I Love Merrymead Farm

As anyone who knows me well in real life can tell you, I adore milk. I guzzle it like it's going out of style. Our household can sometimes go through a gallon in three days, and personally, I used to go through a gallon in two days. While looking for things to do with N last autumn, I found a little farm near us called Merrymead.

Recently, while visiting the farm, I picked up a gallon of their milk. Folks, that was the best milk I've ever had, hands down. It was perfect and delicious and I now make visits to their farm solely to get this milk. The best part of the visits is that N loves to go there too! They've got a ton of animals for children to see, including N's favorites: cows.



If you don't love cows, they also have a hog, ducks, rabbits, goats, sheep, a donkey, and some peacocks. They have fantastic ice cream to snack on, and they sell freshly ground peanut butter and local jams and butchered meat. I like to take a trip up there with N, view the animals, wash our hands at the children height sinks, snack on a little ice cream, and leave with some milk and whatever other little items catch my fancy that day.

While that's not bad, the place gets even more awesome every autumn with hayrides, gigantic corn mazes (and tiny ones too for the littles), and delightful autumnal treats.



I'm so happy that we discovered this place, and I'm sure we'll be visiting pretty regularly for as long as we live at this house!

Carrots!

I must confess, when it comes to things like gardening, I'm never quite sure whether to post in my 'life' blog or my craft blog. Whenever I consider folding the two together, however, I realize how much I tend to babble on about N. While I love my son and think the sun rises and sets on him, I'm not quite sure that you do too, you know? Do you really need to hear about his Easter egg hunts? I think I have decided, in the meantime, to define gardening as a 'craft' though really it's a hobby. I know that's a strange definition, but from what I can gather from the blogs I read, you crafters are in love with gardening.

So, while peas are still coming from our garden (though the plants are not doing well), a few of the carrots have started showing signs of being ready for eating! Paul and N pulled one from our garden and brought it to me to admire.



When I asked him to take about eight hundred photos of it, N got peeved and chucked the carrot at me.



I guess I kind of deserved that.

We still need to pull a few more carrots from our garden, but that should be soon. Sadly, it is so hot out that Paul is about 95% uninterested in cooking, so I'm thinking I won't get my roasted carrot-avocado salad soon.

In good (?) news, our watermelon plant appears to be overtaking our garden.

Summer Is Officially Here!

You know it is summer when you're picking fresh peas from your garden and popping them into your mouth before you even get in the house:



and when your son and nephew are housing watermelon and ice cream at parties:



and when the sparklers and lightening bugs come out:



and when you go to swim for hours and then go to Dairy Queen after it all.

One time, before we were married, I asked Paul what he liked about me, and he said that it was that every holiday and every season thrills me. I throw myself into Christmas, and bloom at the first signs of spring. I feel completely American and patriotic when July Fourth comes around. Every season is my favorite while I'm in the middle of it, but I think I love the freedom and hedonism of summer most of all. (Ask me how I feel this autumn, though.)

I'm Totally Screwing With My Site

Since Blogger decided to update their templates, I decided to update my blog. I'm still not in love with the design, but it's both closer and farther from what I wanted. I feel like I'm losing a lot of the simplicity of my blog, while adding features I want to see (such as the Tweet This bit). We'll see how much I change it over the next couple of weeks/months.

Now, I've only got one link today, so I'll make it count. I've taught numerous people how to knit, and I've converted a hefty portion of my female family and friends to knitterdom. However, I'm a lousy, lousy teacher. I've got no patience for people, no ability to explain clearly (or even speak clearly), and a lack of understanding about how people even make mistakes which I don't normally make. To be fair, I'm usually lousy at learning things from people too. It's why I learn most of my crafts from really clear books.

However, over the course of the last year, two of my 'pupils' have made mistakes in knitting that, if I were a better teacher, probably would never have occurred. The latest instance led my cousin to admit that she had been purling incorrectly for ages. I want her, and all other people who make mistakes at knitting, to feel better about this. One of the knitting blogs I follow, a blog with nearly a thousand followers, recently admitted that she's been doing yarnovers incorrectly forever. I admire this type of post because it's the type the knitting world needs. The one where you read it and go, "Shoot, I've been doing it incorrectly as well. At least I didn't have to discover that in front of a whole class of people."

Maybe if you're making mistakes in your knitting and you fixed those mistakes, you should blog about it. I will definitely try to think of some to add myself, but my first piece of advice is: "Don't hand your lacy baby blanket to your mother to let her count the stitches because she'll drop it all off the needles and then you won't know how to fix it, so you'll just pick it up as best possible and it'll have a giant knotty hole in the middle of all the lacework."

Wordless Wednesday #8 -- Yay, Peas!

Remember Last Summer

You remember last summer when I posted about how during summers all knitting blogs shut down? At the time, I was doing sewing. This year, I feel like I'm totally overweight and I need to diet, so I don't want to sew garments. However, I am gardening! Sort of. My husband and son are the real gardeners.



The things in our garden that interest me the most are our raspberry plants, our watermelons, our pumpkins, and our peas. Of all of those, only the peas have come about. A few weeks ago, while out in the garden, I noticed that our peas were putting out shoots all over the place.



At that point, I bugged Paul to do what we should have done much much earlier -- put in stuff for them to climb and water them more often. This did some good, but we can clearly do much better next year. We only had two really great plants this year, and at least three plants just didn't make it beyond the early stages.

Today, for the first time, Paul and I (and my cousin and her children) reaped the benefits of Paul's hard work!



We picked pods off the plants and opened and snacked. Delicious and sweet and wonderful. I am thinking I might pick a few to open and saute in some butter and salt, but they barely need it! My cousin's youngest loved them and happily gobbled up all the contents of the pods I opened. When I asked her to smile for the picture, she could barely acknowledge me as she scrabbled for the peas in her mom's hands.

I'm going to mark the peas as a success this year. Check back later to see if I've got an update on our carrots which are looking promising! I've been itching to make Smitten Kitchen's Roasted Carrot and Avocado salad.

What are you guys up to this summer?

I Am A Witch and I'm Awesome

Sunday was a witching night. That's right -- I took my Slytherin self out on a witchy witchy evening and I went around being ambitious, sneaky, evil, and awesome. I'm not saying I communed with He Who Must Not Be Named or anything, but when you're in the Slytherin house, you can be just a little evil, you know!

I might have insulted a few muggles and some Hufflepuffs (boring jerks). I might have cursed a few people. I might have eaten all the berries I could find without sharing them with my family. Oh, let's not pretend any more, my cohorts. The first thing I did when I went out was that I found some lousy do-gooder Gryffindor to fight. They're also so 'courageous' and 'honorable'. Well, check out this jerk trying to cast some spell on me when I wasn't looking.



I was checking to make sure innocent ducklings weren't going to be caught in the crossfire, and he straight out attacked. I know that it isn't usually in the Slytherin image to be protective of baby ducklings, but I hate people, not ducklings! And he took ruthless advantage of the fact.

I'm happy to report I won the fight and I celebrated most joyously by being super witchy.

Easter, A Month Later

I know it's late, and I have many other things to discuss such as watching ducklings, tumbling classes, and picking berries, but this blog has become a way to store memories of N, so I had better write down some of the better memories, no? I mean, otherwise one day when I'm old and senile and reading these memories, I'll never remember things like the way in January when N saw a ton of snow for the first time, he pulled himself up onto the radiator covers and peered out of our house in awe.

Easter was intriguing this year. A month prior, I bought a super cute basket, several plastic eggs, and some grass. A week prior, I bought some M&Ms to put in the eggs. Paul and I invited our next door neighbors (also known as N's honorary grandparents) to watch the spectacle of N hunting for eggs. I really didn't believe he'd be able to do it at all.

Easter morn, I ran out of the house and planted the M&M filled eggs all over our yard and our neighbors' yard. I put them in very easy to spot locations. With a quick warning to our neighbors, we let N out of the house with his basket. I needn't have worried. After I showed him the first egg and told him to pick it up and put it in the basket I was holding for him, he went on a tear, flying around the yard looking for eggs.



Sometimes, he'd be so jazzed about the whole event, he would run between locations, attempting to hold multiple eggs.



After we got done the first go around of picking up eggs, I quickly hid the eggs again around our yards and he went for his second round of egg hunting!



All in all, we went for three rounds of egg hunting. Also, the next two days, he'd peer around our yard like eggs might magically appear. What does it say about me that I considered hiding eggs in our yard the week after Easter just to see his egg hunting smile?

ABC, Baby!

Along with all the words lately, N has finally decided to start trying to sing. We often play Fisher-Price's alphabet game together. Today, while playing, at the end, when the song finished, N immediately signed for more. I played him the song again, and sang to him. He started to whisper some random mumblings, but mostly didn't get anything correct except for the letter P which he said much louder than the other letters. He signed more when it ended and we sang together again. We sang the alphabet song together about ten times in total. He never got more than a letter or two correct, but it was fantastic to hear.

Later, while playing Rock Band 2 with his daddy, N tried to sing some of Last Train to Clarksville. When I put him down to sleep at night, he attempted to sing along with You Are My Sunshine. Then, he pointed imperiously to his crib to indicate that it was sleep time. I put him down and turned out the light. As Paul and I discussed stuff out in the living room, we could hear him chattering away to himself (another new habit).



Oh, additional words I forgot from last time: corn, bird, egg, owl, yes, no, and uh-oh!

Silly Me, Busy Spring

I realized I haven't posted about N here in a long time, and that is silly. I was posting monthly (or trying to) when all he did was stare at me and say "goo", but now that he's doing everything under the sun, I have nothing to say?

As you might not be aware, this winter was hellish. Suffice to say that my son has asthma attacks when he gets a cold or infection. I was awaiting spring, and the return of my husband from his job up north, and for the endless rounds of colds to end. We came out of it with a bang, N, Paul, and I all got a horrible cold at the end of April.


Some things to chat about? Nathan is nearly two years old and he has barely forty words, if that, under his belt. I'd be worried, but about ten words of those forty came within the last four days, I think, so I'm rapidly calming down now. His words are: Go, Mom, Dad, car, moon, blue, stop, sun, cow, moo, cat, meow, neigh (horse's sound), roar, duck (pronounced guck), clock, shoe, bus, please, catfood (one word to him), tea, coffee, vacuum, paccy (short for pacifier), play, sit, poop, girl, balloon, walt, dot (the last two are our neighbors), book, and ball. I'm sure I'm forgetting some, but I'll add more to this site, as they come or as I remember them. The most surprising additions have come recently when he called a lion a "Roar" and answered that same word to "What does a tiger say?" When he answered the word "neigh" to what does a horse say, I nearly fell over.


We are also taking tumbling classes and have been for several weeks. He's made some amazing advances due to the class, including learning how to jump and attempting to sing along with the alphabet song. He loves the balance beam, of all things, and willingly walks along it many times. He likes the inclined rock wall, and the bouncy horses as well. He tolerates the bars after watching the girls of the class swing like little monkeys. He likes the way he gets a stamp on his hand after the class too, which is funny since the first few times he wouldn't take the stamp until I did. He attempts to somersault quite often!

Last week, the teachers played a 'game' in which they held up a wedge shaped mat and ask the children to run at it to knock it over. (Of course, in reality, the teachers gently moved the mat to the floor and held the child to make sure that they didn't hurt themselves.) Nathan screamed shrilly each time another child made contact with the mat and would promptly try to launch himself from my lap directly at the mat. When it came to his turn, he ran screaming at it. He took several turns very enthusiastically.

All in all, my little baby is becoming a small boy. Of course, he still knows he's my baby.