updates:gardening and matching

I haven't posted in a week. This is because the weather improved.  I had to do some gardening and some mowing.  Also I lost time last week with the "sick" child who couldn't go to play care.  I haven't had too many interesting thoughts.  We had an contemplative conversation one night, but I still have to edit that post. (Sorry)
This post is just an update.

I've been working on "experiments" for my writing thing.  I spent a while deciding which ones seemed appropriate, and finally got a contract- it specified that I was supposed to have an outline of my experiments... a few days ago.  So by then I actually had one, but I hadn't tried them all out.   I sent it in.  As usual, I haven't had a reply.  (I had to prompt them to send me contract, and I think that took a week to get a reply.   They sent it Fed Ex... I'm not sure why- I was able to send it back by scanning and using email just fine.)

Yesterday I tried one of those experiments out, and it really doesn't work well.  It might work in a very large space with two people, but it doesn't work at all on the small scale.  My husband said he'd tried it out with his brother when they were kids and they never got it to work either.  I'll have to find something else.

We scheduled a meeting for the science play space tonight, and I sent out a reminder yesterday.  I keep getting these emails from people who can't make it.  What?  You people decided on the date!  I suppose this kind of thing is to be expected, but its still annoying.

Little Star refused to nap again, but he really needed it.  I told him he could listen to music lying on the couch and he barely made it through one song.  Last week I got him to sleep on the bicycle and in the car, but I wasn't planning either of those today.  He's been going to bed really late when he does nap, so I had figured it would be OK if he didn't nap.  No, he really needed it.

The garden is partially planted.  I just need to add some herbs, and all my transplants (tomatoes and such), but they are still so small.  Somehow I think something is wrong with their environment that's keeping them from growing more.  And beyond that I need to plant the non-garden with gourds and some iris's I just inherited.  So much to do; so little time.  I'm really only good at gardening for a few hours at a time out there before I get tired, but its a lot more efficient without little star interrupting every few minutes.  I managed to add lime and a bit of compost (not enough, but some) this year.

The weather has been great for gardening... and grass and weeds.  At least the ground is wet enough to pull the weeds up by the roots.  My strawberries have needed weeding since... last fall.  I have almost half done now. They are flowering and have little green berry type things. Every evening or morning we get a rain storm with thunder.  Its like a different climate.  I was just reading that Chicago is expecting more like Alabama climate in the future.  I heard we should expect Maryland, but maybe that's not hot and wet enough.

I took my little star to our little library this morning.   Its at our community center, and behind the building is our local playground.  I asked if he wanted to go to the playground first or the library.  I was surprised he chose the library- I wasn't even sure if we would get to the playground before it rained. I  let him pick among the board books.  The nice thing about the setup at this branch is that the board books are not in any particular order.  This means that he can take them out and look at them at leisure without close supervision, and I don't have to worry about putting them back in order.  He took out about ten books and read them while I investigated the other ones.

When I was done he told me he wanted only two of the books to take home, so we took them.  I didn't even look at them.  He told me they were "potty books", but I'd not seen potty books at our branch before.  Anyway we took them to the potty (no he didn't actually use it (: ), and I noticed that while these books were not "potty" books, they had the same characters as two of the "potty" books we had taken out from the main branch previously, and were by the same two authors.  So, I was pretty impressed that he'd recognized the pictures and characters as similar.

Of course he's always been good with sorting/matching.  One of the books was called something like happy baby, sad baby and I figured this book was really for babies.  I was wrong- it was the perfect thing to help my son with figuring out happy and sad expressions. Perhaps he should have figured that out as a baby, but he's not good with that.   As soon as I explained to look for a tear or the mouth going up and down, he picked up on it immediately.  I'm not sure if this will help with real life.  We also talked about why the baby was happy or sad.  I hope that will be helpful.