This year Rachael and I planted an amaryllis bulb just before Thanksgiving. We were amazed at how fast and how big it grew. Every day Rachael would point out it's progress to me. It has fully bloomed and looks amazing. I think we've found a new Christmas tradition.
Rachael did it. I think she's too young for it, or maybe I'm just not ready. It was so out of the blue. She took me completely by surprise. I was frozen for a second or two. Thoughts of "What am I going to do? What am I going to say?" ran through my mind.
But, she did it. She looked me in the eye and said, "Why?"
My cactus blooms a little earlier each year. We had beautiful blossoms for Thanksgiving instead of Christmas this year.
Rachael loves "punkins". We picked ours at the Red Barn farm again this year. Rachael's favorite was a small white one about the size of a baseball. Go figure. Patrick has all the pictures of her in the fields on his phone. I have the ones on the straw bales. It is hard to take good pictures of her now. She doesn't hold still. It's a good thing she's cute.
I had one random poppy that bloomed in the middle of october, even after we had a couple of inches of snow. It made me happy.
Halloween dinner consisted of slimy snakes and zombie vomit. Rachael was iffy about eating it when I said "snakes", but once she started she ate it all. We didn't remember to take pictures of the girls in their costumes, or us in ours. Go figure. Happy Halloween!
Anna sat without support today for about a minute. She's getting so big. Where is my little baby?
Here are just a few more pictures from our garden. Our bell pepper plants did almost as well as our insane squash. Rachael likes helping, although I have to be very specific about exactly what to pick or we end up with a lot of green tomatoes in the bag.
It's officially harvest time here. We've been picking loads of squash this past month, but tonight takes the cake. Would you look at those roma's? Gorgeous. All this was picked just tonight.
I've been so conflicted about this decision. I recently received some health information that necessitates me changing a few things including increasing my gym attendance. Our current arrangement allows me to go twice a week while Patrick watches the girls on his lunch break. I didn't think it would be fair to make him do that 5 times/wk. Rachael also only gets to play with kids her own age once a week in the nursery at church.Lately she has been coming home and informing me, "I hit my friends" or "I take toys from my friends." She is so smart and a lot of the time I don't feel like I'm giving her enough enriching activities at home. Most of the time I struggle just trying to clean house, entertain and feed both her and Anna, and not fall into a pity party personally.
Our solution is preschool 3 half-days a week. She gets more interaction, age-appropriate activities, and her teacher will help with toilet training. So why is this a struggle? Because I feel like I should be able to do all that for her myself. I am her mother. Putting her in preschool makes me feel like a failure. It's not as if I had a whole ton of kids. I just have 2. Besides that, it was my job to design fun, learning activities for children that were age-appropriate as well as to help them work on negative behaviors and build positive ones.
I guess the bottom line is, preschool isn't about Rachael, it's about me.And that's not right. I'll be praying for some perspective and maybe a little peace. Sorry this turned into kind of a downer. Guess I needed to let it out.
We went to Georgetown Lake last week for a family camping/reunion extravaganza. Patrick took most of the pictures so there's not a lot to this post. Some random flower/weeds and Rachael swinging. W had fun. Glad to be home.
So I am proud of my healthy dinner tonight. Besides what you can easily tell, there is eggplant and kohlrabi in it. The latter and the squash came from our garden. Those are turkey meatballs and homemade baked tortilla chips too. Woot.
Since this has been an ongoing issue. We decided to switch diaper brands. We were using Huggies. Today was our first day with Pampers. Can we say, DISMAL FAILURE. The one tonight put this one to shame. So consider the following questions:
