Sunbun

Between the nice weather and just general busy-ness I'm falling down on the blog job. Today was Planting Day. We got a bunch of plants from Spring Hill yesterday, so today was spent sorting them out and changing one of the Weed Beds™ into a Flower Bed™. The soil is utter crap - heavy clay which needs amending big-time with peat. (That brought back memories of Prawn asking why people were burning "Pete" in The Secret of Roan Inish, LOL!) I'm going to be sore tomorrow from all that digging. But we have a lot more work to do before it's all said and done! I sent Sluggie to sparring and advanced sparring with John since he had to ref, and the rest of us stayed home to work. Well, The Littles didn't exactly work, but Mollusc helped me. We listened to our new Michael Bublé CD for a bit until Mollusc got "sick of love songs," then one of Arabic and Hindi music (Aicha - OK that's in French - "Kiss Kiss" and some for which I don't know the names or artists) that my friend made for us. Our friends came over and gave me a hand and by the time John and Sluggie got home we were ready to move on, so we put in The Reptile Room (Lemony Snicket) and it really made the digging go faster. I love that guy's sense of humour. :-) And Tim Curry does such great executions of the different voices. I love how he does Mr. Poe and Sunny. Mollusc got to drive the lawnmower with a trailer-load of cedar mulch bags over to the bed and now she's dying to mow the lawn. :-)

I was wearing junked-out capris that are a couple of sizes too big now, causing them to become low-riders. (much to John's delight *rolleyes* ) What with all the squatting and bending I nearly have sunbun. As it is, I have a strip of sunburn across my very very lower back. :-P My cheeks feel sunburnt, too. My upper ones. But it was a lurvely day and I'm not complaining. It got a little dicey, though, trying to mulch around everything without stepping on stuff. Especially when some of the planted stuff was impossible to tell apart from the shredded bark mulch! :-/ I had no idea how many plants come as rhizomes before today.

Last night during the kids' red-belt class, Prawn fell asleep in a little ball on the floor and stayed that way through our class's warm-ups. Swimming must have really zonked her out! She was hunched up facedown with her arms and legs tucked up underneath her. Too bad I don't have a pic. The kids got to do flying sidekicks - jumping over folding chairs and kicking a helmet suspended on a string. Mollusc's were absolutely amazingly beautiful! She's not so very much the athletic one, (very, very bookish instead) and we were just staring in shock and amazement. Sluggie, of course, did some beautiful ones too (she always gets the crowd going at TKD) but it was Mollusc that shocked us since it was such a change of form for her. In our class, we got to do jump double snap kicks, which we've never gotten to try before, so a good time was had by all.

I haven't written in what seems like ages. It seems like life is a flurry of activity, even though I don't think anything has changed besides the weather. I'm way behind on my email. Ack.

I made "Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies" from my Chinaberry Cookbook. It made approximately 2 gazillion cookies. Fortunately they taste good, so I don't think we'll have trouble doing them in. We sent home a bunch with our friends and still had a gallon bag stuffed FULL and that was after a bunch of dough AND cookies had been consumed! I actually had to put my hands over the mixer bowl while the chips were mixing in so that the dough wouldn't escape. (I wasn't entirely successful either.) The kids say it's their favourite choc chip cookie recipe ever. :-) Just holler if you need it.

Our friends brought over "Madagascar" for the kids to all watch, so I got to see a bunch of it whilst making cookies. Cute. :-) It always amazes me how they can get the cartoon characters to look a bit like the people doing the voices.

I'm still ogling all the yummy homeschool catalogs that have been showing up. Oh to have an infinite book budget and more bookcases. My dream home will have at least one room lined with wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling books. :-) The new American Girl catalog came and the newest doll is homeschooled, LOL! Hsers are really becoming some sort of niche market. Still trying to decide about Biology for Mollusc. The course I want to use is to be done concurrently with Algebra, which she'll be doing next year (or whenever she finishes this book.) But I'm not sure if she should take Bio so early in case she forgets a lot of it. OTOH, since she'll be doing Science-intensive study, that will give her plenty of time for Chem, Physics, and then Advanced coursework, which would have it nice and fresh in her mind for university. So that's probably the route we'll go.

I'm just realising that I do a lot of rambling to myself here. It's OK if you get bored and don't want to read it all, LOL!

Note to self - wear sunscreen tomorrow. Oh yes - Americans (or Westerners?) now lack Vit D because we wear too much sunscreen. And our air is too clean and no longer blocks out as many harmful UV rays. Can't win, LOL! Well, there always has to be some sort of crisis now doesn't there? Otherwise the papers wouldn't sell. :-P