Joyous Repetition

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This last week I happily was able to break out my beloved loppers and prune some shrubs. I miss having a garden. I am hoping that next garden season I will have a place to live that is not a temporary pit-stop. Apartments stink. I want land.

Most of life is simple, repetitive. But joyful too. I’ve been thinking about how sometimes life feels like a washing machine cycle. Wash, rinse, spin, repeat. Laundry never seems to get done. But even though life can get repetitious, it never does truly repeat itself. The varied repetition is the best way that we can learn and grow. We learn repetitiously, like performing math problems over and over. Muscles grow by doing the same exercise over and over. So life is the same way.

Our cousins came and visited. We all got sandy and wet at the Chattahoochee river. By the end of their visit, PB had a meltdown due to fatigue and hunger. Cousins were much too fun to bother with eating and sleeping.

Fun at home

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Ready? Go! Step on the yoga block, go under the chair, over the mat, bounce the ball, go under the baby gym, rock on the bouncer and jump over the finish line. Repeat. A lot. Then go play cars. Eventually:

I thought he was getting to old to do that. Apparently he got tuckered out by the obstacle course. And if you need something else to make you laugh:

Cornstarch Putty

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Do you remember what happens when you mix cornstarch and water? You get a great homemade putty: gooey, a liquid yet solid, and wonderful fun.

Cornstarch putty is very washable. The day we did this, the water was off when we went to clean up (leak in the mainline). With a few baby wipes we were okay, and it dries back to a powder that brushes off.  My husband enjoyed this one much more than Peter actually did. Don’t forget the food coloring (a must for half of the kid projects I do). We used orange and put it in an ice cream bucket: I was suddenly craving orange creamsicles.

I was wondering if you could save this: just let it dry out and add more water later. It grew mold, so no. But it’s less than $2 for a box of cornstarch, so still a cheap hour of fun.

Little Mulberry Park to Ravine Outlook

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Last Saturday we went hiking at Little Mulberry Park. The weather forecast seemed cooler than normal, so I decided it would be fun to make it out on a hike. We hiked up a hill and down to a ravine overlook. There was a small stacked stone waterfall, that you couldn’t see from the overlook. We crossed the barrier and climbed down to get a better look. (It wasn’t that steep.) The water was at a trickle, but combine that with the dense forest, humid air, and the hike/climb to get there and it was beautiful. Peter actually likes hiking now. He’ll say, “We going hiking,” with a smile on his face. He was anxious to get to the playground afterword.

 The humidity increased down in the dense forest by the ravine. Hiking back up to the meadow, elevation and a small breeze felt wonderful. It is hot here…but I realized I would rather be in hot Atlanta than in Utah with no AC or bad AC. The last four summers (for that matter most of my life) have been devoid of the blessing of central air.

Atlanta Botanical Gardens

Prepare to be bombarded with pictures. I went to the Atlanta Botanical Gardens (and if you like visiting public gardens, become a member of AHS and use the reciprocal garden program). It was cloudy and the gardens were gorgeous so I was a super happy photographer. The only reason I am able to fit all the pictures from my trip into one post is because I had a nursing infant and preschooler along with me.

While there, I though about how beautiful everything is and how I like Atlanta. But although Atlanta is filled with fun stuff to do, has the most amazing wooded gardens, and has been a place I’ve been able to thrive, I also don’t considered it home. Home is Utah. Home is where I can actually give good recommendations on plants, I know exactly when the average last spring freeze is, and I know how to grow the biggest, juiciest melons. Home is where my family lives, where I grew up, and where the landscape is familiar and comforting even if it is covered in dry grass and sagebrush.

I wouldn’t mind if I did end up here, although that’s not the plan. Even if I do, Atlanta will always be an exotic location. It’s not the home base where I grew up and first grew a garden.

Grandma Visit

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Strong boy. This is the result of his daddy being a little ambitious. 

Chubby baby smiles. What could be happier?

A playhouse at the Atlanta history center. Wired, wallpapered and ready for little guests. PB had the idea for the set up. 

Playing doctor

My mom came out and visited for my birthday. We went to the Atlanta History Center, a children’s museum, and a park. But mostly we spent lots of time talking and playing with the kids. Grandma is imaginative and expressive with the kids. I loved watching her play with them, and listening to her stories. She is a wonderful storyteller and I enjoyed her stories as much as PB did.

Star Box

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This creation is all my idea. I don’t know if it is necessarily one people will be running to duplicate, but we had fun. I try to do “school” with PB, and our theme was space. I had this great idea to make a star box.

We took a box, painted the inside black, poked holes in it and added a paper moon in a larger hole. There is paper over the box seams to prevent light from entering in.  Decorated the outside with spaceships and stars. The idea is that you get inside (or in this case use it as a strange hat because it’s a smaller box) and you experience the night sky. It didn’t turn out too bad…I was very pleased when I went to take pictures and ended up with this:

The view from inside

The experience was not so great in real life. But still a fun, easy idea.  

Death by Fall

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My “garden” this year was a few pots out on the balcony. Their have been some bumps in the road. I mistakenly let my son help me thin seedling. Later on I found him “thinning” the already thinned plants. The cilantro and a few other plants were decimated to only a single seedling. I eventually re-seeded…but the damage was done.

After I fertilized, my plants began to grow much better. The basil was doing the best.  I had harvested it several time for such things as basil hummus, and still had a large healthy plant. I was contemplating trying out pesto in the near future and then I came home one day…and the basil was gone. It had fallen off of the high railing to its demise two stories below. I was able to harvest the shattered remains, which ended up being a couple of cups of good leaves, but now there is no more basil.

The demise of the basil has left me with a very sad outlook on the rest of the garden. Mostly due to laziness, I have not used the lettuce, chives and bit of cilantro that I have out there. The morning-glory and cosmos are only sporadic bloomers. I also have a ‘rescue’ plant that would probably be better off in the office it came from. It did not adapt well after the move. (I shouldn’t have put a plant that had been growing inside out into 100 degree temperature…laziness again.)  I have enjoyed the begonia and dusty miller planter: now that the basil is gone it is the one success of my small garden.

Kid Art: Ice Cube Painting

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I enjoy kid art. Much better than grown-up crafts that tend to be a little demoralizing because they never turn out as planned. PB is semi-old enough to participate. He  doesn’t quite get everything as intended, but we all have fun. I like some projects we do just as much or more than he does. Kids are great excuses to have fun. (One day I was singing along at story time, and realized PB wasn’t paying a lick of attention to me so I didn’t need to sing. I stopped but quickly realized I was singing  because I was enjoying it not to engage PB.)

Here is a partial list of some of our projects in the past little while: tractor cut-out, a rain stick, stickers, watercolors, paint butterflies, contact-paper butterflies and ice cube painting. I get some ideas from this blog I subscribed to, along with the very useful Pinterest and the book Homeschool Your Preschooler on a $1 a Day. I recommend that book for anyone trying to entertain preschoolers: the Kindle edition is only a dollar.

I used food coloring and koolaid for the ice cube painting: there are a lot of different methods. We had some friends over to join us in our messiness. Not a clean activity at all (my hand are purplish right now), but a great art project on a hot day. The kids didn’t necessarily paint with the ice…just played with it. PB loved throwing it at the end.



Atlanta History Center

At first glance, this place looks like a history museum. And it is…but it also has some incredible gardens. I’ve enjoyed them more than any other garden I’ve been to out here. The day I went there was a pretty good chance of rain. I planned on mostly looking at the interior exhibits and maybe ducking quickly outside if the weather cooperated. The rain never did show up and the weather wasn’t that hot, so we were able to spend lots of time enjoying the woodland gardens outside. We were out there longer than my little preschooler wanted to walk.

My mom was there with me, and as native Utahns we agreed that you couldn’t mimic this out west. The moist air, towering trees and moss growing everywhere creates an exotic feeling, as I grew up surrounded by sagebrush. I enjoy dense woods with a sense of oddity because they are the opposite of the steppe landscape I grew up in.

The batteries died in the camera, so I didn’t get as many shots as I would have like. Occasionally it is nice to not worry about pictures at all and just enjoy the scenery. There are six different gardens there, each with a unique style. The large formal gardens of the Swan House had a secret garden enchantment to them, surrounded by the more wild woods. My favorite was the quarry gardens, filled with native plants including burnt red rhododendrons in bloom.

The only downside to visiting the garden was it wasn’t spring with its blast of color, but it looked fantastic even in the heat of the summer. For more information visit their website.