Ten month milestone

Teresa reached ten months old a few days ago - everything has been so busy that it really snuck up on me. I was calling her nine months old up to the very day that she turned ten months. She has been celebrating by practicing her new walking skills. Many, many times a day she gets up and takes five or six steps at a time. Her other latest discovery is a horrible, ear-piercing shriek that is clearly intended to be a happy sound, judging from the huge grin on her face while she’s making it.

She has still not expressed much interest in actually eating food. We occasionally offer her a bite, and she puts it in her mouth, then spits it out again. She is our first baby to get this old and still be exclusively breast-fed. She is also our smallest baby, but I don’t think that’s related. She’s clearly very healthy and happy, and her development is coming along just fine.

What’s a gate for, anyway?

We put this up today:

Why? To prevent falls, of course. Obvious, right? Well, not to everybody. We got the gate home, and looked at the instructions, and it said, very clearly: “To prevent falls, DO NOT put this gate at the top of stairs.” Hmmm. Well, to prevent falls, we DID put it at the top of stairs. After all, we’ve got a little girl so eager to get down that she’ll try until she just falls asleep trying.

Happy Birthday, David!

Yesterday, that is.

David, our first-born son. Also, our first baby to be born in America. Six years ago now! That means he’s old enough to start First Grade this fall. I can’t believe I have two kids in school already. How did the time fly by so fast?

The washer and dryer have finally arrived!

I never thought I would be so glad to be able to do laundry, but after waiting almost two weeks, there was practically a mountain waiting, despite our giving in and doing four loads at the laundromat.

The kids found the front-loading machine fascinating to watch in action.

Getting started on gardening

One of the nice things about moving from Florida to Wyoming in June is that we got to finish out the gardening season down South before we moved, and yet we still have a whole season of gardening ahead of us here!

We will have to start out pretty small this year, though, since we still have so much to do with getting settled in and all that that there is not as much time for the garden as there would be otherwise. Our garden area consists of four terraces cut into the hill which is most of our backyard.

Each terrace is 4 1/2 feet by 37 feet, so they will make a pretty good sized garden, once we get to where we can actually use all of it, but it will take a bit of work (and money) to get there. Currently the terraces are full of strong weeds, which do not uproot easily. Instead, we are digging them out, which also makes room for putting in new soil.

The dirt in our backyard seems to be mainly clay, so we are following the Square Foot Gardening method - putting in a mixture of peat moss, compost, and vermiculite, in which to put our seeds. Our plan for this year is to just use part of one terrace, and see how things go.

In the front of the house is a good sized garden bed that will make a great herb garden - once it gets weeded out. Like the back, it is full of tall weeds/grass with very strong roots. It was once at least partially an herb garden: buried amongst the weeds are a couple clumps of chives, some sage, and something else I don’t recognize but which smells too aromatic to be a weed.

Elevation Observations

The elevation here is around 5400 feet above sea level, which in theory should mean we will see some difference in how things cook and bake.  I haven’t done a lot of baking yet - just corn bread and an apple spice cake - but haven’t yet seen any difference there.  Probably it makes more difference with recipes that need pretty precise measurements.  I did measure the temperature of boiling water, and it only reached 200 degrees.  Probably as a consequence of this, some things that cook in boiling/simmering water - like dried beans - have taken longer to cook than they did in Florida.  We had a long discussion with the kids over supper yesterday about this, and why the air would be thinner here, and why that would make a difference.  I think Bernadette was the only one who really understood what was going on.

Breaking the Silence

Okay, so I’ve had a hard time picking up my blog again. A lot has happened since I last posted: we had our ninth anniversary, we completed our move to Wyoming, we took possession of our very own house, we unloaded all our belongings into said house, and then we all succumbed one by one to some nasty little stomach bug.

There has certainly been plenty to write about, but not much time to in which to write it. I think I’ve had some mental paralysis about writing, because I feel like I ought to chronicle all the major happenings, but simply have not had the time to do so. It’s only been two years since our last move, but I’d forgotten how much work is involved with settling into a new house! Actually, it’s more this time, since we do in fact have more things now, and more kids to take care of.

So, here’s the solution I came to: I’m not going to try to fill in everything that’s gone by. I will just pick up where we are right now, and go from there.

Blog Updated

Okay, I finally got all my posts from the last week up, so everything is updated now.

Day Two - Making Up For Lost Time

Our second day of traveling was more or less uneventful.  We got up early after going to bed late, and headed out to see if we could make up for our lost time the day before.  We kept our stops pretty short, and just kept driving and driving, and in the end we reached our first destination - the Arkansas Grandparents - around 9:00 p.m.  A good day’s travel, though pretty wearing.  Nice to have three days of rest ahead of us now before we head out again!

Blog lag

Well, I’ve got several posts written and ready to go up, but they have photos to go with them, and this motel we’re staying at tonight does not have very speedy high-speed, so I will have to put them up later when I have a better connection available.  I will pre-date them, though, so that they will be dated as of the appropriate days.

Just a few notes - we ended up using exactly 16 linear feet, though we left behind one chair (it was broken, anyway).  I do have pictures, though of course you can only see the outer layer.

It was a wild day today - but that’s one of my posts, so I’ll talk about that later!