It's Spring

Spring is officially here, no matter what the calendar says.

This is the Bradford pear tree in our front yard in full bloom. It’s one of the things that I love about our house. We’ve lived here for almost 7 ½ years and I learned something new this year – when the tree first starts to bloom, it smells like a rotting corpse. I actually called the hubby and told him that something had died in our front yard and he needed to locate it and dispose of it pronto. He never could find the dead creature. The next day I was at work and walked by the Bradford pears in front of our building and smelled the same odor. Then a coworker commented about the Bradford pears around her back patio and how badly they smelled this year and I finally realized it was the blooms I was smelling, and not a dead animal in the front yard. The funny thing is I don’t remember them smelling this awful before. And now about a week after they started blooming, the smell is almost gone. Weird.

With the tree blooming and flowers blowing down onto the driveway, the boy has been picking a pretty one every day just for me. And he is so excited that he is able to do this. The first day he saw them strewn about, he grabbed a pretty one off the ground and said excitedly, “Look mom! Aren’t they pretty? I’m going to put this in your room so you’ll have sweet, sweet dreams.” (Now, if you read that last sentence and didn’t think, “Awwwww,” then you don’t have a heart.) And sure enough, when I was getting ready to go to bed that night, there it was on the nightstand on my side of the bed.

I overlooked the fact that the bloom smelled horrible because the gesture was so sweet. And one bloom doesn’t really stink up the room anyway. That sweet boy of mine, he’s a keeper!

Five and full of fun

In case you haven’t noticed by the new tickers I added at the top of this page, SOMEBODY had a 5th birthday recently. Instead of getting into the whole Lets Invite Everyone at Daycare or Let’s Invite Everyone at School (because let’s face it, you either invite the whole class or nobody) and having a potential monster party that we weren’t financially prepared for, we opted for a smallish gathering at home with family and good friends. The theme this year was Pirates of the Caribbean, because our house is all about Disney.

Here is the birthday boy in his Pirates t-shirt.

The cake.

One of his favorite gifts, from his Auntie KatyaR, of course. It's a raincoat!

Oh, and my personal favorite, the Batman outfit for his Build-a-Bear. I don’t think he’s ever going to take this outfit off the bear. Of course, the hubby and I had to crack some jokes later about how the mask resembles something….um…latex-ish and not appropriate for kids (if you get my meaning).

Just for fun, we stuck baby sister in one of the boxes and took a picture of her.

And then, I was able to give him these:

I FINALLY finished knitting these after a year. I think the yarn is Schoeller Stahl Fortissima, but I'm not positive and have since lost all the ball bands. The pattern is based on the sock in Ann Budd's book. The design was purchased on ebay from a lady who takes images and charts them into designs for cross sitch projects. I simply told her how many stitches wide and high I needed, and she easily worked it out for me. This was my first foray into two-color knitting, and honestly, I’m not sure if this actually qualifies as intarsia or fair isle and I’m too lazy to look it up right now. I learned that I need a LOT more practice because I’m not very good at it yet, but I don’t think the boy is going to mind at all. It’s my first finished object in a LONG time, but I’m already at work on some socks for the hubby and I have 2 other projects lined up for the near future, so hopefully I will be finding more time to knit.

Even though it’s only March, it’s already been a challenging year for the boy as far as daycare issues go. He got a new teacher and all the kids had to test her to see how much they could get away with. The room is predominantly males of the extremely active variety. Braden has been routinely getting his name written on the board (which means he was naughty), and he has been disobeying on the bus to school. After every episode we have to have a “talk” and reinforce the rules, which, let’s face it – he’s FIVE! He’s doing good if he can remember to flush the toilet. Oh, and then there was the incident where the daycare forgot to pick him up at school. Bottom line is that if we can just hold off a couple more months, school will be over and we can find a new daycare. Or we could get lucky and win the lottery, in which case I will be staying home with the kids.