A Tenuous Truce

We started our garden late this year because of the move and our many subsequent problems thereafter. Anyway, back in April or so, we rototilled a section of our backyard for our vegetable garden and planted some strawberries and blueberries. I also started some seeds for tomatoes and summer squash.

I've lost 2 and a half strawberry plants to the fight with the gophers, as well as, one of my heirloom tomatoes but we seem to have finally come to a tenuous truce with the gophers. I understand they are hungry too. I am not completely heartless (no comments please). So whenever I see that they are routing around in my garden, I put out some bai...I mean, food for them. They satisfy their hunger...and I get my garden. Admittedly, it's not the best solution but given the circumstances, at least it works...for now. I've also placed a few toys around the yard that twirl in the wind which causes vibration. It's supposed to make the gophers wary of coming up to the surface. Plus they are shiny and they move with the wind so it is supposed to help keep the birds at bay as well. I'm not sure any of it really works so it is an experiment in the works. 

Anyway, here is our garden now...it's starting to take off.

I've spent a lot of time so far in the garden...watering and weeding (weeding is definitely an uphill battle that I am slowly losing). I hope that the garden will be fruitful and that my hard work will pay off. We still haven't gotten any more than a couple of "tastes" of strawberry but here is our first crookneck or summer squash almost ready for the picking. I'm excited!

Caitlyn's Birthday: A belated post

I never got around to the last post I wanted to make about Caitlyn's birthday. Mostly because I was frustrated and disappointed with what we got her. We had Christian's dad chip in for a bed frame for Caitlyn's birthday. I wanted something that would kind of match the style of Emily's existing bed frame which we got from a friend of a friend some time ago. But it was really difficult to find anything close to it that was affordable. I thought it was going to be easy since it was just half of a cheap bunk bed but apparently, I was wrong. People sold them only as a huge set.

Out of desperation, I ended up ordering one online from a company that had one on sale and had free shipping. We were really disappointed with it when we got it. It is more or less the same style, but the color is not anything like Emily's and the worse part was that the quality was soo poor (so were the directions to put it together). I will never order furniture online again. I can't even believe that anyone would even dream of putting together what they did and call it furniture. Sure it looks fine in the pictures, but it is basically, just high density cardboard with a tissue thin veneer to make it look like wood. And then they just stapled it together. And to top it off, the headboard is not even in one piece. The "legs" are separate and they want you to screw it on to the top part that shows. It doesn't fit into some kind of joint, you just screw it on top of the other piece so in the end, the headboard does not sit flush against the wall. Anyway, we'll see if it falls apart in a week or not.

We also got her some of those vinyl sticker decorations for her wall since her side of the room looked pretty stark and barren next to Emily's. She also got some gardening tools (gloves, a shovel and rakes). Plus her Auntie Marian got her a bunch of princess dolls and stickers and stuff.
Plus her dad found these awesome little red high-top converse for her. We've been looking for them for a couple of years now but we could never manage to find her size. We went out with her on her birthday and found them on a whim. They are so adorable and they really bring out her personality!

...more on Mother's Day

I did not expect much for Mother's Day. It's usually somewhat of a disappointment (much like Valentines Day and New Year's Eve). Another man made holiday invented by people trying to sell you something. And hardly anyone can live up to the expectations. It ends up causing a lot of misery and stress for many people.

A friend said that we wake up expecting something different. And it is so true. You don't want to and yet you can't seem to help it. We expect that maybe one day a year, our kids may actually appreciate us and show it (or at least not try to kill each other). But really, by the time most kids actually come to truly appreciate their parents, they usually already have their own kids!

It started out on Friday when I picked up Emily from school. The teacher had them make bracelets for their mothers. She got them fancy boxes to put them in. She got them bags and had them decorate them and write Happy's Mother's Day on it. But when my 6 year old came home with the package, she wanted to give me the bag and keep the box with what was in for herself. She even wore it for a while. Nice, huh?

We stayed up until midnight on Saturday fixing the sink. Christian had to make one last emergency visit to the hardware store to replace an additional piece because it was leaking and then we had to test it to make sure there were no further problems. I had stacks of dishes to do anyway. We were exhausted by morning and got up a bit late. My daughter surprised me by knocking on my door in the morning to leave me the box with the bracelet she made for me in it for Mother's Day. We skipped the many mother's day talks that has always been a sore point for me.

Christian had gotten some flowers for the girls to give me for my garden. I wanted to put a border around our front garden to put more structure into it and cut down on the amount of grass we need to take care of. We had started with the hedge border in the front but had to take it out again so that they can take the tree down without damaging the hedge or having to try to work around it. Christian extended the border around to the corner and side of the driveway for me to put flowers. I was going to put a bunch of transplanted roses along it but most of them did not make it. He got me a variety of simple daisies (African daisies and a shasta daisy). I've always wanted some but never got around to getting any. I've actually tried growing them from seed many times but never succeeded. I can't wait until they grow in!
Christian and I spent the day cooking together and listening to nice music. The kids played outside in the yard nicely without fighting or yelling. It was very pleasant. Plus, Christian baked bread for the first time at our new house. We have not had time with everything going on prior to this. We also have very little counter space. What counter space we have is covered with tile. If you can imagine kneading sticky dough on tile with grout, you will know what I mean. But Christian's brother brought us a big piece of corian to put on our counter and it worked perfectly. He made a simple foccacia bread and it was sooo good. I miss fresh bread. We also smoked some tri-tip and made some minestrone soup.We had dinner with our friends the Jorgensons. We had a rough start but ended up having a pretty nice Mother's day.

Mother's Day picnic

We took our mom for her annual mother's day picnic this year to the Tri-City Park in Placentia. It was not quite as big as I thought it would be. Plus parking was a nightmare. I don't know why we keep doing this to ourselves. But on the brighter side, it was not quite as hot as it normally is. My dad came out to get some sun. And my mom got a bit of exercise. Here she is doing Tai Chi in the park.

It was nice but we did not stay too long. We had to get back to continue working on our sink and Emily had a birthday party to attend.

A new month, a new problem...

So, it is a new month here at the new house. Month 4. As you recall, we had the problems with our pipes bursting under our slab in two different places the day after we moved in. A nice welcome home surprise. During month two, we had the added surprise guests in the form of subterranean termites. And during month number three in our new home, we had falling limbs from our 60 or 70 foot ash tree in the front of our house and had to remove it. 

What will month four bring? Peace and serenity because trouble only come in threes? I think not. Instead, my garbage disposal broke before mother's day weekend and Christian spent the next two days trying to decide how best to fix it and what parts and tools we needed. In the end, we decided to not replace the garbage disposal but to redo the pipes without it. 

Now, it's not just that I didn't have a use of a garbage disposal. In that case, I would barely have blinked at the problem as I hardly use it anyway. No, when the garbage disposal broke, a 1/8" hole rusted out of the bottom and water started spewing out into my already ruined cabinet from our little welcome home surprise. I lost the use of my kitchen sink for nearly two days. 

We were back and forth to the home improvement stores for the next two days trying to fix the problem. In the end, we had to just rip everything out from under the sink and replace everything (even both the strainer baskets in the sink) because we could not get around the strange "plumbing art" the previous owners did. 

A Comparison...of sorts.

A couple of months ago, when Caitlyn happened to be wearing an outfit Emily used to wear, I thought to take a picture of her so that I can do a comparison of the two of them. You really can't mistaken one for the other, even in the exact same outfit. The main difference is in their eyes. The only mistake I made though, was that I thought that they would have been roughly the same age at the time. I was clearly mistaken. I was wondering why Emily was still sitting on her tricycle in the picture. I checked the date and found out that she was barely 3 years old. In fact, I believe it was the day after her 3rd birthday, when she demanded to have her hair cut like Dora the explorer. It was hard chopping it all off but I refused to give her the bangs.
The picture of Caitlyn was taken a couple of months before Caitlyn turned 4 years old. I did some real comparisons and found that Caitlyn is still almost 2 inches shorter than her sister at the same age!

Caitlyn: A Retrospective

Caitlyn has changed a lot over her brief years of life so far. Especially from when she was a baby. Emily, on the other hand, has always looked like Emily...from the minute she was born, in fact. She just looked younger and smaller in her baby pictures.

Here is Caitlyn's baby pictures from birth to the end of her first year.
Here is her second year. She is looking a lot more like Caitlyn now.
This is year 3.
And lastly, here is Caitlyn almost leading up to her fourth birthday.