Still Snowing

Picture of ominous storm cloud taken from our front porch yesterday.

Sometimes the sun shines under the clouds and onto the west side of the Wellsville Mountains, but not on our side. We only see it when there is enough snow to reflect the low-angle rays.

Yes, believe it or not, it is still snowing in Petersboro. The snow has not been sticking, but it certainly has been coming down. And sometimes simply flying sideways past the windows. Violet has been disappointed in the "we're not going outside tonight, it is too cold, "brrrr"" weather lately, but we've been keeping ourselves occupied by taking care of the kittens. Violet is quite enamored with them, and loves to make sure I'm aware of their presence and location at (almost) all times.

Although Mike is out of town on business travel, I thought I'd include a picture I asked him to take last weekend at the feed store. Probably the best bit of advertising they've done in ages.

The semester is almost over at USU, and I will be so grateful for the brief lull in activity. If only I can get through the next week-and-a-half of final exams and grading, grading, grading, and more grading. And then submitting the grades. Ahhh, I can almost imagine what it will be like...

"Boo"

Many of you likely have no idea what that means. But the Wojciks do. And probably my Mom and Bruce. At any rate, "Boo" (sp?) is the Wojcik term for, basically, "Cheers" when eating or drinking.While we were out to dinner on Friday evening, at our favorite Italian-ish restaurant Calloways, Violet decided to join us in our Boo-ing. Luckily for you, she loves doing it, and was willing to "Boo" again, and again, and again:-)

Violet has also been spending a lot of time outside. Although we had a hard frost last night, the days have been relatively warm. We are expecting rain/snow later this week, but we're enjoying our time outside as much as possible lately.

Violet enjoying her butterfly chair, courtesy of Great-Grandma Phylis.

Violet enjoying both her new chair AND some raw zucchini, which is apparently her new favorite snack!

Vi is really excited about her new gardening tools. Thanks Gramma Nancy and Grandpa Bruce!

Kittens (read on...)

Violet, enjoying her new car-seat-box-turned-fort.

As of Saturday, we have some new additions to our household. We were outside doing yard work when I heard a tiny little mewing noise coming from our haystack. I found a little white kitten clinging to the side of a hay bale, underneath our tarp. Upon further inspection, we found a feral momma cat and five kittens. Apparently they had been living under that tarp for some time now, as the kittens all have their eyes open (except for the ones with eye infections). Mike donned has heaviest jacket and gloves, and extracted the cats. He suffered no injury on that occasion, but when we tried to stuff the momma in a travel crate to take her to the vet this morning (to be spayed - we certainly don't need MORE feral cats around here) she did manage to bite him, and draw blood, through his leather gloves and his heavy jacket. That cat certainly can hold her own in the world...

We are now in a holding pattern of sorts with the kittens. I called up the Cache Humane Society and inquired about their current space for kittens. I kept my fingers crossed that being a member of their Board of Trustees would give me a little edge in getting the kittens in, but apparently I didn't need it. They are currently low on kittens, and were happy to accept them - especially if I would be willing to A) pick up some vaccinations tomorrow and give them at home before we take the kittens in, and B) treat their eye infections for a few days as well. Lucky for us, the CHS offered to give us the vaccines and eye ointment. Soooo, we now have a U-Haul box configured for five kittens, with eye ointment nearby. We spent about a half-hour tonight washing kitten faces and trying to soften and then pry open the worst of the eyes. I'm not sure that all five kittens will make it, but certainly four are doing well. I'll be stopping by the shelter tomorrow on my way to Violet's 18-month pediatrician appointment. Guesses for her height and weight are welcome...

You May Have Noticed...

Or maybe you have not. Either way, take a look at the button at the top right of this page. Yes, the one that says "I'm a Mabel's Labels Buzzmama". I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you have no idea what that means. If so, great! That means I now have the chance to explain it:-)

So I've used a couple of Mabel's Labels products in the past, and I've ogled their website, daydreaming about what I want to order, on several occasions. Yes, I said it, I've daydreamed about ordering labels. But what you have to understand is that these are not just ANY labels. They are super-cute, thoughtfully-designed (in large part because you get to design your own...), particularly utilitarian, highly-reviewed little items. And there's quite a range of items to peruse...not only labels. There are the iron-on clothing labels, quite similar to the ones that my Grandmother used to sew into my clothes. (She gave me a few of her left-over labels with her sewing machine a few years ago, which have a lot of sentimental value, but certainly aren't as cute as the ones you can get from Mabel's.) There are shoe labels, which I am only recently starting to understand the value of now that Violet A) wears shoes every day (mostly), and B) has to take off the aforementioned shoes at school. There are bag tags and teeny tags, which I could have used for the past, ahhhh, 32 years or so to keep my stuff out of the klepto-hands of others. (I'm thinking a teeny tag will be a great addition to my laptop case!) There are sticky labels, which fulfill a similar role as the tags I just mentioned. And for the more mature needs (no, not THAT kind of mature need...), there are curbsides, date mates, cord control labels, and so on.

And that brings me to....kid labels. Not really, but uhm, well, sort of really. Make the call for yourself - my 411 wristbands and allergy alerts. It might seem weird (it did to me, at first) to label your kid, but once I realized the emergency and/or allergy necessities, these make perfect sense. Especially considering the stories I hear from my Mom, the school nurse, and my friends with kids who have severe food allergies. And now that I think about it, the wristbands might just come in handy, at least for the littler kids, on your next trip to super-mega-amusement-sunburn-land this summer.

And finally, there are the stationery products. While you may not consider these "essential", they are pretty neat. Particularly as a gift for an older kid who appreciates the "old school" methods of communication, like say, actually writing something on paper and sending it through Ye Olde USPS.

So, now that I've co-opted the Violet Blog for my own soapbox, please keep in mind that A) I am pretty excited to be able to promote Mabel's Labels, and B) I just might have some swag to give away at some point in the near future. Or maybe a coupon or two. Or some other personal recommendations. I'm just sayin'...

Now on to the gold standard in the Violet Blog world. Actual information about Violet.

Mike and I got the most amazing (and amazingly cute) surprise today. Violet has learned how to give us kisses! At first she would just turn her head toward your face and purse her lips a bit, but by the end of the day, she would give us a full-on, lips-to-our-face kiss! No one could possibly have convinced me that this would be such a wonderful development, but it really is:-)

Vi also has decided that helping around the house is of even greater satisfaction now than in the past. (I presume at least some of this should be credited to Mr. Bob and Mrs. Beckie, who have some "clean up" rules that the kids follow every day.) Vi takes her paper towel 1/2 and throws it away after we wipe up after meals. We find this exciting because she is starting to understand that some things get put in the trash and other things don't, and she finds it exciting because it provides a great excuse to squeal with delight and clap her hands every time she does it. And she loves to help (still) unload the dishwasher and load/unload the clothes dryer. And when she has a full diaper, she often will tell us (in baby sign), and then go grab a diaper and lie down for a change. It is so amazing that she is so excited to help and so happy to comply - most of the time;-)

Oh, and last but not least, Violet is still adding to her baby sign vocabulary. She loves to babble and tell us all kinds of A-MAZE-ING-LY interesting (at least in her mind) stories, but the stories that we can really understand are the ones she tells in sign language. She loves to tell us about cars and people driving them. She can even see the cars on the highway about 1/4 mile from our house when she looks out the front windows. She'll tell us about them and sometimes even wave "hello" to them:-) And although it breaks my heart whenever she does it, she will wave goodbye to me (or Mike, for that matter) whenever either one of us gets into the car/truck. So cute!

Violet loves her pickup truck. She plays with it a lot, but tonight she was really into driving it around.

Violet (at school) is practicing to be a gardener.

Or maybe a bike racer.

Or possibly an opera star?

Or even a tennis pro!

Flowers and pickup trucks

Today was a wonderful, warm spring day. It was so nice, in fact, that we had to get out of Logan and find some flowers in SLC since there aren't that many flowers here yet. We went to Temple Square to find them. Temple Square has some of the most painstakingly executed and stunning landscaping you will find. I haven't bothered to do a calculation to estimate the number of bulbs that are planted there, but my SWAG has it well over 100,000 individual flower bulbs.

I have no idea what their landscaping philosophy is, but it seems to be to overload you with visual color and crab-apple blossom smell. It works wonderfully.

Can you spot the Violet among the rest of the flowers?

After we returned home from our trip to Temple Square, and Whole Foods, and REI we prepared some quick dinner and then headed back outside to feed the horses and seed our new two acre field.

OK... I promise if you read this diatribe, there will be pictures at the end. :-)

Over the past few days I have been attempting to play farmer. Let's get this straight, I am in no way claiming to be a farmer. I am about to describe our fumbling around while as we try to get our two acres put up in pasture. In practice this means that we were on the phone with Bruce a couple times a day for the last three days for "consulting".

First we had a local farmer disc the field with his real tractor/disc rig, this worked great but the field was still a pretty cloddy. Second, I used our neighbors little 50 horse tractor to harrow the field with a undersized, underweight harrow. The weenie harrow sucked, all it did was move the clods around. Not to be defeated, I loaded four railroad ties on top of he weenie harrow and it did a better job, but not good enough as the field was still pretty corrugated. Finally, I stopped overthinking the process and tied a railroad tie behind the tractor and dragged it all over the field. Success! The RR tie did a great job breaking up the clods and the leveling the field for planting. It's amazing what a great tool a big ass piece of wood can be.

The question is, how to plant our seed mix which was 15% alfafa and 85% grass? See, alfafa seed is tiny and grass seed is comparably huge. Two different sized seeds will spread at different rates if you don't have a real seeder. And we don't own a real broadcast seeder implement, all we have is one of those cheap $6 lawn seeders designed for fertilizer, not for seed. I tried it but it didn't work for shti. Gotta to old-school, I guess, we broadcast our seed by hand. We turned it it into a family affair, though, so it was fun. Joanna drove the LUV, and I put Violet in the backpack while I sat on the tailgate throwing seed out the back. Violet was a great manager, hat re-arranger and bird pointer-outer. The final product? A seeded pasture waiting for one more light harrow to cover the seed.

No words necessary :-)

I'm sure that a few years from now Violet will object to this, but it's too wonderful of a moment to not share.

Vi has been especially cute lately

Little Vi is the cutest girl in the world. No joke. She is. Seriously...

I'm a little punchy tonight. I took the day off to clean up and burn some weeks, then took a bike ride and then shampooed the carpet. So my usual riveting posts will probably end up all disjointed sounding. Besides, all the video took a looooong time to load and whatever steam I started this post with has long since escaped.

She loves to sit in her rocking chair and read books.

She can make this puzzle. She can do it all by herself. Of course I have no movie to prove it, but she really made the puzzle herself. Vi is in serious puzzle mode right now. It's great to make puzzles with her and watch her figure out the spatial and visual relationships.


Cute outfit #1
Cute outfit #2, with muffin.
Cute outfit #3

Violet is working on her collection of animal noises. Here she demonstrates a lion. She also has decided that buzzing her lips is great fun. I would agree.

Violet loves to play in the tub. For example, yesterday she had a 30 minute bath, and then stayed in the tub another 15 minutes after we drained the water. I would have thought she would get cold but she seems perfectly happy playing with the bubbles. Goooood times.

We inflated Joanna's huge exercise ball the other day, too. Violet has figured out how to use it for exercise as well. Vi loves the novelty of a ball the same size as her. Violet also likes to explore percussive qualities of the exercise ball.

Baby Animal Days

Today I left work a few hours early so we could go the American West Heritage Center and catch what appears to be a Cache Valley tradition, of sorts... Baby Animal Days. It's spring and therefore it's time to visit all the newborn critters.

Baby duck.
More baby duck.
Pygmy goats.
Violet feeding the regular goats.

Horses.
Train, train, train!
Taking a ride on my shoulders.

Garlic french fries with Joanna.

Wagon ride, pic and video

Guess what we had for dinner after baby animal days? Uh, spaghetti with marinara?

If you haven't seen Violet climb stairs... here you go. She is feeling lackadaisical about this ascent, but eventually she makes it up the bedroom!

Long Time, No Blogging

We feel compelled to apologize for the length of time between blog posts lately. But not a huge apology, just one of those "sorry, we've just been so busy..." kind of apologies. Because, well, we've just been so busy. So very, very busy.

News updates.....let's see. Violet can run now, which is pretty much amazing. Violet has a new "big girl" carseat. If faces forward, so now her perspective has been vastly enlarged due to the fact that she can look out the window. We have two varieties of garlic coming up in the garden, hooray! We're having on heck of a storm tonight - 3-5 inches of snow predicted, but gale-force winds are currently driving the snow (presumably) miles away. [By the time I finished up the posting we had over an inch of snow, and it was still falling quickly.] We do have some drifts in the making, though. Current seeds started in the house for the post-Memorial Day garden planting: pumpkins, summer squash and petunias. More seeds to be planted.

Oh, and as amazing as it sounds, it really is true....Violet sang along (and improvised!) with a song she's NEVER HEARD BEFORE last night! We were listening to American Routes on one of our local NPR stations, and Vi started dancing with the music. Dancing progressed to singing and dancing, and her singing was in tune and in the correct key. And then she decided to improvise her own melody, again in tune and in the correct key. Simply amazing. Even Mike, with little-to-no musical background, grasped the enormity of this event. A-Maze-Ing. Mind boggling. Fan-damn-tastic:-)

Violet gleefully chasing one of our cats, Kate.

Notice the cat tail in the foreground.

Our last snowstorm - late last week.

Violet and her friends, Henry and Angelo, at school.

Notice Violet's reading choice. It makes us proud...

Violet driving her car in the hallway.

Hasta luego. Enjoy your post-Easter, pre-graduation/school's-out-for-summer, almost-Spring!