After letting our house sit on the market for well over a year with nary a nibble, we decided to bring the farm to the city. Urban farming, if you will. But, lack of soil makes that difficult! My neighbor suggested something called Hugelkultur and then this weekend, he started collecting this and that and before we knew it, Andrew's empty planting box was a Hugelkultur system!
This creation is an amazing display of scavenging, reusing, and making do. Andrew created the planter from old doors destined for the landfill. It's quite large and when we moved it to the end of the driveway, it now gets tons of sun.
Rotten logs were scavenged from the abandoned house down the street and used as the bottom layer. The logs will hold moisture, create air pockets, and eventually decompose to create rich soil.
The logs were lined up to create the bottom layer.
The box is on a slope, so a tarp was positioned to help prevent run-off. Since this was a free project, it was a pretty sad looking tarp!
Rotting leaves and other plant-stuff was scooped up from the alley to fill in around the logs.
Then compost soil was placed on top of that.
We had a great deal of child slave labor. Always a good thing.
This corner is at the alley where the telephone pole is. Tons of leaves had gathered there over the years and started to decompose. With a little ingenuity, now it houses a grape vine to grow up the telephone pole and a blackberry bush which will vine across the driveway.
One more layer of soil is needed and then I get the fun job of planting! I can't wait to see how well this garden produces.
I am joining in on Elizabeth Foss' Needle and ThREAD link up this week. I am doing so in order to TOTALLY SHOW OFF.
But not me. These are the quilts made by the amazing kids I had at the homeschool co-op this year. These kids were great - so eager to learn and so hard working. They did a great job!
My knitting has slowed lately! So sad! I finally started on a sweater for Andrew with yarn I purchased last summer at a fiber fest. It's a hand dyed, one ply wool and it is seriously delicious. It's wonderful to knit. I am using the Jones & Vandermeer Nathan Vest pattern. It's super easy, but turns out a classy sweater vest.
My mom bought the kids a fabulous gardening book: Kids First Gardening Book This is definitely our new favorite book! As I write, the kids are making a "wormery" with Andrew. This afternoon, the kids and I made a fun herb planter. This book is chocked full of wonderful gardening ideas! So fun.
We've been gardening like crazy people here on our tenth of an acres urban plot. If you want an eight year olds perspective, Grace is blogging it at www.graceblog03.blogspot.com
(Yarning Along with Ginny! Go check out the other great entries!)
It seems that, at the ripe old age of 22 months, Avila is potty trained. My kids have been all over the board with potty training, but she is definitely the youngest. I credit this to cloth diapers, cheering older siblings, and ample doses of naked time.
With the youngest two kids, we have approached this different.y Not that we ever went about potty training with rewards and punishment or any other crazy games. We've always been really lax, but with these two girls, (the two earliest to ditch the dipes) we have been even more lax. How can you get upset when a 22 month old has an accident?? So basically, she ran around in the buff, we praised her when she went, said "oops" when she didn't, and in no time, she pretty much got it. Easy peasy!
For the first time, I think ever, we have no one in diapers! Crazy! Avi can hand down her basket of diapers to her new little to-be-born cousin!
This evening, I ran out and bought her some new tiny undies (size 2T - so cute!!). She was so proud of them that she insisted on wearing every single pair at the same time!
We had a busy,but fun-filled weekend. Grace was thrilled to be invited to her new friends roller skating birthday party. She had never been roller skating before, so it was quite an adventure.
Sunday we went to the annual "Bug Bowl" at Purdue. There are many educational and cultural benefits to living next to a University and Bug Bowl is one of them! We all learned so much and had a really great time. Bella was even chosen to be a Cockroach Jockey at the Cockroach Races! She was too shy to go up on her own, so I had to join her.
Andrew discovered the PU Butcher Shop and bought a stash of beef jerky. Avila approved :)
We also learned all about beekeeping, something we have been pining over for a while now. It just might be time to jump on the bandwagon. Purdue offers wealth of information to the aspiring beekeeper as well!
M exciting score of the day was when I convinced Andrew to attend the sheep shearing demo and ask if he could have the wool (for his crazy wife). We smelled like barn for the rest of the day as we hauled our enormous stash of wool around, but it was totally worth it!
Sunday evening we attended a fundraiser dinner for the Wabash Valley Youth Symphony. It's an annual dinner held at a locally owned Indian restaurant. The food is amazingly yummy AND they do free henna! Annie and Martin went with us and we had so much fun. The henna girl had to yell at me once for laughing too much and thus shaking and making her job a little more difficult.
I mentioned before that I participated in an Easter craft swap over at This Cosy Life. It was great fun! I made knitted wool eggs and peg gnomeys. When I went to take pictures, my batteries died after one shot. So this pretty crummy shot is all I have!
In return, I got a great stash of handmade creations. They were used to fill the Easter "baskets" for the kids.
Actually, in lieu of baskets this year, I used potted plants. It was a fantastic comprimise! I despise Easter grass, so I have been trying to come up with a viable alternative.
I love the idea of growing pots of real grass, but I seriously lack the organization and forethought to make something like that a reality.
Pretty purple potted pansies was the perfect solution! I think this will be out new tradition. The kids loved getting their very own flowers. It was so fun and sweet to tuck gnomes and felt eggs under the flower leaves!
Of course, when you pot them at 10:30 the night before, some kids get coffee cans or plastic cups instead of really pots! Hopefully next year I'll do a better job!
The kids looked lovely at Mass. The girls wore their dresses from my brother in laws wedding last spring. Thankfully, Christopher served Mass and it didn't matter so much when we discovered that his dress shirt was way too small . . . about 15 minutes before he had to be at the church.
After Mass, we headed to my parent's for food and an egg hunt. The cousins all had fun romping around in search of eggs!
Easter was also Izzy's fourth birthday! Grace made special ice cream sundaes for everyone to celebrate.
I.
Where did the week go? I kept thinking I'd pop in to update, but here it is Friday again already! We had a great Trinity of Lenten Respite between St. Patrick's Day and St. Joseph's Day.
(Fantastic diaper courtesy of Annie, fantastic bum courtesy of Avila)
St. Paddy's day was quiet, as Grace spent the night at a friends and the boys were at a Super Cross event. But St. Joseph's Day more than made up for it with a neighborhood brawl and police showing up, literally, in our back yard.
II. Celtic Woman is THIS WEEKEND!!! I am SO excited!!!
III.
Blooms are popping up everywhere. These in particular made me smile. I got the bulbs from my aunt years ago and I believe they are from my grandparents farm. I have seen bits of green each year, but this is the first time they have flowered!
IV.
The beautiful weather spurred me to take this kids to the neighborhood park the other day. It is right next to the YWCA, where the local director of Planned Parenthood was giving a talk. I about died laughing when I saw THREE different friends going in to covertly gather information.
V.
Cute little girls interrupting a photo shoot. But who could resist?
VI.
We have been in the slooooow process of reorganizing our upstairs. The plan is to move the majority of clothing out of the kids rooms and into a storage system in the laundry room. I am hoping this effort will force me to cut down seriously on the amount of clothing everyone has as well as cutting down on the messes in the kids rooms.
When I saw a "cedar wardrobe" (which, it turns out, meant particleboard with a cedar veneer) on facebook at the local supply and surplus store, I jumped at the chance to get it. My husband may divorce me now. (Actually, he was quite cheerful about it.)
It only weighs roughly seven tons, but he and I manhandled it up the stairs (it only took an hour!). Visions of death-by-wardrobe may haunt me forever.
And then we got to the top of the stairs and the $@%! thing fell apart!
Sweet Andrew patiently put it back together for me.
And soon it will happily house the kids clothing. We did have to tell them to NOT climb inside looking for Narnia.
VII.
I am still working away on the eggs for the Easter Swap over at This Cosy Life. I finally got the pattern figured out so that not only do they look like eggs, but they open to tuck in a toy of bit of candy as well. I *may* attempt to write up the pattern and share it here. I have never written a pattern before, so we'll see. Sometimes I craft like a cook - a little of this and a little of that. If nothing else, I'll share pics soon.
Yesterday, our homeschool co-op shirked all education responsibility and capitalized on this fantastic weather we've been having. We canceled our regular classes and met at Happy Hollow Park instead. The kids had a wonderful time romping with friends in the sunshine! Bella insisted that the name of said park is "Happy Halloween Park". She's such a goofball!
II.
Tonight is the Pinewood Derby! I have a couple of very excited boys, ready to race. I am pretty sure victories aren't in our future, since they care way more about appearance than speed! PeterXavier made his look like a mouse, complete with wavy tail and Christopher's is a stylin' silver with gold stripes.
III.
Bella's been on a roll lately with saying silly things. Last night we had a impromptu visit with friends down the street and her friend Helen was running around without a shirt on. (Oh happy 80* weather in March!). Later, Bella commented on her shirtlessness saying, "I bet Helen wanted to wear shirt, but it was probably in the wash-ish-a-sheen." I'm not sure which is funnier - her pronunciation of washing machine or her assumption that Helen only has one shirt!
IV.
Grace, many moons ago!
Grace is very excited to have been invited to her very first over night at a friends house this weekend! I can't believe she's ready and willing, as she is usually so shy. I've been happy to see both her and Christopher grow to be so independent and confident. When they were both really small (and my only kiddos), I caught a great deal of flack for indulging their attachment to me and not letting them "cry it out" either at night or to be left with other adults. It's nice to see the all the Attachment Parenting talk that attached young children grow to be more independent bigger children might actually be true!
V.
On that same note, it's interesting that when you have more kids than the average joe, people stop giving you unsolicited parenting advise. (They may give you other unsolicited advise, but let's just take what we can get here!)
VI.
Last night, we were driving around and passed a McDonald's with a playplace. Bella commented on how fun it looked. This set Grace off on a tangent about the horrors of McD food. I was cracking up in the front seat as she described nuggets as "crushed bones, food coloring, and poison!" Once she stepped down from her little soapbox, PX piped up "Well it tastes good to me!!"
VII.
My main agenda today is to knit an insane number of wool eggs. I am participating in an Easter craft swap, hosted over at This Cosy Life. I am a bit behind and more than a bit intimidated by the craftiness of the other ladies! Yikes! I'll share my finished product before I ship them out.
Happy Weekending! For more quick takes, visit Jen.
My brother and his family are visiting this weekend. Ben has four girls, which brings the total number of children to nine. This is a large number in and of itself, but add to that the fact that the oldest child is only nine and you have yourself a veritable circus! (The exact breakdown, for the overly curious, is 9,9,8,6,5,4,3,1.5,1)
Thankfully, God has blessed us with warm weather and sunshine, so the kids have spent a good deal of time outside. The other wonderful aspect of this little adventure is that the kids get along marvelously!
.
Even the two youngest, Avila and Ronia, get along! They love playing in the sink together.
There was a time when Grace and Angelica didn't get along at all. But now, they love each other and spent hours turning the jungle gym into a magical fairy house.
The kids took part in a track meet this weekend with the Purdue Track Club. They had a great time and all did very well. Even Bella got to run the hurdles, although even the tiny ones were too high for her to jump! She would run up to it, stop, step over, and then take off running again!
Christopher joyfully leaped over each hurdle, while Grace plowed through with gritted determination.
The most exciting part of the day was when BOTH boys took blue ribbons in their class for the "TurboJav", which was like throwing the javelin. PeterXavier almost took off my head with his powerful shot! But when he got first place for it, I forgave him!
PeterXavier has a love for all things kitchen related. Be it eating the food or making it. Lately, he has been making the other kids lunch a few times a week. The other day, he even brought me a quesadilla!
He was quite proud of the lovely yolk in this egg.
The girls are enjoying eating his little masterpieces!
