Family

It's been a good weekend. Friday night I took the boys to a father-son camp out. While we didn't make it up with poles for our tent, we were able to stay in a tent with a friend and two of his kids. Thanks Jacob! That also meant 6 people in a tent. While the tent was sufficiently big, that didn't mean that I got any sleep. It's difficult to sleep on uneven hard ground while two kids squirm and try and steal your pillow from either side. At the camp out it was reaffirmed to me that i don't fit in. The fathers sit around talking about their trucks and hunting. I was the vegetarian in the group who doesn't own a car. Cool would not be the word that others used to describe me.

Yesterday I was able to get to the store and buy stuff to build a shed. I have almost everything that I need, except a roof. I'm excited to get a secure place to store our outdoor toys. Once we have a place to store outdoor toys we will be able to free up our current shed that isn't sufficiently large. Then, with a cleared out old shed and a full new shed we will convert the old shed back into a chicken coop, the purpose for which it was initially intended (~50 years ago). I'm looking forward to having chickens. My wife isn't looking forward to having chickens as much as I am.

Today we got a few pictures of the garden. The boys got in the way of most of the pictures, but I'm going to post them anyway. (most people will probably prefer pictures of the boys to pictures of our weed infested garden.)

No, the Mugwump is not peeing on the flowers, he's standing in front of the watering can. In the background you can see the sea of black plastic that we have called our front yard for the last couple of weeks. This is our attempt to kill the Morning Glory. We're thinking that if you get it good and hot, with no water or sun for several weeks it will be dead, and hesitant to start growing immediately on receiving light. Then, the day we remove the plastic, we rake in some peat moss, cover it with grass seed and keep it watered so that the grass will block out the morning glory. We may be dreaming, but we'll give it a shot.

Again, this is the Mugwump watering. In the foreground on the left you can see our potatoes that are doing quite well. Luckily you can't see the one on the right (that we didn't plant, but showed up anyway) that is dying. In the background you see the forest of squash that is overtaking our paths. If we have nothing else we will have potatoes and squash.

This is a zucchini. You may not be able to see it, but it's in there. In fact there are several in there. Actually, we didn't plant any of the squash plants that you saw in the previous pictures. All of these grew from the compost that we used to cover the garden. We have lots of squash that are coming up, and we have no idea what kind it is. The leaves are quite different and some are vining, while the zucchini is just bushy. I'm excited to see what grows.

There's another picture of the boys watering. This is actually a great picture of the garden because the lighting doesn't allow you to see that 90% of the garden is being taken over by morning glory.

This is Six-pence eating cantaloupe. This was dessert after watering the garden. I love how this kid eats cantaloupe. The first bite is always from the very center. That makes it so he literally has cantaloupe juice from ear to ear. This kid ate 8 pieces of cantaloupe this evening before he decided to call it quits. I'm glad that I don't have to change his diapers tomorrow. (Don't tell my wife I wrote that!)