rachel's continued ramblings

in my old age maturity, i’ve come to really appreciate the rhythms that flow throughout the year, bringing the seasons and their changes and uniqueness and the varying ways these affect our lives. when i was younger, i always said i liked summer the best, because i liked warm weather. i held to this until a year or two ago, when in the spring, we were driving down a road and i was practically jumping out of my seat with excitement over the beautiful flowering trees and the other deciduous trees which were starting to get their leaves. that combined with the vigil i start keeping in late january when the first little green peaks of what will be daffodil leaves poke their way out of the frozen ground caused dave to point out that he thought my favorite season was really spring. he’s got a point. so i’ve thought about it, trying my best to come up with a firm ‘favorite’, and i can honestly say that it’s impossible! the closest i could come would be to identify a least favorite season, w...

so, i’ve been really bad about blogging lately. apparently i’m not the only one since hardly any of my bloggy friends post anything anymore either… my excuse is different lately though… it’s not that i have nothing on my mind or nothing i want to write about, it’s that the stuff stirring around in my mind is of a nature that it would probably offend, shock or alienate most people who would read it. am i the only one who does this? do other, seemingly normal, people out there walk around with thoughts in their heads that are so different from the actions of the masses that the sheer thought of people acting on them in any sort of numbers would cause some sort of major upheaval in the way our society lives? or is it just me? am i some sort of revolutionary or prophet, too afraid of saying what’s really on my mind, so as to make my ideas and opinions completely irrelevant? probably so. i guess i’m just wondering if anyone else ever feels like that. somehow or other i’ve always fel...

this is yesterday’s harvest… yup. the garden is doing what it’s supposed to be doing. these are just some of the 100’s of cherry tomatoes i’ve brought in in the last month. i’ve had 2 big tomatoes before yesterday, but HOLY COW! i think i’ll need to share those. this is one of 2 red cabbages i’ve got. it’s beautiful! we had some in our salads last night. YUM! dave and shane were good sports and tolerated it. layla was ecstatic, as was i. and micah just ignored it (as he does with most food). that was just yesterday! i don’t think the other one will be as good, since it got attacked early on by some sort of bugs and still looks kind of pathetic. but we shall see. looking back, we’ve had 2 full meals’ worth of green beans (one of which i tried to steam w/out any water, so that was a bust). kind of pathetic, considering i’m doubtful we’ve got more than a few beans left on the plants. the crows were out to get me this year and pulled out or plucked off most of my plants just after they sp...

so, we started school today. this is a big deal because it is OUR first day of official homeschooling. you know, here. at home. most everyone reading this is already aware of the fact that shane has been homeschooled since first grade, but that he has spent the majority of that ‘school’ time, with my mother as his ‘teacher’. this was a fine arrangement, she was willing and more than qualified, and he was learning. but for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being my mother’s current cancer issues, it had become clear that it was time for me to take over. AND,with layla being 4 now, i really wanted to do a little bit more preschool stuff with her. being a little bit of a chicken flake, i (with much urging from my loving husband) decided the best route to go would be with a packaged curriculum. i figured it would be the most time-effective way to cover what we needed to cover, and be somewhat dummy-proof, but at the same time, having the option to supplement with as much ...

i know i wrote a post about “nonnies” recently (bananas), but i’ve been noticing that micah is starting to abandon his cute baby pronunciations of some things and i want to make sure i write them down before i forget. doko=hot dog (or any similarly shaped object) bopple=apple (similar to layla’s bapples, but not quite) lala=layla (not the teletubby) beebee= baby (usually in reference to dolls, but he got super excited at the library the other day when he saw a real baby and kept pointing and yelling “beebee! beebee!”) gaygake=pancake there’s no more mama or dada, we’re mommy and daddy, or sometimes even just mom or dad. SO depressing! and the one that’s killing me is “toot toot” is starting to change over to train. sometimes we get “toot toot, train” now. like he has to combine both before switching. we really like his “what doing?” and “where going?” questions. if you’ve seen phineas and ferb and know isabella’s tagline, “whatcha doin?” that’s the spin you’ve...