Update: Strawberries!

Tonight's harvest:

Six very small strawberries.  They may be all I will get this spring from my rebounding plants.

You would not BELIEVE how delicious they are and how sweetly I am savoring them.  Worth it, oh yes.

Garden stuff

Quick garden update, mainly for my own self to look at later.  :)

Blue and white hydrangeas are blooming.  The pink hydrangea has buds for the first year ever -- I'm waiting to see what shade of pink the flowers turn out to be!

The roses have been blooming for some time now and they're doing great this year, after their pruning this past winter.

My tomatoes are finally really bushing out, and I have lots of little yellow flowers.  The pepper plants are all still small, but they also have flowers.  The broccoli plants are growing teeny broccolis tucked down inside their giant leaves.

I dug up and replanted the strawberries late this spring.  I figured it would do away with this spring's harvest, and I was mostly right, but I do have a few ripening berries.  We'll see if I can get to them before the bugs, slugs, and whatever else eats them, do.  In the same strawberry bed I planted a different crop that is supposed to bear fruit in the summer.  I don't know if they'll bear this year though.

The blackberry bush is just teeming with blackberries!  I can't wait until they ripen!  I'm also very pleased to see two brand new branches growing very fast, that will provide me with next year's blackberries.  :)

Last but not least!  First garden harvest!

Potatoes from my Walmart potato bucket.  They're pretty small, but they provided a whole lot of happiness to me as I cooked them up and ate them, with a little butter.  :)

The Wedding, Part Two

In Which Everyone Gets Dressed Up
And I Get All Sentimental Over $30 Worth Of Satin

(read part one)

Even as I was standing in David's Bridal admiring myself in the dress I was about to buy, I was thinking about how my girls would be dressed for the wedding.

I had to keep in mind their individuality.  Thea and Faith, especially, have very different styles.  I wanted each girl to be dressed in her own way, in something that made her feel happy, but still have all three of them complement each other and me.  My green sash planted the seed that grew into the idea we went with -- each girl would pick her own white dress, and then would wear a colored sash with it in her favorite color:  Blue for Thea, pink for Faith, and purple for Holly.

I figured it would not be easy to find dresses to each of their likings, but actually it did not prove too difficult for Faith.  At Burlington Coat Factory she tried on a total of four dresses, and the fourth was the winner.

This was not the dress we picked (it is hanging on the wall behind her),
but doesn't Faith look adorable in this one?

Thea, however, was every bit as difficult as I expected.  We traversed the entire mall (and Arundel Mills is pretty big) and she didn't even find anything worthy of trying on.

In the meantime, Dan searched online for a shirt to wear (smart guy).  He already owned a pair of white linen pants which were perfectly beachy and yet dressy.  He wanted a similarly classy looking Hawaiian shirt.  Originally he thought he might get a blue one, but as the idea of the girls' colored sashes fleshed out, he didn't want to take the chance of clashing with one of them or of this whole thing ending up a mish-mash of color.  Eventually he found a black shirt with a white flower print down one side at HulaOut.com that was perfect.

Here we are on Valentine's Day, still smiling.  Look what a good sport Dan was as I obsessed over every detail of our attire, and he finished his part after an hour or so browsing the internet on his laptop while in bed.
Wait.... who is the good sport here?

Thea's dress search took us to Marley Station Mall one Sunday afternoon where we spent what seemed like four hours in Vivace Bridal while Thea tried on what seemed to be fifty prom-type dresses.  Most were too fancy, too sexy/trashy (in my mom opinion), or too expensive, but we finally came to an agreement on one.  It had detachable spaghetti straps, which Thea did not want to wear, but I was adamant she would not go strapless.  It also had black piping along the folds of the skirt, but I gave in on that since Dan was wearing black.

Modeling the dress at home.  Notice how Thea has strategically arranged her hair
to give the illusion that her dress is indeed strapless.

Luckily Holly was just excited to wear a fancy white dress and couldn't care less where it came from, so a friend from church gave us a flower girl dress her daughter had worn in a wedding years ago.  It was slightly large on Holly, but I fixed that by shortening and re-sewing the straps.

Off to Joann Fabric to get the material for the girls' sashes.  Dan and I picked vividly colored satin and got about three times the amount of each that I actually ended up needing.  Then I spent the next couple of weeks measuring, sewing, ironing, and cursing.  Each sash needed to be a different length and width.  I foolishly decided Thea's and Faith's should be pleated to really look like they went with their dresses.  Keep in mind that I had not done any real sewing in approximately twenty years.  Not going to lie -- there was cursing.

But the result... just as I had imagined.

I mean, look!  I bought the green sash from David's Bridal, but I made the other three.  You can tell they were done by an amateur when you see the way the satin puckered under my needle, and how the pleat sizes are uneven, but I'm still pretty darn proud of them.  They were custom made to be perfect for each girl in each dress.

Sorry, not done bragging about these sashes yet.  :)  The piece de resistance comes next.  This idea was born while I stood there on the platform at David's admiring myself in the mirror and thinking the preliminary thoughts of each girl somehow having her own color.  What I really wanted was a way to tie it all together -- a way to symbolize that in this new marriage, along with me would come a little bit of each of them.

So, with some of the leftover satin from each of the three sashes, I made flowers.  This was time-consuming but not very difficult at all, after I looked over a few tutorials on the internet.  For each flower I cut out 12 to 15 circles of varying sizes.  Using a candle, I just barely melted the circumference of each circle.  This would keep the satin from fraying, and also curled the fabric just enough to give it a very petal-like texture.  Then I held the center of each circle over the candle just until it puckered.

I assembled each flower by hot gluing the circles together, with a dab of glue in each center.  To the top and final circle or two I gave an extra pinch to give it a little more shape.

Beautiful!

I pinned these three flowers, representing my three girls, to my green sash.  It turned out just as lovely as I had imagined, and the meaning behind it was priceless to me, no matter who else noticed.

OK, I think I'm done bragging about the sashes now.  But never fear, there is more nuttiness to come, because wanting to be all unique and sh** AND being a cheapskate always equals going overboard in, yes, a Martha Stewart way.

All this and more in The Wedding, Part Three!

(How many of these egotistical "parts" will there be, you ask?
AS MANY AS I DECIDE THERE WILL BE.)

The Wedding, Part One

In Which We Systematically Destroy
Every Original Wedding Idea We Had

Becky and Dan, summer 2010, in the happy early days well before considering marriage.

So.  Dan and I got engaged last year.  See the ring?  Opals -- my birthstone.

We originally thought we'd have a fall wedding last year, but it didn't work out that way.  Circumstances, yada yada yada, and after a while it seemed like maybe we'd just be engaged forever.  Then in February everything just dropped into place and the wedding was a go.  I still wanted a fall wedding, but October of this year was a long way from February and we were tired of waiting.  Plus we really wanted to have a real family vacation to start off our new lives together, so we decided to get married at the beginning of the girls' spring break and then take a week's vacation with them.

Here we are a few days after we picked our wedding weekend.  Yeah it's not the most flattering picture of me, but see we're still happy?  :)

Our original plan was to get married in Baltimore and then go to Florida for vacation.  We thought we'd have a small ceremony at the Maryland Zoo.  Did you know that you can have an "animal ambassador" attend your zoo wedding?  Like.... a PENGUIN?

Zoo Penguin Wedding Photo by Sweet Pea Photography -- I am jealous!

How cool is that?  We decided that absolutely we were going to have a penguin at our zoo wedding!  Unfortunately, the zoo was doing renovations on the main wedding venue that would not be finished until May, and they were reluctant to schedule us an outdoor wedding at the end of March without the indoor venue as a backup.

So we sadly scrapped our plans for a zoo wedding and decided the heck with it, we would just get married while we were down in Florida.  On the beach!  At sunset!  Why not!

Now to find a dress.  I had plans for an informal white dress, something flowy, simple, a little bohemian.  I found several online that I considered ordering, but I needed to know my exact size, so Dan and I went to David's Bridal to get me fitted.  Of course they brought out a bunch of dresses they wanted me to try on.  And I did -- because it's kind of fun.  :)

Enh... not really what I had in mind...  Plus the dress lady kept sticking
veils on me even though I said I wasn't going to wear one.

WHEW this is tight.  Makes my back view look shapely though!

Liked the idea of a halter, just not this one.

The dress lady loved this birdcage veil which she said was so
retro and fashionable.  I did not. 

But then I put on THIS dress, that I grabbed off the clearance rack because I loved the fabric -- bright white shantung taffeta, crisp like cotton instead of shiny or floaty like everything else I had put on.  The dress lady zipped me into it.  It fit perfectly, straight off the rack, and I stared at myself and said, "Wow."  She later told me that I said "Wow" seven times, and she knew we had a winner.

I loved the idea of a colorful sash, as I had planned on adding some burst of color to whatever dress I was going to order off the internet.  I liked the blue sash a lot, but green is my favorite color so I asked to try the green one, even though it looked dull on the hanger.  And... It was good.

Look -- even with messy hair and no makeup, this dress made me feel gorgeous.

The shape, the fabric, the brightness, and, oh yes, the clearance price.  It was certainly not the informal, breezy dress I had planned on.  It was a big and poofy ball gown.  And I LOVED IT.

Stay tuned for the The Wedding, Part 2 -- In Which I Go All Martha Stewart On This Wedding's A--