The last week

Lots has been going on... where to start.

Well let's start with about a week ago. Tom's mom was here for the week for her spring break. She and Tom went crazy on the front yard and then I helped on the weekend. I'll have some photos for you soon, but basically they have transformed the front yard (in a good way). My main contribution was in planting two packets of sunflower seeds in a my own peculiar planting style.

What? you didn't know I had a planting style? Well let me just tell you! I've invented this style I'm pretty sure, because I've certainly not read of it anywhere else. I call it Darwinist Gardening. The basic premise is that the strongest seeds/plants will survive. So to plant a packet of wildflower seeds beneath our newly planted pink dogwood, I pretty much just sprinkled them around it and then rubbed my hand around on them and watered them. We'll see what happens.

I also found two packets of sunflower seeds that I'm pretty sure are at least 4 years old. They were in my kitchen drawer and have move with us at least twice and probably were stored in our old laundry room in the Micanopy shack. I found a bare spot in the front yard, raked at the soil a little with Nicky's plastic digging tool, sprinkled them in the dirt, pushed on them a bit with my hand and watered them. We'll see what happens. They're supposed to be planted 10 inches apart 1/4 inches deep, but meh, the strong ones will make it. Right? I mean, they grow in the wild, and nobody spaces them out and pushes them in there.

I planted a bunch more along the east side of the house under our bedroom windows using the rake and sprinkle method, and then still had a whole nother packet left. So I actually raked out along the fence line and really spaced those guys pretty good, and pushed them in too. Then I still had more, so i sprinkle them on top for good measure and watered the whole lot of them in. Surely I'll get at least one sunflower out of all that. And if I don't, well they were old seeds and probably just all dried out.

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The good thing about all this gardening going on is that Nicky actually has been spending time outside. I know it's shocking, but he's really not been out all that much so far.

It's very sunny here in Florida, and babies crisp up pretty quick. And that's just one of our many reasons we've mostly kept him in the house. The other many reasons are these tiny little demons that are all over the freaking place here. Fire ants.

I hate these things with a passion normally reserved for much more important things. I can't think of anything in particular right now, but regardless, it's really unnatural how much I loathe these creatures. I might feel particularly vehement towards them now since I stood in a pile of them while bent over scratching the dirt to plant my little sunflower seeds and therefore had multiple stings all over my feet and ankles.

Oh, and if you've never had the joy of a fire ant bite, let me just tell you, these don't just hurt for a little while, these bastards boil up and create a pus filled blister that itches and burns (hence the "fire" part of their name) for days! I ended up wearing flip flops to church and work for a few days since those were the only shoes that didn't touch the blisters.

So anyway, these are all over the yard, so we try to keep Nicky safely inside away from the beasts of hell, I mean Fire Ants. But Tom and his mom picked up some ant killer and hopefully they'll soon die horrible painful little deaths. The ants, I'm talking about the ants!

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So we've had Nicky outside lately to play with his water table and other things while we work in the front yard and water the plants. Nicky now knows how to use the hose to spray water into his table, and on himself, and on us. And he also knows the pain of scraped knees, elbows and palms. See, he's fallen a lot inside on the carpet and the linoleum, but that's a LOT different than falling on concrete.

Yesterday he wiped out once before dinner, scraping a knee and his hand a bit. A little blood came out, so we took him in and cleaned him up, put on medicine and a bandaid, kissed the "boo boo" and made his "owie" all better. Then we went out more and played till Tom's dad and JM came for dinner.

After dinner when they left we worked in the yard more. Nicky was running around and fell again on the driveway, this time he was running and fell with more force. He scraped both knees, ripping off the old bandaid, and his palms and elbow. His elbow was pretty raw. I took him in and got him right into the tub to clean him up. We cleaned up his boo boos and put medicine on his elbow with a bandaid. More kisses for his owie and he went to bed.

Poor fella, he was bound to start getting scrapes at some point. Heck he has brusies all over his legs from climbing on things and falling inside, but it's a much rougher, harder world outside.

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He's a tough little boy though. He was crying pretty hard after that second fall when I took him inside. I took him straight into the bathroom and the first thing he did was reach for the binky that was on the edge of the sink. He popped it in and it helped him calm right down.

He finds those binkies to be a real comfort to him and reaches for them when he's upset. I'm not sure how to handle that. I mean he will need to give them up at some point. Here's the thing though, by allowing him to gain comfort orally am I encouraging him to later have an eating for comfort kind of mentality? Or if I take away the binky before he's really ready to give it up, will I be pushing him to have an oral fixation later in life? See it could really go both ways.

Speaking of binkies, Nicky's always called his a Ginky. He knew what we meant when we said Binky, but I guess the B was harder for him to say. Well Sunday he started saying Binky out of the blue. And now I'm the one saying Ginky and he's saying Binky. I already kind of miss him calling it a Ginky. He's growing up so fast.

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What else? Well, tonight Nicky watched most of a real movie. It was the movie Curious George. I borrowed it from our public library Saturday, and have had a heck of a time with it. At first it wouldn't play at all, then Tom finally got it to play, but it's really damaged and skips in places.

I tried to get it as streaming video (you can check out the movies from my library this way too) but then I was driven mad by the technical stuff required to make the streaming video work (error message after error message, I was ready to blow up my laptop).

We were able to watch the first little bit on Saturday night, and we watched the rest tonight, some before dinner and then the end after dinner. And he did a pretty good job watching it. Usually he's not that interested in what's on the TV. Which is a good thing I think. But we do have a lot of the great Disney movies that I look forward to watching with him.

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Nicky's vocabulary is blossoming every day. The latest is "funny." He uses it appropriately too. He'll do something silly and say "funny!" I'll have to see if we can catch it on video.

Speaking of videos, I'll try to upload a few that I took last week soon.