five years gone by

To my little sunshine puppy.

Today you are 5 years old!  Can you believe it?  I can’t.  When I think about how I thought you were growing up so fast I was thinking more along the lines of you getting so tall.  Still in the 90+ percentile for your height I know that you’ll be taller than me by the time you are in 5th grade or so.  But what is really surprising to me is how fast you’re maturing.  Listening you muse about certain topics or explain something you’ve learned to me is both an amazement and a practice in holding laughter.

You’re just so grown up.  You state everything quite matter-of-factly.  You have your own little theories about what makes the world go ‘round.  Sometimes when I try to give you some kind of vague answer to one of your ‘how does this work’ questions you come back with a ‘well that wouldn’t work because of the electrons’ or something else like that that I don’t understand.

It goes without saying that you are one of the best things that has and will ever happen to me.  I’m thankful everyday for you and Daddy and baby on the way.  I love that you still love to cuddle with me and give me kisses.  I love that when I’m the helper mom at school you show me all the new things you’ve done and are so proud to have me there.

I love how smart you are and how you think you tell the funniest jokes.  It’s always fun to hear you sing whether it’s a Glee song or a song you’ve learned at school.

I hope that you don’t grow up too fast now.  Since you’re five now and starting school I think it’s okay if you slow down on the growing up.  Okay?

Just remember, no matter how old you get you’ll always be my Sunshine Puppy.  And … I love you the most!!

the dark and hollow places

Finally.  I finished.

I finished reading up to issue #80 of The Walking Dead over the weekend and though I watched the first season of AMC’s TV show based on it I decided I wouldn’t be watching the rest.  After going though all those issues I put the last one down feeling so hopeless.  There is a never-ending world of pain and death and there is literally no light at the end of the tunnel.  Even though I loved The Forest of Hands and Teeth and The Dead-Tossed Waves, after getting a third of the way though The Dark and Hollow Places I began to feel that depression of hopelessness.

But Carrie Ryan doesn’t ever really let you fall into that pit.  There’s always hope.  The books are a testament to humanity’s survival instinct and their never-ending ability to hope even in the most dire of circumstances.

If you haven’t read the first two books you should stop reading this review now.  There will be spoilers.

It all began with Mary.  Daring to question the authorities of her Village and then when all hell breaks loose the only one seemingly determined to survive.  While she wasn’t the most likeable character in literature she was strong and she was a survivor.

Years later we find that she has built a life for herself in a seaside village and has a daughter who despite not being blood related seems to have inherited Mary’s bravery.  Gabry introduces us to Catcher and Elias who holds all the secrets to Gabry’s past.

Now finally, in The Dark and Hollow Places we meet Annah.  Gabry’s twin sister and the one who has survived in the Dark City by herself for the last 3 years after Elias left her to join the Recruiters.  Deciding that she is not going to wait another day for Elias she heads out of the city only to stumble across her sister, the sister she hasn’t seen since she was 5 years old, but whom she has thought about every day of her life.

The world is literally coming to an end.  The options they once thought might be open to them are gone and with so few left not infected humanity has left this world.  But Annah refuses to give up.  She knows that she made a decision to leave her sister behind once and regretted it every day since then … she will not make that same choice.

The characters are all so strong in their own way.  Once reunited the sisters forge a relationship as if they were never separated.  Despite the grim and apocalyptic subject the book is full of hope and love.  It is at times nail biting, gasp inducing and stomach turning, but it is mostly a love story, albeit quite an unusual one.

Butterfly Effect

On May the 4th be a part of the Butterfly Effect.  Draw butterflies on your wrists to show your support for people with depression & self harming addictions.

can you really kill 2 birds with 1 stone?

I’m not a hunter.  I don’t understand sport hunting at all.  The closest I get would be fishing I guess, though I don’t do that very often at all.  And I usually don’t keep anything I catch except for one time when I couldn’t get the hook out of the fish and freaked out.  We had that fish for dinner.

Anyway.  There is a bird outside that has made our tree in the backyard his home.  It’s just the one bird and he is LOUD.  He begins screaming at around 4 am and doesn’t stop until sometime around midnight.

I can hear him right now.  Doors and windows closed.

I would like to kill this bird.

Now.

the great aphid attack of 2011

I started noticing an alarming number of aphids collecting on our rosebushes next to our driveway.  I kept thinking I would need to do something about it, but I just kept forgetting.  Then I noticed that the rosebushes at the front of the house were infected.  Ugh.  So began the war on the aphids.

We went to Johnson’s Garden Center and bought three containers with 1500 lady bugs each.  

We waited until nighttime when it’s cooler.  Lady bugs don’t fly at night so if you scatter them on the bushes at night they’ll crawl around and discover the aphids instead of flying away immediately.  This is what the roses looked like before we let the lady bugs go.  So many aphids!!

Here’s one little guy the next day wandering around.

This is the same rose bush I took a picture of the night before.  HUGE difference!  We still have a long way to go.  Hopefully the lady bugs will start laying their eggs and make the rose bushes their home.  Then we’ll be able to keep the aphids under control.

The other bad deal about aphids is that they attract ants.  The ants eat the honeydew that the aphids excrete.  Did you know that ants will actually farm aphids!?  They’ll take aphid eggs back to their nest to protect in case they have to move to another home.  If they do move the queen will take one egg with her (aphids don’t need mates to reproduce) and start a new aphid farm wherever she goes.  It’s quite a symbiotic relationship, but I don’t want any part of it!

Happy eating little ladies!

project 365, week 17

Short week this week since I went over last week.  This week I edited my pictures.  Mostly using Picnik adding boost or the lomo effect.  Nothing too fancy, I’m just not that good at editing!

4.26.11 – Ray went out and bought a bunch of these little containers of ice cream.  They are awesome.

4.27.11 – Just a picture of a snowflake Christmas decoration we had laying around.

4.28.11 – Mushroom Portobello Mushroom burger from Carl’s Jr.  SO GOOD!

4.29.11 – German Rock Cane Sugar.  Best thing for my tea!

4.30.11 – Emma’s sunflower is almost ready to go into the yard!

5.1.11 – Had to buy three of these bad boys to try to get rid of the aphids that are destroying our rose bushes!

she just keeps growing up

In less than a week my baby girl will be five years old.  It’s so clichéd but I really can’t believe how fast these five years have gone by!

We transitioned her into a toddler bed when she was 2 1/2.

Look at how little she was!  She still had her pacifier!

And now she’s a giant.  Ray set up her bed today and we let her pick out her own bedding set.  Of course she chooses the one with the guitars.  After I spread it out I noticed it also says ‘I love boys.’  Yay.

She seems pretty happy with the bed, right?  It’s not a strange bed to her too.  It’s the bed that she sleeps in at my parents’ house when she spends the night there.  She was not happy about moving into a bigger bed until we told her she could have Ba-Chan’s bed.

Of course, she loves the bed but for some reason she wants to hang out underneath it.  She brought her blanket, CD player and a book of Japanese Fairy Tales with her.  The book has a CD that reads along with the stories so that’s what she’s got in there.

She was excited to go to bed for once!  Hopefully she has sweet dreams and doesn’t fall out of the bed!