Summer Vacation Begins!

Last August, I accepted a full-time position at Walters State Community College's library. I LOVE my job- I get to do work I'm interested in and good at, I spend my days with co-workers whose company I totally enjoy, and the place is just, in general, a really great place to work. My new job also came with a nice little perk that I doubt I'll find any other time in my library career:

I work a 10-month contract. That means, as of June 15, I am off for the summer! It's been a strange adjustment, to be sure. It's been a long time since I've had a chunk of time off, and I had almost zero vacation time at my previous position, so it's been a huge relief. 

And here's the thing: we have to continue paying for daycare, otherwise Lukie would lose his spot at school. So, I'm working to find the right balance of extra time with my son and some time to get things done on the house. We have two years of deferred maintenance (ahhh, the child gap) to catch up on at the house. There is a lot of painting to be done, cleaning, organizing, all that fun stuff. Pete has to basically rebuild large sections of the porch and its railing, and we have three outdoor decks to paint, as well. So far, our summer schedule has been something along the lines of Lukie going to school at about 8:00 (after his pancakes and obligatory Mommy Snuggle, which has become a morning routine), I work until after his nap (he sleeps better at school, anyway), and then I get him and we come home and play. It's a pretty great life...can't I just always be a stay-at-home mom whose kid spends half the day at daycare? No?

As Pete put it, it's nice not having a job when you have a job. To be fair to myself, I'll note that I have worked my bottom off while at home. Last week, I painted all the bathroom trim and its two doors, in addition to touching up the trim in the kitchen. I planted a new rose bush and have been keeping up with the garden. On this week's schedule: paint the mudroom, paint the dining room trim and finish painting the new dining room window, work on an embroidery project that's been haunting me for possibly 2 years, process an insane amount of basil, and go through the kitchen for things to donate. Whew.

All while spending Tuesday at the Kingsport Splash Pad with Lukie and my dear friend Rebecca.

Now, for some pictures.

Blooming in the garden right now:

Above, those are black eyed Susan vines. They're on a neat trellis Pete hooked to the side of the house. They're right next to the new deck he's building. Below is a picture of the newly painted side door and the brand new dining room window. That's the new deck. Pictures to come when it's finished.

I'm a little obsessed with this flower, below. It's a coreopsis variety called Heaven's Gate. It's pretty and pink and lacy and I love it. I think I'll order a few more next summer...though I need to move this one because it ended up being a lot taller than expected.

I'm also really into this hosta, below. It's an Abique Drinking Gourd, and the leaves have this awesome curl to them which makes them almost cupped. It's in the corner of my new hosta garden. All the plants in here will get much bigger by next year, and whenever we leave this place, I'll definitely be taking starts. This hosta in particular is supposedly really neat when it's full grown; when it rains, the cupped leaves catch water until they are too heavy and then tip it. Apparently, it's like watching a living sculpture. I can't wait to see it next year!

That's also a deck that needs painting. See? Lots of painting to be done.

On to pictures of the inside of the house.

Our house has only one bathroom, but admittedly, it's pretty fabulous. We have plans to possibly add a second half bath upstairs, but they won't be happening this year, I don't think. The trim was poorly painted when we moved in, and over the years, it's taken a bit of a beating. I painted all of it, and also painted the two white doors to match the dark warm gray of the kitchen. I love it when a house flows from one room to another; seeing decor repeat itself in creative little touches makes it seem so much bigger and more cohesive.

The kitchen has undergone a major change or two in the last six months, as well. First, Pete built me a beautiful pantry cabinet for Christmas. Originally, we painted it mustard yellow, but in that small room, it just didn't work. I think in a larger, brighter kitchen, a big, colorful piece like that would have been fun, but in our kitchen, it looked a little forced and a lot too bright. So now, it's a nice charcoal milk paint color that blends with the trim, but has extra texture.

More pics of that to come later; Peter has since sealed it with a coat of polyurethane, so it's darker. I think I'm going to add a house tour page to the blog that I can periodically update with things we work over. So...I guess more on that eventually.

Pete's currently prepping for our big trip up North later in the summer. He bought some new rubber boots to wear when he's fishing in Canada, and Lukas has been very enamored of them.

And finally, I've also had time to work on a project I started a year and a half ago. For Lukie's first Christmas, I wanted to start making a map that would show all the places he visits throughout his childhood and trips we take as a family (and before we were a family). I bought a huge map, and Pete mounted it on foam core. I started embroidering it. I actually put our wedding trip out West on there, and then got busy with life and baby and work and stuff. I finally finished the wedding trip last week, and moved on to trips Lukas has taken. It's going to be fun to see it get filled up with lines as he grows up. Pete is going to build a frame for it, and I have to decide where it will go. I used to think above our bed, but I think maybe the dining room would be more fun, because we could show it to people and Lukie could tell them about his trips!

Above, our wedding trip. We started in Champaign-Urbana, drove to the Badlands, Yellowstone, Craters of the Moon (Idaho), northern Oregon, Cape Disappointment in Washington, down to the Oregon Dunes, and then inland to my Grandma Dot's house in Ashland, Oregon, where we got married. Then, we went out to the coast for a few more days, and finally high-tailed it back, stopping in Iowa before getting to Illinois. We camped the whole way and had so much fun...we can't wait to take Lukas on a southwest version of this trip when he's older. And, Pete and I plan to take a trip to the Northeast next year for our 5-year anniversary!

Lukie's trips, so far, have been mostly local to the South. He's been back and forth to IL a lot, of course, but he's also taken trips to Kentucky, North and South Carolina, and Georgia.

See? It's huge! Pete will be making a BIG frame, and it has to be removable so I can keep up with our vacations. Incidentally, this is not an easy project to embroider. After bruising my finger repeatedly, I finally lighted on a technique of using a pushpin to chart my course and then coming back and flipping the map over and over as I embroidered with floss. There's a lot of looking back and forth, especially since the needle often gets lost in the foam core between the front and the back.

I think the whole project will be worth it, though. Imagine what it will look like when he's a teenager!

Anyway, that's what's been going on lately! I'll be adding a house tour page sometime soon! Lots of things are changing around here!

My Grandma Noel and Mother's Day Adventures

It's been a crazy few weeks around here. Crazy and sad and exhausting, but also crazy and fun. Just at different times, I guess.

I went to Memphis April 22nd-25th and presented at the Tennessee Library Association conference. Lukie had given me a stomach bug earlier in the week, but I was well enough to drive to Memphis with my co-worker, Julie, on Wednesday. Well, I got there and the stomach bug made a nasty return and I spent the next 36 hours holed up in my hotel room, miserable. I got better by Friday morning, though, and Julie and I presented and, I have to say, we killed it. She would agree, I think!

I got back to find that Lukie and Pete had survived without me-- I think Lukie did better than either of us were expecting! The co-dependent part of me was sad he didn't miss me more, but the compassionate part of me was glad that he hadn't made it too hard on his daddy. He slept well while I was gone, though Peter learned that he does NOT like Lukie's bedtime habit of sticking his finger in the bellybutton of the person he's cuddling. I think he was glad that my belly button and I were back so that I could take over bedtime duties.

The week after Memphis was rough. My mom called me on Wednesday morning to tell me that my grandmother had slipped into a coma and that she had hours to days left. By 4 p.m., she was gone. 

My grandmother half raised me- I grew up next door to her and had no other neighbors for a mile around. My brother and I caught the bus at her house- so we went in and had whatever she was having for breakfast. We got off the bus and went to Grandma's house. We spent half our time in the summer there once we were old enough to stay on the farm. We spent sick days, holidays, out-of-school days, all the days at her house. 

Grandma's door was always open-- quite literally. She had big French doors in her kitchen and we'd come marching through them as if we owned the place. Even when she was on vacation, we'd go watch TV at her house, basking in the air conditioning (somehow her house was always five degrees cooler than our own). She'd come home, and five minutes later, Eric and I would appear asking for a big plate of white bread toast with butter (she had a toaster that made it perfect every time and we NEVER got white bread at home). We'd watch Nickelodeon and beg her to let us stay the night. she usually did.

After she passed, I worried on it for two days but then decided I needed to be at home. Pete was, as always, supportive of whatever I felt like I needed to do. In truth, he wished he could go, as he and my grandmother had a special relationship (she always told me to "tell Pete I just love him! He's so wonderful!" when I hung up the phone with her), but it was the last week of classes at his school. I flew out of Knoxville on Saturday, stayed through Monday morning, and was back in time for Pete's students to come over for a picnic on Monday night.

I missed my boys, especially my littlest boy, but it was good to be home, and in a lot of ways, it was good to be home without the little person, hanging out with my cousins without chasing him everywhere and protecting both him and everyone's personal property. I got to spend time at my aunt's on Saturday night, and saw this lady, Miss Skylar, who has been "my girl" since she was born. We spent a lot of time negotiating when she is going to come down and be Lukie's nanny for a week. :) Her mama and I had a couple glasses of wine and lamented not living closer together.

By the way, the busy-ness has not included me hauling around my real camera...so, sorry for a post full of iPhone photos. I picked up this photo of myself at my mom's house...and I swear it's Lukas with long hair...though I have no idea what I'm doing with my face here...

It was good to be home. All 11 grandchildren made it, and we told stories at the funeral. Grandma Noel was a wonderful, enchanting lady who was smart as a whip and one of the least judgmental people I've ever met. She was genuinely intellectually interested in everyone and everything, a rare quality. I'll miss talking about books with her (she always liked my picks but told me I had "quirky" taste), and chatting with her about Lukas or my latest show, asking her about her church friends or her garden. I'll miss her support in everything.

I got home to irises blooming, which she would have loved (though they aren't in pastels, the only colors which made it into her front garden, but she loved a nice bright bloom elsewhere). The mirror that hung in her dining room, part of a set that went to my father and which he sweetly let me have, hangs in my dining room now. I like to think of her putting on her makeup (she used lipstick on her cheeks instead of blush-- said it lasted longer and always matched her lips) in it in the mornings. I'll have to scrape the hot glue off of it, I guess- though that reminds me of her, too. :)

Anyway, we got through the week, and decided to have an adventure weekend in celebration of Mother's Day. Pete had to go to Tusculum's commencement Saturday morning. Afterward, we piled into the car and drove to Asheville, NC. We stopped at a tea and spice shop and I picked up some lovely white tea with peaches and pineapples, and then we went to the North Carolina Arboretum, one of our favorite outdoor places and a great place for a toddler who likes to explore.

Poopin' in a corner at the Arboretum...:)

We grabbed a pizza on the way out of town and ate it in the car. When we got home, we made the mistake of letting Lukie play with the hose. Pete ended up SOAKED.

On Saturday, Pete took Lukie to Walmart to find a Mother's Day gift for me. He came back with a new pizza cutter (we have pizza every Friday night and I was SICK of having a crappy cutter), Mary Poppins on DVD (SWEET!) and some chocolate. I had also told Pete to get Lukie a sprinkler to play in, and he came back with this thing. It's a long tube with smaller tubes that, given enough water pressure, wiggles and sprays water all over the place. The problem with it was that the tubes often didn't stand up straight enough.

Pete fixed that problem real quick...

And Lukie had tons of fun in it! We already have a play date scheduled for next weekend with some friends from Kingsport. They're bringing their little girl and everybody will have a blast!

I have more garden updates to write, and I'll get around to them, but as a quick update, we painted our front door and the weigela are blooming. They're really lovely when they bloom. I'll have to prune them back after they bloom, though, as weigela bloom on old wood; if you cut them in the fall, you'll be cutting all the stuff that would bloom next year. I love learning stuff like that!

I removed a bunch of fungal-infected irises from the back garden. I think it looks nice. That big clump at the front, though, is super floriferous and just needs to be split a bit.

One of my hosta gardens. I got new hosta in a week and a half ago, so when they're up and unfurled, I'll post more about those.

The end. Let's hope for a little happier and more relaxing time this week. In a little under two weeks, we'll be taking another adventure trip-- we're going to Georgia for an annual get-together with a bunch of our friends from grad school. Updates coming soon!

And, in honor of Noel Anne Shoemaker, as beautiful on the inside as she was on the outside (and that's saying something), here she is with my beautiful baby boy last summer...

21 Months Old!

I promised a big Lukie update, so here it is...

This guy...

...is 21 months old! That means he's only 3 months from being a 2-year-old. I find it mind-boggling. We took him upstairs to his "bedroom" (as in the room we decorated before he arrived in which he has never slept) to take his 21-month-old photos. Traditionally, this has meant sitting him in the chair in his room to be photographed the same way he was once a month for his first year and every 3 months since turning 1. It was...difficult...

In the end, I decided this is his 21-month-old photo.

I think it accurately portrays the likelihood of success when you're trying to get an almost-two-year-old to sit in a chair. It pairs perfectly with his 18-month-old photo, in which he is wearing a bicycle helmet...

So update-y things. It's hard to put things into categories, even though I'm a librarian and categorizing things is one of my all-time, absolute, most favorite things to do, ever. It seems like every part of his personality is so wrapped up in the rest of it that I have a hard time talking about one thing without jumbling in the rest!

We'll start with all the things Lukie likes right now. His favorite thing in the world being outside. We have an epic meltdown every evening when it's time to go in the house. We are outside from the moment it is warm enough to the moment darkness falls, and even that wouldn't be enough for him. He loves bugs (particularly flying bugs, particularly bees and wasps, but he knows not to touch them), birds, his play equipment which looks like a castle, the lawn mower (the LAWN MOWER OH MY GOD THE LAWN MOWER), running back and forth to Daddy's wood shop, and bubbles. He dislikes being told to come inside and being forced to stay in the side yard. 

Lukie is a copycat right now. The other day, he was spinning around and laughing at a bumble bee, and Peter realized he was pretending to be Shaun the Sheep, a character in his favorite TV show, who does the same thing when the Farmer is attacked by a bee. He likes to pretend to scoop dog poop out of the yard and throw it over the fence. He sniffs flowers like I do, even though instead of sniffing, he blows through his nose. It amazes me every day when he has picked up on something Pete does or I do.

Eating-wise, well, Lukie is still a super picky eater. He loves peanut butter sandwiches, cottage cheese, applesauce, bananas, grapes, strawberries, sweet potato puffs, french fries, pancakes, French toast, anything sweet, and apparently (though I haven't been able to replicate this at home), the meat sauce pasta they give him at daycare. He eats few foods other than those, but that doesn't mean I don't keep trying. He's Peter's child; someday, he'll eat anything and everything.

Lukie weaned two weeks ago-- after nursing for 21 months to the day. All along, I have hoped that Lukie and I could go as long as we needed to for him to just stop on his own. That was, until my co-worker and I got accepted to speak at the Tennessee Library Association meeting next week in Memphis. I'll be gone for 2 nights and 3 days, and Peter will be alone with Lukas. We had thought that we would wean him this week, but two weeks ago, he went all night without asking to nurse. Oh, he still woke up, but instead of grabbing his pillow and handing it to me, he just cuddled into me and went back to sleep (that's pretty much how we sleep now). I decided it was time, and for the next two nights, I gently told him "nursies were sleeping" when he asked to nurse. There was a little crying, but not as much as I had feared. He hasn't nursed since the 3rd or 4th of April. I'm a weird combination of relieved and sad. Relieved that my body is mine again, sad because it kind of felt like the last thing that I could do for him that Peter couldn't. I know I'm the mommy. I get that. But telling him "nursies are sleeping" felt a bit like saying "Mommy can't love you right now." Irrational, I know, and holding him while he fell back to sleep says the opposite of that. But it's certainly bittersweet. He's growing up, and it was the last connection to that time when he and I were one working unit.

Ah, well. On to speaking.

Lukie still doesn't talk much. To be truthful, he wasn't a very babble-y baby, and it was something I noticed before he was a year old. He has a few words: juice, weeee (for swinging or playing with something), yay, Dada, shoes. Those are all new developments, though. At his 18-month appointment, he still had no words, and the doctor recommended we see the speech therapist. She assessed him and said that he was behind on his expression (using words) and reception (understanding words). Both were things she felt he needed to work on, and she recommended speech therapy.

Lukie goes once a week for half an hour. The therapy is play-based. He and the speech therapy assistant, whom he really loves, play and do tasks- a lot of them have to do with teaching him to pay attention and listen when she's speaking. Lukas is a focused child, and because of that, he often tunes out the world in order to really focus on the toy he's playing with or the activity he's doing. He wasn't listening when Pete or I would speak to him, so we work on making sure he stops what he's doing and listens to us. 

Lukie's therapist says he's doing really well. He will now mimic her when she does something with a toy, respond with increasingly varied babble (both the sounds he's making and the inflection he uses while making them), and pays attention a little better every time. I know his reception is better; the other night, I asked him if he was ready to watch Shaun the Sheep, part of our bedtime routine as he's still not great with books, though we're working on it, and he ran directly to the bedroom and wanted help onto the bed. We don't know how long he'll be in therapy, but it is really nice to see him making some serious leaps in the speech department. 

So that's it; that's our life with Lukie right now. He's developing a personality, which we can't wait to find out more about once he's talking to us, and we're watching and enjoying. We're slowing being able to do more and more fun things with him, and that is such a welcome development. As he grows older, it's so fun to watch as our family settles into a life where Lukie is interested in the things we're doing, learning from us, and teaching us to be patient and creative.

Oh, and here's my first tiny bouquet of cuttings from my garden. :)

You Should See the Other Guy...

Ok, first things first. Lukie go his first real shiner over the weekend. He was playing swords with his Daddy (a constant pass-time in our house ever since we watched The Princess Bride a few weeks ago), tripped, and smacked his brow bone on a concrete flower pot. There was LOTS of swelling, but now it's mostly just bruising. I was going to postpone taking his 21-month-old (I KNOW!) pictures until it was gone, but I think I'll take those tomorrow. It's all part of the story of growing up, I guess.

Anyway, there have been some "What did you do's?!?" and a lot of "poor guy's", but I think ultimately, it has looked way worse than it has felt. He hasn't complained about it or messed with it since Friday, when it happened. It's definitely a good one, though.

Last weekend was, of course, Easter, and my folks came down for the long weekend. The weather was great--- it's SPRING in TENNESSEE, which I will admit I LOVE. Spring is beautiful and mercifully early in this state. We had a lot of fun playing outside, especially when we did an Easter egg hunt with Lukie. He had one at his daycare on Thursday, so he knew exactly what to do with all the eggs we had hidden for him!

You may think he's crying, and he probably was previously, but this is actually his "fake crying, not quite done fussing yet but not really able to scream anymore" face. It is identifiable by the scrunched up nose-- he does that when he wants to pretend to cry a little longer than he really cries.

My dad's birthday was March 30th, so we had a very ugly but very tasty German chocolate cake on Saturday night. Lukie helped blow out the candles, but then he wanted to keep blowing after the candle was out. :)

It was a great weekend.

To switch gears, my perennial garden is starting to really take off. When we moved into the house 3 years ago, there were a lot of ill-placed plantings behind the house. Hostas in full sun, daylillies where they could push into and destroy a rock wall, bugleweed covering everything. I've spent two years moving plants and tackling what seemed like an insurmountable seed bed of weeds, particularly bindweed. I feel like this is the first year it's looking like MY garden- not the previous owner's. I've replaced everything in the back with perennials. The phlox is taking off and covering the top of the rock wall, my dianthus and coreopsis are growing and spreading, and my rose bushes are starting to leaf out.

All the hosta I moved have now been in their own garden for 2 summers, and this spring I split them to spread them out and fill in my hosta bed. I've also created another new hosta bed. It's impatiently awaiting the three rather unique varieties I ordered from a hosta nursery in Vermont. I could see myself really getting into the hosta variety collecting game-- I love their beautiful green foliage and all the awesome combinations of white, green, yellow, and blue you can find in it. When we leave this place, I'll make sure to take starts of all my varieties. I think there is some of my Grandma Noel, the queen of beautiful gardens, in me.

The new bed, above. It's waiting for its Blue Gourd, Happy Hearts, and June hosta varieties.

I'm excited that the ones I split the most look to be the ones with the best variegation. I have no idea what varieties they are, but I really hope that the biggest ones in the center there maintain that awesome color variegation!

Oh, and my tomato plants are progressing nicely. I started them in a Park's Seed Biodome, but they have subsequently been moved to their own individual newspaper cups. They'll get a shot of fish fertilizer pretty soon and find their new homes after the frost date, which I can say is a short 5 days from now. I do love planting early in Tennessee. We'll have Cherokee Purples before we know it!

Check back after the weekend for a giant Lukie update-- including, eating, sleeping, nursing, talking, growing...all the important things!