy tank tops, shirts, halters, etc., to make wipes. Seems like babies are always leaking out of one place or another, and so I'm always looking for something to wipe him with! So now I have stacks and stacks of nice little wipies made out of my old, fugly, circa-1995 clothes. Oh yeah baby, recycle, reduce, reuse.

Because I'm almost embarrassed at how much time I've devoted to this, this is going to be my only post on the subject. But I have spent so much time evaluating the options here that I feel like some sort of documentum is in order!!!

Courtesy of Diaper Lab in Somerville, I have had a mix-n-match experimental pack of different diapers for the past few weeks. It's a great way to try different things out and evaluate them before buying. Here's what I've had:

1 DryBees Small Fleece Nightime
1 BumGenius Organic OneSize
1 Imse Vimse Small AIO
1 FuzziBunz Small Pocket
1 Knickernappies Medium Pocket
1 DryBees Small Pocket AIO Hybrid
1 DryBees Small Pocket
1 Happy Heinys OneSize Pocket(with snaps not aplix)
1 LovelyBums Organic Fitted

Plus a multitude of different hemp and microfiber inserts. It took a while to figure out what works best and to decide what to buy. Reviews and my opinion under the cut. :)

( All you ever want to know about these diapers )

I highly recommend both the store, and the trial packages. :)

The good news is that SOMEONE likes to sit quietly in the crib and play with the crib toys.

( The bad news is that it ISN'T the baby... )

Tons of people I know are in piles of debt. Piles. It seems like student loans up the wazoo, credit cards of all different types, private loans, car loans - they are all normal for everyone, even those who aren't great earners. This was a new one for me, I graduated college with minimal student loans and no consumer debt of any kind. I didn't realize this wasn't the norm, and this book by Anya Kamenetz paints a very vivid picture of the average Generation Y college-grad.

The problem is that fundamentally, I disagree with her message - the message that avoiding poverty is a RIGHT, and the message that everyones chosen career should pay well - at least, equally well on a baseline level. She argues that the grocery store checker should be able to support a family on her full time wages on the same level as a skilled worker might support a family on their wages. I disagree.

But there are a lot of interesting points on why student debt has mounted in this changing economy. We lack the great numbers of well paying, blue collar unionized labor jobs - jobs that didn't require an education but did require some training, and they were jobs that could support a family that were not unskilled labor. We lack many of those today (replaced by technology) and those that do exist, many people don't want to work them. Every student is encouraged to go to college, whether or not he is college material. And I don't think that everyone or even nearly everyone is college material. People attend college to study fields they love, regardless of whether or not they are lucrative, and then they are confused and upset down the line when they are unable to secure gainful employment with their comparative literature degree. Many then turn around and go back to graduate school to get a degree in a more useful field - which on the surface seems like a good idea. But below the surface, they are most often racking up more loans, and even worse - they often don't get out of school until almost 30, which has a very serious impact on when they are able to start saving for retirement.

It's not a good situation for anyone, the author points out. Record rates of college attendance are flooding the job market with more qualified applicants than there are white collar jobs. An aging baby boomer population is also riddled with debt and has not saved appropriately for retirement - making them less likely to leave their posts and free up new jobs. Social security is reaching a point where there will not be enough workers to sustain retirees at their current benefit levels, but no one is willing to have those benefits reduced. Rampant advertising and consumerism encourage young people to buy things on credit that they can't afford. Young people who have grown up with everything don't find themselves willing to do without and start lives deep in debt just from living in the style to which they are accustomed. The ever increasing cost of college leaves recent grads deep in debt.

What is there to do? The author does not have the answers, and neither do I. But in reading it, I felt strongly on a few points:
1.) That not everyone is suited to attend college, and those ill-suited should probably not attend.
2.) That very very few young people know how to live within their means. The author admits that almost every person she interviewed had a cellular phone, a mp3 player, and stylish clothes - even those interviewees $50k in debt.
3.) Federal entitlements (social security, medicaid, medicare, etc.) need to be reduced in some fashion as the number of payees swells and the number of contributors shrinks. People piss and moan about this but it is not fair to bankrupt the young to save the old - and in this time of rapidly reducing replacement birth rates, who is going to save the young when THEY are old?
4.) That young people have been sadly lied to by an older generation who told us to "shoot for the stars" and "do whatever makes you happy and the money will follow" - those things are not true and we are having a generation of starry-eyed debtors chasing their dreams right into bankruptcy rather than settle for a job that is less than ideal.

What to do? I feel divided on these issues, torn between the younger generation and the old.

I learned last night that Prika is finally gone, to my utter sadness. We've been prepared for this to happen for quite a while, as she was very old and also very sick, but not prepared for it to happen the way it did. Apparently there was a stray cat prowling around my parents house and starting fights, there was a cat fight one night and though my parents tried to call both Prika and Ed inside, Prik didn't come. That was a week ago. She has always been an incredible homebody and never stays outdoors overnight or for more than a little bit of time at once, so being that she's been away for over a week and without her medication, I think it's safe to say she's gone. She would have come back if she could have and without her medication she becomes lost and panicked and confused. They have looked all around for her for days and days, so after a week, she's surely gone. She just does not have it in her to survive outside alone for a week at this point in her life.

It's hard not to be sad about this, but Prika led absolutely the most amazing life for a cat. 16 years old, she lived in the same place since she was a kitten and she had everything - the best of both worlds. She slept in our beds at night and had the freedom to go outside on the luxurious-for-cats property during the day. Her health was cared for yet she was always able to run and mouse and do all the things in a wild cats nature to do. I know she missed me when I left home, but never has there been a cat more loved. She used to follow me around like a puppy dog and run down to the end of the driveway to meet me when I got off the bus from middle school. She loved to be picked up, constantly wanted to be held, and wanted to snuggle so close that she would crawl up your shirt to do it. I can't ever imagine loving an animal more than I loved Prik. Her name is pronounced "preek" and it's short for paprika, the spice. Her coat was black with flecks of paprika-like red.

In the past 2 years, her life went dramatically downhill - she started having grand mal seizures and was diagnosed with a brain tumor that was inoperable, and she needed to take medicine by ear twice a day to keep the seizures at bay. She had some sort of thyroid issue that no one could diagnose or treat and she could not keep weight on to save her life - no matter what vet-recommended food or supplements we gave her. She weighed less than 6 lbs last I saw her and though she was still spunky, she was so frail. I hated to see her waste away like that, she was so uncomfortable - never able to settle down, constantly goinggoinggoing, never able to find a comfortable position with her aging kitty body. We were prepared to have to put her down this summer. 16 is old for a cat, even older for an indoor-outdoor cat. Her quality of life just went downhill. She lived 2 years longer than her sister Anna, who died in my brother's arms after suffering from kitty liver cancer in 2006.

We hadn't put Prika down yet because she still had spark in her, she still seemed to want to be alive, no matter how uncomfortable she was. Mom reports that she spent most of her time laying in the grass under her favorite tree, and that just last week she caught a chipmunk. So she was doing the things she loved, right up until the end.

I love pretty much all kitties, and of course I love Nellie and Pip, but I doubt I will ever love another cat like I loved Prika. Sometimes you have a pet that is just...special, and that was Prik. She was special.

( Prika )
I wish I had baby Prika and little Prika photos, but alas, she was older than digital. :/

ETA 8/25/08: They have found her body. She is really and truly gone, but does not appear to have suffered or have been attacked. They have buried her and made her a lovely grave.

Making for a fabulous weekend, babyfevertime came up to Boston this weekend and threw a baby shower for me, and also for our good friend J. In fact, we all sort of threw this shower and this turned out to be a beautiful plan because being so far away, C would have had a hard time setting up food and decorations and whatnot, but it would have been odd for J and I to throw a shower for ourselves. So we had a great plan of C hosting the shower, coordinating invitations and RSVPs and registry info and general merriment, and then J and I took care of the local issue things, like setting up tables and food and things like that. In retrospect, this was a beautiful plan! Everything went off without a hitch and it was so wonderful to see babyfevertime again! We really miss them.

Coming up to join in merriment, all the way from NY, were my Mom, my sister B, and my Aunt W. I don't see them often enough!

This shower featured tiny tigers galore:


( Lots of Girly Baby Shower Photos, Nary a Man in Sight )
All in all it was just wonderful! She did such a beautiful job throwing the shower and everything was just right.

We went home for a visit to upstate NY last weekend - it had a dual purpose, both to welcome B home from Bangladesh (though she passed through Boston and stayed her layover at our house) and to celebrate my birthday at home with my peeps. It was excellent, nothing helps me relax and recharge like chillaxing with my family.

B came home with a suitcase laden with gifts! Hundreds of gifts, really. She left behind almost all her clothes there so she could have a whole empty suitcase to bring people prezzies. So now I have been gifted with some beautiful Bengali items - in both attire, baby attire, and decor.

( B and her Bag of Gifts to Bequeath )

Ever doing his part to help the drastically falling bee population, my father has again ordered 12,000 bees this year. He calls them his "girls", as in "I need to go out back and check on my girls", and it's funny. Dad and M suited up in bee garb and worked on the all-important mission of releasing the queen from her little box. You pull out the plug and the queen bee is there in this little space with a marshmallow blocking the door. So it becomes the drones job to eat away at the marshmallow until the queen is free and then they can protect her and eventually she will make more little queens.

( Dad and M Work on the Beehive )

Monday we had the day off and went on a great hike in the High Tor area of Naples. We are big on hiking but 4 miles was all I wanted to handle at this point! It's like climbing steep trails with a ten pound dumbbell strapped to your belly. The weather was just beautiful and with a wet spring the runoff streams and the waterfalls were in full gushing glory.

( Rocks and Waterfalls in the Naples Valley )

And then of course we spent time out back watching the cows. It's calving season and C says so far 43 calves have been born. We had the, ahem, pleasure of speaking with a cow fresh out of the birthing process - she still had about a 5 foot trail of placenta spilling out of her and dragging behind her. That is truly a sight to behold. We fed the cows some fresh asparagus from the garden and they all lined up to say hello. They are really such handsome cattle!

( Our Asparagus Brings all the Cows to the Yard )

In an effort to achieve ultimate thrift, I have been making my own iced coffee. This may not be a big deal to some, but I have carried a thermos of hot coffee for years and never branched out into making iced, probably because it's just so nice to get a fresh cup from DnD. This easily runs me $15/week, or $60/month.

So now I have a nice setup of making my own. Complete with coffee ice cubes so the coffee does not get diluted. Thus far I have been putting it in clean plastic DnD cups, because I had so many...but come summer I will have to find a better receptacle for this. I still maintain that the best tasting coffee comes from a percolator, rather than a drip coffee maker. I will probably never budge on this.

( Coffee + Ice cubes + Cream + Cups )

It took me forever to get ice cube trays, I have not used them in years since we have an icemaker. I finally had my mother bring me a few so I didn't need to buy any.

In a Monday night exercise for marital bonding, yesterday M and I worked on a new "thrifty-chore" together - making laundry detergent. Laundry detergent is a point of contention at our house because I am anal about the clothes and so I make him use about 3x more than the jug calls for (how can that little tiny capful REALLY clean things???) so we have for years been probably supporting the laundry detergent industry all by ourselves. Anyway, sell your stock.

So in an effort to be a fun, contriving, thrifty wife - I bought all this stuff to make detergent with. It involves purchasing boarax and washing soda, and grating up bars of ivory soap with my cheese grater (all things purchased at the Hannafords in Waltham, for local people interested). You then combine these in different porportions in a large 3 gallon jug of water and stir in different orders to dissolve. It's sort of fun, and soap is a LOT easier to grate than cheese. So the upshot is that for slightly less than a dollars worth of raw materials (does not include energy to heat the water) we have 3 gallons of nice smelling laundry detergent. We ran it through a load last night and it does seem to work adequately well. I don't think it smells as strongly as packaged detergent, but that just means that I'll throw in more and more of it. And at a cost of about 3 cents a cup, I think I can afford to do that. The true test is smelling gym shirt armpits and underwear, which after coming out of the wash (before being dried) smelled fine. So I think we will give this a go for a little while (and also, because we now have 3 gallons).

It makes me feel like a good wife, in an "I'm in ur kitchen, savin ur monies" sort of way.

I would like to give a shout-out to my fabulous little sister, B, who is currently teaching at a convent in Bangladesh. I am lucky if I get to talk to her every couple of weeks, and even so there is no guarantee that my call will get through (apparently there is a dearth of cell switches in Dinajpur) and it takes nigh on 6 weeks to ship of box of anything to her over there. So mostly I send cards, emails are no good because she shares a computer with like 200 other people and it seems to break down every day. I wish I could just ship her an extra computer but it would probably take 10 years to get there. The US postal service lies like a rug, they say it will take 10-14 business days but once it gets to Dhaka it's out of their hands and I'm pretty sure that my packages just sit around waiting for the next rickshaw to Dinajpur, which comes like once every billion days or something like that. Also, I'm pretty sure that they open the packages and scan through them, so this time the joke will be on them because I put some nice silky ladies underwear right at the top of the package so all those Bengali men will open it and blush bright red at the scandelous American undies.

Anyway, because she is my sister and I miss her, here are some photos of B's fabulous journey to Bangladesh. She has been there 3 months so far, and will be back for summer.

( B in Bangladesh )

They hardly ever get to blog, but when they do if anyone cares to read about it they can do it here: http://bestfriendsjourney.wordpress.com/

:)

One of our investments in 2007 was a Roomba. Usually M rolls his eyes at things I deem "household expenses", in a way that says to me "do you really NEED 20 Dobies, dear?" but since it is superhot robotic technology, buying a roomba was not a hard sell on him.

Since we got the furry ladies last summer, I have been vacuuming obsessively to keep the house spanking clean, and vacuuming everyday - it got old really fast. So now the roomba runs while we are at work, and it does a good job on the day to day, and I only need to run the big vacuum on weekends. I hate hate hate to see things on the floor, even one fuzzy. If anyone has been considering purchasing a roomba, I would highly recommend it (so long as your floors are mostly level and do not include any big jumps).

( See the Roomba Here )
Now I am campaigning for a Scooba.