The ground is pretty hard

Tented out with Ellis in the yard last night. Generally, he had a great time, but as darkness settled he really wanted me to zip the flaps over the screen window and door so that "nothing could get in and get us". I suggested to him that this wasn't necessary as nothing was going to come into the tent. Ellis looked at me earnestly and said, "Dad, those screens are only made of thread."

For sale at the 5 year old flea market

I don't often repeat second hand stories from other people's lives here, but this one was too good. We were telling child rearing and disciplining stories today while slugging coffee at work and I told the stories from the previous post. My coworker told me the following:

My coworker and partner are close friends with a family of three, with the third being a little boy about five. One night before my coworker arrived at their house for dinner, the father and son got into an intense battle of wills that resulted in the son being banished to his room and a fit of yelling and pouting ensued. When my coworker showed up to dinner, the little boy had taken his "Daddy and Me" book and propped it up on the couch with a large scrawled sign declaring it to be "For Sale".

Objection! Hearsay, that testimony is hearsay!

So lately Ellis has been really stubborn. And when he doesn't want to do something he needs to do, and can't do something else until it is done, he runs upstairs and hides down under the covers. Yesterday, he fell asleep under his winter comforter and when I pulled him out he told me he needed to take a rest and slept for a good 3 hours.

Today, he didn't want to put his Go Fish cards away and when I came in from getting gas in my eye to eat dinner, I went upstairs to try to talk to him. It was about 85 degrees and he was under our winter comforter getting his pout on. So I peel back the covers and he laughs because of how good he was at hiding and then we have this conversation:

Me: Hi Ellis. What's going on?

Ellis: Cafrine tried to make me put my cards away.

Me: Well they're your cards and if you got them out you need to put them away.

Ellis: We didn't even get to play the game!

Me: That doesn't matter. If you got them out, then you need to put them away.

Ellis (crying a little): You weren't there to see what happened if I got them out!

Law school anyone?

Garden Notes

Well the garden is at that phase where it is all pretty much hopes and dreams. I got the rest of the boxes in yesterday, mulched the space between and built two tepees for the beans and cucumbers to climb. Today was planting day and it began with a wild Ellis at the nursery in the next town. They did manage to get home though, all in one piece with plenty of seedlings.

We put in tomatoes (cherry, roma, hybrid, heirloom), red pepppers, lettuce, pole beans, summer squash, zucchini and cucumbers. I also made a heap over by the raspberries where we put in some manure and hard squash as an experiment. We will add some peas this week since we forgot to get them at the nursery. The first planting from earlier in the week is doing well. All seedlings survived and the kale and beats are sprouting. We are looking forward to a hot sunny week, so hopefully things will get off to a good start. The 3 cherry bushes, 2 apple trees, 2 walnuts, 4 service berries, 2 native plums and 5 high bush blueberries all have leafed out to varying degrees. About half of the new raspberry plants have leaves and the old ones have little blooms.

Here is the view from above the garden to give you some idea of the drop we had to contend with. 17 inches over 24 ft. Back there where the sun is setting you can actually see Lake Champlain but I couldn't get the camera set up right to catch the glare for you, so you will have to trust me. Before the leaves on the trees you could see the lake through the trees at several points, especially from the balcony at sunset, but now it is limited to this one crack.

This is the crazy lilac bush (to be pruned once flowers are done) that I mentioned in a previous post. The smell of this thing when one is working on something in the garage is overwhelming, almost like walking into "The Body Shop" in some mall and thinking that you can taste the soap because the smell is so strong.

I also built a new bird feeding station and put that up today. No pictures until it is decked out with feeders though as the design has gotten some crap from the peanut gallery. Catherine saw it and said, "hey, what time is the crucifixion?", because it does vaguely resemble a cross.

We also picked up a used lawn mower, which had a problem right out of the gate (weak battery it turns out, rather than a bad starter) so I have to fix that before I can mow and have the lawn tidy so that all of our other work looks worth it.

Also, does hardwood mulch somehow warp the space-time continuum such that 3 cubic yards of the stuff weighs 100 pounds when you are lugging the bag but then only covers 3 square feet? How does it do that?

late vs. never...Mother's Day

Okay, I've been trying to find the time to get these pictures up for almost 2 weeks. So here goes some crappy text to go along with them.
The boys took Catherine and me out on the Spirit of Ethan Allen for brunch trip for Mother's Day. The boat cruises around Lake Champlain and so we were a little apprehensive about going out on a day predicted to be rainy and cool. Luckily, it is mostly indoor space and so the weather proved to not be a problem at all. Ellis loved it immediately, because the first thing that happened was we were seated at tables with fruit cups waiting for us. Here he is munching on a strawberry before even bothering to remove his coat:

The boat tour itself was nice, very smooth with good views of the Adirondacks.

And there was even a rose each for Catherine and me:

Maddox was happy to have lots of captive adults for snuggling:


Ellis, though, preferred to stick with eating, eating, and more eating:


As we headed back towards the dock, I thought we might take advantage of the time to get a couple pictures of the family:

As if getting everyone to look at the camera and not cry, frown, or stick out their tongues wasn't hard enough, Ellis discovered a tray of cream puffs mid-way through the impromptu photo session:

So this is as close as we could come:

Garden, yard, responsibilities

The last few weeks have seen us abandon most other stuff around the house (repairing vehicles, improving the house, having fun) in order to make a big push into improving the grounds around our lovely estate. It has been interesting to see Spring, such as it is, arrive. We found out that:

1. The lilac bush has dark purple lilacs.

2. The forsythia is ridiculous looking.

3. The person here before us really really liked bleeding heart plants.

4. There are lots of raspberry plants in the edge of the forest.

5. Said raspberry plants are intermingled with dense wild roses and plain old brambles.

6. At one time, there was an extensive apple orchard that is now choked by the forest below our driveway.

7. Only one of our mature apple trees is likely to be productive.

8. Raccoons are more of a nuisance than bears.

9. Three finch feeders will attract two dozen finches at one time.

10. We do not own one contiguous square foot of level ground.

11. It is possible to go until the third week of May in VT without mowing the lawn.

12. Waiting until the fourth week of May to mow may be disastrous.

Step one toward improving the grounds was going a little nuts on Gurney's website. They had a half-off-orders-over-$200 special. It is all in the ground now. The additions include:

12 Heritage Raspberry Plants

3 Patriot Blueberry Bushes (Early Yield)

1 Elliot Blueberry Bush (Middle Yield)

1 Blue Something or Other Blueberry Bush (Late Yield)

2 Native Plums

1 Honeycrisp Apple

1 Lil' Big Gala Apple

2 Black Walnuts (We were stuck at $183 so those two trees saved us $83)

3 Hanson's Cherry Bushes

4 Saskatoon Blueberries, Service Berries or whatever you want to call them

Pretty much, the area to the north side of the house is now orchard. We can probably get several more trees in there. The Hanson's cherries and Saskatoons I would call real experiments as some people love the fruit and others find it blah or only good for cooking. Either might make a nice mead though and they yield quickly and were strategically placed for appearance and blocking the view of the road. The walnuts are in the main yard away from the others where evidence (stumps and google earth) indicates large trees were before.

Ellis really enjoys going out to help water and did help quite a bit with digging the holes. Here he is wearing his work boots and standing next to a native plum. Notice the leaves. Pretty much everything is showing signs of life, which was a relief since it all arrived the day before a snow storm.

Step two was the elimination of some of the yard by converting it over to wild flowers. We will see how this turns out. We got the seed from a local operation that ships all over the country. They contract with farmers all over so they can make mixes appropriate to the different regions of the US. We chose two patches along the drive that were going to either be difficult to mow or pointless to keep as grass. Germination was evident this weekend.

Step three has been the vegetable garden. This is the part where not owning any level ground has been a real killer, particularly if we want something like full sun.

We are putting in two boxes like this one and two smaller boxes as well. We planted a few cold weather plants tonight: broccoli, kale, beets, cauliflower. Notice the rocks in the portion not planted. Our soil leans toward clay and rocks so we have adopted what my dad called "dig yourself a pot" soil improvement. I suspect next year we will add more raised beds and just have some decent black dirt brought in, if we are sure we want to keep the garden in this location.

Ellis helped with the planting tonight and was pretty cute. I read him one of the seed packages, including the depth and spacing instructions and he ran off to the garage to get his ruler out of his tool box so we could make sure we got it right. Surprisingly, this was a more detail oriented approach than I had planned to adopt.

Like a lot of little kids, Ellis has trouble avoiding stepping on plants. Tonight, he stepped on the broccoli seedlings while they were still in the plastic trays, while they were laying on the ground to check spacings and after they had been planted. After hearing, "Ellis you're stepping on a plant...now you are on another one...honey you have to pay attention to where your feet are... Ellis look down what are you standing on?", Ellis got this exasperated look on his face and said, "Dad, they will get used to it!"

I am struggling to not bite off even more. We have a damp low spot that would be perfect for elderberries and they are available. It is also the time of year to plant hops and the brew store here has the rhizomes and they are cheap. One reason we have done so much this year is because of the time it takes to get stuff established. Since the elderberries would be a relatively small amount of work and take up an area that will be like mowing a swamp, I will likely do those. But, the hops will have to wait. I just don't have the time or energy to figure out where we want them and build the necessary structure and from what I understand you really want to have the structure in place from day one.

three months of Maddox

Maddox is still pretty much in eat-sleep-poop mode, but is smiling more and starting to talk his little baby talk language. His grip has strengthened quite a bit and he constantly grabs at clothing and the little tiny hairs on the back of our necks (well, Catherine's and mine; Trey and Ellis don't have hair long enough). Along with gripping, he's getting more aware of his hands and is pretty reliable getting them into his mouth. However, he doesn't have complete control over them and still thrashes around quite a bit. I had to explain this to Ellis one morning this week when they were "snuggling" and Ellis exclaimed "Mom, baby blue punched me in the eye. this eye!" Well, maybe Maddox WAS aiming. We'll never know. Not much sign of preparing to roll over, though he does somehow manage to follow me across the bed at night and is smooshed up against my side whenever I wake up. He remains super-snuggly for daytime sleeping too and spends many hours cuddling with Aunt Catherine with his head pressed against her neck. He's still an extremely cooperative baby, so much so that I worry that we will pay for it later. Also, he is giant. No pediatrician appointment this month, so we guess he's around 18 pounds. Anyway, here are a few pictures.

genius

Thanks to his hardworking teachers, Ellis is getting pretty good at forming his letters. And, oh look, he's already writing one of the most important words in the language:

just give me some of those dern fern fritters...in which we are obliged to contribute to public broadcasting

Ellis loves fruit with a passion, with the exception of cantaloupe and this, we haven't really seen him fail to devour any fruit that's been introduced. Vegetables, though, are much more of a struggle. Cucumber, corn, and the occasional pea are about all that we can get past his lips.

But he's been watching a lot of Dinosaur Train with Aunt Catherine and particularly singing the earworm tunes that are a feature of each episode. I was not prepared, however, for him to burst out into Hungry Herbivores, while taking giant bites of lettuce (lettuce!) followed by broccoli the following night. So here's the annoying/magical gift of HH.

Profound this kid is

Ellis continues to develop sound reasoning skills. Several hours after I mentioned that it might rain, his mother told him that we would need to water all of the new trees again later and he said, "no we won't mom because rain is made of water."

I find it pretty interesting when he translates a word or phrase to a new context. As I was digging a very big hole for the first tree, Ellis looked at all of the dirt that I was throwing on the tarp and said to me, "Dad! What are we going to do with all of this scrap dirt." He has heard the word "scrap" associated with wood, dough and paper, but he applied it to the dirt all on his own.

He has also started pointing with tall man which means that just about every time he is excited about something, some innocent bystander is being "given the finger". Since he is four and everything is new and exciting, this means a lot of potential to offend.