Reading & Loving:

Like an Agatha Christie mystery – featuring a spunky little girl as the main character/detective.

Listening:

Meaghan Smith “The Cricket’s Orchestra”  – Won’t let me embed the video here, but here’s the LINK. Loving her music! SuperBoy and I love this song especially!

Eating:

Plums! (Best thing about summer)

Kid laugh o’ the day:

SuperBoy says “moo-ing” instead of mowing. As in, “Dad’s mooing the lawn.” Or, “Daddy should really moo the lawn today.”  I can’t bring myself to correct him.

One green bell pepper

And one cute cucumber with the face of a kitty cat inside:

And about 20 of the cutest green tomatoes that I thought were doing just fine…but when I looked at the bottom of them, they were all gray/black and rotted! Apparently it’s called Blossom End Rot (BER) and is caused by inconsistent watering or lack of calcium in the soil.

My mother-in-law and I discussed how awful it would be to have been a pioneer! Your precious food supply failing because of uneven watering and you, with no Jewel to run to to stock up for the winter. Reason #290 I’m Glad I’m Not A Pioneer.

Kids and I went to Brookfield Zoo where we enjoyed the new dolphin show.

Kids and I have all gotten sick one at a time. Oh well. We have been enjoying hilarious episodes of Phineas and Ferb and Penguins of Madagascar.

Kids are going to this cool VBS program where they signed up for classes on things that interest them. The two girls are doing Culinary Arts – where they made chef salad, breadsticks, chocolate mousse and lemon-limeade…all on the first day! Little Mr SuperBoy is in Lego Building – where they don yellow construction vests and hats and build away!

This means I have TIME ALONE. I enjoy time alone at places such as: Borders, Target, Dominick’s (yes, even grocery shopping is fun!) and Starbucks.Tomorrow I get to meet my sis-in-law for breakfast and it’s just the two of us – I don’t think that has happened since 1937. We’ll have so little to talk about without kids interrupting us every five seconds!

Love to you all and especially to my Grandmothers and my Grandfather, whom I love very very much.

xo,

me

p.s. I threw in the xo for lots of extra sunshiny happiness for you!

Tis the Summer Headache that afflicts me. There is something about the combo of heat and then walking into air conditioning, then walking back into heat and the summer scorching sun that burns into my retinas right back into my brain and gives me the gift of a headache. It’s not bad enough to be considered a migraine and not quite good enough to make me want to walk around a crowded zoo looking at elephant poo in 90 degree weather. But it’s there. And it’s ugly. I’m thankful for my life and the weather and the sunshine and my health, but man, these headaches.

Give me winter or give me death.

It always bothers me when people act like losing power is romantic and fun and “oh, we went back to a simpler time and talked and played games”. Do they forget that most pioneers died by the age of 40 because simpler times were harsher and unforgiving and terrible and full of hard work? We play games quite well by lightbulb, thank you very much.

Don’t be fooled by this picture. It wasn’t nearly as romantic and fun as it looks. No, really, it wasn’t. You’re being fooled, aren’t you? The pug sitting in the candlelight got you, didn’t it?

What I will say for all these storms and rain, is that it creates beautiful sights:

And it’s doing wonders for my little baby two-week-old garden:

I have been wanting a garden for YEARS, but with babies and my deep disdain for any labor that includes the word “manual”, we haven’t done one yet. Finally this year I just did it. And I don’t think Mr MIP thought I would.  Which is usually what happens around here and causes my children to ask, “Mommy, does Daddy know you have a hammer in your hands?”

He just knows my disdain for hard outside work on a hot day. But that made me want to prove myself all the more. So, I dug up the grass:

And then he jumped in and helped set up my “box.”

We added dirt and veggies, and presto chango – I have a cute little 4′x8′ garden!

We’ll see what happens! My past experiences with gardens include accidentally pulling up all of my grandma’s cucumber seedlings and digging weeds out from between the cracks of the sidewalk with a butter knife, which my dad tried to promote as “Cheap Fun & Summer Entertainment.” We also famously got told on while building said grandma’s garden, as told in my brother’s guest post: Washing Our Hands of Dirt And that’s why I wish dad could see this – his daughter VOLUNTARILY building a garden! Manual Laborers Unite! (Right after this sweet tea and a little rest in the air conditioning.)

I later changed the white trellis thingy to a bamboo teepee to help my green beans – who are not very happy right now. What to do?

And wouldn’t you know it, the pests are already invading!  (I’m kidding. I’m kidding – he’s too cute to be a pest. Same with SuperBoy.)

I love that my kids love reading. SuperBoy is really into comic books – Star Wars and Spiderman. The girls are into Disney Fairies books, Geronimo Stilton and Wishbone. All of them enjoy the creepy gross books of the “You Wouldn’t Want To…” series. They’re favorite is You Wouldn’t Want to Be Sick in the 16th Century, which shows how they used to bleed people with leeches and perform surgery. Pictures highlighting the boils from the Plague also keep them entertained for quite some time.

I admit I may have gone a little crazy this week over these $1 (normally $2.49) 40 oz bottles of ketchup available at Target. But with three kids who think ketchup is the Ninth Wonder of the World, we’ll have no trouble using it all up.

And sometimes being “frugal” means spending money! These are my favorite pair of flip-flops EVER. They are Havaianas and have lasted almost a year and half of constant wear. They are $18-$24 and I know that seems like a lot for flip-flops – but, trust me, they are worth every penny. I actually just bought a second pair yesterday (at Gap), and with a $10 off card I had, they were only $8. I subscribe to this formula when buying clothes:

Cost of clothing divided by # of times worn= cost.

You’ve bought $5.99 shorts from Old Navy and worn them once before they wore out, right? So, you paid $5.99 to wear those shorts. However, spending $18 on Havaianas and wearing them 180 times. Formula: $18 divided by 180…equals 10 cents each wear.(And they are hardly showing any wear yet…trying to get it down to a penny a wear!)

Meanwhile, look at the fun little sundae we got at dinner  – the guy asked why we were in Chicago and we told him we were celebrating our anniversary, and look at our cute little treat.