Today's planned activity for the girls was to make banana bread. It seemed like a good idea--the girls and I hadn't cooked in awhile and all that banana mashing would be fun, right?
Ooh no...nope...definetly not fun. Just a minute or two into the cooking and the girls were bored, bored, bored. But the unplanned dish washing afterwards? Now that was a hit!
Pookie carefully filled the sink, added the soap, and washed, scrubbed and rinsed the dishes...
...while Fig stayed busy with scooping up water in her cup, pouring it into the thermos, pouring it into the mug, and pouring it all back into the sink...

...and I sat back and observed. It was a good reminder for me that children don't necessarily need carefully planned lessons in order to be learning--they are always at work pursuing knowledge.

So what's the plan for tomorrow? I don't know, I think I'll wait and see what the girls come up with...

Getting some help with the dinner preparation...

which means more clean-up for me...

but seeing how proud they are, after cleaning an ear of corn all by themselves, makes it all worthwhile.

Slowly, but surely, I'm becoming just like my mother...and my grandmother too.

Everytime we'd go to visit my grandparents, my grandmother would whisk my mother off to her garden and there they'd be pointing, talking, walking about for what seemed like hours and hours. As a child I wondered how you could talk about flowers for that long, I mean weren't they just...flowers?

Then I became a teenager and summer mornings I'd look out the window to see my Mom slowly walking alongside her garden, studying this, pulling up that, moving a flower here and there. I couldn't understand it. Those same flowers were there yesterday and the day before, what more was there to look at?

Now here I am, a young adult with a garden of my own. Every morning the same, I tell the girls to behave for a second while I sneak out back and look at my garden. I pull a few weeds, prop up a vine that has fallen over, marvel over how beautiful some plants look and wonder what to do about the plants that are struggling along. Just a few minutes, all my own, to enjoy the beauty that my hard work has slowly brought forth from the earth.

When my mother comes to visit, out we go to the backyard and we talk about things like why the nasturtium leaves are yellow and the dahlia leaves are brown. We talk about plans for next year and plants we'd like to have. Somehow, although they are "just flowers" there is always plenty to talk about.

And so, I now know what I'll be like in fifty years or so. I'm happy with that.

I had plans to remake a rummage sale mens shirt over for myself, but it just looked better...as a summer dress for Pookie.

I've never tried doing anything like this before, but now, after just one attempt, I'm hooked. I'm looking at old clothes in a whole new way...

and thinking there will be a lot more dresses to come!

Little hands...

Little feet...

Our little one...

is finally here!