The Crazy-Lazy Weekends

Wow! Thanks for all your kind words and encouragement, everyone!!! I don't think I've ever gotten a whopping 25 comments on my blog ever before, either. And such nice ones!! Aah, I love my little blogworld.


As I began this post, (yesterday,) Martin was on a walk with both girls AND the dog. Yikes! He scores a lot higher on the Bravery Meter than I do!


We had a pretty good weekend. Well paced and productive but fun at the same time.


So, Martin and I don't have a TV, I think I've mentioned that on here a few times. I never got cable after I moved out of my parents house, and though I used to watch it when I lived without a washer and dryer and did my laundry at my parents house, it's essentially been 7 years since I've watched TV. Still, I had a TV and would watch movies a lot when I lived by myself. When Martin and I got married we still had my TV and we watched movies for awhile, but after Anja was born, we just kind of stopped. We'd watch one here and there and it was always fun and festive, but it didn't happen all that often. Then during this past travel season, Martin bought me a movie and when I went to watch it I discovered the TV was broken. I tried to watch it on the computer, but our computer was too low on memory to run a DVD. So a few months later we finally threw the TV in the trash and we still haven't cleaned off our laptop. When Greta was born we borrowed my dad's little personal DVD player--it's really neat! It's about the size of one of those very tiny laptops, but when you open it, it's a DVD player instead of a keyboard, and a screen like a laptop. We watched "Walk the Line" on it in the first days I was home and we didn't feel like doing anything. Then we kept forgetting to give the player back to my dad, so it sat on a table gathering dust for a long time. UNTIL.... Martin's friend Patrick from work lent him some DVDs of a television series called "The Unit." It's about Delta Force. Martin was watching an episode one morning while I was getting ready for my day and he was holding Greta so I could do that, and I was making fun of it. But then I stood there (we set it up on the kitchen counter) and watched a little bit... AND GOT TOTALLY HOOKED!!!! Not only am I completely hooked on the series, but it's been a lot of fun watching it together too. We've been watching a few episodes every evening while Greta stays up. On Saturday when we did our grocery shopping I got saurkraut for a recipe I'm making this week, and so we picked up a package of brats as well and Martin grilled them up for us along with a can of baked beans, and we pulled up a couple of kitchen chairs and cracked open a beer and had ourselves a little midnight picnic in the kitchen while we watched this show and walked around with our insomniac baby. It was GREAT!!! Martin has always told me, when Anja has been a bad sleeper, to "just have fun with it." And this weekend we did! We actually looked forward to Greta staying up all night so we could watch our show together.

On Saturday we bought flowers and herbs. Hooray for summer! On Sunday we planted them. I now have a little patch of purple phlox at the end of my driveway with some decorative bricks I uncovered and a big rock that came out of the Jungle. I have purple impatiens in hanging baskets on my porch (note to all: Don't waste your money buying hanging baskets every year! Save your baskets from year to year and buy flats of flowers to replant in the baskets!! It saves SO MUCH MONEY!) and the same purple impatients in a ring around one of the trees in front of the house. (I have to get more flowers and do the same to the other tree. This was an unplanned flourish.) Martin dug up a peony from the Jungle as well and replanted it in the backyard. The herbs for my herb box this year are cilantro, basil, thyme, and oregano. Those are the herbs we use the most and I'm sure I'll enjoy going out to the yard and getting them for our dinners just as much as I did last year. I'm very excited! Meanwhile, as I was planting all these flowers, Martin was destroying the Jungle. Hard work, but it's great to finally be attacking that stuff after two summers of letting it grow!! Today during the first half of Anja's nap (this is the second half) I tore weeds from my garden. Hopefully soon we can borrow my dad's tiller and get things rolling. It had better be sooner than later, since all of my vegetables are still in their flats on my front porch.

Also on Sunday, between Martin-and-Annie yardwork and Martin-only yardwork, we took our first walk over to campus as a family of four! It felt good to do it. Now that we know it's still possible, I'm sure it'll keep being our normal route. And we saw our friends Ryan and Ben who now live in Chicago. Fun!

And here are on another Monday, but everyone has been delightfully cheerful today so far. Hopefully Anja will wake up happy from her nap and Greta will still be not screaming, and we'll have a good afternoon as well. We're having corned beef and cabbage for dinner!

OH! And we got Anja a birdfeeder!!!!! Some friends of ours gave us some Target giftcards when Greta was born. Well, actually, they gave real gifts to the girls and me, and gave Martin a stack of Target giftcards to do what he wanted with. And he bought Anja a birdfeeder with part of them because lately she's been spending about half the day standing at the kitchen screendoor looking out at the birds in the jungle. So after Martin tore down the section of the jungle outside the kitchen door, he planted the birdfeeder. So far we've had only one or two visitors, but we are hopeful that there will be more. This morning we were looking out the FRONT screen door and there were FOUR squirrels running around in front of our house, and one of them even came right up onto the porch! Anja was so excited she was shaking. (Mama: She was doing that thing she does when I come home after leaving her with you. The kind of seizure thing, you know?) So we put some bird seeds out on the porch steps in hopes that we will get some more furry guests today. We love to watch the animals!