Anniversary Gift

You know you're married when most of your anniversary, birthday, Mother/Father's Day, and Valentine's Day gifts are items for the household.

You know you're married to the right person when that doesn't bother you one little bit.

(At least in our case.)

Behold, our 4 year anniversary gift to each other: a new Nesco American Harvest food dehydrator with fruit leather trays.
The one we currently have is really my dad's and it is probably just about as old as I am. Every year it makes a new noise and one of these days it is just going to quit--probably when we're neck-deep in tomatoes destined to become sun-dried. Besides the heater and fan mechanism failing, the plastic spokes on the trays are also breaking. We have only 2 fruit leather trays right now and we're super excited (seriously, even Dave is) to have more.

The only bummer is that in the 3 days since we placed our order the price went down another $7. Oh well, at least we got free shipping!

Four!

Wowza...yesterday was our four year anniversary! Where on Earth did the time go?

We were married in Point Arena on a Saturday night and had a huge reception the following afternoon in Gualala at the Arts Center. It is kind of cool that we're up here again on our anniversary weekend...I always know it is getting close to our special day when the miniature white roses are blooming on my mother-in-law's front porch. We took wedding pictures for a couple of days after the wedding and my original bouquet died...so we made a new one with those roses and a boutineer for Dave to wear, too. I didn't want to have a contemporary style bouquet (red roses bunched together in a tight wad) so I asked the local florist to make something with whatever color gladiolas she had--those are my mother-in-law's favorite flowers and she has TONS of them in her front garden every spring. I ended up with a few of every color--pink, white, orange, purple. She said making the bouquets was a flashback to the 1980s for her since glads have since fallen out of fashion! Haha. It is very "Julie" to do things out of style... Anyway, the mini white roses will always be special to me, just like the glads because they remind me of Peggy and of my wedding.

I still can't believe how lucky I am to have such a wonderful husband...and I can't believe we have a darling little boy! I wonder how many kids we'll have after another four years???

Tomato Trees!

Whoa...our garden is out of control. In a good way, though.

This was in May:And this was today:
Some of those tomato vines are like 7 feet tall!

See the red arrow in the picture below? That's the TOP of the tomato!
Craziness. Tilled-in compost is nothing short of amazing, that's all I can say.

I can already see some fruits forming on the tomato, pepper, eggplant, zucchini, and squash plants. So far there's nothing on any of the bean vines (soy, sugar snap, or green). I can't wait to start eating all this fresh produce...and then to preserve whatever we can't eat in time.

Father's Day!

We had both sets of parents and both our brothers here for Father's Day. Knowing so many people would be in attendance, I decided to make a FEAST. It was dang good, if I do say so myself. (And I'll be eating left overs all week because, as usual, I made too much food.)

We had smoked chicken...Smoked ribs...Pasta salad (made with TWO pounds of pasta...I told you I made too much)...Apple raisin coleslaw...Cherry lemonade...Corn on the cob...And creme brule for dessert.
Before dessert we headed to the park to take some family photos. Here's Eddie with all of the doting grandparents:
I want to say thank you a million times over to our parents for coming all the way from their nice cozy homes to dine and celebrate fatherhood with us. But mostly I want to thank Dave for knocking me up so we could be parents together. (I luff you, Lover!) He's the best daddy for our sweet, cute baby boy.While it was nice to have everyone here, it was really stressful for me because of Bernie. I won't go into detail because it isn't appropriate and I'm honestly tired of thinking about it (try as I might, I just can't figure out what I'm doing that threatens her). Let's just say that her behavior confuses me more than ever, it made me angry, and it also made me sad. Mostly sad, I think.

Enough of that. I look forward to next year when Eddie is big enough to pick out a gift for Dave...it'll be so much fun to see what he picks!

Baby Sitting Swap

Right now I go to campus 3 days a week: on M/W Eddie goes to daycare at Cassie's and on F he stays home with Dave. I'd love to have an extra day or even a half day on campus but we don't want to spend even more money on childcare. So I started asking around to see if any of my mama friends were interested in swap sitting. After getting no interest from the pregnancy support group moms from last year, nor anyone I know on Facebook, I finally posted an ad in the childcare section of Craigslist.

My ad explained that I'm a grad student looking for 4-8 hours of swapping per week, ideally with another grad student, and that I won't travel outside of Davis for this.

Five people contacted me immediately. This afternoon Dave, Eddie, and I met Morgan and her baby boy, Jonah, who is only 4 days younger than Eddie. He's adorable and mellow and his mom is really nice. They also have dogs at home so that's not an issue (something I didn't mention in the ad). Starting next Wednesday we'll be swapping 4 hours each week at our house--I'll go to campus from 8-12 and then we'll switch.

Cassie knows that I've been looking for someone to swap with and she said I could rearrange Eddie's schedule at her house if I need to. I think I will have him at daycare M/Th. That way I'll go to school M/half day W/Th/F but will have all day T to get errands done and hang out with my darling Eddie Pie. When and if Dave EVER gets a job near Davis then we'll have Eddie in daycare on Fridays, too (unless we can't afford it and then we'll have to do more swapping).

Freebies

I love living in Davis for a lot of reasons...one of them is finding tons of nice, free stuff in our neighborhood. In a small town largely populated by students, the end of the school year means you see free stuff everywhere. It's pretty amazing what people deem unworthy of packing when they move out of the dorms or an apartment/house. Lots of my friends go "dorm diving" (like dumpster diving) and rummage through all the stuff left outside the dorms each June--they find clothes, lamps, school and cleaning supplies, and lots and lots and lots of unopened food. Crazy!

The other day Eddie and I were walking to the Dollar Store to buy some frozen peas (and a candy bar for me...shhhhhh). We walked down our old street a few blocks from the park and I found a whole grocery sack full of cookie cutters. Two of them are even the nice nonstick kind you can use to make pancakes. I took the whole bag (which also had a couple of books inside). I can't wait until Eddie's big enough to make sugar cookies or Jello jigglers with me...or to play with Play Dough.

I've never seen such tiny alphabet cutters before...too bad it is missing the V. For our wedding we received a larger set of letters and numbers so I'm sure we'll have lots of fun when he learns to spell.

Pictures

I love finding pictures on the camera card that I didn't take. These are a few that Dave took last Friday while I was at school. He was trying out the different effects on the camera, thus the grainy black and white photos.

We have a bunch of left over pieces of PVC pipe scattered around the porch from our irrigation project. Eddie loves playing with them so we've never thrown them away. One of these days we're going to get him a whole box of pipe pieces and various fittings to play with. My dad fondly remembers playing with pipe pieces in the back of his family's station wagon on long car trips. I'm sure Eddie will enjoy it, too.
It'll be fun in a couple of years (or sooner) when we find pictures that Eddie took with the camera.