The Chick has Hatched! June 2010

Welcome to Our Family!

We are so thankful for our little girl!  One of my favorite parts of the whole weekend was soon after she was born,  Luke, with tears in his eyes thanked God for new member of our family.  It was such a tender moment.  I have spent the last 3 days looking at her in awe and amazement, so of course to me pictures can't capture how wonderful she is! 

The rest of the Blog was composed earlier this month while waiting for our little girl to arrive.

Garden

 Wow!  The growing season in TN is amazing!  This mid-western girl still cannot believe it!  We have harvested 1 jalapeno, with 2 on the way.  Our red bell pepper has 2 medium peppers.  The Roma tomatoes and the grape tomatoes have more green tomatoes then I could take the time to count!  and the flowers are going strong.  Here are my cone flowers and butterfly weed.  I started the butterfly weed from seed last year.  This year it reseeded itself and is doing amazing.  Our home came with some interesting day lilies that I had never seen before, like this one with the striped center.

Day Lilies

 

Jalapeno

 

Sewing

I took my first stab at sewing since middle school home economics (were I remember more about discussions of whether our teacher was wearing a wig than I do about sewing).  So I started with these flannel rectangles.  They are cloth reusable diaper wipes.  I am going to be using cloth diapers with our baby and so I thought I might try out cloth diaper wipes (though I am not as committed to them as I am to the cloth diapers.)  What a great first sewing project; I just sewed rectangles, and if I messed up it didn't matter because it was just going to be used on a baby's bottom!  I tried all three designs described here.

 

The next project took things up quite a few notches.  But I had Holly (Luke's mom) teaching me as we went, and so I learned a lot.   For the valance for the nursery I was originally going to make it out of the Juicy Jungle fabric by Alexander Henry.  Then I realized it might look a little busy for a valance.  So I got the idea to make a valance and applique some of the animals from the fabric onto it.  Pretty ambitious for a second project!  I was really thankful that Holly was willing to take on this adventure with me.  We used a gabardine fabric in cream for the main part of the valance.  It has a wonderful hang to it.  For the applique I used an iron on bonding agent called Heat n Bond, and then I did a small zigzag stitch around the edges of the fabric to prevent raveling.    

The Bean Game

This month's game is one that I've enjoyed for many years, it's called Bohnanza.   I'm trying out a game ranking on a strategy-social continuum.  1 to 5. 1 being a very concentrated strategy game where you want no distractions and 5 being a laid back social game.  Bohnanza would get a 3 on this scale.  It is a nice combination of some strategy but fun social time also.  It involves planting beans in fields and harvesting them.  But you only have two fields.  So deciding when to plant, when to harvest and when to trade bring in the strategy.

For those of you who have played this game before with me, you might be interested in an that I really enjoy called High Bohn Plus.  It has a western theme in which you buy different buildings that let you do certain things that other players can't.  With this expansion more strategy is added, and so it would go to a 2.5 on the scale.

What do you think of my strategy-social scale?  Is it helpful?

Nursery

Here's a short video of the nursery.