What a Difference a Month Makes

This year has been a funny year for gardening. The winter was brutal and so some perennials died back a bit. We also had a super cool spring and so we got started a bit late on planting the veg.

Just a bit over a month ago, this is what our newly planted vegetable garden looked like:
 

And as of a few days ago, after a serious weeding, it looked like this:

There are teeny tomatoes on all of the tomato plants.  Tiny cucumbers are growing. I have already made one small lunch batch of pesto from backyard basil and have used dill in a salad made with farmer's market potatoes.  It's so great to be able to walk out to the backyard at dinner time to "shop" for ingredients we need.

Gardening is like magic.  I mean, it's hard work, I guess.  But after such a miserable winter, it's hard to believe that all of this green and growing and bounty will return.  And that it grows like weeds on top of that?  It makes me feel lucky and it makes me feel proud that we have been working this ground for seven years now, creating a bed that supports all of this life and food production.

As proof of that. . . as I was weeding the whole garden on Sunday, I thought, "Why don't we use gardening cloth to keep these weeds down?"  But once I was done weeding and could see the darkness and loamy-ness of the soil, I thought, "We worked hard to make that soil so rich and pretty.  I'm not covering that up."  I am a silly and vain gardener as it turns out.

Plus, new for 2014! Dan has made me three trellises for container gardening: 

 

Our veg plot is so small, that it's hard to give up space to large trailing plants like watermelon or winter squash.  So, this year, I'm growing those and summer squash in containers with the hopes of growing them vertically and training a number of them up on to the trellises.  It's just a side bonus that they will also cover up our boring gray garage for a few months.

I definitely got a late start on these, but squash grow so quickly that I'm not worried.  And those containers are jam-packed with organic potting soil and manure.  By next month, I expect them to all be two to three feet up the trellises. And I have dreams of late summer watermelon and winter squash dotting the trellis in tiny support hammocks.

Fingers crossed.

Nesting

So, on Thursday we have our first meeting with the adoption agency post-home study. Which means we're clicking up the big roller coaster hill towards finally going live with our birth mother letter and producing birth mother books so that potential birth mothers can find us and decide whether they might be interested in placing their babies with us.

Ridiculously exciting.  As soon as our profile is up online, I will share it with all of you, and maybe, if you like me and the Daniel, you could pass it along?  We're looking to adopt from Illinois or Indiana.

Anyhoo, we've done some work and searched our hearts and thought deeply about why we want a child and why each other would be a good parent, and it's been fun.  But it's also felt like super active waiting.  And, I think it's fair to say that we're ready to get past that and down to the business of knowing a birth mother/family and raising a baby. But there doesn't seem to be a way to rush this process, so my solution to help allay the anxiousness?  Nesting.

My first completed project is burp cloths. Six, so far, though if I can find another towel that we care little about, that number will likely double.  Here's the first batch:

Always good to have a fabric stash hanging around when you want to do an impromptu project to keep you from obsessively reading the 500th online article about cotton diapering.

I am also still underway working on stripping and repainting a piece of furniture for the baby's room.  While on a family walk, we found the bottom half of a built-in hutch and brought it home.  It will be a perfect dresser for baby once done.  But it's been a total monster to strip--layers and layers and layers of paint and one final stubborn heavy coat of shellac. The stripping is pretty much done.  Now I need to clean it with mineral spirits, sand it, prime it and then paint and stain away.

In the mail is coming a bunch of cotton gauze for swaddling blankets and yards of cute flannel for receiving blankets.  I have always disliked flannel.  The patterns are substantially awful--cutesie, terrible pastel colors, ugly, ugly, ugly--but thanks to Fabric.com, I have found great flannel and I am inordinately excited.  Look at some of these patterns:

The last two are so cute, I sort of want to frame them and keep them forever and ever and ever. Good to know that flannel with good design exists out there. . .

Anyhoo, all of this making and doing to keep the waiting feel like prep time instead of just waiting.

The Past Week