Planting and Growing Stuff this Summer

Mary, Mary, quite contrary how does your garden grow?

Honest answer: I have no clue.

I have never been good at gardening of any sort, and all my attempts to plant a vegetable garden have failed miserably. The only plant I have successfully maintained is our jungle of raspberries, which are technically weeds that require no effort whatsoever. So when Dave and the girls went shopping and brought back not one, not two, but four plants that looked anything but "easy-growing" I wondered how long I could make them last. With some incredible help from the girls, I have been pleasantly surprised.

Typically, our only staple harvest of the summer is the raspberries, and this year they were great. I learned how, or I should say Dave learned how and then read me the instructions on how to make jam ~ isn't it pretty?

We are using the topsy turvy things to grow our tomato and cucumber plants. The girls water them everyday and amazingly, they just grow. The tomatoes have not turned orange/red yet, we are being patient.

The cucumbers have been great! They aren't quite the perfect oblong shape as the ones in the produce section, but they taste perfect.

We've been thinking about pumpkins since May! The girls were so excited about these cute little pumpkins in a cup. We have no idea yet if an actual pumpkin is going to grow, but it sure has been fun to plant and keep an eye on them!

The girls are not about to eat them here :-) ~ they are using a plastic fork to pull apart the small the soil tablet that came in each cup. After planting the seed, they had to grow and germinate in these dome lidded cups for a couple of weeks. Then they were ready to go into the ground.

The tallest leafy thing here is currently what each of the 3 pumpkin plants look like. I need to weed the area around them. We are keeping fingers crossed that by Fall, we'll have at least three round pumpkins to be excited about.

This next plant is probably what I am most amazed with and excited about! It does come with a warning however. We started with this tiny little Wally the Watermelon plant that we decided to put in the planting bed along with our blueberry plants {that likely will not yield fruit for at least two more summers} because they both need a very similar acidic type of soil to grow well. I knew, being that it was a watermelon, that the plant would hopefully get bigger.

I had no idea it would take over the entire 7-8 foot long by about 3 foot wide area! It just kept growing leaf after leaf, twisty vine after twisty vine until it encompassed the entire bed. We can hardly see the blueberries anymore, and I hope that is okay for those plants! So, only try to grow watermelons if you have plenty of room for them!!

But thrill beyond thrill, we walked out a couple of weeks ago and found several pea sized watermelons. It really is silly how happy these tiny little things have made us ~ only one of them has gotten much bigger than a pea so far, but we have hope that many of them will continue to grow.

The biggest one yet...when it was about the size of a quarter I enthusiastically told Emma that Rebekah had found the biggest watermelon yet and did she want to come outside and look at it. She followed me and when she saw the quarter-sized fruit looked at me like I was crazy for being so excited. She laughed very hard at the entire watermelon that she could eat in less than half a bite.

So proud of the proof of her hard work out in the garden this Summer!

The Shedd Aquarium

While Dave's parents were visiting, we spent a beautiful day in Chicago. The weather was absotlutely perfect, sunny and warm, with a refreashing windy breeze.

We visited The Shedd Aquarium. I'm not sure if our girls are the only children with the strange affinity for these sugar sticks...but they honestly have some sort of magnetic attraction to them. We cannot hardly cross the threshold of a store that sells these and the begging begins. Especially now that they seem to specialize in sour flavors. I would love to ask the manufacturers of such treats to please start selling them in more appropriate locations. Places where sticky hands might be problematic and where I am going to have to carry the sticky sugar sticks around with me all day should be out immediately!!

Fun playing penguins.


Visiting the homeland of Great Grandmommy's family ~ The Philippines.



And we ate dinner in Chinatown...YUM!!

Jellies

During our day at the Shedd, Emma had my cell phone and she took TONS of pictures. When I took them off my phone, I was surprised at how nice many of the jellyfish pictures came out. Who knew they were so photogenic?

The Shedd has a special exhibit going on right now called Jellies, which explains the vast array of and sheer number of jellies Emma photographed here:













And these aren't jellies, but I thought they were also cool pictures that Emma took:




Scary!!

Circus World Museum

Our totally fun day at Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin ~



In testing out the circus acts, Emma thought she would like to walk {or maybe cartwheel} on the tight rope.

Alyssa would like to be a lion tamer.

And Rebekah thought she would stick to plate spinning, at least until she learns how to juggle.

The actual circus acts were really neat. Many of the performers were family members and it was easy to tell that preserving the history of this park and teaching about the tradition of circus has become a huge part of their lives.



And you can see from the pictures below that our girls did not all enjoy dressing up in the circus costumes and posing by the old fashion circus wagons...

All of the wagons pictured here are very old and used to be part of "The Great Circus Parade" which was an annual tradition in Milwaukee. It eventually became to costly and dangerous to successfully move the antique wagons to Milwaukee each summer and they have only had the parade once in the eight years we have lived here.






It looks like we finally found our place in the circus :-)