A Patch of Our Own

Scott and I have acquired a small plot of land, a Pea Patch.  It was really my idea and to be my project, but after an hour of heavy labor (and less than a sixth of the way through our plot) My back rebelled and I decided that I had to find some other way of getting the soil ready.  Scott kindly took over, and when he pulled out as many of the rocks and roots as he could, he helped Susanna plant some carrots in her part of our patch while I planted some lettuces, carrots, and summer squash in the rest of it.

Here is a photograph of our patch (ours is only the left half, the plot on the other side of the nearly invisible piece of string is someone else’s).  And Susanna’s part is the small corner of the patch that is marked off by rocks (you can barely see it on the left edge of the frame, about halfway down).

Susanna has had a great time “working hard”: collecting the millions of rocks we fished out of our plot, throwing dirt around, and her favorite part, playing with earthworms.  Here she is with one of her finds.In this last photograph, she is going home after gardening with her baby (these days she likes to carry it around in this backpack fashioned out of a blanket).

It turns out that I don’t know anything about gardening (Liz, maybe I’ll enroll in your gardening class).  So I’m trying focus on enjoying the experience of gardening rather than its fruits, in case there aren’t any.

Easter Festivities

You’ve already seen our bread bunnies (or if you haven’t, you can by clicking here).  Here are some of the other things we did to celebrate Easter.

We dyed Easter eggs and then had smoothies:

Susanna participated in a “Spring Egg Hunt” at our local community center.  I’m not sure she grasped the importance of Christ in all of our Easter festivities, but she certainly latched right on to the idea of an Easter Bunny.  In one of the photographs below, you’ll see her looking adoringly at the famed large white rabbit.  She probably gave him (or her?) three hugs before we dragged her away (dragged Susanna, not the Easter Bunny).  Pictures:            

And here’s our own little egg hunt on Easter morning.  Susanna enjoyed finding the eggs and loved the bubbles.  That little Easter treat is gone already (she dumped all the bubble juice on the floor after two rounds of bubbles), but hopefully the seeds we gave her will sprout.  And here’s the pictures:

One of the wonderful things that happened to me this Easter was an assignment to teach an Easter lesson to the Young Women.  There was no manual so I found myself, in the weeks preceding Easter, reading various talks, articles, and addresses on the wonderful Easter story, and then, on the day before, the story itself in all four of the gospels.  This research and preparation was a fabulous way to prepare for this, perhaps the most sacred of days on our calendar.  I felt more keenly the love of my Father in Heaven and of my Savior Jesus Christ as I partook of the sacrament yesterday than I had in a long time, and it was a potent reminder to me, not only of the power and truth of the atoning sacrifice, but also of our ability as His disciples to find the comfort of his love and the strength of his gospel through the simple pattern of searching, pondering, and praying.

While in the throes of this preparation, I came across a little video produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  I really like it, so I’m giving you a link to it here.  It’s about four and a half minutes long.

Passover Bread Bunnies

Inspired by last night’s Young Women’s activity (I serve among the 12 to 17 year old girls in my church), I decided that today Susanna and I would make bread bunnies. We started by grinding some wheat in our little mill. Susanna loves the mill, but doesn’t love the sound is makes so after throwing handfuls of wheat into the top, she ran off to hide while I ground it into flour.

Then she helped me mix the dough and we let it rise while my diligent visiting teachers came to share a message. After they left, I pulled her small table into the kitchen so she would have a work surface and it was a resounding success. “I am working very hard, mom,” she kept telling me. She was.

Here she is making a “baby loaf” for “baby Nora” (a friend’s daughter):

And here she is making “frosty the snowman.” Frosty the snowman ended up looking like a small-ish round loaf (or a very large dinner roll), but whether or not anyone would have recognized it, it was certainly fun to see her hands and imagination work.

Here are the finished products (I’m sorry to say that I forgot about the flower and the two bunnies in the oven while I was trying to clean up my hard drive—hence the black-ish hue—and frosty the roll, who was still rising at this point, isn’t pictured):

And here’s Susanna:

On an unrelated note, and one without pictures, thanks to one of my neighbors, we had our own little Passover dinner tonight. I was telling her how I needed to think of something for dinner because I had the third annual schedule-a-Passover-meal-without-doing-any-research-or-making-any-real-plans-so-I'll-have-to-think-of-something-else-last-minute going on tonight and she told me that she was doing a Passover dinner and had leftover bitter herbs and unleavened bread. “We’re also having almonds, apples, almonds, lamb chops, horseradish, and hard boiled eggs,” she continued. Wait a minute, I thought, I have all of those things. So I decided that I would use her handouts and throw the rest together for a Passover dinner. We didn’t have horseradish (I have no idea why I thought we would), and it was pork chops not lamb chops we had. I didn't feel like I could really serve chops at a Passover meal, so we ran to the store to get lamb chops, horseradish, grape juice, and milk (we’re always running out of milk). And we had our Passover dinner (albeit, an hour after dinnertime). We threw in some tomatoes (why not? they were all chopped up and ready to go…) as well as some cheese for Susanna’s sake—although I admit all three of us ate it. It’s true that the traditional Passover meal has lamb shanks not lamb chops, and I doubt any other Passover meal served cheese along with everything else, but we were pretty close and got a good discussion out of it.

What a Weekend!

Yeah for conferences in Seattle! Scott’s dad had one last weekend and we took advantage of the opportunity to par-tay. Among our activities were a visit to Seattle Center (see photograph of Susanna on carousel below-- she was too scared to actually ride one of the horses so she and Scott sat on the bench), lunch and shopping at Pike Place Market, an afternoon at the Seattle Aquarium (see photograph to the right), walks to parks and through wetlands, and canoeing in the Washington Arboretum (I wish we had taken our camera on that outing).

And then there was conference! wonderful, wonderful General Conference. As always, I was renewed and uplifted by the great talks and I am excited to go back and read the talks. We didn’t really have a Girls’ Night Out this time (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can see our last conference GNO—and get some background—by clicking here); we were so busy enjoying family that we completely forgot about it! Next time around I’ll have a baby boy in tow, so we’ll have to figure out what to do then.