Spring...time?

This is what most of our mornings look like. The boys wake up too early, we angrily shush them about 40 times (why do they have to run laps around the house while 60% off the house is still sleeping?) and eventually Lila wakes up (of course she sleeps in) and then comes into our room to watch Elmo or Clues Clues.

It has still been so cold here (notice the footie pajamas.) But today was the first day of Spring Break. And believe it or not, we actually saw the sun. I think it has been overcast for 85 days in a row. So even though it was still barely 50 degrees, we pretended it was spring.

Amy was uber-brave and took the kids to the zoo. If you have been reading the blog, you know that we are great fans of the Oregon Zoo. And Amy is a champion to brave it with all the kids by herself on the first day of spring break. (I got to stay home and be on the phone with dumb people that I work with.)

Lila thought it was great, but refused to ride in the stroller (she's that age, you know. The age where she gets 100% of what she wants because she screams like a terror when she doesn't.) Then she would get tired and want to be carried. 

Noel did want to ride in the stroller which meant Amy had to push it while carrying Lila. Also, Noel weighs 51.2 pounds. That's a lot.

 Jonah rode on the head of a stone lion. He's a trooper.

When they got home I was done working and Jonah wanted me to come out and jump on the trampoline with him. Since I weight more than 51.2 lbs, I usually try to avoid this activity. I will feel really bad when my jumping crushes the cheap steel frame of the trampoline. 

But I did go. I laid there and watched him jump for a while. But I have a disease. It is called the "If I spend more than 4 minutes in the yard I start getting driven mad by all the yard work that I see that I need to do." Do other Dads have this disease? As soon as I lay on my back on the trampoline, I saw the moss growing on the roof that I need to spray (which is the most annoying thing about living in Oregon.)

Summer is daunting to me. It is so nice on Saturdays in the winter that I don't have to worry about what the yard needs from me that day, and how much it will cost and how much time it will take, and how annoying it will be. I have a deep seated hatred of weed pulling left over from Saturday's spent pulling weeds at my Grandmas. Inevitably, we would pull things up that weren't weeds and then get in trouble.

I am committed to having a successful garden this year. A couple of years ago I built some garden boxes in the back yard. That may seem manly and impressive, but I got the instructions from a website called The Pioneer Woman. Somehow I don't think that is how my dad gets his how-to instructions. The first year, they did OK - nothing great. A few tomatoes. A few zucchini.

They were unimpressive. Then last year about half way through the summer, when all of our plants were spindly and anemic, I decided to buy a soil tester. Even though I had loaded the garden with organic compost at the beginning on the spring, the eternal rain her had washed all of the nutrients out of the soil. I might as well have planted the tomatoes in crumbled up Justin Beiber magazine. I bought a bunch of stuff, and doctored the soil and we saw some major improvement, but it was a bit too little too late. 

This year I thought I would get a jump start and start layering in nutrients now. All my hours watching Top Chef: All Stars has made me think that layering nutrients might work the same way Blais layers in flavors. The layered in flavors make for a more complex and nuanced dish. So maybe layered nutrients make for a more complex and...nuanced garden? Is this logical at all? Again, I don't think this is how my grandpa got gardening tips. So I grabbed one of the boxes I had bought during the great soil doctoring of last year. It was called Blood Meal. Um, gross. But it was high in nitrogen, which I guess you need if you are a plant. So I cracked the box open and sprinkled it on the dirt. And it smelled really rank. So I thought "What is in this blood meal?" 

Derived from: DRIED BLOOD!!! (emphasis mine.) Really? This is what it takes to grow a garden? Sprinkling dried blood on my plants?!? Isn't that sort of weird? Also, sorry ahead of time to any vegetarians who eat at my house. No, you don't have to eat meat. But you do have to eat tomatoes grown in a pool of blood soaked Justin Beiber magazines.

So despite all of the coming yard work (and that I sustained chemical burns and almost fell off the roof trying to kill the moss you can see running along the edge of the roof in that picture,) and despite the fact that not only do I have to pull weeds, but also sprinkle blood in the soil, I need more of those blue skies. Look how happy it makes the boys? And look how happy, and not killed, that moss looks?