Saturday Morning, 6 am

I know it's been here for awhile now, but I'm still kind of shocked that spring is actually HERE. The baby corns are popping up, the trees are all filled in, and the other night we sat out in the rain and I was hardly even cold! I am SO GLAD it's summer. I was so sick of winter by the end of it. And this has been such a nice spring with a mix of the warm sunny days and cold rainy days that I love. On one of the recent cold rainy days, I took a sweater my sister-in-law passed along to me (I am her pre-Goodwill stop, remember) right after Anja was born, which had kind of a funnily big neckline making it awkward to find the perfect thing to wear underneath. I wanted to wear it more often--like, all the time--so I ripped some buttons off of some scrap clothes and sewed them onto the neckline. I don't have a picture, but it ended up looking really cute! And now I can wear the sweater with anything I want underneath. The sweater is really silky feeling and soooooo comfy and bright green. It's also very loosely knit, making it a perfect summer sweater.

But speaking of sweaters.... I've been inspired by so many things lately that seem to be screaming at me, "GET OVER YOUR FEARS AND KNIT YOURSELF A SWEATER!" that I am just going to do it. Soulemama recently posted a finished sweater of hers, which is the Hourglass Sweater from "Last Minute Knitted Gifts"... which just happens to be the book TusaRebecca lent me over the winter that I've never given back. So I flipped through, checked out the pattern, and realized that's the sweater TR knit for herself back when she first started knitting, which turned out really cute. The next day, she happened to stop by with a gift for me--a huge tote bag with a frog and a dragonfly on it! It's the perfect bag for a sweater project. Not only that, but she told me it's actually a really great pattern because it's knit in the round and it's measured by inches, not by rows--so almost no counting is invovled! That's been the main thing keeping me completely away from knitting lately. I don't have a free five minutes to be counting and concentrating. AAAND she said she wants to make another of that sweater in a different, lighter yarn and that we could each start one together and help each other out (translation: she will help me until I get frustrated and after she finishes her sweater in a couple of weeks, she'll finish mine for me.) The only other start to align is to find some perfect, preferably on-sale yarn. And then I'm going to go for it.

Yesterday I went to Bennett's looking for some plants/herbs. I never found the vegetables, but I did find the herbs. It was kind of a disasterous trip... Anja has taken to running away. It would've been better, except that I was wearing my elephant skirt, which is a wrap skirt, which doesn't fit me (*ahem*) quite as completely as it used to... so where it used to wrap all the way around the other side of me, now it comes more to the middle in the front, where it is likely to blow open even at the slightest little puff of a breeze. Yesterday was kind of windy... and the greenhouse was full of people. AND, Greta was screaming THE WHOLE TIME. (Imagine that!) It was horrible. And then we almost got run over twice by the same huge SUV in two different places in the parking lot. So we left and went to the hardware store where both girls could be happily situated in the basket of a shopping cart with a bowl of crackers and I was able to find and purchase two baby basil plants, two baby green pepper plants (really babies... SO CUTE!) and two baby Celebrity tomato plants. This is the start for the old garden plot, but on Sunday we are bringing the garden boxes over from the neighbors house and the garden will be officially begun. I CAN'T WAIT. We were going to do everything from seed this year, but we weren't on the ball enough (who, us?) so now we're buying baby plants.

Greta seems to have a little cold so she's not sleeping well. Yesterday we purchased for a deal on Craigslist, two window unit air conditioners. One for our bedroom upstairs, one for the bedroom downstairs which is centrally located, and it looks like we'll successfully be able to not turn on central air for the entire summer. HOORAY!

And one last picture of Anja with the Nydegger....