Gravitational Pull

Can I just say, I need for my kids to meet some friends!  While I love my kiddos very much, I feel like I currently have some gravitational pull and they all just endlessly orbit me.  The girls did meet a very nice girl who lives across the street and two doors down.  She is 10 which is a bit older than my girls but she's a slight distraction from the constant-ness of being around mom.  It is all compounded by the fact that we do not have any TV service yet (we had a problem with the previous owners still having DISH so we couldn't get anything set up while they had an active account - that's all getting fixed this Thursday).  It's not like I want my kids to watch TV all summer but mommy needs a break!  Thank goodness we can stream Netflix or I'd seriously be in the loony bin.  I try to get them to go outside to play, and they may do that for about 10 minutes, and then they are all right back to their orbit.  (sigh)

This week I was able to plant our garden!  A friend of mine couldn't believe I put in a garden before I had everything settled in the house.  But the growing season up here is so short I wanted to make sure that we had everything in as early as possible to make sure we get a harvest.  We now have growing in our back yard:  tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, radishes, carrots, sweet peas, green beans, cucumbers, spinach, leaf lettuce, and watermelon!  Ambitious, I know.  But I'm hoping to have some yummy veggies later this summer.  We already tried the leaf lettuce and it was great.  I'll have to plant a few more of those.

I also got around to weeding some of the many garden beds around the house.  They were very much overgrown with weeds.  So they are looking more tidy and we added some annual flowers to add some color around the house.  The weather has cooperated being nice and sunny during the planting and obliginingly raining after everything was planted.

We made a trip to Walmart.  It's a fairly new one with a grocery store, but it confirmed my long held belief that I hate Walmart.  I won't be going there on a regular basis.  I just don't like it.  But I did find a kitchen cart there to hold all my larger countertop appliances.  So we did get a little organization done.  Now we need to concentrate on the desk area - too much stuff is piled all around the computer!

We were originally going to go camping this weekend but saw the forecast and decided we didn't want to be stuck in a small camper all weekend during thunderstorms (also, see earlier paragraph about orbits and mommy needing a break).  But we did manage to head up there on Sunday for the day.  It's only 45 minutes from our house!  Scott and I spent the day cleaning brush, weed whacking the road, taking down trees that had fallen (one right over the shed) and generally sprucing the place up.  For the first couple of hours the kids just kind of sat there in a daze, following me around wondering what to do.  Sad.  But then they finally realized they could throw sticks in the fire, and go swimming whenever they felt like it.  They also found skinny dipping to be huge fun - its a very small and private lake and on Sunday there was no one there but us.  Digging the hole in the woods to go number two was a highlight for all three, don't ask me why.  But they got a big kick out of it.  By the end of the day, after yummy hamburgers on the grill eaten around a nice bonfire, we were all sufficiently tuckered out and ready to head home.  I think the next time we head up, they will have the hanging-out-in-nature thing all figured out from the get-go.

This week I'll be finding some summer activities to put the kids into.  I'm thinking T-ball for cooper, gymnastics for the girls, some swimming lessons, and hopefully VBS at some local church.

If you're inclined to pray please pray that the kids find some friends in the neighborhood to play with.  And that mommy loses some of that gravitational pull.  :)