Spring Planting With Shi

Shiloh and I had a great time on Skip's first mid-week Sunday (Thursday 2/28). Rob and Nomi agreed she could come out to visit for the day and we had decent weather for about half of it. Just long enough for the three of us to get the garden hoop house up and planted.

Shi and I started out by running over to the Fred Meyer to pick up some packs of cold weather seeds. She was thrilled to be in a store with a captive and submissive audience. For starters, she wanted to ride in the kiddie-car cart. Honestly! I have no idea how moms manage those things. I did take it out for a spin.

They are bulky and unwieldy and they do not respond to driver turning well at all. I think they need to redesign the wheel base or possibly make them front wheel drive. Just getting it out of the entry way was amusing, so I intentionally rammed the door jamb to entertain Shi. She was admonishing me about how to drive :)

She had brought along her new Hello-Kitty personal camera, a birthday gift from Tim & Patty. She started out being frustrated with it because she didn't know how to turn it from video to camera. She thoroughly enjoys the 'click' of the shutter and then knows how to scroll back to look at her previous shots.

In the store as she was parked alongside the seed displays, she decided to take some photos of a display on our right of several live plants. She was quite disgusted with her early attempts, backing up the view and showing them to me. They were somewhat blurry and un-centered. Smart little thing commented that they didn't look like they should. I told her every photographer has to learn to take good pictures and she might want to try holding her breath to keep from moving when she pushed the shutter. Also she should get the picture just the way she liked it in the window before clicking. She retried and decided she was much improved; continuing to take a variety of pictures as we went through the store.

Of course the toy aisle was right next to the seed display. We looked at the Schleich figures, which she loves, and she pointed out all of the ones she owns and also meticulously reset every line of them so they were all correctly lined up, facing the same direction, and there weren't any fallen over. I have gotten her fairies with unicorns previously (it is a slight disappointment to me that she prefers these to the actual horse figurines ... lol) and she showed me which ones were different versions of the ones she likes. We tried to find one her brother might like, but she didn't think there were any he might be interested in.

She decided he would rather have a car. We went along the aisle and then ended up finding a display of !!! ta-da !!! those wierd rubbery-plastic spider things that stick to walls and then "crawl" down from the pull of gravity. These were the hit of the day -- we took two -- a pink one for her and an orange one for the boy :)

Once home we went out to plant the garden. Without the hoop house cover I doubt if anything could be planted this early around here .... we will likely have snow again and definitely will have some below-freezing temps. Those $20 pieces of PVC and plastic mean we can start early, and I am thrilled. Skip and I ate more from our garden last year than I have ever eaten from a garden, although I believe I've had one most every year since leaving home. Yesterday we planted two kinds of bush peas, one snow pea, one section of radish, one section of spinach, and one section of Red Chardonay carrot.

After planting we put up the hoops and unrolled last year's plastic over the frame, tying it down with zip ties. All four sides can roll up later on in the year to work the bed or to allow breeze to go through. We did this for the first time last year and started all of our plants in here. That wasn't until mid-May though and we transplanted them to the other raised bed and our upper garden bed as the plants outgrew the space within this bed. It really seemed to make a difference in how the plants performed ... we had a terrific garden last year!

Shiloh always has a great time playing in our yard. She climbed in and out of the tire swing, swung for awhile, climbed a tree, played with sticks, got out her favorite copper watering can and filled it a few times in the kitchen sink and watered something ... I'm not sure what :)

She must have been in with the chickens for close to an hour, meticulously giving them just a few seeds from her treat cup. We give the chickens normal laying pellets, but also have a bucket of treats that they expect to receive from daily. We have a small metal measuring cup and Shiloh has no hesitation touching each of the treats and feeding them one at a time.

Skip's mom and sisters can't even stand still when they look at the treat mix because it has a fair percentage of freeze-dried blood worms, which are little centipede like creatures. They are dead of course, but they are very light-weight and tend to blow around in the slightest wind. I am always amused at how squeamish his city-raised family are about things like this. Now, truthfully, I'm not fond of touching even regular worms with my skin. With gloves, no big deal, but I tend to jump when I touch them bare-handed. And, OMG, I am just as bad as I ever was about touching and/or being near anything that jumps, which of course includes grasshoppers, crickets and small tree frogs. I too am a wimp.

Just as we finished the plastic on the hoop house, it started sprinkling and we went inside. We started out coloring, but then my sewing machine started pulling her attention ... lol. She LOVES to play with all of the tools at my sewing machine, standing in front of it for hours while carefully pulling the thread out of either the needle or bobbin one or two inches at a time and cutting it off with tiny scissors. As a lifelong seamstress, I have several various sets of very good scissors. She has been allowed to play with them as long as she's been interested in them --- early-on only on my lap, but gradually with less supervision. Now she understands what she is allowed to cut and she loves sitting in there cutting away. To date she has not made a mistake or cut herself, although we always have "THE CONVERSATION" before she starts. I tell her it is unlikely she can kill herself with the scissors but if she is not careful with them she will cut herself and bleed and I will have no sympathy. She agrees to be careful.

Yesterday I asked if she wanted to start to learn to sew. I am working on the Elephant Quilt for Ike and have decided to put a row of 5" blocks in a scrappy frame border at the spot where the quilt will drop along the mattress of the king-sized bed. This is a simple block and I make them by sewing 5" widths together in the order I like and then cutting them into 5" blocks. Shiloh sat on my lap and carefully lined up the edges of the fabric, right-sides together, and then fed it into the pressure foot as I operated the pedal. After she was bored with this she wanted a review of the foot pedal. I showed her how you can choose to go slow or fast and if she wanted to try she had to remember that if it went too fast she had to step off of it. After hearing it go fast, she declined to try. She continues to have great distaste for loud noises :)

Thereafter she went through my fabric stash and pulled out a 30" square left over from the sleeping blankets I made as Christmas presents for she and Tristan 2 years ago. Sassy was sleeping on the bed and she decided she needed blankets, so she started with that square and proceeded to pile various handy pieces of fabric onto Sass, who tolerated it all without much moving. Shiloh would go over to adjust the exact layout of Sassy's feet and nose after every succeeding blanket.

By this time it was getting close to 6:00 and I told her Rob was on his way out. She wanted to know how I knew and I said he had sent me a text. She said quite indignantly that I had promised to go horse riding and we hadn't done that yet. I said it was dark outside and it had been pouring rain all afternoon. She agreed and went back to cutting with the scissors :)