The Babs

The crazy last days of the semester draw nearer. I'm ready for the summer vibe at work, indeed. The kid is so rad these days. I can't believe he's our guy, we are so lucky. The words are tumbling out of him, they make us laugh six thousand times a day. We are teaching him the names of flowers and trees, and he is totally game. Ask him, he'll tell you about the Jack-in-the-Pulpit at the top of the ridge, he'll school you on Daisy Fleabane and Lyre Leaved Sage and Solomon's Seal and the Buttercups dotting the meadows here. He knows that he can eat violets and clover leaves and redbud blossoms, and we are already haunting our berry spots just in case we find the magic April strawberry. I take a lot of pleasure in giving him this kind of geography: this is where you're from, kid.

Sometimes when he's quiet for too long and one of us gets the spider sense that he might be up to mischief, we tiptoe through the house and find him. Sometimes he has invented new naughtiness (discovering the case of figs in the closet, for example) but more of often than not these days this is what we see:

  

   

Kicking it with Miss Rumphius. He especially likes to pretend to eat the cookies and drink the tea.

Last funny tidbit: Osh often asks for music. Sometimes he wants B and me to play tunes ("Mama - g'tar! Papa - fiddle and bow!") and sometimes he asks for one of three artists: Andrew Bird, Gillian Welch, or Pete Rock. I mean seriously, how awesome is that playlist?? Oh, and every now and again he requests Mos Def. We'll get right on that.

Containers

We miss the yard. It's that time of the year. We're getting there on the vegetable front, but I miss our flowers - the peonies and columbines and bachelor buttons and dahlias and bee balms and bright red yarrow and tansy. I will plant some of these in our vegetable garden to attract good bugs, but since the garden is no longer in the front yard my time with it is slimmer.

Thus, last week we took a splurgy trip to our favorite nursery and had a ridiculous amount of good time there buying shade loving container plants. Osh surreptitiously ate basil leaves and collected rocks while B and I grilled affable staff about shade grasses and scoured for blooming things.

We came home with mertensia and ferns and red veined dock and beautiful grasses and sweet potato vine and dead nettle and peachy coleus and wood poppies and get this: you can't eat any of it!!! Ok, that's not true, you can eat the dock but we're not going to. All that stuff is eye candy, it doesn't even attract good bugs. And perhaps even more stunning, some of those are annuals! I tell you, that is decadence.

We even bought fuchsia, which I generally don't even really like but Oscar identifies this plant due to an illustration in a book we have so you know, when your 21-month-old points and shouts "Fuchsia!" in a greenhouse you pretty much have to buy it, I'm pretty sure I read that somewhere...

Captain Blueberry

Watch out, Errol, there is a new Captain in town.