Grade 6 STomp

Shae and some friends from her Grade 6 class have been working hard the past couple of months to design and perform their own stomp routine. I got to watch the big performance yesterday, here it is:

(Sorry for the shaky videography near the end - my phone started ringing in my pocket and I was trying to turn it off and keep filming at the same time...)

Bathroom Reno - Before and After

Our ensuite bathroom renovations are finally complete and I really love my new bathroom. It's so much brighter and cleaner and prettier, it makes me happy. Here are some pictures from before:

Kind of embarrassing how mouldy the grout was but it's not my fault! It was like that when we moved in and even spraying it directly with 100% bleach didn't kill all the mould.
The counters aren't usually so cluttered but I might have purposely not tidied them up before taking these pictures to make the before and after even more dramatic...
...And, here is the finished bathroom:

It's a really tiny bathroom so it's hard to get a good shot of the whole thing.

Those tiles aren't actually pink at all, but on my monitor they look really pink. They're actually cream coloured.

Connor's 6th Birthday and other June happenings

On June 17th, my sweet little Connor turned 6. Here are some pictures from the big day.

As you can see, he really likes soccer. He's on a community U6 team this spring called the Blue Lightning and he absolutely loves to play. He's definitely a competitive kid and you can see it when he gives it everything he's got in every game, running hard and fast the whole game to try and score as many goals as he can (we're working on passing...). He's also a very fierce goalie when it's his turn to be in net, he's not one of those kids who gets bored or distracted in net, he's always got his eye on the ball.

Right after Connor's birthday, we celebrated Father's Day. Here's Jess after we brought him lunch in bed (none of us, including him, are interested in waking up early enough to do a fancy breakfast in bed on a morning with 9:00 church!)

The kids worked hard on some artwork for Jess which I printed out onto an iron-on fabric transfer and then ironed onto a black t-shirt for him.

And these are some shots from a Sunday afternoon walk to our favourite neighbourhood green spot, Muskrat Pond.

Garden Update

Well, some of my plants are doing really great and others...not so much. I think I must have transplanted some of my seedlings into my hothouse too soon because 3 of them died almost immediately. I guess they were just too small to take the change in temperature.

The two bigger transplants (I'm still not sure if they're pumpkin or cucumber - I really should have labelled them!) are thriving and I planted some new seeds beside the dead seedlings just for the heck of it so we'll see if I can get anything from them before the frost hits in September.

But my peas are doing really awesome, I'm so excited! Every single year that I plant a garden, I always always plant peas. They are my very favourite vegetable to eat fresh from the garden, probably because of childhood memories I have of picking bowlfuls of peas from my great aunt's garden on Seal Island, Nova Scotia, and sitting on her porch, shelling peas and feeding the shells to the sheep and eating the delicious fresh peas. BUT, I have never had any success with them. This is frustrating because they seem like they'd be such an easy plant to grow but they usually grow a foot or two and then wither and die and maybe produce a few anemic peapods. But this year, they just shot up and they're showing no sign of slowing down.

They seem to grow a few inches a day! I'm not going to get bowlfuls of peas but maybe if I figure out how to grow them successfully, I'll plant more next year...

My Garden

I added another square foot garden to my backyard this week so now I'm up to 1 4x8 garden and 2 4x4's. This is the most ambitious garden I've ever attempted but so far I'm loving it! I've never had a ton of success growing things but slowly but surely, I'm learning and improving and I love the anticipation as I watch my little plants grow.

Those are peas at the front - I made the trellis out of some pvc pipes and a blue broom handle I found in the shed - at first they were just pushed down in the dirt but then Hudson decided to pull them out and play with them so now they're screwed to the sides of the garden. I planted the peas, along with the carrots (just little still), the beets and the spinach in mid-April but they haven't grown very fast: I blame our ridiculously cold and wet spring. Hopefully June will improve soon.

The next box is strawberries - I've never grown strawberries before but these ones have flowers on them now so they're doing well! I ordered the strawberries as small plants from www.veseys.com. They shipped them here from P.E.I. - amazing that they can survive such a long trip through the mail!

And the last box is my most ambitious: I'm attempting to grow Roma tomatoes, cucumbers and mini pumpkins. I've tried pumpkins before and never gotten any fruit and I've never tried cucumbers. But considering that my backyard is west facing with some giant pine trees, I really don't have enough sun to grow these - so that's why I pulled out my father-in-law's handy dandy Garden Hothouse. I've never tried it before and it's really designed for a slightly larger space but I figured that if I didn't maximize what little sunlight my backyard gets, there was no way I would succeed with these plants.

First, you cover the soil with black plastic and then you fill a black plastic tube up with water and lay it around the plants.

Then, you put in a metal frame and cover the whole thing with clear plastic:

Wish me luck!

You Can't Teach an Old Dog New Tricks

So, according to dog training books I've read, a great way to discourage a dog from stealing food off the table is to rig a trap with tin cans where the tin cans fall and startle the dog when he takes food from the table. Normally, Howie's pretty scared of loud noises so we thought this would have to work really well.

Well...as you can see, not so much.

Any suggestions on how to teach him to stay off the table?

I-Spy Swap

I signed up for my first I-Spy Swap this weekend at Obsessively Stitching - this is a new concept to me and I think it's a fabulous idea. I made an I-Spy quilt about 6 or 7 years ago and it was really really hard to gather enough fabrics, each one different and with some kind of picture on it, to put together a fairly small quilt. I think I came up with about 75 different squares and felt happy with that. Well, by entering this swap, all I have to do is buy 0.2 metres of 10 different fabrics (2 metres total), cut them up into 20 4" squares of each fabric, mail them off and then I'll receive 200 different squares back. TWO HUNDRED different squares! I'm so excited to see what I get back.

And yes, I do realize that I already have an I-Spy quilt, as Jess has already reminded me. But that's not the point.