Arlo Gets By With a Little Help From His Friends

One of the highlights of Arlo's very brief daycare tenure was watching his reactions to all of the other little ones in his class. He was so captivated by their sounds and movements, and his contentment in watching everyone around him was downright adorable. When we left daycare after those [VERY LONG] three weeks, a teeny part of me wondered how this new absence of socialization might affect Arlo. Of course, the only real socialization Arlo needed at that age was socialization with his mom and dad, but I wanted Arlo to have a peer group, one he could grow with, and I worried that my new stay-home gig might interfere with that.

After exploring the different social groups for moms and babies, I lucked out in finding a cozy group of other moms--some of whom work, but most of whom stay home, and all have babes very close to Arlo's age. We meet once a week, usually in the park, but this recent, gross heat wave has forced us indoors to the comfort of refrigerated air. The weekly playtime has been such a perfect addition to our weeks. I love watching Arlo interact with the other little guys, and by "interact" I mean hijack their toys and poke them in face.

At the end of a recent playdate we tried to capture a picture of all our little duckies in a row, which was quite ambitious considering that no one was at all interested in sitting still.

From left to right: Arlo, Owen, Ben, Matthew, Levi and Louie
 (with Ben's mom and Louie's mom doing a little goaltending)

Seconds later, quite literally, chaos erupted:

Um, yes, that is our son crawling over other babies like a revved-up monster truck.



Trouble

We have an increasingly mobile little boy on our hands! He even started cruising this week! (And also has a few bumps and bangs to show for it.) I am more and more on the chase it seems, and all too often this is my view:

And he's off!

Hmmm... What's in here?

Is there anything cuter than a cloth diapered rump?

Get Up, Stand Up

When he first wakes in the morning, Arlo's first order of business is a diaper change. We head to his room for our cloth dipe and cloth wipe sundries, take care of business, and then I deposit him in his crib so that I can take care of my own bathroom business. And when I come back to retrieve my little baby a few moments later, this is how he greets me. Seriously, how can you have a bad day when it starts like this?

C is for Carrots



My approach to our garden over all of our growing seasons has been this: 1)Find heirloom seedlings/seeds with funky/badass sounding names; 2)Put them in the soil; 3)Watch 'em grow; 4)Eat 'em up. Sure, we compost and water from our rain barrell, and that's probably the most skilled thing we do to contribute to the health and bounty of our garden. We've never taken the pH of our soil, not once. We seldom weed. After our desperate attempts to fend off a plague of flea beetles two years ago, we stopped trying to combat pests. We essentially find quality seedlings/seeds, say a prayer, and hope that we get to have some fun in a few months picking and eating what we've grown. We're kind of lazy gardeners, now that I think about it.

I wish I knew how to stagger our plants so that we were always harvesting something. I wish I paid more attention to that kind of detail.

In our garden's first year three summers ago, we picked handfuls of ripe Cherokee Purple, Black Plum Paste, and Pineapple tomatoes during the 4th of July holiday weekend. And this growing season we've picked a total of...2 Cherokee Purples, weeks later in the very same month. Sure, that first season we grew from seedlings, and this season we started from seeds, and I'm certain that makes some kind of difference. This was our first year growing from seed, and we had a lot to learn. We still have a lot to learn. We tucked in the pert seedlings of 7 different types of tomatoes this year, and only the Cherokee Purple, so far, has kicked out its ripe fruits. I was particularly stoked for our Reisentraube tomato, a type of cherry tomato that is reported to have beautiful, abundant flowery blooms...but we lost it in this miserable, wretched heat wave. Several other tomato plants are bursting with little yellow blooms, and others sport the promise of green little globes. Hello, tomato plants, GET BUSY. I AM READY TO PICK YOUR WARES.

We've picked all of our Chiogga beets for the growing season. If we had been smart, we would have sown them earlier and staggered their plantings. We have a few cute pictures of those, but, alas, they're aren't accessible right now due to the previously mentioned crap-out of our laptop.

Our bush scallop squash plants appear to be on strike after steadily producing. Their leaves are starting to yellow. I read somewhere that coffee grounds (of which we have plenty, thanks to a teething baby who keeps us awake at night and likes to rise at 5am even when he's feeling well) can help yellowing plants, so I might give that a go this weekend. We found a hysterically LARGE, derelict squash hiding under some weeds and its neighboring melon vine, and snapped a picture of it with Arlo. Hopefully we'll have that picture to share when our other laptop is mended. (Pretty, pretty please, computer gods!)

We are growing some ever-bearing Seascape strawberries, and it looks like their second wave of fruit have come in. I happily picked handful of them this week.

Anyway, the biggest and happiest surprise of this year's garden has been our Chantenay Red-Core carrots. I meant to plant these seeds last year, but forgot about them. When we were digging through our seed stores this spring I came across this forgotten seed packet and figured I'd direct sow them to see if they were still any good. The thought of throwing the seeds away made me sad, so I did what I usually do: put 'em in the soil and said a little prayer. I honestly didn't expect them to grow. 

But they did, and how! 

This is the strangest rattle you've ever given me, Mama.

What's up, doc?

If you're wondering which is sweeter--the baby or the carrot--obviously the baby.

Pool Party

Apologies for the recent silence. We've been having some technical difficulties! One of our laptops--the one that holds ALL of our digital pictures of Arlo--is in the shop. We're told something is likely up with its video card, which means, for us, that the monitor is kaput. Nick has backed the laptop up to our hard drive, so I am hoping and praying and wishing that all of our pictures of the first 7 months of Arlo's life are safe. It fills my stomach with a ton of acid to think that we may have lost all of those pictures. I can't bear the thought, really. So, all of our recent haps--Nick's birthday, Father's Day, plundering our garden--are, hopefully, something we can eventually share with you.

For now, though: POOL TIME! Our city pool is open for the summer and last week we took our first family trip to the Dixon Street pool. Arlo didn't quite know what to make of it, but he hung in there with us. I think we were more entertained by the whole adventure than he was. Our pool adventure came to an abrupt end when another child barfed in the pool. Aaaah, the public pool. :)

First family pool visit! 

 Literally chillin' with Dad

A few giggles in the fountains

My hat is cooler than Mom's hat. Thanks, Auntie Hannah!