Grass????

.... I certainly hope so because it has been a lot of work. The good news is that, if the grass actually grows, the backyard remodel project is coming to a close.

A week ago I planted the last 5 of my raspberry plants. Three of the first five plants that I planted are already growing shoots. I have 5 Boyne plants and 5 Caroline (ever bearing) plants. Next year, I am looking forward to getting to eat raspberries from mid July through the first frost. I also finished the rock bed in the corner of the sidewalk. (Half of the rock was sifted from along the edge of the sidewalk where the raspberries are now planted. Reusing has been the theme for our backyard.)
Tuesday B helped me plant our asparagus. Can't wait to eat that next year too. We also worked compost into the garden beds so I can plant those too. (I should have planted a month ago. Our weather has been so warm.) The asparagus box is the one only partially full of dirt and the blue tubs contain the dirt we have to throw on as the plants grow.

Wednesday and Thursday it was all about weeding. The whole backyard had to be weeded in preparation for seeding. B helped me for an hour and a half, the rest of the time I was on my own. 8 hours of weeding later it looked like this,

and three hours later, I was done. I actually loved every minute of it. I love to dig in the dirt. My 40 year old body was complaining pretty bad by the end though...my back, my legs, my wrists, and even the muscles in the fingers of my left hand became exhausted.

I gave the yard a good water last night to get some moisture in the soil. We have had no significant rain all spring and the ground was completely dry. Then this morning I spread the seed and threw out the straw.
And, I learned that as much as I would have loved to be a farmer (let me do physical labor outside all day....it makes me happy) I probably would not have survived. By the time I finished throwing all of that straw around the yard my nose was running like a faucet and every inch of exposed skin was itching so bad I could hardly stand it.

P.S. Please excuse the orange fencing. It is due to the construction happening on our back hill. Note our beautiful new retaining wall in the back of the last picture. It really is going to look nice once it is done. Once they take the orange fence down, I am going to have to seed the edges of my yard that I couldn't do right now due to the fence.

Our Miracle of Elijah and the Widow of Zarepath

A week ago I was in the commissary doing my weekly grocery shopping. With gas prices rising, food prices have been rising. R’s cost of living adjustments the last two years haven’t kept up with rising gas and food prices, let alone the increasing consumption of our growing family. Our budget continues to be tight. As I was shopping on Thursday, I was a little discouraged. I was thinking about all of the extra food that I was buying for R’s birthday party Friday night, and the extra food that I was buying for the company we were having on Sunday as we’d invited a couple of sets of friends over to watch General Conference with us. I wondered about how much all of it was going to cost. As I walked the aisles of the store I thought back to the story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath who he asked to make bread for him from her last little bit of meal and oil. (It had been shared in sacrament meeting last Sunday.) I also thought about the people I see in the commissary each week with grocery carts overflowing and mine, that is usually only half full of food. I reflected on thoughts I’d been having over the last few weeks when week after week I go to the check out counter with only a half a cart full of groceries, amazed that I can feed our growing family (to included a teenage son) with so comparatively little food. I unloaded my cart wondering what the total would be this week, only to be shocked when, in spite of all of the extra food I was buying, the total was what it always averages out to be. As I paid for the groceries, the thought came clearly to my mind that I was witnessing our family’s own little miracle…our version of Elijah and the widow. That, in spite of rising food costs, and feeding extra people, and a growing teenage boy, our family is fed and full on such a small grocery budget and such a small amount of food. I thought about all of the many people we have fed over the past nine years that we have lived here.

It was wonderful to share this experience with the kids this week in Family Home Evening and testify to them of this ongoing miracle that is blessing our lives because we are trying to serve others and do the right thing. (And R added, "because we’re paying our tithing.")

The Orchid Show

Thanks to a sweet friend, I got to visit the NY Botanical Garden for the first time on Friday. It was Member's -Only Preview Day for The Orchid Show. She and I were talking at dance class Thursday night. (Her gran-daughter P - yes...same initial because she has the same name as our P, is in C's dance class.) We were talking about fun places to visit and she mentioned the Botanical Garden. When I said I had never been there she said, "I'm going tomorrow to see the Orchid Show, you should come with me." And so I did and we had a wonderful time.

I really didn't know anything about Orchid's and had no idea there were so many varieties. They grow naturally in rain forests but up in the trees, not on the ground. Consequently, they don't grow in soil. They get their moisture from the air and they are anchored into the moss, etc., growing up in the trees.

I was so glad I took my camera. All of the following are orchids. Note the variety in their appearance. Orchids consist of 3 parts that vary greatly from species to species (sepal, petal, lip). These variations and all possible combinations of their variations result in a huge variety of flowers, not only in colors but in appearance.








Pansy Orchids



Lady Slipper Orchids



Little Dainty Orchids (see the little pink orchids above the pink pansy orchids.)


As a main attraction of the show, the Botanical Garden brought in Patrick Blanc a french man who was the first to create Vertical Gardens. He has designed and built several growing gardens around the world. If you want to see some interesting pictures of his work, click here.

For the orchid show, he designed several vertical gardens using orchids and complementary plants. These are much more dramatic in person. I couldn't get the lighting right to show the real contrasts, colors, and textures. They're kind of washed out in the pictures.




I also saw some other fun flowers I took a picture of a few of the most unique ones.
Bird of Paradise.

Not sure what this is but thought it looked interesting.

How about a pink pine cone. These delicate petals look just like a pine cone and are the size of a pine cone. (Sorry about the focus, not sure why I didn't get this one in focus.)


Lilly pads in bloom.

And we thought this was a unique pink flower/seed pod that we saw in one of the orchid displays.

President's Day Weekend

We are really going to miss my brother and sister-in-law when they move. It is so nice to have family close by to spend time with and to visit on long weekends, who live somewhere with lots of great places to visit, and who even watch our kids so we can have a mini get away while we are visiting.

With no school for B on Friday and only a half day of school for the girls, which we decided they could miss, we loaded up Thursday night and drove to D.C.

Friday morning while my brother and sister-in-law were working, we headed in to D.C. with the kids, to check more things off of our D.C. "to do" list. We started with a stop at the White House visitor center followed by a tour of the White house. It is a self-guided tour so you get to walk at your own pace, but there are people in every room that can answer questions you might have.

Sorry, no pictures...you can't take cameras into the White House. (Here is a link to an online tour though where you can see pictures of what we saw. ) We entered the White House on the ground floor, the level the president enters on if he flies in on a helicopter that lands on the South Lawn. We only saw a few rooms. Dividers were set up about 1/3 of the way down the hallway since the opposite end of the hallway is where the kitchen is as well as the exit that takes you over to the West Wing. We did get to look into the China Room, the Vermeil Room, and the Library. There was also a display of several of the China sets in a hutch in the hallway. I enjoyed getting to look at the China.

Next we climbed some stairs arriving on the 1st floor at the end of the cross hall. We walked through the East Room (which we learned Theodore Roosevelt's Children used as a roller skating rink), then through the green room, the blue room, and the red room. We saw beautiful art work and furniture and enjoyed the view out of the blue room windows. They just roll the carpet out of the way and move some of the furniture so you can walk right through the rooms. (You can see that in the virtual tour picture of the red room.) The kids loved seeing the beautiful silk on the walls. They thought it was cool that instead of painting the wall, they put fabric on the wall. We would have seen the dining room but it was under renovation. Then it was back out into the cross hall and we were now at the other end. The cross hall is that long hallway with the red carpet runner on the floor, that you will often see pictures of the President walking down. In the middle of the cross hall on the north side is the portico and entrance. We got to see the stairs that the President and guests use when they come down for State Dinners and are formally announced. (You can see the same thing in the virtual picture of the north portico.) It was fun to get to see these famous spaces in person. Now when we see them on T.V. we will have a greater appreciation for what we are seeing.

After we finished up at the White House we hurried back to the car and got our cameras so we could take pictures the rest of the day. We stopped back at the White House to take a couple of pictures of the north side. (We'd taken pictures of the South side on our last D.C. trip.)

Then we walked the whole length of Pennsylania Ave. from the White House to the Capitol Building. That was a hike. We stopped mid way to have lunch at our favorite lunch spot, the cafe in the basement of the National Archives.

On our walk, we passed this statue that P found fascinating and wanted her picture take in front of.

Finally we made it to the capitol building. Originally we were to have a guided tour by staff from our Representative's office but something came up last minute so they had to send us on the general tour. We still got to see some pretty interesting things though.

Each state has been invited to send two statues to the capitol building. Many of these statues are in the Rotunda and in the visitor's center. Others are scattered throughout the capitol building. While we were in the visitor's center, waiting for our tour to begin, we saw one of Alabama's statues...Helen Keller. I had to take a picture since I was fascinated by Helen Keller when I was a child.

The Rotunda was amazing. There was so much to see in that beautiful space, but we were kind of hurried through everywhere. We did learn that if the Statue of Liberty was placed in the center of the Rotunda, she wouldn't even reach the top. That is how tall the space is.

We also saw the old House Chamber ...a beautiful room containing several statues from the states.

Scattered around the floor are plaques. Each plaque marks the desk location of a former representative who later became president. We found Lincoln's plaque.

Then, in the basement we got to see the compass rose that marks the center of D.C. It is from this point that the 4 avenues begin, dividing D.C. into 4 sections.

Our last stop was back in the Visitor's Center where we had fun quizzing ourselves on government facts and capitol building trivia. P was fascinated by the size of "Freedom", the statue that stands on the dome of the capitol building. She wanted her picture taken next to the life size replica so that you could see how big it really is.

After a long day and lots of walking, we returned to my brother's place for dinner. Then, we left the kids and R and I headed off for some couple time. Usually we would have filled Saturday with a ton of our own sight seeing but I was so tired, we spent half the day sleeping. We finally made it back into D.C. to visit some of the Art Museum and eat some yummy Mexican food for dinner, then walk around a shopping mall.

Meanwhile, the kids got to watch a movie in the Apartment Building's movie theater (a tradition for when they stay with Uncle B and Aunt L...complete with a bag of their favorite candy, thanks to Aunt L.) The next morning they played the Farming Game, also one of their favorite things to do with Uncle B. Then they headed out for a picnic at Gravely Point where they had great views of planes coming in to land. C took these pictures and she said she didn't even zoom, this is how close the planes were. She also said it was really loud.

They also bowled, got in a car accident (they were rear ended but everyone seems fine), and then spent the evening playing Guitar Hero. Uncle B and Aunt L know how to treat their nieces and nephew to a good time.

We all met back up on Sunday to spend the day together before we headed home Monday morning. Thanks brother and sister-in-law for a wonderful weekend!