Month: October 2012

Take me out to the ballgame . . .

As baseball season is winding down in the US, it’s just beginning here. Usually baseball means new cleats, broken in leather gloves, and the smell of freshly mown grass in the air.
Welcome to the baseball “field.”


It was dusty, hot and humid, and the sweat turned the dust to mud on our skin.

 

All three boys had tryouts over the weekend — not because anyone was going to be cut, but to make the teams as even as possible. Caleb played well enough that they moved him from the younger age bracket to the league with both of his brothers.

And this is where they’ll be playing
 
 

Warming up 
 

The luscious green grass in the background is the new artificial turf soccer field. Too bad we can’t use it for baseball while we wait for spring (soccer season).
At the end of tryouts we found out that all 3 boys would be on the same team — crazy age span (8 year olds playing with 13 year olds?). I’m actually pretty happy about it because yay for less driving and yay for being able to cheer for all 3 boys at the same time. I’m sure it will never happen again so I’m going to enjoy it while I can. There aren’t enough kids here to have more than two teams so they kept things simple and put all siblings on the same team (God bless them!). 

I’m hot and dirty and I’ve had enough! Time to go!

Halloweenie

There was a Halloween party on base for the kids tonight. I thought it would be fun to go as a family. Nope. She hated it. They were doing face painting and all the kids running around with painted on cat whiskers and skull faces scared her. She started shaking and crying, “I want to go home!” so I took her over to the base department store (right down the hall) and we looked at shoes while the boys ate pizza and candy, watched a movie, and played with friends.  
While we were shopping, these punks decided to get their faces painted and then came over and scared their sister. 
It was super fun to have her start screaming in the middle of the store every time she saw them: “Scary, Daddy!”

Clicking

This week has been better. Camille is watching less tv, which is always my barometer for how successful I’m being at life, and she’s been napping during the day. Our routine has been falling into place — do something in the morning, lunch, nap, kids home from school and homework, pick up Calvin, dinner, bed. Not the most exciting life, but it will do.

The biggest change has been in my driving. Not that it’s any better out there, but I have determined that I am going to show love to the other drivers on the road. Sure, pull in front of me! Let me wave you in so you don’t block the other traffic. I don’t need to make this light, I’ll catch the next one. (I know that you suspect I’m being sarcastic, but this is for real.) The result has been that I’m arriving at my destinations no later than before and much less stressed. Win. Win. Win. Who knows how long my Zen will last, but it’s working for now. I was tired of feeling angry all the time — this is much better.

My seeds are sprouting! The rocket (arugula) is up, and beans and sunflowers have joined the beets and chard. Things sprout ridiculously fast when it’s 95 and sunny. My lettuce isn’t showing itself so I may have planted it too deep — it needs light to germinate. I reseeded today to be sure.

Today is our busy afternoon out that ends with home group this evening. I wrote this on base while waiting for Calvin to finish basketball practice and Josh to finish work. Then we’ll have dinner here before going over to our friends’ house.

PS: I’m so relaxed, I let them get ice cream before dinner. New and improved Mom for sure.

cast iron stomach

Did you know that grapes are toxic to dogs? I did because my brain holds on to useless pieces of information while discarding gems like Josh’s work phone number or my street address. I am not your go-to girl if you need to get directions to my house, but dog toxicity issues? I’ve got that covered.

So grapes (and raisins) can be deadly to dogs. They can cause kidney failure and no one knows if there is a “safe” amount to eat because some dogs are fine after ingesting grapes, others keel over. There is no known pattern to the dogs that are affected: size, breed, grape color, it’s a crapshoot.

By now you can guess that Micah got into some grapes, huh? I was upstairs putting Camille down for a nap and I came back to find a bunch of grapes on the living room floor that had been picked naked. Normal people would have cursed the loss of expensive grapes (it was $7.70 for a medium size bag, ouch!), but my brain immediately pulled up the “dogs+grapes = EMERGENCY” file and my peaceful afternoon was over.

Josh and I were supposed to have a few hours to ourselves since the boys were out and the girl was asleep, but instead we had to tag team googling poison control home remedies (since of course it was the weekend) and dog watch vomit duty.

I knew from my previous hydrogen peroxide experience that all I had to do was give the dog a few teaspoons of the stuff and those grapes should come right back up. Problem solved. Except that he didn’t throw up. Dr. Google said it could take between 5 and 15 minutes, so we sat outside waiting for our prize. Other suggestions were to feed him bread along with the peroxide so it would bulk up in his stomach and give him something to regurgitate. Another site suggested jiggling his stomach so it would be mixed with his stomach acid and make him feel really nauseous. Oh, and still another said to take a syringe and give him extra water. Did it all. No joy.

The procedure calls for administering a second dose, but by now the dog was on to me so I first had to catch him. Giving a dog peroxide the first time is easy, the second time? Impossible. I was pretty sure I had gotten enough down the hatch when I read on another website (by googling “dog peroxide no vomit?”) that said the peroxide had to be fresh or it wouldn’t be foamy/bubbly enough to make him sick.

I tested our peroxide by swishing some in my mouth — hmm, not that powerful. Still nasty tasting though. Then we had to decide whether to give up or go get new peroxide. To make this horrible, painfully long story short, I’ll cut to the end: Brand new peroxide, double strength (oops!), much waiting, jiggling, bread feeding, water boarding, no throw-up, gave up, dog fine, wasted afternoon.

The end.

putting down roots

Since we’ll probably be here for two years (inshalla/God willing), the best thing I can do is make it feel like home. What makes me feel at home somewhere? Putting my hands in dirt and growing edible plants. Ever since we’ve lived in Oklahoma I have had a passion for vegetable gardening. I had a huge backyard there and devoured books on square foot gardening, raised beds, mulching and composting, trellising vining crops like cucumbers and melons, and four season gardening (extending the growing season with hot water bottles and bedsheets or cold frames).
The result of all that study was the garden of my dreams — 3 four foot wide beds that were twelve feet long. I grew long rows of baby lettuces that I would snip with scissors to have fresh salad every day, a green wire trellis covered with sugar snap peas, half a bed of purple, yellow, and green bush beans, rows of carrots, beets, swiss chard, and spinach, bushes of yellow and green squash, cucumbers and melons sprawling on an A-frame trellis (the key is to support the growing melons inside pantyhose slings), and half a bed full of corn. The other half held pumpkin plants that quickly overgrew their beds and crawled across the grass — we just mowed around them until pumpkin harvest was over. 
In addition to the beds I had 8 huge tomato plants along the back fence — cherries, yellow pear, early reds, a variety called sungold that held orangey bite sized tomatoes, and sweet 100s that grew in bunches like grapes. Add in some pots of cilantro, parsley and rosemary and that covers most of it. And that was only a “temporary garden.” A few years later we pulled up our stakes (literally and figuratively) and headed down the road. I’ve never had the same sort of space to work with, but I’ve grown vegetables ever since. Whether it was a small bed that I dug alongside our house in VA (I couldn’t bring myself to actually eat anything from this garden since we’d been warned about lead, asbestos, and unknown chemicals in that housing area and I was pretty sure the ground was contaminated as well), or growing hot peppers at the edges of our lawn in 29 Palms, edible growing has been part of my life everywhere we’ve lived. 
I put a few things in pots the other day (and posted a picture of it), but it wasn’t enough. I needed more dirt. Since I have a husband who is very supportive of my gardening efforts (and is the one who did all the heavy digging in the Oklahoma clay to create the original huge beds), we headed to the nursery together. Unfortunately we got sidetracked for a few minutes by a burning smell coming from the car as we pulled up. 


It’s quite the man that can handle car repairs and babywearing at the same time.

(It turns out that the burning smell most likely was coming from a combination of the manure/fertilizer and burning tires in the area — but we do have an electrical issue in the car that is being worked on today). 

Caleb holding my new “beds.” We bought a bunch of dirt (6 huge bags of it), a few more seeds and some flowering/vining plants and decorative ceramic pots to put them in. We barely fit it all in the car and we only had 2 kids with us.

We have this rooftop space that we want to turn into a garden/outdoor room. 
 

Jasmine, Morning Glories, and this plant of unknown origin. The guy at the nursery didn’t speak much English so we would ask, “Flower?” And he would nod and either point at the color on something else or say the name if he knew it. This plant is supposed to have two-color flowers, but I don’t remember what colors. I’ll just have to wait and be surprised. 

Carter planted sunflowers — I do veggies, he always plants sunflowers. 

She kept trying to poke bean seeds into my carrot rows.
 
 

We have 2 plastic chairs right now, but eventually want to get some sort of outdoor couch

Tiny tomatoes

My beets and swiss chard have sprouted!

They are in the same family, so I won’t be able to tell which is which until they get bigger. And honestly, I’m not so sure I trust the labels on the locally produced seed bags anyway. What they called “psinish” was certainly not spinach seed — it looked more like wood shavings. 

I’m betting that these are beets because of the red in the seed leaves . . . I’ll find out soon.

Micah’s not impressed with my gardening, but at least he’s not scared to go out on the roof anymore (I had to carry him up the stairs and out onto the roof yesterday, big heavy baby).

I think I might need a few more big pots . . . really. I was looking online for some more seeds and I found my favorite purple beans, a variety of faux-spinach that is supposed to do really well in the heat (real spinach likes cool, spring weather), a miniature red pepper that is supposed to be perfect for containers and a few new lettuce mixes that I haven’t tried before. So yeah, I’m out of dirt space, but I have 7 more seed packets on their way. 

We’re hoping the vining plants grow up and distract from some of the pipes, A/C units and satellite dishes on the roof.

Waiting for it all to grow!