Urban Farm Living

It isn't even May yet and already my garden is eating up most of my free time! Last year was great, but this year we decided to expand operations a little more. I was cramped, needing more beds in the plot, and more space to walk around. Last year we had six 4x4 foot beds and one 1.5x10 foot row. This year we've almost doubled that. And we added a chicken coop. Because we weren't crazy enough with our giant front yard garden.

These are some of our silkies. We currently have more chickens than we will ultimately want, but since we got them unsexed, we bought extra. We are only keeping ladies, and probably only about 5 of them. But there are more than that right now, so, yeah, we're going to be eating some really fresh chicken dinners some time this summer. 

These are some of the second run of chicks we got to replace the fellas from the first run. Plus, somehow we ended up with all one breed in the first run, even though they were supposed to be assorted. The second run has three different breeds, so we will have a little more variety.

Speaking of variety, the vegetable varieties have increased dramatically this year. Since we'll have more room, I let each kid pick something new to try and grow. Sam chose brussel sprouts, Lucy chose purple cauliflower, Maggs chose watermelon, and Fred chose peppers. We already grow those, but he didn't really understand that. Plus we have five tomato varieties, tomatillos, lettuce, spinach, cucumbers, corn, zucchini, pumpkins, two hot pepper varieties, two sweet pepper varieties, and blueberries. I saved seeds from all of last year's tomatoes, and luckily everything sprouted! If everything goes well, we should be getting fresh eggs sometime in August. It should make for a tasty summer! 

Potty Training: The Final Episode

Well, it's that time of life again. Spring break equals potty training time in our house, apparently. This time it's a little different, though, with an added dose of peer and parental pressure! Fred goes to a toddler pre-school class that meets 3 days a week. There are 5 kids in the class, all of whom turned 3 between January and March, with Fred being the lonely March baby. One of the children is potty trained fully, and another is 95% potty trained, so their teacher thought it a good idea for the parents of the non-potty trained kids to get on that shit over spring break. And on it we are!

Fred has been doing only ok. At home he gets to run around in his brand new star wars lego underpants, and when we go out I often put him in loose, athletic style pants for easy access. He'll pee on the potty all day long, and has had zero accidents at home and only one out in the world. But he waits each and every day until he gets a diaper on to do his pooping. Which STINKS, pun intended. He still has to rest for some time in the afternoon, and so I put him in a pull up. Plus he wears one to bed. And yesterday we had several errands to run which necessitated him being in the car for a longish time, so he got diapered then, and each time is when he chose to poop.

Except for this morning, when he pooped and peed his pants at the playground directly across from our house, not 10 minutes after he had used the potty at home.

He still has all of next week off, so I'm hoping we can get this worked out before he has to go back to school diaper-less. Otherwise, his teacher is going to be pissed.

Love and Marriage

Nearly 12 years ago SOB and I got married. I pretty much knew when I was 17 that it was going down like that, but we were respectable and waited until we were 23 and 24. It was a fun day, but not without it's faults. At the time, I had a lot of anxiety, and the medication I was taking made me quite zombie-like. When I look back on our wedding photos, all I see is a girl with a blank, vaguely pleasant looking face on. Good, but not great. See below for an example, plus a photo of all of my lovely bridesmaids! 

Additionally, and this may ruffle a few feather so consider yourself warned, there was a large part of me that wasn't too thrilled with our catholic wedding ceremony. At the time I was recently graduated from a Jesuit university, but for years I had been having doubts about the faith in which I was raised. I just wasn't sure what I believed in anymore. I knew, however, that I believed in this relationship with SOB, and so it didn't matter to me where we got married. 

As time went on, though, I really began to think more and more about catholicism, and religion in general. I spent the better part of a decade thinking about it. I spoke with clergy, the priest who married us in fact, about my ambivalence towards religion. I spoke with therapists. I spoke with friends. I spoke with family. I spoke with the man to whom I had committed my life. Finally, after many, many years of literal soul searching, I finally came to the realization that I was an atheist. 

SOB had kind of been there all along, just waiting for me to catch up. He never once tried to sway me to the "dark side", but there I ended up just the same. 

A few months ago, by some serendipitous chance of fate, in the two minutes I get alone in the car I heard Penn Jillette on the radio. He was talking about a crowd funding project that he had going on, and as soon as I got home I checked it out. Scrolling through the list of items, I noticed that one of the things up for grabs was to have Penn marry you, or renew your vows. Now you may or may not know this, but Mr. Jillette, besides from being an amazing magician, is also quite the outspoken atheist. Having watched his show Bullshit, having heard various interviews with him, and having read several of his books (two of which are titled God, No! and Every Day Is An Atheist Holiday!) we were fully aware of his godless slant, so to speak. We thought, what a perfect way to renew our vows and shed the shadow of the religious ceremony that had shrouded our union for more than a decade! 40 minutes later it was a done deal.

After a few months of planning and scheduling, the event finally went off this past weekend, and it was everything we could have ever hoped it would be. Thanks to his beautiful and gracious wife Emily, we have a short video of the ceremony. If you are sensitive to swearing or atheism in general, please don't watch. I won't be offend. You might be, though. 

Once before, I have stood with you before family and friends; once again, I take your hand as my partner. I believe in this marriage more strongly than ever. We have evolved and transformed together. We have endured together, laughed together. We are raising a beautiful family together. It is with joy born of experience and trust that I commit myself once again to you.  The best is yet to be.

Second Time Around

We're going to Vegas! SOB got a retro 1970s tuxedo, I got a dress, I have a celebrity's wife's phone number, the chapel is reserved and it's going to be epic!