One day at a time: 18th August 2015

Golden days.

Yesterday was glorious. Actually glorious in the clear-blue-not-a-cloud-in-sight, hot-but-not-too-hot, breathe-it-deep-into-your-memory-lungs-air-sunshine, if-heaven's-better-than-this-wow, type of day. We really enjoyed the afternoon especially as we met up with some friends down at the community croft ('play garden' according to Felicity.) What with changing work commitments, being out of town for several weeks and in my case, having a baby after a hard pregnancy, our community patch (a 12'x15' piece of earth) was looking very very sorry for itself. The other crofters actually cleared our potatoes which had fallen over due to blight, poor blighters (the potatoes, I mean, not the other gardeners!)

So, I have a new project and that is to determine what plants can be started here in late August/September and give us some kind of return over the winter, and arrange them in a pleasing aesthetic way on our little patch (because I'm competitive that way! heh!)

If it were earlier in the year, I'd copycat some of the demonstration gardens we see in the Botanics, which are always lovely. As it is, I'm going to sift through my seed packets here at home and see what we can use. Alarmingly, I'm considered a bit of an 'expert' in gardening by my friends, though my own style has just been trial and error (and a lot more errors, imo!) Though I'm surprised when people don't know to knock the soil off of weeds before tossing them, or not splashing the leaves of plants in full sunshine to burn them, and other 'common sense' things like that. I'm sure there are many many 'common sense' things we've lost as our culture has moved away from that agrarian model into urban cities. I re-read the Little House books last year and was amazed at how many things they knew how to do (from building their own houses, to kitchen gardening, to making shoes and cloth and clothes, to processing a whole hog!) I would die in the wilderness. Maybe that's why I like to garden - it feeds the illusion of self-sufficiency, while I have the protection of the local grocery store around the corner.

Felicity is back at nursery Monday and Tuesday mornings and she enjoyed it yesterday, though she came away from it *starving* and an absolute bear until she had had something to eat. Wee soul, something is definately going on in that little body - she has such strong emotional swings! Yesterday, she was actually *screaming* for me to come and get her at the bottom of the porch (while I was juggling crying baby and trying to get lunch on the table before we all killed each other, LOL!!) and when I was able to put enough things down to get down on her level and *deal* with the behavior, she melted into sobs - 'CUDDLES?!?' she begged. So, I figured rocking her and feeding her was probably more effective than making her sit in time-out. She didn't have a nap and last night she was so tired, I went into her room about 2:30am after feeding Mr, Mouth and nearly burst out laughing. She was laying sprawled out on her bedroom rug, as if she had fallen out of bed and hadn't even noticed. I debated about leaving her there, since she was obviously not-uncomfortable-enough-to-wake-up, but even when I picked her up and put her back into bed, she didn't even stir.

Then yesterday evening our good friends the Kirkwoods came over for dinner and it was great to see them, though the baby had his crazy hour during dinner. The girls love eachother and hd a great time playing together. G had brought S's pajamas, so we gave the girls a bath together in the big tub upstairs before dressing them for bed. They had so much fun in the deep bubbles Simon made for them. Reminded me of Jean and me when we were little, as I don't think I had a bath alone until I was a teenager!

Anyway, must run and do some housework while the baby sleeps (I hear him ooching in the hall.)