Mantis Hatchery

It's bedtime and Robert comes out of his room looking a little nervous.

"Mom, there are two weird yellow bugs on my closet shelf that are kinda scaring me. They look like baby praying mantises."

"What?!"

He was totally right. Baby praying mantises. Not just two of them. I found nine.

Five months ago, he found a cool looking something on a stick and brought it in the house. It looked a little like this:

Except the top was sealed, not broken open and ruffled like above. See where we're going with this? He had brought home an unhatched praying mantis egg case and thrown it on his shelf and completely forgotten about it. Now he had a nursery of itsy bitsy carnivorous insects next to his paper airplane collection.

Alice was terrified to sleep with them roaming free in her room.

Robert was freaking out at the idea of any of them getting hurt.

James, thankfully, had passed out on the couch just 30 minutes before. I can't even imagine what he would try to do with these guys on the loose.

Matthew was oblivious.

The kids brought me a jar and a paintbrush. I carefully collected the baby bugs and put a lid on top with air holes. It's hard to know what to do with them now...it's still the middle of winter. No mantis food around for months. Will they survive outside, even if sheltered? Will they survive inside, at all?

I have no idea what to feed them, but I figure water is probably important, so I put a tiny drop in the bottom of the jar. We'll see how many of them survive (or escape in) the night. Sheesh. Then we can think about the best place for them longer-term.

Math Carnival

The UIUC Mathematics Department put on a little Math Carnival for elementary-aged kids this weekend. Alice and Robert are on a math kick right now, so I thought they'd enjoy it. Turns out it was a very loud, crowded event and it was difficult to participate in most of the activities. James and Matthew were bored out of their minds most of the time, too.

But (and this is a big but) Robert got to see math a little differently. He played tangram puzzles, built a structure with magnatiles, and folded an almost complete set of platonic solids (missing the icosahedron). He turned to Bobby and asked, "What does any of this have to do with math?!"

Alice had fun, too, hanging out a long while at the riddles table (getting lion-goat-grain across the river one at a time without allowing any to eat the other), tangrams, making a few platonic solids of her own, and gathering the courage to ask what they were building in their 3-D printer.

James played Connect Four.

Matthew threw colorful balls into boxes labeled with prime numbers and enjoyed a couple flights of stairs.

Bobby and I pretty much wanted to leave as soon as we got there. If we do this again, I will leave the smallest of the small ones at home, arrive the moment it starts, and zip through all the interesting bits before things get too crazy. There were activities there for a wide range of math levels. We could have spent half an hour at each table, honestly, with how much was presented there.

Robert's tangram creation

Matthew and Robert getting into the magnatiles

Farm Planning

I warned you about my big plans (BIG PLANS!) this growing season, right? Still in Phase One: Planning.

Big plans, Page #1:

First day of planting, scheduled 8 April 2017

My backyard garden beds boast about 300sqft of growing space. This year, thanks to a nearby community garden, I have plans to expand to 900sqft of growing space. The diagram above shows my first planting day on 8 April (+/- a few days), which fills in all 300sqft of my backyard garden beds. But "planting day" is a misnomer. Most of it will be transplanting starts from my greenhouse room (still under construction).

On the docket for 8 April: 
broccoli (10)
cauliflower (4)
Brussels sprouts (6)
head cabbage (14)
leaf lettuce (20, 2/week for 10 weeks)
head lettuce (16, 2/week for 8 weeks)
regular onions (55)
cylindra beets (35)
garlic (8)
big carrots (75)
baby carrots (85)
radishes (18)
bush peas, shelling variety (508)

If I left it at that, I would still produce more food than my typical growing season.

BIG PLANS!

More to come.

I'm still trying to wrap my brain around how much MORE work this garden will need than any others I've grown to date. A project on this scale goes beyond backyard gardening. It's more of a small-scale urban farming outfit...20 hours/week, 6+ months...and it deserves a name...

Green Dirt Farm
Poulson Produce
Greenlife Farm
Seven Sisters Farm
Penny Produce
Crazy Old Lady Foods
Midlife Crisis Farm
No Face Foods

Love this little guy

Sweat Equity Farm
Because It's Important To Me (BIITMe Farm?)
Soup On Navels (anagram for Poulson Evans)
Pa's Novel Onus (another anagram. So true! Poor Bobby.)
Food Matters Farm

I'd love to hear your thoughts/suggestions on an appropriate name. I'm also accepting applications for summer internships :)

Compost Tea Leaves

I cleaned out my seed-starting supplies today and consulted the resulting compost tea leaves for a peek into this upcoming growing season:

Reading left to right, it looks like prepping the soil will almost kill me (big black circle), followed by the usual hurry-up-and-wait of spring planting, then a great black wave of hard work about July and August as harvesting and successive planting kick into high gear. The first hard frost will hit somewhere in November, dissipating the rest of the work into a winter oblivion. Yup, sounds about right.

The kids digging for treasure on a freakishly warm January day.

I've got big plans (BIG PLANS!) this year. It's the first time in a long while that I will be (and plan to stay) pregnancy-free, nursing-free, and infant-free the whole growing season. I'll have my WHOLE body to work with, and more of my own schedule than ever before. I'll also have 4 eager-but-not-very-skilled child-laborers farm hands to help with the chores and the harvest. Maybe. Gotta find an effective form of motivation first.

I have very ambitious goals planned. More details to come. Stay tuned, if you can bear all the gardening talk. If it's not your thing, that's cool, we can still be friends. I think ;)

Spring makes me as giddy as a kid at Christmas time. Sheesh.

Flooring

Good news:
We're finally putting some durable, beautiful, and sweepable flooring in the dining room and master bedroom.

Bad news:
No one will deliver it to us. We get to move over a thousand pounds of material ourselves.

Good news:
While working on the master bedroom, we get to stay in our guest room instead of our living room floor.

Bad news:
We're not accustomed to a queen-sized bed. The last few nights have been, well, painfully sleepless for both of us. Today, we independently confessed that we would rather sleep on the couch than share the guest bed again. Ha ha ha! Why did NONE of our guests mention that before?

Good news:
We have a trusted friend installing the floor for us.

Really good news:
This same friend happened to have a coupon that saved us hundreds of dollars (on top of a pretty good sale price) AFTER we had already paid for the materials. The store actually took the coupon retroactively! I'm tossing around ideas to put that rescued money towards making the guest room more comfortable. Or taking this friend out to dinner. Or investing it in some farm/garden equipment. Or simply putting it back into the pool from whence it came. Trying not to be too selfish about it all...

Popcorn!

I prefer the stove top stuff, but I have to admit the microwave popcorn version makes for a pretty exciting show:

Not ready, but taking a peek anyway

It's too early to be thinking about this year's garden...

it's gray and cold...

and yet...and so...

I'm dreaming of these things to add this spring...

Hibiscus

Honeyberry

Poppies

Some Pictures from Christmas Break

"The Baby" and "Little Mom": accurate and completely inaccurate nicknames for both kids.

The fresh new look of our dining room! We have since replaced the chandelier, too, and have a new floor coming sometime soon.

My boys. When I see them smiling like this together, they look identical.

Grandma Evans took a couple hours to teach the older kids how to weave a little bag. They LOVED it. Totally loved it. And now they notice woven fabrics all over the place.

Matthew admiring his own baby's eyes for the first time. He's such a sweet Daddy. 

Here's Alice shrieking over her first batch of homemade ice cream that she made with her brand new ice cream machine. We've since made strawberry sorbet, egg nog ice cream, and Martinelli's sparkling apple cider slushy.

Reconnect With Self

Whoosh! Christmas and New Year are gone.

Just me, now, chillin' with the fam for one more day before everything starts again on Tuesday. Part of me is clawing to return to my comfortable routine. The other part is stuck in a loop...looking for a new routine...looking for another project to fill the holiday planning void...

• I researched what it would take to train for a marathon.

• I contacted the Student Sustainable Farm project about volunteering in the greenhouses this winter/spring.

• I took on an extra shift at the local Family History Center.

• I finally worked through a family history trouble spot that's been bugging me for years. It opened up a whole new family to explore and research, but they have the unfortunate circumstance of a very, very common surname (Johnson) and I'm finding it difficult to make much headway in the snippets of screen time I can steal throughout the day. It's going to take some serious study to parse out this bit of my clan.

• I briefly considered researching/purchasing airfare for our family reunion in California next summer.

None of those projects are driving me right now. Especially the marathon thing. That's completely out of the question.

Maybe I could think about some resolutions for the year. Or I could let you know about the goals/projects I'm already spending my energy on.

I spend a lot of time planning, shopping for, preparing, and cleaning up after food.
I spend a lot of time planning, acquiring, preparing, and cleaning up stuff.
I think about my personal health and fitness every day.
I weigh myself and record basic dietary info (food groups and # of servings) for myself every day.
I exercise 3 hours a week, with 2 specific cardiovascular fitness targets in mind.
I spend a little time 6 days a week sitting with Robert while he practices the piano.
I devise tests to measure whether Matthew is color blind.
I think about each of my kid's needs in this moment.
I try to serve in my church, whatever I have been asked to do. Diligently. Genuinely.
I practice speaking Spanish 10 minutes every day.
Sometimes I blog :)

Another topic/project on the horizon this year:

Alice has been asking more questions about growing up and all the physical/emotional changes that come with it. Especially the very earliest changes. She seems much more aware of it at this age than I ever was. There's a lot I never thought about as a kid. Anyway, I've got some more reading to do. A friend recommended a book published by the American Girl Doll folks (yeah, I rolled my eyes, too, but it's actually pretty good!) that we've been reading together. That's helped a lot. We are in the "tweens" with both feet now. Last night at our dinner party, she was the oldest kid and didn't have a friend, so she wanted to be counted with the adults. I said "sure" and completely forgot about it. When Alice reached for an adult plate, I hastily reminded her that kids were supposed to take the small plates. She firmly replied, without attitude, but with complete confidence, "I'm not a kid."

Oh, right.

9 years old.

This is my official public request for thoughts/suggestions on this whole raising a daughter through puberty thing. Holy Cow!