Birthday Boy

Hard to believe that my little guy just turned one. Brings tears to my eyes just thinking about how quickly this past year has flown by. I'm reminiscing now about all the precious moments and sweet infant glances that I wish I could have bottled up to relive again and again. I'm always in such quandary about whether I should be capturing (i.e with a camera) or be mindfully living the moment. I go back and forth and most of the times I think I choose to just let the experience be what is it and then just lament later that I didn't get the shots. I guess I am sorting venting here because I really didn't get the best pictures of the big guys birthday. Lighting was bad, he had a big poop in his diaper that I didn't know about and it was the end of a very very busy day so I guess I should be glad I got what I did. It really was a special day. Dad played hookie, Theo's buddies at little gym all sang to him, we had lunch out after an outing at the toy store (where he scored big time) and finished it day off with a cake I made in the nick of time the night before. I have a funny story about this cake that I won't go into but Dad and I were in tears laughing at 1:30am and will never forget this ONE.

Macro Greenhouse

After 3 years the terrarium that Tess and I constructed in our earlier post had to be put to rest. The plants had gotten leggy and it was no longer the small sweet green world on my dinner table it was more like the big green monster. I transplanted all the plants outdoors into a bigger pot and since the container has just been sitting in the garage waiting for me to make another. I've been either too busy or lazy to clean it so I decided to use another vessel and make a smaller slightly less planty version of a terrarium. I had a some left over moss from an orchid repot and a great glass globe I had purchased at West Elm that had been calling out to be used. I went scouring my junk box for some cool things that might work together thinking I wanted to make something greeny and easy enough for Tess to help with. I chose some quartz crystals, miniature model figurines and a piece of pyrite that was collecting dust on Matt's shelf. The project took us about 15 minutes to put together but a good hour and a half to talk about all the items. Tess was completely fascinated by the figurines and played with them forever asking all kinds of bizzaro questions. She was also enamored by the pyrite and crystal shapes, we had a mini lesson in rock formations and even took a trip to the back yard to get additional rocks to examine. I love this age, even the smallest simplest little projects turn into opportunities for learning something new.

Vegetable Basics

Ha so much for more frequent postings. I actually had such good intentions, Tess and I have been working on a lot of great projects and I've even managed to capture some of them with the camera but... I had some computer problems. I guess you could call it user error. My computer just stopped recognizing my camera and download images. Immediately I went online lurking around tech sites to see if I could figure out what the problem. I tried like every thing. Nothing worked. Finally after a week I had to admit defeat and call Matt in to fix my buggy camera but moments before I was about give up I noticed that the camera wasn't even connected to the port. It was only half way plugged in but looked like it was connected. I felt like such a dunce...arghh and the time wasted troubleshooting. So again I am committing to more frequent posts... wonder what shenanigans will come up this time.

In the mean time I wanted to post some images from a cookbook I've been using all week. It's called Vegetable Basics - 84 Recipes Illustrated by Jody Vassalo. The recipes indeed are pretty basic but what I love is the design and layout of the pages. This is by far the easiest to follow visual cookbook that I have ever used. You barely need read the instructions to be able to follow along...exact what I need since most of my cooking is done darting into the other room checking on a toddler or trying to juggle dinner with a baby in arms or clinging to my left leg. If you are in the need of a basic veg cookbook that will inspire you to make great simple tasty food this is a good one to check out.