Libba getting married

Well, Bloggers, it’s official. My sister is now Mrs Dirk South. And I have a new brother-in-law. And the event, and days leading up to event, were just amazing. Libba and Dirk picked the perfect little getaway just south of Birmingham for their wedding – A luxurious bed-and-breakfast with plush rooms, gourmet food and a fully stocked bar. Making it the ideal setting for the party of the year. Oh yes, it was a party. Complete with the bride rapping Gangsta’s Paradise while standing on a chair in the middle of the dancefloor, and ninety-percent of the wedding party jumping into the pool fully clothed at the end of the reception.

But I don’t have pictures of that debauchery. Because I was serenading Libba’s Coolio routine and later ended up swimming in my bridesmaid’s dress. But I do have some great pictures of the rehearsal dinner and morning of the wedding... Enjoy!

How many brides do you know relax the morning of their wedding by simultaneously getting a facial and hula-hooping?

And Taylor-the-Flowergirl was quite the hit. We had pumped her up for her big job all trip, and by the time the processional started she was all ready to, Throw flowers! And when she got to the end of the aisle and realized there were ALREADY flower petals leading to the alter, she got a peeved look on her face and shouted, But I throw flowers! And waved her arms wildly at the already placed petals. And then she tiptoed around all the decor before getting to the end of the aisle and chucking all her petals out of her pail in one aggressive dump. And then she ate her weights worth in candy dots while sitting on my Mom’s lap. Good thing she looked so darn cute in her outfit.

So. The wedding was an absolute success. It was such an honor to stand up their with my sister and to be a part of her and Dirk’s blessed day. And it was also wonderful to be able to spend the long weekend with my family. Now that we are all spread out across the country, any chance I get to laugh with and squeeze my parents, brother and sister is bound to be a good time. We’re a fun bunch. And extremely good looking too.

Why I’m considering wrapping her in bubble-wrap for the next four days

My little daredevil is going to be serving as my sister’s flower girl at her wedding this weekend. And, along with a white leotard, Taylor will be storming the aisle while wearing this poofy creation that Libba’s fabulously crafty friend, and fellow bridesmaid, Kate, made for her:

And after taking a nasty spill down the driveway this past weekend, I realized that for the next few days I’m gonna have to keep a close eye on my little ballerina in order to keep all other scrapes and headwounds at a minimum.

Wish me luck.

Enjoying the fruits of her labor

Looks like someone earned both Dora stickers AND ice cream this weekend...

And that’s all I’m gonna say about our potty training progress. I don’t want to tempt the Universe.

The Ruby not-so-Blues

So somewhere between my weekend trip to Sewanee and re-landscaping our entire front yard, my four-legged daughter had a birthday. Miss Ruby Blue turned the big seven late last month, marking her close to 50 in dog years. And even though she’s got some gray on her chin and belly, not to mention a titanium hinge for a knee, she’s still got all the spunk and sass she did when we brought her home with us seven years ago.

And maybe it’s because she is getting up there, or that I know how happy this makes her, but Ruby has officially become a car-dog. So whenever you see us driving around town with the windows down, there’s a pretty good chance the Rubes is in the way-back, dog-watching, smelling the fresh air and hope-hope-hoping that Taylor shares some of her snacks with her.

And I don’t know if it’s that Rubes has finally realized that, after two years, Taylor is indeed a part of this family and not leaving anytime soon, or if it’s that she’s actually warming up to the idea of having a two-legged sister, but both of my girls have been getting along just fabulously. And that makes my heart smile.

Ooh-la-la

I think I may have found a new way to keep Taylor’s bangs out of her eyes this summer, and all it took to keep her still for five minutes was a freshly-baked cookie and Dora the Explorer on the tube.

Going off the grid

Two weekends ago, Chris was browsing through the Saturday paper when an ad for the Asheville Herb Festival caught his eye and he announced that we should put in an herb garden this season. Never one to disagree with fresh basil, we scoped out our yard and designated a small, rectangular patch to where we would put in an herb box and plant some spices.

I had tried to grow a few basil plants last summer in the corner of a flower bed, but between the bugs and poor maintenance, I only got enough leaves to make one or two pots of tomato-basil soup. Nothing spectacular, but after watching countless hours of cooking shows on Food Network, I do prefer to use fresh herbs and spices in our meals, and if we could somehow grow them ourselves and stop paying for them at the store that would be ideal. Enter my husband, his strong back, his barely used power tools, and the fact that this is the first summer I have him at home on the weekends with two fully-working knees, and, By God, we are going to have the finest herb box our cul-de-sac has ever seen.

The first step was weaving through the masses at the Herb Festival. I hadn’t been to the Farmer’s Market for some time, and forgot the interesting mix of mountain-folk, dread-heads, yuppies and normal people, like us, that filter into the market to pick up their weekly produce and plants. And let’s just say that if there’s a sale on medicinal herbs in the Asheville-area, you can bet on a pretty good visual arcade of personalities. It’s better than the food court at the mall.

So we get in and get out with our herbs, and on the way back to our car notice an old, crusty farmer selling vegetable seedlings and Chris stops and says, Hey, I bet we could fit a few veggies in our new herb box if you want. And, of course, I say, Sure. Why not? And we proceed to buy an assortment of peppers and squash transplants from a man with four teeth and the oldest pair of denim overalls ever made. And as we drove home, I weaved stories of how, this summer, I won’t have to go to the store hardly at all, and how we’ll just be able to eat everything out of the garden. Because a diet a yellow squash, bell peppers and cilantro will be all we need to survive. And, Don’t Worry!, because I’ll make it delicious. I’m pretty sure I watched Giada make a fabulous dish out of just those ingredients on her show last week.

And after unloading our new plants out of the car, and then unloading our little peanut into her crib for a nap, we started digging, tilling and hammering away at our new project outside. And I can’t remember if it was before or after the final beams were nailed in, but we took a step back and realized how small our little garden-box seemed next to all of the herbs and veggies we bought. And then I read on the plants that they needed to be spaced at least 24-inches apart, to which I said, I don’t think that’s a big deal. We could probably half that, right? To which Chris replied, Last year’s basil, honey. This year, we’re doing it right.

And to DO IT RIGHT, we realized that our new little box would house just our herbs and spices, and that we would have to take a 25-foot strip of grass out of our side yard, cut down a fully-grown pine tree and re-sod where that tree was. All by ourselves. All with the shovels and tools we already had in our garage. Which was a pretty sizeable, exhausting project to accommodate the fifteen-dollars worth of vegetable seedlings we bought from a man with four teeth. But we did it. And so far everything’s still alive.

And to keep the ball rolling, last weekend we decided to dig out a few bushes and completely makeover our flower garden as well.

So, as you can see, if I have been for lack of blogging the past few weeks, it’s because our household has been a flurry of digging, planting, watering and nursing our sore backs. Luckily we have a little girl that likes to be outside so much, and allows us to use her ladybug sprinkler to help with the watering.

Now if only there was a way to get her to eat all the vegetables that we’re gonna survive on this summer. Too bad Mr. Hillbilly Farmer didn’t have any animal cracker plants... THEN we’d be set.

25 months old

Yesterday my Taylor-tot turned 25 months old, and while I was iffy on continuing with my monthly milestone posts past the two year mark, I realized that we just had such an exciting month that I had to document it. Because THIS is my baby book, and if I wasn’t recording all of her firsts on this blog we would have to rely solely on my brain for remembering all of these things. And, no offense to my Brain and all, but I just don’t trust it to keep all of these important, toddler benchmarks on file without blog-backup. So here we are, Taylor’s monthly milestones, version 2.0.

We welcomed the transition into Life with a Two year old at a steady pace, keeping ourselves occupied with parties, festivals and lots and lots of time at the park. Lucky for us, we have a little girl who thrives on being outside and running around, and everyday I try to find some sort of a new adventure for us to explore and keep us away from the television. After such a long winter, we are all taking a much needed break from Miss Dora and Mickey Mouse, and T couldn’t be happier to run through the sprinkler for two hours straight or play in the yard until her whole body stinks like feet. It’s heavenly.

And a few weeks ago we took our little peanut to her first-ever PGA golf tournament. Chris scored two passes to the fancy-shmancy, executive tent on the 18th green at Quail Hollow last month, and we decided to make a last-minute daytrip to Charlotte to check out the action. Taylor did as well as could be expected. She didn’t care at all about seeing all the golfers play through, but the tent had an unlimited supply of water bottles and chips, so she was a happy camper. It was a great setup for Chris and I as well, as we were able to get primo seats to watch the action, free cocktails and whenever T felt like squealing during a backswing, I was able to take her inside the tent and let her shriek to her hearts delight. By the end of the day, we had seen almost all the golfers we had wanted to, and Taylor had become the Wells Fargo tent mascot, with every single person there feeding her snacks and squeezing her cheeks for good luck. It was a great day.

Another milestone we hit this past month was letting T participate in a YMCA’s Parent’s Night Out. The age requirement is two, and since we already know almost all the girls and guys that work in the Child Watch program, we decided to test our luck, take advantage of the cheap babysitting and let her spend an evening of fun with them. It’s a really great program, and they feed the kids snacks, do crafts, swim and let them go through a gigantic inflatable obstacle course. I brought along a big bag a snacks, her blankie and her jammies, just in case she needed any comfort items from home, but she did just awesome and was so excited to show us all of her crafts and toys she played with when we picked her up. So it was not only a fun-time for her, but Chris and I were able to get out and play golf together for the first time in three years. And that was fantastic. And she slept until 8.30 the next morning. So I’m thinking we’re gonna be taking advantage of the Y’s semi-monthly PNO from here on out.

Taylor has also become quite the Chatty-Kathy this past month. She can pretty much say and repeat anything we say, which has gotten us in trouble a few times. Me while driving, and Chris while watching the nightly news. We have moved to spelling things we don’t want her to understand, but with as fast as she’s evolving, I’m not sure how much time we have left with that either. My favorite thing about her talking has to be the way she narrates everything anything is doing. Momma tie her shoe, or Ruby lick the floor, or Daddy go outside, or TeeTee read her book. Sometimes she’ll run into kitchen at full speed to rehash something that just went down on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, and be all, Goofy fell down, Momma! GOOFY. FELL. DOWN. And then she’ll realize she’s missing the outcome of the cartoon and – Poof! – like a ninja, she’ll be gone. Well, a ninja that stomps on the hardwood and sings at the top of her lungs while running.

And while her language skills have peaked this month, so have her stubbornness and fierce independence. One of her most used phrases is still, I DO IT! And don’t even try helping her to put on her shoes or walk up and down the stairs, as she will scream bloody murder and collapse in a sobbing mess on the floor. She has to DO everything. Or at least try to DO for twenty minutes until she gets so frustrated the only thing that can pull her out of her tantrum are Dora gummie snacks or sprinkler time. And I blame all of this bullheadedness on her father. I used to think Chris was the most stubborn person I knew, until I met his spawn. I’m flashforwarding about 15 years from now, both T and her Dad in the car, trying to direct themselves around somewhere, both fuming at the other for suggesting an alternate route. Both clenching their jaws and squinting out the front window, knowing inside that THEY are right. Oh, and we don’t even have to wait 15 years, I saw the both of them do that dance the other night over picking out a book to read at bedtime.

Something else she has obviously inherited from her Dad is her brainiac skills. We have been practicing her counting for the past few months, and the other night while goofing around she counted all the way up to fifteen. FIFTEEN. I was ready to stop at ten, and then she pulled out the, Eh-leh-ben, and just went with it. I was flabbergasted. And after we put her to bed that night, Chris got a silly grin on his face and said, She’s MY brain in YOUR body. She’s gonna rule the world.

Like there was ever any doubt.