Garden update

In gardening news, we have eaten the first strawberries! Picked a small bowl -- maybe 15 -- on Friday. The patch is in bad shape, overgrown with weeds, and after this harvest I'm going to try and relocate the plants.

The blackberry bush has blossoms and some things I assume will turn into blackberries.

I planted bean seeds at least three weeks ago, but they never came up. I replanted them Saturday as well as put seven pepper seedlings into the ground. Tonight I put in seven cauliflower plants.

Left to plant -- tomatoes that are currently in paper cups, and cucumbers I was planning to seed directly in the ground. Had a little surprise -- I found some volunteer cucumber plants growing over where I had them last year! There are about five plants all clustered together. One of them in particular is very robust and I'll have to do the rest of the garden around it, apparently!

A Silly Tale

So Thea and Faith (although mostly Thea) are obsessing over the new hottest thing: Silly Bandz. Basically these are like those jelly bracelets we used to wear in the 80s, except when taken off your wrist they take shapes -- animals, stars, letters, symbols, etc. I really don't understand what is so exciting about them, but they are being traded at school and I do remember what it was like to want desperately to be involved in the recess trading post (*cough* sticker albums *cough*). Anyway, the girls have been dying for their very own Silly Bandz for three weeks now but they're not easy to find since apparently every other middle schooler in the region is also dying for them.



Finally last night their dad took them to the mall and they found some at Claire's. These are in space shapes -- rocket ships, moons, planets -- and while they are definitely not the shapes my girls coveted, they glow in the dark! Ooooooooh! It was all Thea could talk about when I got home. Faith was similarly excited, but she was busy working on homework in her room.

I went up to see her and she had her 11 (she had given one of her 12 to Thea) Silly Bandz laid out on the floor while she was sitting on her bed doing her handwriting homework. I sat with her for a few minutes and talked to her. I dimly registered that the dog had followed me upstairs... you see where this is going, don't you.

The dog gobbled up all 11 of her Silly Bandz.

Yes... For Faith this was indeed a Woohoo Dammit moment (although since she's only 9 let's call it Yay Nuts) She finally got some Silly Bandz YAY! Not two hours later the dog ate them all NUTS!

Caught

Trying to get a morning-after picture of Holly's new haircut, instead I captured Spot sneaking out the door...

In the Fridge

Something smells bad in my refrigerator. Unfortunately I do not have the drive right now to play rotten-food hide-and-seek.

First lie?

Me: Holly, did you scribble in the library book?
Holly: No.
Me: Then who did it?
Holly: Um, a bad guy did!

April Flowers!

April has been a good month for flowers. I missed getting a picture of the daffodils, which bloomed very early, but I only had a couple anyway.

But here are my tulips.



I swear I used to have several colors, but it seems I only have pink now, and only a few of them. But the irises:



The irises are spreading. They are from bulbs that sat in my shed for over a year before I finally got around to planting them. Hardy. This is the first flower.

The sprawling azalea that came with the house awes me every year. It is the most vibrant, stunning bush on the block. (Although it needs some pruning.)



I planted two new azaleas this year, and although I feared they wouldn't flower until next year, if they even survived, the purple one erupted about two weeks after the mature azalea bloomed.



It's small, just a tight mass of flowers. I love it.

I planted phlox last year under the mature azalea and although the plants lived, they didn't seem to be thriving. I was pleasantly surprised when they all bloomed this year -- little rugs of color.



And last but not least, my roses. The first flower came almost two weeks earlier this year than last year, I believe.



It has been open for about a week and already looks pretty rough, but it endured a couple of strong rain and wind storms. There are plenty more buds on the red rosebush, and the pink bush is budding too. The other two bushes are a little behind but I have faith in them.

Cloudy With a Chance Of...

The little weather widget on my desktop shows a bleak weekend ahead.



Is it just me, or are we bracing for a cockroach invasion on Sunday?