Gardening and Leprechauns

Today was a busy time. We'd been babying a line of potted vegetable plants for the last couple of weeks, bringing them inside each night, waiting for the weather to be warm enough for them to live outside. I mostly just got fed up with shuttling them in and out everyday, but the weather is pretty warm now so we decided to go ahead and plant them today.

Jake and El and I worked together to prepare the ground. The dirt is pretty clay-ey, so we mixed in some soil that the plant nursery recommended. I am so clueless when it comes to gardening - I'm crossing my fingers this works!

After the big kids got home from school we worked together to put those plants in the ground.

El digging, Caleb planting.

Caleb really got into this and ended up doing most of them.

Emi and the romaine.

Jake was able to plant one too, but I had to supervise him pretty closely for the safety of that poor plant. No opportunities to take pictures of that, I'm afraid.

Not very many plants, but we've got some tomatoes and cherry tomatoes, some romaine and kale, some broccoli, and Elinor's flowers. (There's a teeny garden fairy that El has put near her flowers, but I don't think it's visible in this picture.) I like that it's such a small garden because we don't have much space, but I also don't want to become overwhelmed in keeping it up, this first year of gardening. I want to keep it a manageable, pleasant experience.

Everyone got a good spraying down with the hose afterward, followed by celebratory smoothies.

After gardening we worked on a Leprechaun trap for Caleb that's due tomorrow and other homework.

The signs say "Stay off ladder," "No Trespassing," and "Private Property."

The sign on this side says "No Leprechauns" and the one behind the hanging coin says, "Hands off my treasure."

The instruction sheet said that leprechauns don't obey signs and love shiny things, so we took those ideas and ran with them. Oh, and I love that rustic twig ladder so much! The whole time we were constructing it I was marveling to Joseph about its cuteness and wondering why I've never even made one of these before! There's a hole hidden under the pile of green grass and a yogurt container taped to the bottom of the inside of the box. Caleb was afraid the leprechaun would jump out of the yogurt container so we made a whole bunch of fake fire out of tissue paper and glued that to the floor of the box around the yogurt container. That oughtta hold him

Then we had dinner and then... Well, my sister Michelle was kind enough to look through every box she had in storage to track down an old Nintendo 64 Mario Party for us. It arrived in the mail today and Caleb was ECSTATIC.

Neither picture is very flattering, but I would say this is an accurate portrayal of his excitement. We squeezed in a half hour of game time before bed.

So, we got a lot done (a trip to the grocery store and gymnastics in the morning before gardening), but Joseph had to make dinner, I didn't get to the vacuuming or cleaning the kids' bathroom, Caleb didn't do any reading, we totally forgot about baseball practice, and no one practiced piano. I feel like this is sort of the story of my life. I'm learning to just focus on what we accomplished and feel satisfied about that. There's always tomorrow, right?