"And when you want to go explore...

...the number you should have is four."  -Sandra Boynton

I'll let Eve tell this story:

In case the kid-writing is hard to decipher, here's the text:

"Dear, Mommy
I hop you hav a good day. I am ver ecsited abowt the noborn baby. I love you Mommy!
wat? wen is the baby going to be born?"

The answer to her final question is May 28, give or take a couple of weeks.  :-)

Fall pictorial roundup

Aaaaand we're back.  A lot has been happening, so I will try to sum up with photos.

 Grandma Bernadine came out to visit us for two weeks in early October.  It was the first time she'd visited us! It was very exciting.  At one point we and two of Brian's sisters took her on a day trip to Astoria, and thence to the beach.  It was the first time she had ever really seen the ocean, and lamely, I did not take any pictures of that momentous occasion.

Eve with Daddy on top of the Astoria Column.

On to Halloween.  Eve had been requesting for a full year that she go as a lamb, and I go as Little Bo Peep.  For once, I was happy to indulge her costume fantasies.

Thanksgiving!  Isaiah is in preschool three mornings a week, and boy, do they crank out some great crafts!  This turkey hat was one of their best pieces of work:

Also in honor of Thanksgiving, there is a tradition at Eve's school that the first-graders put on a simple Thanksgiving play.  The most challenging role is that of the narrator, who has to read about three times as much text as rest of the group combined.  Guess who got picked?

Eve, narrating while in pilgrim woman costume.  She rocked it. 

And that sums up our autumn, except for one other item I'll cover in my next post.

A handful of belated summer pictures

Brian took these pictures with his phone, which is why they weren't included previously.  I hear that Grandma Kluge in particular has been wanting to see the photos of Samuel doing his Samuel thing with Grandpa's birthday Mississippi Mud Cake.

 Face painting at the school carnival

Eeeep. Eeeep. Eeeep. Unauthorized intruder alert.

 Who needs forks when you've got a spatula?

He does this sort of thing a lot.  Last week he carefully carried the remnants of a pear crisp over to the table, where he sat down and proceeded to dig in before being busted by Mommy.  You'd think he'd just eat wherever he found the food, but no, one must maintain *standards*.

Infinity beach

We spent this past weekend at a rented beach house in Ocean Park, smack in the middle of Washington's Long Beach peninsula. The name of the peninsula is apt, because the beach in question is 28 uninterrupted miles long.  From where we stayed, you could walk for a day in either direction and not reach the end.

I've always enjoyed the beach; as a teenager, I promised myself that I would never live more than a few hours drive away from the ocean.  I just liked knowing it was there if I needed it.  This particular beach vacation affected me somewhat strangely.  To begin with, I was amazed at how relaxing it was, in spite of still having to prepare meals and dress/referee/discipline/clean up after the children.  And then wow, that beach...  I'd walk out onto it and it was as if I'd stepped outside space and time.  If I looked straight ahead, I could see the sea and the slight curve of the earth.  If I looked to the right: empty flat sandy beach disappearing into a sea-mist horizon.  To the right: same view as to the left.  I felt swallowed up by it, and even when I tried, I couldn't put together any coherent practical thoughts.  I just *was*.  I moved and spoke and attended to the kids, but none of it touched me.  I've struggled since then to think of a short, sound-bite way to describe it (I considered "nirvana" but rejected it on philosophical principles), and the closest thing I could come up with was that it was an experience of infinity.

“The car shot forward straight into the circle of light, and suddenly Arthur had a fairly clear idea of what infinity looked like.
It wasn’t infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity—distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very very big, so big that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself.” -Douglas Adams

Exactly.  Illusory or no, it was a lovely experience, the weather surprised me by being beautiful, and I will now post more pictures that I ought to.

 The kids had more fun sliding down the dunes than doing just about anything else.

 On the path to the house

The main living area of our rental house

 The view from the house

 On a beach this big, you don't get much company.

 Eve really got into sand-castle making.

 Samuel, making a zen garden?

Hot hot hot

Early September weather in the Pacific Northwest is always a toss-up. Sme years it is hot and dry, some years it is cool and dry, and some years it is cool and rainy.  This is one of the hot and dry years, for which I am profoundly thankful.  With any luck, my tomatoes and grapes will actually have a chance to finish ripening before the cooler fall weather shuts things down.

On a related note, we have peppers.  LOTS of peppers.  My two bell pepper plants are ripening at once just like they always do (why can't they space themselves out a little more?), and we have five plants of jalapeño peppers that are loaded down with ripe fruit, plus two Serrano pepper plants in the same condition.  The cayenne peppers aren't quite ripe yet, and the two habanero plants are definitely not ripe yet.  But those jalapeños, whew!  Last year, for reasons that could not be fully determined, all of my jalapeños were utterly mild.  I had bought the packaged labeled Hot!, but I now suspect it might have been mislabeled.  I soldiered on and tried again this year with seeds bought from another source and goodness gracious heavens to Mergatroyd, these jalapeños are volcanic.  I put five mostly seeded *slices* in a pot of tomato soup last night and it was almost too hot for me to comfortably eat. Now to find more uses for all this hotness. :-)

Beginning of school, end of summer

Eve's first day of first grade was a half day ending at noon, so we drove a few minutes further south and had a picnic lunch on the banks of the Columbia River.

 Still in uniform

 Gazing

 Boy, it was a good day for a beach picnic.

A few days later, Brian scored a used kids' pool for cheap.  Thank goodness the warm weather is holding.

 Eve, practicing her swimming moves.

I agree, Samuel:  pools are awesome. Thank you, Daddy!

This one's for Brian

That's not a carrot.

THIS is a carrot.

....  [insert witty comment here, I'm at a loss]

I'd never seen this before, but since I took that picture I've found another pair of conjoined tomato-twins on my Sungold plant.  Nature is fun.

Late summer, 2012

Okay, here is the late summer photographic round-up I promised.

 We took the kids to the zoo.  This bear was in front of the gift shop, which had a special kid-sized door next to the adult-sized one.  :-)

 I love our front porch even more, now that we've acquired a glider bench for it.  If only I had the time to actually sit on it.

In late August, I took the kids down to Grandma and Grandpa Kluge's for a short visit, the main purpose of which was to spend time in the river and on our island, just like Daniel and I did when we were kids.  Conveniently, Daniel was still home on vacation while we visited.  

 Walking through our field towards the best path down to the river

 Our neighbors (who own the other part of the island) kindly allow us to use their spiffy gangway...

 ...and their even spiffier wooden bridge.  They take it up in the fall when the water begins to rise, and replace it in the summer.  It's a big improvement -- when we were kids we had to wade out to the island.

 Uncle Daniel helping Eve practice floating

 Samuel, getting into the splash of things

 The South Fork of the Yamhill River, with Eve for perspective

Hops, growing decoratively over my parents' dining room window.

Bail, bail!

This is a very short post to explain the chief reason why I haven't posted anything in over a month.  See on the calendar there?  That big blank no-posting period was the second half of July and most of the month of August.  As any gardener will tell you, that's harvest time.  As joyful as it is, I often find that harvesting and finding uses for my veggies takes on a tone of subdued panic, much like bailing out a leaky boat.  I'm not harvesting because I want to, I'm harvesting because I have to or the beans will get overripe and the basil will bolt and the cucumbers will turn old and bitter and in any case I'm harvesting because if I don't, I'll have twice as much to harvest tomorrow!

 This was a typical green bean harvest.  Every other day for about two weeks.  Gah!

This was back in July when my garden looked nice and tidy.  Now all the plants have grown so big, there's scarcely any room to step between them.

I'm still in the thick of it, actually.  Today I made an all-from-my-garden batch of salsa, a batch of blackberry freezer jam, a batch of kale chips, and I roasted and froze about 6 lbs of cherry tomatoes.  *whimper*  I want to lie down.  But soon I'll be back with more pictures of our summer doings.

Oh no, not again

"Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now."  -Douglas Adams, HGttG

Anyone remember this? 

Yes.  Well. 

It wasn't the the pansies this time, or at least not at first.  It was the nasturtiums. 

I should explain at this juncture that Isaiah and I have been having a lot of conflict recently.  Things just seem to be going wrong for him lately, and of course the main person who points out his errors in judgement is me.  Previously, he would simply get upset and cry, but now he appears to have a new method of conflict management:  don't get mad, get even.

Yesterday the kids and I were outside.  Isaiah wanted to help me weed, so I set him to the task of following me around and putting the weeds I dug up into the bucket.  He wasn't terribly focused, and ended up being put in timeout for some thing or other.  When I released him from timeout he wandered off out of sight and I enjoyed what should have been an ominously quiet fifteen minutes.  At the end of that time he approached me with a small plant in his hand, saying "Mommy, I just thought this was a weed...".  It was a nasturtium.  I suddenly realized that the place he'd disappeared to was the narrow bed on the front corner of our property where I had been babying a dozen or so struggling nasturtiums.  They had just started to bloom that week.  I ran around front and there they were, all the nasturtiums pulled up by the roots.  I said blankly "Isaiah, you just pulled up all my flowers."  Without a word he turned and ran to the timeout place, and put himself in timeout. 

He has insisted that he thought the flowers were weeds.  Aside from the fact that I had specifically told him not to pull up any weeds except grass, I find this extremely difficult to believe.  He may only be four, but he's been around me and my garden for a while.  The nasturtiums were alone in that bed, except for a bit of invading grass.  They had blooms on them.  It should have been obvious.

And then today, while trying ineffectually to help me herd Samuel back inside, he accidentally crushed one of my delphinium plants.  I yelped at him, and a few moments later I caught sight of him taking a running jump onto one of my pansy plants.  A. Running. Jump.  Which he then denied with the increasingly suspect line: "I thought it was a weed." 

I'm completely at a loss as to how to deal with this.  I know why he's doing what he's doing, but I'm so taken aback by it that I have no ready response.  I very much hope this is a phase, and not an indicator of things to come.  In the meantime, I'm going to have to keep a close eye on him while he's outside.

Fourth of July

The only thing tying this next series of photos together is that they all were taken on or near the Fourth of July.

I believe this is the first time I've ever bought the kids matching shirts.  It seemed as good a time as any.

 This is as good a posed shot as we could get.

 Yep, them'r my kids.

Two days later, we were eating breakfast and Isaiah began shrieking and pointing out the window, babbling about a parachute.  I looked out across our back yard and saw this:

 I'm pretty sure this same balloon flies over our house once a year, in the summer.  It's a thrill every time.

 They were close enough that we could see the flame and hear the roar of the burner.  Eve insists she saw the people in the basket waving at us.

 My slightly belated Mother's Day present.  Now to plan the Mary garden!

Orange calla in front of lavender.  And a random solar light I was too lazy to move out of the picture.