Garden art by Grace.

A while back we bought this cute mosaic tile kit, and we finally got it out yesterday and worked on it. The directions were an amusing translation from (I think) the French; we were, for instance, "treasured" customers and the directions for mixing the cement involved grams. But Grace had a blast - she very dilligently adhered the tiles in the suggested pattern to form the image of a dolphin, and then we mixed the cement and poured it into the little mold. The tiles stuck, the mold worked, the cement hardened, and voila! a lovely mosaic tile with a dolphin, for decorating the garden.

Suburban chainsaw fun!

For some time we've been meaning to trim a branch from this beautiful old maple, because the branch spreads out over our neighbor's driveway and we're afraid that a snowstorm will take it down right onto her car. Not so good. We're also having the house painted (Van Courtland Blue from Benjamin Moore, for those who keep track of these sorts of things) and the painters are allegedly coming any! week! now! so it seemed like a good time to trim other branches that were touching the house and might get in the way of the painters. And once you head down that path... so Mike got the chainsaw, climbed the tree, tried with minimal success to teach me how to start the thing, finally had to start it himself while perched in the tree, and took the branch right off. We'd had the foresight to ask the neighbor to move her car, and she seemed only slightly irritated by that. When the branch came down, we could see that it was starting to rot inside and might well have come down under the weight of snow this winter. Peter was so impressed by the sound of the chainsaw that he dashed inside to get his hardhat. He and Grace sang a few rousing rounds of the Bob the Builder song (inspired by the hardhad) while they helped us pick up the debris.

Not nibbled by rabbits!

This looks to be the only bloom we'll get from a packet of spontaniously scattered (cosmos?) seeds we tossed in around the basil a couple of months ago. There were more buds at some point, but I think the rabbits or maybe squirrels ate them. No matter: Grace and Peter are both immensely fond of this one blossom, and have charted its growth and blooming carefully (mostly by hollering, "Mom! Come quick to the garden! There is a red flower!")

In which we visit the apple orchard!

So every year since before Peter was born, we've gone to an orchard in Indiana to pick apples. One year we went with Mike's dad and also bought a pumpkin; the year Peter was a baby he rode in the sling the whole time. We avoid the petting zoo/little kid train/face painting/etc. because we're slightly grinchy, we grown ups, and we feel that picking apples (after riding out to the orchard in a wagon towed by a tractor!) is fun enough. We have gotten lunch a couple of times, which is fun - we did that this year and the kids enjoyed it. The actual picking is a real pleasure; even the year that we went in a rainstorm it was fun. The trees are gorgeous when they're full of ripe apples, and this year the weather was perfect. We got apples for eating and apples for pie, and I'm going to spend some time peeling, cutting and freezing some for using later in the winter. Technically I make apple crisp more often than apple pie, and I've also got an apple cake recipe that gets raves. Crisp is easier than pie crust, and the kids eat it all equally well.

Late-blooming roses

The rosebushes didn't look so fantastic during the really hot part of the summer, but they are rebounding. This one looks like it might bloom a few more times before the first hard frost, and the other rosebush has a couple of buds that look really good. The roses felt like a bit of an experiment; I don't know much about caring for them but I really wanted one on either side of the garage. I'll have to do some research on what to do to help them survive the winter - they've done well so far and I'd like them to bloom again in the spring.

Secret house

Peter and Grace brought me a few branches earlier today with these beautiful little pink blossoms on them. I asked where they got them, and they said the flowers grew near their secret house. So Peter showed me the secret house, which is a bit of hedge between us and the next-door neighbors', which the kids have furnished with a couple of sand buckets and some bricks. They propped up branches that fell in a recent windstorm to frame out the door, and voila! they've got a little hideaway.

Peter, the iconoclast

So as part of our hardware store journey (see yesterday), Peter and I also went to our local independant bike store, located in the same little shopping center. Recently, in a fit of weakness, I let Peter pick out this cute plastic bike horn at Target, which he honked and honked and honked until he crashed his bike a few days ago and the horn broke off the handlebars. He was crushed. It felt tragic. I was crushed by the prospect of yet another epic journey to Target, where we'd recently seen that their bike accessory section did not have bike *bells,* which is on Grace's list of must-have items (it strikes her as a more dignified version of the horn, and I can kind of see that.) So - Peter and I figured the local bike store might have both horns and bells, and it's close, and it would be great good fun. We went there. We saw many bike horns, which fell more or less into two categories: cute kid ones, which featured small plastic animals that you squeeze to get the horn business going, and cool, retro ones for bigger bikes. Peter rejected all the cute kid ones. The panda? Nope. The orca? Nope. The [shudder] plastic skull? Nosiree. He wanted a fancy, shiny, metal horn. They were a little big for his bike, but I figured what the hell. He's three, he's a man of the world, he can choose his own bike horn. So he picked a three-horn trumpet-looking one, and I picked a bell for Grace which reads "I <3 my bike" [that's a heart there]. Great! Good to go! And then Peter decided he wanted streamers. I looked at the options. His bike is red and black; I figured the white streamers would be fine. He figured the pink and silver streamers, just like Grace's, would be *much* better. Again, he's a man with his own aesthetic... so, short story long, here's the visual on his tricked-out bike: too-large fancy and deliciously loud horn, pink and silver streamers, happy three-year-old. Such is a morning in the life of mama and Peter.

In which mama builds a birdbath.

So Peter and I, we have time on our hands. Today we went to the hardware store (by way of the bike shop, which that's a whole 'nother story for which the visuals are priceless and you should check back for it later) and we noticed this birdbath on clearance. Not this exact one so much as one already put together. But the hardware store folks assured us that they had more, in the back, in boxes, and since we were on foot/bike that made sense to us. After 20 minutes they found one, lugged it out, and handed it over. I juggled the box while begging Peter to slow down already as we went home - he's now faster on bike than I am on foot. Once we got home I dug the thing out and read the directions, which included this priceless bit of advice: "Keep the area free of small children while assembling." Um, sure, buddy. We'll pretend that's a possibility, just like we'll pretend that I know what it means to avoid crossthreading screws. Happily, this bit of garden art is metal, because Peter couldn't resist "helping" me by testing the flight ability of the little bird. (It survived.) He was delighted to take the picture above, in which you can see part of the birdbath. Proof! that I actually assembled it myself. And there's the finished product, which is cute and not even all that wobbly.

Produce!

So we have some future tomato sauce here, courtesy of our somewhat aging tomato plants, which have overgrown their cages and are sagging with fruit. And Peter's got a carrot there, despite what you might think (for example, "That's not a carrot! Carrots are bigger than that! And orange!") That is a late-planted carrot, dug up by the curious (Mom and Peter), and unsuccessfully transplanted to a bucket of soil in the front yard. Unsuccessful because Peter promptly dug it up and ate it, without benefit of any kind of washing prior to the eating. Yes, this is the kid who owns a shirt that says, "I Eat Dirt." He reported that it was "yummy!" and I'm hoping we get some slightly more robust carrots before our first hard frost.

Have bikes, will travel sloooooooowly

For the first time today, I had the opportunity to really ponder what it might be like to be a migratory animal. Specifically, the mother of two smaller migratory animals, who really need to stay with the herd or else the family bike ride is going to take forever and be teeth-gritting and mama-crazing instead of relaxing exercise. Um, wait, that part was about me. Seriously, though, what do mama elk do when their babies want to stop and examine leaves, or go the wrong direction, or bike on the grass instead of on the bike trail, or get off their bikes to *run* because they figure (correctly) that things will just be faster that way? Luckily, we brought the bike trailer, so Peter had a few transfers back and forth from his bike to the bike trailer (from which trailed... his bike. We were like circus clowns.)

The good, fun part is that Peter is riding his own teeny bike, and riding it well. Grace is riding so fast that we have to calibrate our speed to go on family bike rides. But by the time next spring rolls around, his legs will be longer, the park will seem closer and maybe we'll be able to successfully migrate with our herd.

Late summer blooms

Our black-eyed Susans and purple coneflower and beebalm are all looking great - we sat on the porch for a while today and just enjoyed the flowers.