In May we celebrated not one but two birthdays!
R turned 1.
And C turned 4.
J also finished up 1st grade and did a really neat end-of-year celebration at her school.
We also kept getting strawberries into June!
The warmer weather really started setting in so we got in as much outdoor time as we could, hiking and working in the garden.
I also did the 8-mile family Tour de Nash with J and C.
We celebrated finishing with ice cream cones.
R said her first word this week (on Thursday): "Night night!"
We celebrated Passover last night with our friends, the Murdochs.
It's a little chaotic with kids, but I always enjoy reading through the Passover story. The girls watched the Disney's "The Prince of Egypt" and found it rather scary. Both of them cried when the Egyptians started killing Hebrew babies.
The story of the Exodus is pretty brutal. It's a common story throughout history - a story of a marginalized people at the hands of a privileged few that fear the marginalized will overcome them. It's so common that the nation I live in is guilty of it even now.
There were two things our Haggadah referred to that I had forgotten about:
We took some pictures of the girls in the strawberry patch this evening. They are really starting to come in!
They're starting to roll in!
Eighty-degree days are already upon us. On Thursday (April 13th) A ate our first ripe strawberry. Since then, J has already raided the garden several times to pick and eat "ripe" strawberries (she is now banned until we have an opportunity to pick some ourselves). Also on Thursday, A set out tomato starts that she has been tending for weeks now. Unfortunately, a gate was open and our extremely persistent Rhode Island Red hens got into the garden and picked the leaves off of four or five of the plants. Thankfully, some of them were still salvageable. We have made it clear to the girls that for the remainder of this season the hens are to stay inside the pen. They are little eating machines, and they are very persistent in their attempts to get into the garden and eat those delicious little plants we're setting out.
The fruit trees have all been blooming nicely. The flowers have mostly already come and gone (see last month's post), except for the Montmorency cherry trees (which are currently in bloom now). We have not gotten any cherries since planting them in the winter of 2011/2012. Here's to hoping we actually get some cherries this year. The plum tree is covered up with little green future-plums. Similarly, the two Elberta peach trees we planted last year (?) appear to have quite a few peaches.
We stopped at Bates Nursery yesterday and got three more trees:
I put the apricot tree, which requires more attention (i.e., watering during any dry spells) near the rear of the house. It's a small tree, only getting 8-10 feet tall. The peach tree went behind the existing peach trees (near the bees) and the nectarine tree went in the back corner.
A couple of weeks ago I also planted almost a dozen trees we got from the city (free trees!). There were four or five Cherrybark oak trees and six or so hazelnut trees. They were all bare-root and very small, so we may or may not be around to appreciate the shade or nuts from those trees!
The blackberries seem to be doing really well. If I can keep from mowing or weed-eating too closely, we might be getting quite a few berries this summer. I really like blackberries, so I'm really hoping we get a bumper crop this year. I worked on mulching some of them this morning and tying them up to get them off the ground.
There are a two grapevines and two muscadine vines that made it through the cold winter. I've also been tying those up and mulching around them in an attempt to keep down the weeds.
The only thing that probably doesn't appreciate the heat is the sugar snap peas. We might have planted them a little too late. It's always hard to tell when to plant those - too early and they freeze, too late and the heat stresses them out.
As we try to do every year, we made our annual trip out to our old rental house to take photos in the daffodils.
March was unusually warm, so the strawberries all started blooming very early. That meant that we had to make sure that when the occasional freeze did happen we they are all covered up. Frosts and freezes are normal in our area up until mid-April.
All of our fruit trees also put out blooms. The peach and plum trees were especially spectacular.
The new chickens have been doing well. We're getting eight or nine eggs a day, which means we no longer have to buy eggs at the store at all (in the past we've always had to supplement from the grocer). The chickens demolished our mulch pile by scratching around in it for bugs.
We also pulled more honey off the hives, about 2.5 gallons. Unfortunately, we lost one of the hives to hive beetles. The remaining hive, however, seems to be doing quite well. We ordered a second queen so we can split the hive.
C started taking violin lessons. She's just getting the mechanics down for now: learning to hold the violin and the bow.
J picked her piano lessons back up. She's already playing with both hands (melody on the right, chords on the left) and creating her own little riffs. Last week she had C playing a short ditty on the bass line while she riffed on the top.
R is crawling now, meaning we have to stay extra vigilant to make sure she stays out of her big sister's toys. She is also pulling up and standing. It won't be long until she's walking!
We watched all of the original Star Wars trilogy with J and C. They were quite excited about it. Now they ask nearly every friend, "Have you see Star Wars?" After seeing "The Force Awakens" J keeps asking when the next movie about Rey is coming out. When I told her she would be 8 when the next movie is out, she was crestfallen. Maybe we'll all go see that one in the theater!
February was another cold, grey month.
We were fortunate enough to escape a bit of the gray and take a nice trip to Panama City Beach. The drive was long and boring, but completely worth it.
It was, as A pointed out, one of the best trips we've taken. I snagged a decent deal on AirBNB that allowed us to stay right on the beach. Spring break season hadn't started yet, so we pretty much had the beach to ourselves. The water was a bit cold (60F), but that didn't stop us from hanging out on the beach. There was even another family staying at the same apartment that had girls the same ages as ours so they ended up playing on the beach for hours. We couldn't have asked for more. J filled up her journal with notes and illustrations about how much she enjoyed playing with Reese, Cole, and Rowan.
Both A and myself, on the other hand, were able to read to our hearts content!
Seriously, could introverts ask for more? I think not.
March is also the month that A usually gets seeds started. Indeed, our house is full of seed starts: tomatoes, snap-dragons, and more.
We also got back into the chicken business.
I got a fairly good deal on some 4-month-old hens. We got 6 Rhode Island Reds and 3 Ameracaunas. They are already laying lots of eggs! I put a bird netting across the pen to attempt to protect them from the neighborhood hawk - the reason we lost our previous flock. I'm pretty sure this hawk has gotten wise to all these hippies in East Nashville raising chickens. It's a veritable buffet.
R continues to show her growing personality. She claps at us constantly, showing "Hey, I can do this! You like this, right?" She also has four teeth now.
J and R are their regular ol' selves.
C is reading up a storm. She's also going to school with J on Fridays, which she seems to really enjoy.
March was great, but I'm ready for spring.
J reads constantly. I mean, constantly. She was at the dinner table tonight with her nose in a book (I have mixed feelings about it). She reads late into the night until we have to tell her to turn out the light. She passes out with piles of books in her bed. She reads in the car when we pick her up from school.
She tore through four of the "American Girls" series - Molly, Samantha, Kit, and Felicity. Molly was set in the WWII period, and J started asking all kinds of questions about the war, about the 1940's. We would ask questions about Molly and she'd tell us about how her dad was a doctor, etc. The questioning was partly driven by my disbelief that she was reading them so quickly (as in a book or two a day). When drilled on the content, however, she seemed to have retained a good bit of it.
She also read a three-book series on a "troll-fighting 11-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl" called Hereville. I wanted to introduce her to the graphic novel format and, wow, did she like it. I also picked up Last of the Sandwalkers but it was a bit too advanced. I'll have to revisit it in a couple more years.
We had a goal in January of both J and R reading out loud for fifteen minutes a day. We skipped a handful of days (less than 5) but we made good on the goal. It was pretty easy because both of them are pretty motivated. C is more than halfway through TYCTRI100EL so she's already reading simpler things.
After December's rather mild weather, January was a bit of a surprise.
At first, it just got a little bit colder.
Then it snowed a little and collapsed our hoop house (but, hey, no complaints - we got greens nearly all winter! Plus the spinach still survives.)
Then it snowed a lot more and absolutely squished the hoop house.
It snowed 8" in total on Friday, so we had the whole weekend to cavort. And cavort we did.
We wrapped up the evening by visiting Ugly Mugs for hot chocolate and witnessed an amazing sunset.
I could do with more snows like that. Unfortunately, that 8 inches was the most Nashville has gotten since 2003, so it's likely the girls will be almost adults before it happens again. I like to think we milked as much fun out of us as we could.
A is already getting out the seeds to start the spring garden.
The bees seem to be doing a-ok even with the cold snap.
And how's R, you ask? Well, she's fine. She has a couple of teeth now. She still steadfastly refuses to crawl, but she's able to scoot around on her butt. She does it veeerrry slowly. If I'm working from home and set my laptop 2 or 3 feet away from her, I'll be working away and look up when she's suddenly banging on my keyboard. I don't actually see her move - she just does.
She's hilariously picky about her food. Picky probably isn't the best word. She eats everything. She wants to look at it first - closely. If you sneak up on her with a spoon she'll just slap it away from her face (where Wilbur is happy to clean it up). If you approach more slowly, she will eyeball it for a few seconds, and finally open her maw.
It's fun to see her personality start to emerge a little more.
December was a bit weird. We had several days of weather in the mid-70s. Thus, we spent quite a bit of time outside (despite the fact that in Nashville it's dark by 5pm in December). The plants were quite confused and A had to remove a lot of strawberry blooms.
However, it was quite nice getting outside so much.
J got her hair cut short. It was her first trip to the salon. She got some new play ideas from it.
R is starting to eat more. She's a little picky about her food - she'll eat most anything but she wants to look at it, and even lick it, before she'll take a bite. She has also started clapping her hands when asked.
I was recently looking at some photos of C from three years ago and marveling about how quickly this time with a small baby goes by. It certainly does feel like our lives are an accelerating train. I want to soak up every minute of it as a gift.
Everyone was in the car, ready for the long drive to Texas for Thanksgiving. We made one last walk through the house to make sure heaters were off, computers were unplugged, and doors were locked. Of course, when we returned to the van C had already gotten out of her seat so we opened up her door, buckled her back in, and as A pulls the sliding van door shut it comes right off the rollers and falls into the driveway.
Not the best way to start a road trip. The fun part was that every mechanic was completely booked up, no one had time to fix it for us. I ended up removing the rollers, latching the door shut, and taping the lock down so no one would attempt to open it. Fun times. Our family in Texas tells us that if you have Tennessee plates you're allowed to drive without doors. I'll have to remember that next time.
R finally has a single tooth coming in. She's not crawling but she is sitting up and is much more engaged with her sisters. While J was not keen on cousins carrying her around, fawning over her, and generally unused to commotion, R, in contrast, seemed completely nonplussed by Thanksgiving.
A little vignette Google Photo built.