Gotta love the classics.

In case you're new to this blog (Hi!) or haven't read some of my older posts, I work at a school (which I love, most of the time) and I also have to drive a school bus (which I don't love, most of the time).

This however, is one of those times that I did love driving the bus.

I was down to my last stop and had three boys who were still on, so it was fairly quiet (which is extremely unusual for the bus) when all of a sudden one of my little guys who is in first grade belts out with:

" Take me down to the paradise city
   where the grass is green 
   and the girls are pretty
   Oh won't you please take me hoooome!"

I'm tellin' you he did Axl Rose proud.

Spider!!!

This is what I almost ran into when I went to take the trash out the other night.

I know, I know, the picture is blurry. I really wish that I had gotten a good shot of the thing, it was huge.

The dang thing had strung a web from the edge of our gutter to a tiki torch on the other side of our patio. It must have been ten feet long.

The web, not the spider.

The spider itself was nothing to shake a stick at either though. If I had to guess, I would have to say that the body was about the size of a quarter. Shudder.

It's supposed to be red!

The other night I woke Sarah up to make her use the bathroom when I tucked Alex in. We've been having some, ahem, issues at night this last week.

Nothing serious, probably just her drinking too soon before bed, but I was very tired of stripping a soaking wet child (which I'm sure she was sick of) and bed in the middle of the night and washing all of her bedding, so I thought that I'd hedge my bets by making her get up and use the potty.

Well, when I picked her up out of bed she was apparently dreaming. Really hard.

Sarah: Red!
Me (very startled): What?
Sarah: It's red!
Me: What's red?
Sarah: It's supposed to be red!
Me: What's supposed to be red?
Sarah: It's supposed to be red!!!

At this point I gave up, she was very adamant that whatever it was was supposed to be red. Alex and I both started cracking up, and Sarah used the potty and went back to bed without a peep.

... And She Creeps

Last night Sarah and I were alone because Alex was spending the night at a friends house, and we always make these our 'girl's night.' It's nothing huge, but we hang out, cook, paint our nails, watch a movie Alex wouldn't be caught dead watching, things like that.

We usually have a really good time and enjoy being girly.

Well, I told Sarah to go get ready for bed while I finished some things up, and while I was walking towards her room to tuck her in I noticed that the lights were out.

Perfect. I could play 'And she creeps' with her.

This was a game that my mom used to play with me at bedtime when I was little that always involved lots of squealing and giggling. You hide under the covers while mom slowly creeps towards you saying, "Here she comes... and she turns... and she creeps... and she creeps..." walking as quietly as she can towards the bed until she pounces on you and tickles you. Tons of fun. 

So here I am playing the game and creeping into Sarah's room and she's giggling up a storm, when all of a sudden: 'gigglegiggle fart giggle fartfart giggle', and then of course I started cracking up...

It was priceless. 

Cooking, lots and lots of cooking.

 This:

 is my basil plant.

So this:

 was the todo list on the dry-erase board on my fridge today.

Alex is spending the night at a friend's house, so I thought that it would be a perfect time for Sarah and I to spend some time in the kitchen cooking together. So we both strapped on our aprons and got to work.  Here's the breakdown of what we ended up making:

• Pie crust ( for apple pies that I'm going to make next weekend from apples the kids and I picked with my mom)
• Pesto
• And Pinto/refried beans (these were a last minute addition, but they turned out yummy)

Sarah and I made the pie crust first. Now this was an experiment for me because I am inexplicably afraid of making my own pastry, but I'm tired of using Pillsbury and I wanted to try doing it from scratch this year (apple picking and pie making is an annual event in our house.)

So what's a girl to do? I opened up my trusty Pioneer Woman cookbook.

If you haven't heard of her yet  here's her website. Go ahead, check it out. I'll wait.

I know, cool huh? I've been reading her blog for a couple of years and have really enjoyed it, and I also love the recipes on her site. Anyway, so I followed her recipe for pie crust. It was really easy, and it's hanging out in the freezer right now. I'll pull it out tomorrow and bake some of it by the way of taste testing before I actually make pies with it. I'll let you know how it goes.

Next came the pesto, so Sarah and I went out on the back patio to pick the basil. My basil plant is up past my waist so I decided that it was high time to make pesto.

Here's a close up of it. Hello beautiful.

 

Here are some pictures of the process. 

                                    

 

I started with high hopes, but I'm not quite sure of the results. 

I'm not exactly a pesto expert, but I think that it turned out okay. I won't show you any pictures of the finished product though, I just couldn't find a way to make it not look, well, gross, and I'm not going to subject you to that. Aaaanyway, moving on. 

Here's the pinto beans, also a la Pioneer Woman, they turned out really, really good. I filled up four freezer containers with them. I left half of them whole and then mashed the other half to make refried beans. 

 And just because I love ya, here's a photo of my kitchen counter in the middle of everything.

Pumpkins! (Yes, I know they're early, we'll get into that later.)

Well, this Spring I decided that I was going to take back the godforsaken weed patch on the side of our house that used to be a garden. 

Here's the whole sad, sorry tale. 

I had picked up the book Square Foot Gardening (which is wonderful, I wholeheartedly recommend it) and promptly got the vegetable garden bug. Which as you know from this post, and this post, is not unusual for me. I have always wanted a garden, but the tiny postage stamp of a patio in our apartment in California prevented me from having one. After moving to North Carolina we had plenty of space, but then resources were a problem, go figure.

So, anyway, silly stupid me decides that it would be fun to involve the neighbors and kind of have a little community garden instead of just putting in a bed for the kids and I. 

Baaaaaaad idea. 

It was basically the cause of WWIII around our little patch of driveway. One neighbor wanted to plan things out very methodically and had some very expensive ideas on how we should do the garden, and the other neighbor wanted to have the garden in now, and I mean NOW because the planting season's getting late and we needed to get everything in the ground yesterday. Well, long story short, he won. 

Now, not only did he want the garden in NOW, he also wanted it to be huge. I was thinking maybe a couple of 4 x4 ft. beds, but noooooo, he rented a rototiller and dug out a ridiculously huge 12 x 30 ft. monster of a garden. Sigh. We had one growing season and then he and his family moved out, leaving me with the monster. The monster promptly overgrew with weeds because I couldn't keep up with it, and I'm not talking about little itty bitty weeds, no, I'm talking about weeds in excess of five feet tall. 

Some of them were over my head. 

No, I'm not kidding. I really wish that I was. 

So this eyesore sat on the side of my house for over a year, and I battled with it when I couldn't stand the sight of the weeds anymore. Finally this Spring I had had enough. I went out, pulled as many weeds as humanly possible, got free mulch from down the street at the tree cutting place, built two 4x4 ft. beds with Alex and Sarah, and put in our garden this Spring. 

Here are some shots of how it looks now. 

These morning glories showed up on their own. Aren't they gorgeous?

The two beds went at one end, and since we had this ridiculous amount of space left, I decided to grow pumpkins. I figured why the heck not. If they grow then cool, we have pumpkins. If not, I've lost a buck or two on pumpkin seeds, no big deal.

They grew, oh boy did they grow. The vines grew to over six feet long and it was super cool when the blooms and all of the baby pumpkins started showing up. Unfortunately I didn't lay the mulch down thick enough and all of the weeds came back. Those weeds overshadowed the pumpkins vines and caused all of them to rot. So, we had a pumpkin harvest in August. 

Gee, I hope they make it until Halloween, but in the meantime we have all of our little pumpkins in a row on our kitchen counter. How cool is that?

Forgotten how addicting this can be...

Must. stop. fiddling. 

I need to go to bed, work tomorrow.  

P.S. I love the changes that they've made to blogger since I've been gone. It's amazing what happens in a year... (coughcough) right, going to bed. 

P.P.S. I've also forgotten how incredibly frustrating it can be when you want to change something and you can't figure out how to do it. I'm really going to go get ready for bed now, I promise.

P.P.P.S. Yay, I figured it out! Okay, good night.  

On being a single mom and attemping to write a blog...

 Well, let's see, take single mom with blog (exhibit A), move her out of parent's house (exhibit B) and remove those sources of support (see exhibit B) and see what happens to her blog (exhibit C).

I've been reading back through my posts after not being on here for I don't even know how long and realized that I really miss doing this. I actually enjoyed reading my own writing ( I don't know what that says about me, I really promise that I'm not narcissistic) and I would love to get into doing this again.

It's neat to sort of chronicle this life that I'm living and to be able to look back at things I don't even remember months and years later. There are some precious memories in these archives, there are also some very painful ones. It's interesting to see how much I've changed, and how much I haven't. It's interesting to see how far I've come, and how far I still have to go.

Now I'm not promising anything (please see exhibits A, B, and C), but I hope that I might actually be able to make this work and stick to it this time (finances for internet permitting).

~ Jen