Saturday in the Backyard

Scott is suffering at Twi-Con today (if you aren't a "Twilight" fan, then you have no idea what this is; if you aren't one, then you have no reason to care), so it's just me and the baby. We both woke up at 5am this morning, along with Sadie. On a freaking Saturday. The funny part is that as we were sitting on the couch, dressed and ready for the day by 5:40, blearily rubbing our eyes, Scott looked at his watch and went, "Wait -- it's only five forty?" Turned out he'd rolled out of bed when I did, not actually looking at the clock. I laughed at him a lot. We've had a lot of early mornings recently, but this one topped them all.

Since I last posted, the teething has miraculously improved. Really, that one awful day was a stand-alone. Her mood remains generally cranky, though, so I think she's suffering from a general malaise, and that's tougher to treat than sore gums. Also, STILL NO FREAKING TEETH. She is the toothless wonder.

She likes to climb all over me like a jungle gym now, hurling herself at incredible speeds towards anything I'm holding in my hand -- a glass of wine, a hot cup of water. The phone. ESPECIALLY my iPhone. When Mac created the iPhone, did they intentionally design it to look like baby crack? Because apparently that is what it most closely resembles. Possibly the only thing Sadie is more obsessed with than my iPhone is the remote control. She picks it up, jabs her fingers at the buttons, and inevitably, sends our cable reeling into some strange outer dimension from which there is no return.

Despite her newfound wiggliness when she's attached to me, she still has no interest in getting around on her own once you put her down on the ground. No scooting, cruising, crawling, pulling herself up. Not even any inching backwards while on her back, which used to be her preferred method of transportation. She just sits. Plays. Gets bored. If it's within her reach, she'll grab it. If it's even three inches beyond her grasp, she'll give it a cursory look and be like, "Nah." COME ON, SADIE, YOU HAVE TO TRY.

Update on the vegetable garden: it was...a semi-success. I choose to look at it this way: this was our rehearsal, and this fall will be our real attempt at growing a garden. We did get some good output from a few plants, mostly the herbs, but also failed spectacularly in other areas. Here is what I know now about planting a vegetable garden:

- Do not plant seedlings too close together. I had no idea how big full-sized plants are. We mistakenly planted six zucchini seedlings inside about 12 square feet of growing space, and what we have now is a tangled jungle of zucchini plants, several of which do not produce at all. Two plants would have been plenty.

- Deadhead plants before they flower and go to seed. Now I understand that flowering is the final stage of a plant's life, and they have to be regularly clipped and pruned to prevent this.

- Cool weather plants shouldn't be planted in mid-spring. I had to throw out a lot of lettuce plants today.

- Herbs can be touchy.

- You really shouldn't forget to mulch.
 

Tending Beds and Cribs

I feel like there's so much to catch up on. Sadie now rolls easily from belly to back, having figured out that if she uses her gigantic melon of a head as a counterweight, it does all the hard work by pulling her over.

She barely fits in her infant tub anymore. Scott's thoughtful and lovely mother brought us over a bathing...ring...sort of a thing. It's like a bucket with the sides and leg holes cut out. You sit the baby in it and it fixes to the bottom of the tub with suckers; that way she never gets so long that she outgrows it. But it also means I need to find a new way to position myself during bathtime; before, Scott had rigged a bathing platform by tying together two milk crates and placing them in our very deep jacuzzi tub, then placing the infant tub on top of the crates.

The tub is deep enough that I have to lean way, way over to reach inside it, which is murder on my back. Just add it to the list of things that give me a bad back these days; I literally can feel myself aging more every day as my body creaks and groans under the strain of lifting baby with one arm while dragging a bouncy seat across the room with the other so I can then twist around putting laundry into the washing machine. Never realized that perpetual back pain would one day become a fact of life. Well...not this soon, anyway.

Aquababy

As she becomes more mobile, she commands more attention. It used to be I could place her in her bumbo chair or bouncy seat and she'd watch me wide-eyed as I moved around the room. Now, she's got to have something in her hands to distract her, or she easily gets bored. And it has to DO things, too -- a simple rubber toy or spoon isn't good enough. It needs to rattle or clack or make music or light up. She enjoys tossing things out of her own arm's reach then straining to pick them up again, and when she can't get to a toy she has tossed across the room, she fusses with frustration. I don't think we'll need to worry about her crawling or walking early -- she's already clearly desperate to get moving.

Now, for a change of topic -- I thought I'd post an update about our vegetable garden, which we were so proud to plant only three weeks ago. For the most part, it's thriving very well. And I can't really express how much of a thrill it gives me to watch it grow -- I think it can only really be understood by someone who, like the two of us, has never had a green thumb or planted a flower or eaten food that came out of our own backyard. These days I come out every morning and look over each plant with a critical eye, noting new shoots, which plants are succeeding against my expectations and the slam dunks which failed in spectacular fashion.

To begin with: the successes. The arugula, after a shaky start, is thriving. Even prettier are the mesclun greens which, after flirting with death, came back strong and are now blooming in that lovely, rosy lettuce shape. They're still delicate, but healthy and I can't wait to eat them. The pepper plants are growing slender and tall.

The tomatoes, alone in their own planter pots beneath steel A-frames, are growing voraciously. The broccoli is growing so fast it almost frightens me a little; we planted them as tiny shoots and the tallest of them is already 6-8" high. But far creepier than the broccoli is our giant bed of zucchini. "Woe to the zucchini grower," sniffs one gardening blog I've begun reading, which notes that a bed of zucchini soon yields so much zucchini that its owner will inevitably start offloading zucchini upon everyone they come into contact with. And sure enough, these plants have already spread so fast and thick that they're on their way to covering the floor of their planter box. I admit, I don't like the look of those wide, flat, horny leaves. Then I tell myself not to be a veggie snob -- they don't have to look pretty to taste delicious, and I've always loved steamed zucchini. Besides, if everyone gets a loaf of fresh zucchini bread for Christmas this year, who's going to complain?

I'm proudest of all of my herbs, those that are thriving. Scott did most of the planting, but the herb bed was all mine. Three cilantro plants died in quick succession, but one last plant has hung on, giving off all sorts of delicious smells. The rosemary, sage and basil chug along bravely. And the Italian parsley, which I had to much of and so planted in three extra pots I had lying around, is thriving and looking pretty.

Now, for the failures. Like I said above, I managed to kill three cilantro plants by the simple act of planting them. (No idea why the fourth survived.) A spearmint plant was my mother's gift to the garden; the notes advised it be planted in its container within the ground, so I did that and it promptly died. The peppermint was quick to follow. My English thyme looked great, then one day shriveled into a dried brown mess of twigs without warning. I did some research and discovered thyme is nearly impossible to kill -- the only way to do so is to overwater it, which, duh, I've apparently been doing. Thyme likes dry soil, not the super-moist soil that all the rest of the plants have been living in.

At any rate, I've got a new game plan now, which involves transplanting all of my parsley from its containers to the main herb bed, then planting thyme and the mint plants in their own containers. I also plan to grow chives in the bed.

I never though I'd admit it, but I think I've caught the gardening bug. We both enjoy watch it it grow so much. We even made out own pesticide out of soapy water and cayenne pepper to spray on the the leaves, and the one time King made the mistake of wandering into the planter boxes to sniff around, I almost took his head off. I think the first time we sit down to eat a salad with food we grew ourselves, we'll be so brimful of domestic joyousness that we may spontaneously explode and emerge solidly in the 1950s where our kind belongs, a la "Hot Tub Time Machine." 

Next time I remember, I'll take pictures and post them for visual reference.

My Suburban Dream Realized!

Tomatoes

Ever since we bought our first house a year and a half ago, we've dreamed of having a vegetable garden. But when I got pregnant two months after we moved in, those plans got pushed aside for more immediate and necessary concerns like creating a nursery and finding me a pool I could float my giant belly in all summer.

Now that it's spring and Sadie is almost 6 months old, the time is ripe, and this weekend we're finally going ahead with our big plans. Now -- let me disabuse you of the notion that we have ANY IDEA what we're doing. Neither of us has ever taken on a project like this before. If building the actual planter boxes were not daunting enough, having a working vegetable garden also requires the ability to keep plants alive once they have been placed in dirt. My trial run involved buying two extremely hardy house plants, which have survived for a good 8 months at this point, so I consider myself ready to move to the next level.

As of right now, here's the plan: Saturday we'll be constructing the actual planter boxes, Sunday we'll do the planting. For the boxes we'll be using untreated 6' redwood beams between planter posts -- very basic stuff, nothing fancy like ledges or anything like that. The four boxes will be placed end-to-end along the side of our backyard, where there is currently an ugly dirt strip that runs from the side of our house all the way to the wall at the end of the yard. It's a somewhat odd configuration, but the boxes will hide the otherwise useless dirt, and will also get some measure of shade from the tall ficus trees that line our neighbors' yard.

I don't really know yet what we'll be planting, although I have a few ideas: tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, carrots, radishes, spinach, arugula. We'll be buying all our plants pre-grown, or whatever the correct term is, rather than trying to negotiate seeds.

In addition, we'll be adding some large pots to put between the planter boxes. This will be for my herb garden and also possibly for some strawberries, blueberries and other fruits. I honestly don't know. When I say we don't know what we're doing, I mean it -- our entire body of research has come from articles on the internet entitled, "How to Grow Fruits and Vegetables in Planter Boxes." Yesterday I was discussing plans with the babysitter and she suggested buying mulch to spread on top of the dirt, and I was like, "Ah yes, mulch! Excellent idea!" So...this could work out great, or I could end up inadvertently murdering a small army of plants.

I hope they don't fight back.