A Boy and His Sunflower (And His Bug)

Donovan planted flower seeds at daycare back in . . . July? Early August? I didn’t take pictures because I really didn’t expect the poor things to grow (see: black thumb grandma).

But we re-potted them 

and watered them 

(when we remembered . . .)

and watched bugs make homes on them. This was definitely Donovan’s favorite part. If you ask him about his flower, the first thing he says is, “it has a bug!!”

Top bud

And we waited. 

Lower bud 

On the day Donovan left for a week’s vacation, 

two buds appeared . . .

and one grew . . .

and opened

and I was afraid Donovan was going to miss it. 

But he came home today,

in time to see this flower

and to watch with me while we wait for the bigger top bud to bloom.

The excitement is real, people.

Pumpkin Season

Took Jac to the local farm stand after school today

to pick up some berries,

completely forgetting it’s Pumpkin Time! - 

aka my favorite time of year. 

We behaved ourselves, 

only getting a small pumpkin and 3 ears of Indian corn for decorating. 

But we’ll be baaaaaaack. 

Counting Lessons

I know I’m math challenged but I thought I could do basic counting. Apparently not. 

Before I started, I imported the bricks quilt design, colored it in and counted the various blocks. Easy peasy, right?

Yeah, not so much. The circles are all the blocks I was missing,

and these are the wrong-color extras. It’s not even the same number of blocks!

Fixed it.

Other lessons this quilt has taught me: when in doubt, make the blocks bigger and trim them to size. So much less stressful than ripping and swearing. 

If your seams start to ruffle (thread pulls too tight), it could be a mis-wound bobbin. Figured this out after 2+ hours spent thoroughly cleaning and rethreading two sewing machines, only to have the problem continue. The common denominator? Besides idiot operator error? I used the same bobbin in both. Replaced it, problem solved. Glad I figured it out before taking the machines in for $$$ servicing.

Most helpful lesson? When your blocks have a different # of seams along the sewing edge, put the block with the most seams on the bottom, against the feed dogs. I started doing this and my blocks went from wonky to perfectly lined up every time. Maybe I had a couple extra thread’s widths due to the two seams? Or the seams pulled a tiny bit apart when they fed through on the top? Don’t know why, but it works. 

 All that remains of my background fabric. 

And my favorite? Playing fabric chicken is every bit as satisfying as yarn chicken. 

Bread Day

In addition to “her” cookies, Jac has been asking to make “my favorite bread”, aka focaccia.

How can a grandma resist that face??

While we waited for the dough to rise, 

Jac was in charge of picking and cleaning the rosemary. I wasn’t a rosemary fan until we started growing our own (thanks, Marie!) but now Jac and I both love that smell.

Jac was also in charge of rolling out the dough. I flipped it for her but she did the rest herself.

And made a video to prove it. Love my little baker girl. 

Black and Whites

Jac has been asking to make her favorite cookies for a week, 

so when she got home from kindergarten today, we got out all the ingredients and set to work. 

Jac’s favorite part of baking used to be cracking the eggs and rolling the chocolate dough into balls, but she’s decided that is much too messy. 

Today she was all about the stirring (so much stirring and splashing) and rolling the balls in powdered sugar after I did the messy part.

But there are some messes she’s willing to put up with, 

especially if it involves licking the sugar off her fingers or the chocolate from the spatula.

I found the recipe for these in a novel I was reading and thought they’d be fun to try. Everyone else is kinda “meh” about them but Jac loves that they are black on the inside (from melted chocolate chips) and white on the outside, just like the name says.

I’m hoping these freeze well so I can keep them as a treat for Jac  . . . and the rest of us can go back to gooey, delicious, real chocolate chips cookies. 

Growing

It’s growing, bit by bit.

The individual bricks are all sewn, with only a few that still need trimmed to size.

Then all that’s left is to get the last 8 rows in order and sew everything together. 

 Love the upcoming blues and teal 

Piece of cake. 

Pool Wall

The decorative stone wall is up

(remember the Amazon boxes?)

and the stairs are in place, ready for the handrails that were delivered this week. (Finally!)

Hubby spends most mornings working on this but it’s far enough along that he and Leanne can go swimming most afternoons. 

Next up is getting an additional electrical outlet installed - we’re on the electrician’s very busy schedule - and a solar heater on the roof to warm the water above the current (too cold for me!) 71-ish degrees. 

Porcupines

I FaceTime walked Leia through making my porcupine recipe, where I never measure anything and just go until it “looks right”. “Now pour in a big glug of worchestershire sauce . . . no, bigger . . . yeah, that’s about right.”

To make it even more challenging fun, she didn’t have two of the main ingredients - ground beef (subbed ground turkey) or Minute rice (subbed frozen, pre-made brown rice) (her reaction to brown rice? “Ewwwwww” 😂)

But it must have worked since this is the picture she sent me afterward. Success!