That Was Then

This is now!

It feels like I just barely wrote about Wes's four month stats, and here we are at six already! Wes is coming in at a whopping 29 inches and 21 pounds! He is growing so stinkin' fast. He loves to eat and it shows. Wes prefers oat cereal over rice, and loves veggies while he barely tolerates any fruit except real mashed bananas. None of that jarred stuff for him!

Here are some darling pictures we have taken recently.

Still won't smile for the camera.

I want more carrots! NOW!

Just playin'.

Lookin' more like daddy everyday.

Grant went out of town on business for a week, and hanging out alone with a six month old didn't exactly appeal to me, so I went to my parents for a few days. I was a little worried about how Wes would do, since he had never slept anywhere but in his own crib in his own room. I was thrilled that he did wonderfully. Better than usual, in fact. He slept all the way from 8pm to 7 am two out of the three nights we were there. Happily, he continued the habit when we came back home, allowing me to get 8 or more consecutive hours of sleep for a week straight. I was finally putting a dent in my sleep debt that is bigger than the national debt. And then we got a visit from the teething fairy. Yup, Wes's first tooth is just barely breaking through. Thankfully, it hasn't been too bad (knock on wood.) Nothing that a little Infant Tylenol and Baby Orajel couldn't fix.

It has been awhile since we mentioned Oscar and Scooter (those poor, neglected pups.) They are still alive and well and loving Wes. They are near him every opportunity they get. Oscar is much more gentle and will just lay down by Wes, but not Scooter! Scooter wants to lick every inch of his body. Wes just takes it, and even laughs sometimes. Every once in awhile, Wes will even grab Scooters tongue, just to show him whose boss! Needless to say, I keep Scooter away from Wes most of the time. Oscar has a little more freedom. I sat Wes on the couch today while I was getting things together to leave the house, and Oscar hunkered down by Wes resulting in the following pictures....

I had grabbed Wes's hand just before I took this picture so that Wes wouldn't yank on Oscar's ears. Sadly, it left Wes vulnerable to an onslaught of puppy kisses!

Harvest

We have more tomatoes than you can poke a stick at. (I tried to poke a stick at them and I just couldn't.) The funny thing is, we didn't even put forth much of an effort this year. Planting time coincided with having a newborn, and so we almost didn't even have a garden. My aunt bought a whole bunch of sprouts from a local school for kids with special needs. (At this school, the kids plant the seeds, and cultivate the plants until they are ready to sell to the public. Cool, huh?) She had so many that she shared her abundance with us. Grant had tilled the garden earlier this year with a bag of peet moss and a bag of manure, so we plopped our plants in the ground and that was that. No rhyme or reason to it, and we just hoped for the best. We didn't fertilize, we didn't spray for bugs, we barely remembered to water.... and yet somehow our tomatoes did just as wonderfully as they did last year, if not better. We have picked literally hundreds of tomatoes so far. We also go a decent crop of peppers, squash, and a few zucchini (which is still plenty, if you ask me.) Our cantaloupe, which did awesome last year, have failed us this year. Darn.

We have become pros at canning. We have made LOTS of salsa and spaghetti sauce. I am glad we could this year. We had to give all of our tomatoes away last year because I was newly pregnant and I had a major aversion to tomatoes. I couldn't even be in the same room with a tomato. Just reading the word salsa would make me gag!

During such hard times with rising prices and a crummy economy, we are so grateful to have our garden and our home canned goods to helps us get by.

Good Question

Last week, Grant's Coke fizzed and foamed so much when he added ice that it overflowed all over his desk at work. He wanted to know why it did that, gosh dang it! So he decided to Get Gephardt. Grant wrote it to Gephardt's "Good Question" segment wherein you can write in with a question, and if your question is chosen, Gephardt will investigate the answer and air it on the news. He picked Grant's question, and it aired on TV last Friday. Good work, Grant. Anyhow, if you would like to check out the answer, go to http://www.kutv.com/content/gephardt/story.aspx?content_id=3c0e8d2c-a2dc-474e-b31a-7f843770ef92