Some recent pictures...

At a local kids book festival, getting to meet two heroes




Trying to be big enough to reach the handle in my car



At the local fire department open house, getting to try out the fire trucks.




Awash in honest-to-goodness crafts now that preschool has started. Tucker is especially proud of this apple he made

A couple videos

I don't think either of these published correctly when I tried a couple weeks ago... maybe this time around they will work.

Quote of the Day

"I love juice. It tastes like chocolate."
-Tucker, campaigning to get more juice

Tucker at three

Life is pretty quiet around here. I have two weeks left before my due date, so mostly I'm waddling around waiting for Baby Jamison to make her appearance.

Tucker, on the other hand, is keeping himself and all of us entertained on high volume these days. He goes to Sunday School, Preschool and the kids' program at a Bible study I attend so we are awash in crafts and new songs that he enjoys singing at the top of his lungs. (Incidentally, he also still enjoys making up his own songs, which are frequently quite amusing.) Having never had another three year-old, I'm not sure if this love of singing is a stage or if we have a musically inclined little man, but at this point I'm betting it's the latter. I also wonder if all three year-olds talk as much as he does... it seems that his modus operandi these days is to continually narrate his activities.

Of course, Tucker still has no filter and will tell you exactly what he's thinking. Apparently at the gym last week he was having a snack and the person in the kids' area was talking to him, and he just kept giving her dirty looks until finally she asked "Am I disturbing your snack?" He answered "yes" and proceeded to finish his snack before he would say another thing to her. He seems to have opinions about how everything should be and is very happy to share them. Thankfully, his tantrums have become fewer and farther between as of late, though he gets big teary eyes that are much more effective than tantrums in melting my heart.

His vocabulary is also growing and he enjoys using lots of modifiers to his sentences:
Me: What songs did you sing today?
Tucker: Maybe sort of like I don't know.

For a week or two in August I thought Tucker would go back to napping, but it was a false alarm and he remains as nap-less as ever. He also insists on sleeping in his reading/jumping nook every night, completely surrounded by toys and pillows and detritus that he collects there.

His favorite activities at home lately are playing dress-up, baking with me, playing doctor with any available person or animal, creating and mailing packages (usually VHS video covers with remotes inside), and making sure all the animals get into Noah's Ark before the rains come ("Two by two everyone, come on, it's raining!" he tells the animals as he marches them up.)

Sleeping in Style

Last night Tucker really surprised us. I went in to check on him before bed, only to discover he was missing. He's been sleeping in his little jumping/reading nook between his two big boy beds for the past week, and with the amount of stuff he has piled in there it's a bit hard to see him sometimes. I removed his sleeping bag and pillows and it became more obvious: Tucker was not there. Tucker was also not in either of his beds.

At this point as a parent, I started to freak out. The windows weren't tampered with. The door to Austin's office was still closed. He wasn't crashed on the rug. So where was he??? Visions of Tucker wandering through the house asleep without us hearing went through my mind.

Thankfully I found him the next place I checked: under the bed. He was fast asleep under the middle of one of the beds in his room, on the hard wood floor, with a book beside him and ducky under his head. He had to have crawled under there because it is just not possible to have rolled to where he was. Totally ridiculous.

Also ridiculous was the fact that he was sleeping so soundly that I couldn't wake him up by talking or touching him and that Austin needed to pick one end of the bed up so I could sling him over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes and deposit him in a more reasonable sleeping location. (He did open his eyes for about a second when I put him in bed, but that was the extent of his acknowledgment of his new location.)

This morning when we asked him about it, he didn't remember being under there when Austin asked and when I asked he said there was a book under there he went to get. Hmmmmm.

Birthday videos

I just want to say that our internet is too slow to upload and watch videos. They're such a pain! Maybe these will work this time. The videos are Tucker singing hail to the Redskins in his new jersey (thanks Uncle Mike and Aunt Kat!), singing happy birthday to me, and generally enjoying his birthday morning. My apologies if not all of these go up correctly!

Happy Birthday, Tucker!

Yesterday was Tucker's third birthday and we had a fabulous day. It started with a special breakfast of baked oatmeal while we made a few last-minute transfers from his old room (the nursery) to his new big boy room. Then came the big revealing of the big boy room, which was quite a hit. Tucker knew he was going to get a big boy room when he was three but he didn't know any details (not even if it was going to happen on his birthday), and my mom and I had done all the putting together of it while he was at preschool or asleep on Thursday and Friday.

At one point Tucker turned to me and said, "I want to keep my big boy room. I love it." (I think he was trying to make sure the big boy room wouldn't go away after his birthday ended.)

He spent the rest of the morning trying out both of his new beds, his jumping/reading nook, and his new sleeping bag and pillow from GoGo. Later, I asked him what his favorite birthday present was and he said the balloons. (GoGo had gotten him five mylar balloons of Mickey Mouse and yellow smiley faces, and had also blown up regular balloons and put them all around the room.)

Of course, that's not counting the gas pump that Austin's dad thought up and made for Tucker. Tucker loves that gas pump. Last night we had two other families over to watch our town fire department's 100th anniversary parade and then eat dinner and cake. The three other kids were also in awe of the gas pump, but it was so hard for Tucker to share it. He just sat in his car with very serious eyes watching the other kids touch it. Then when I suggested he give another child a turn with the car, he dutifully got out and followed me with big, teary eyes.


At the parade. This was the longest parade ever. It took 50 minutes for the whole parade to go by. (We left the parade watching after half an hour for the fire truck shaped moon bounces.) Because the parade was to celebrate our local volunteer fire department and there were no competing parades since it wasn't a holiday, the number of rescue vehicles appearing in this parade was mind boggling. I didn't count but I'd estimate there was at least 3 dozen fire trucks from the five surrounding counties that all showed up. I promise I'm not exaggerating--and that's not counting the police cars and ambulances!!!



Enjoying dinner and Tucker's much-anticipated yellow school bus cake (he has spent more than a month talking about the cake he wanted, and the green mint chocolate chip ice cream but it turned out he didn't even touch the ice cream he was so excited about the cake!).




Conked out in his jumping/reading nook during naptime. It's hard to fit in all the partying!

Pictures from the big boy room!

Quote of the Day

"Daddy, do you keep me safe?" Tucker asked at dinner last night.
"Yes, Tucker, I keep you safe," Austin answered. "Do you feel safe?"
"Yes," Tucker replied.
Five minutes later, out of the blue, Tucker added, "My toes are not safe."

Quote of the Day

"Watermelon helps me grow big and strong."
-Tucker

Even with vegetables and meat and complex carbohydrates on his plate, Tucker repeatedly singles out watermelon as the source of his future growth. He certainly is my boy.

Tucker Rides a School Bus

Tucker's dreams are fulfilled: he got to ride a school bus this weekend.

We went to a fall festival on Saturday that featured local farms and seeds and harvest. Tucker enjoyed the festivals activities: sampling the melons and apples, getting to bang on the drums and shake noise makers on a blanket to accompany some bluegrass musicians, making his own cookbook, and eating a picnic lunch complete with doughnut and popsicle.

But the main event for our little boy was the shuttle ride in the school bus to and from the parking lot. Life is good.

Things not to say to a pregnant woman

"You look like you're going to pop!"

"Really, you have a whole month left? Looks like it should be any day."

"Are you sure there's only one in there?"

"It's anti-Christian to find out the baby's gender beforehand." (When I was in the middle of a conversation with someone else about having just found out the baby's gender....)

These are the greatest hits so far of this pregnancy. I've received the "you're going to pop" exclamation twice in the past 10 days. Gee whiz, thanks. :)

Culinary Adventures

I tried my hand at canning some tomato sauce the other day and the result was good, though the process was messier and more time consuming than necessary. I learned some good lessons for next time. Even though I have a pressure canner, not a hot water bath canner, I opted to do the hot water bath canning to start with because it's been so long since I canned anything. It was a bit awkward and intimidating. I have a very healthy respect for hot jars and boiling liquid after seeing the burns a friend from master's swimming got (who had been canning for 40 years) that kept her out of the water for a month.

I learned for next time that:
1) I don't need to sterilize all the jars and lids before filling them if I'm going to be processing them in a pressure canner or for over 10 minutes in the hot water bath. This means no lifting jars out of boiling water and makes me very happy.
2) I used the jar tongs upside down. No wonder why I melted the plastic off the handles. Smart, Jackie.
3) I need to get a circular rack to put in my canner so that I can can two rows of half-pint jars at once. That will double my capacity or halve my time in one fell swoop.

In my spare time before baby comes, I'm going to experiment with pressure canning because it's faster, and not necessarily more scary than hot water bath canning (did I mention I don't like the boiling water?) given that I already have the equipment.

In other culinary adventures, I saw a gigantic pumpkin at the grocery store yesterday and couldn't resist buying it (at about 25 cents a pound it's the cheapest vegetable I've seen in a long time). Has anyone else noticed the utter dearth of canned pumpkin on grocery store shelves this past year? Apparently there was a problem with the pumpkin crop and canned pumpkin became very scarce.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure this was supposed to be a Halloween pumpkin, not a pie pumpkin because its skin was so thick I couldn't get a knife through it. Austin offered to bleach his hatchet and attack it outside the house, but I decided to just pop the whole 15 lb monster into the oven and roast it completely uncut. An hour and a half later, I still was barely able to cut through the skin (I've never met squash skin like this before--very odd) but the insides were perfect pumpkin mash. That is definitely the easiest way I've ever cooked a squash--from now on, just cook it, don't cut it.

I was going to try my hand at pressure canning the wonderful pumpkin pureee, but it turns out that mashed pumpkin is something that is not safe even to pressure can at home. Apparently the viscosity, the water content and the acidity vary so much from pumpkin to pumpkin that safe processing times can't be determined for home operations. Interesting.

(In lieu of canning, I opted to freeze the pumpkin in ice cube trays and pressed flat in quart ziplock bags so that little bits can be broken off and used at different times without having to defrost a hulking mass of pumpkin.)

Tucker's First Day of School

...It is hard getting many details from a not-quite three year-old, but I think he had a good time!

"This is my house!"

Tucker spends a lot of time in his own little world these days. He gets in a zone where he is off by himself, totally happy, living in his imagination. This picture is him having a picnic in our yard the other day, singing and swinging his feet.

His favorite imaginary pass time these days is collecting everything he can find into a small little nook that he declares his house. His favorite nooks are the trunk in his bedroom and his playhut bus. He fills these to the brim with throw blankets, pillows, stuffed animals, trucks, kitchen utensils, really anything that will fit. Then once he has successfully furnished his house he climbs in and talks and sings and colors very seriously. Sometimes he declares that his house is a bus or a plane that is taking him to Spain or to the moon.

More Recent Projects

We've continued to churn out the projects recently. I've been doing the random indoor ones due to the oppressive heat that is finally starting to subside, Austin the big, impressive home improvement one (ie the patio). It's just about done and it looks fabulous, of course. The weathered bricks Austin's parents gave us from their driveway renovation look perfect next to our old house. The patio definitely has character.


I painted the entryway bench from white to blue so it wouldn't look dirty all the time...


I covered our changing pad with a vinyl tablecloth so that it would be easier to clean and not look so dirty all the time...


I refinished a coffee table so that it would hide the abuse we give it (the old finish wasn't doing a very good job of protecting it from propped-up feet and cups)...

And I stripped a threshold that had been painted white many, many decades ago (I'm guessing there was at least 10 coats of paint on it). Now it hides the dirt, too (are you sensing a theme with my work?)


And lastly, I tried to dye a fleece blanket with KoolAid but succeeded only in dying my hand because the fleece is synthetic and doesn't absorb colors. If Kool Aid can dye my hand this color, it must do great things to a person's insides....

Coolest Plumbing Gadget Ever

We have one of those old bath tubs whose drain stopper has long ago been lost. This bothers me. The plastic drain plug (we've tried a couple different types) doesn't stay in when the tub is filling and so I have to bend over and hold it down until the water is at least an inch high. Annoying.

Anyway, this is the "Flip-It Tub Stopper" that you permanently insert into the drain and that you can just switch open or closed. It fits most standard tubs (even our old one--nothing in our house is standard...). Plus, it was about $10 on Amazon. I am excited by small things.

Chef Tucker

Tucker made his first batch of chocolate chip cookies last week and is now firmly hooked on cooking. He helps me make his oatmeal or granola in the morning and is very enthusiastic about any shaking, pouring, stirring or squeezing activities.

I find his description of tastes particularly endearing right now--everything that is sweet tastes like chocolate (or sometimes, strawberries). The strawberry jello he made yesterday tasted like chocolate, according to my little man. The rootbeer lollipop from last week tasted like strawberries. He was so excited about making cookies that he insisted that even the flour that got on his hands tasted like chocolate.

P.S. The picture is Tucker getting ready for football season.

You are grounded

Ben is officially grounded for the next few weeks. We are confining him to the house with only supervised potty breaks and supervised outdoor time.

You may be wondering why he's lost his outside privileges. I have one word for you: dirt. The dog can't stop eating dirt.

Ben has always eaten everything, including occasionally munching on potting soil (always the store-bought kind) from our planters. But recently the combination of digging up the area for a patio behind our house and doing some grading around the foundation to improve drainage has proved too much for him. Ben has developed a taste for plain old red Virginia clay.

It may surprise you, but eating dirt all the time doesn't do good things to Ben's digestive system. Specifically, it does bad things to his digestive system that result in messy floors EVERY SINGLE morning. Yuck.

I hear it takes three weeks to form a new habit--I'm hoping it will only take three weeks of supervised potty breaks to form a new habit of not eating dirt. Silly dog.

P.S. FYI, I'm aware that new tastes for the inedible can be a sign of worms or dietary insufficiency so we're exploring those avenues, too, though with Ben's shiny coat and having never contracted worms in all these years of eating nastiness, I'd be surprised if those were the culprit.

Does this sound like naptime to you?

Tucker spent his naptime today driving his ride-on car around his bed, then standing on top of the seat and dive bombing onto his pillows. For some surprising reason, no sleep occurred.

Quote of the Day

"Daddy took my nose and hid it in the closet."
-Tucker

Quote of the Day

"I don't want to make real cookies. I want to make chocolate cookies."
-Tucker after I told him we would make real cookies together today (he usually just bakes imaginary ones in his oven)

Recent Projects

I've been doing a flurry of crafts recently... the things that I know I won't get to for ages and ages after the baby comes. I finished up my project for work before I left for Spain so I'm basically footloose and fancy free with respect to employment now and am enjoying the extra time.

Above are a few pillow covers I made (the chicken one I had on hand) for the baby's room... I made matching curtains with the fabric on the right. Below are picture frames I made out of one of our old windows that we recently replaced. We're going to hang them on the stairs (when I say "we" I mean Austin, because I don't trust myself to hang heavy items in plaster walls).

Further below is a tote bag I made on the spur of the moment after re-discovering some fabric I had that I really liked, and a tag quilt for the baby for Christmas (they were just giving the ribbon away at Michaels, and again, I had the fabric on hand... have I mentioned I stockpile fabric?).

Napping, and other accomplishments

After a hiatus of more than four months, Tucker has begun napping regularly again. I have been hesitant to put those words into print lest that jinx this new trend, but I am cautiously optimistic that my stubborn boy will continue actually sleeping during his rest time. Why is this so nice? First and foremost, we have had zero tantrums since the napping has become somewhat consistent again. ZERO. It is so much nicer to be around a well-rested two year-old than a cranky-hyper-tired one. Enough said. Second, dinner time isn't so much of a crunch. Without a nap, Tucker disintegrated at about 6 pm, which meant we needed to start putting him to bed by then at the latest, and to do a bath, much earlier. A 7:30 bedtime is much more civil for everyone involved.

Other recent developments in Tucker's young life include his interests broadening from all things wheeled. I've heard that you usually can categorize boys into truck boys, ball boys or dinosaur boys. Tucker has always been a truck boy, and he still likes his trucks, but the days when the trucks march all over the house and are inseparable from him seem to be gone, at least for now.

In the meantime...
*This summer balls are quite the hit and he is very interested in throwing them, collecting them, rolling them and trying to catch them.
*Tucker's imagination is exploding. He rounds up his Winnie the Pooh characters and enacts things with them, talks to them, etc. Sometimes it's harder now to figure out what he's saying because half the time it's some imaginary thing that has no basis in anything close to what the conversation at hand is about.
*Tucker's love of dressing up continues to grow. His latest acquisition is a football helmet which he runs around the house with. He also likes to put on his mud boots as a fashion statement, and to dress us with hats. Poor baby sister--I fear she will be dressed funny by her older brother.
*Tucker is very into reading right now, and into snuggling in bed. He will get up on any bed, at any time, crawl under the covers and say its night-night time. He also loves to "read" to Ducky, and will read books by himself for long periods of time. He especially loves his Bible--but will only read the stories about Jesus. He gets mad when I try to read him other ones.
*Tucker's creativity is blossoming into the first artistic urges I've really seen. He sits at his table and methodically scribbles with his markers, and paints pictures that take more than two seconds each. He proudly presents them to me and waits for us to hang them up in the hallway upstairs.
*Tucker is also obsessed with his upcoming birthday. We began talking about it to get him ready to switch rooms (which will happen on his birthday), vacating the nursery for a big boy room... but we began talking about it so early that he is ready for his birthday NOW and it's still more than a month away.

Garden update

Our garden weathered our long vacation much better this year than in years past because we had house sitters this year. In fact, Ben the dog weathered the long vacation better than in years past as well--he always is hyped up and neurotic when we pick him up from the kennel, but I think he might have liked the house sitters better than he does us (more treats?). His welcome home to us was more like "Oh, you guys again?" (Okay, slight exaggeration.)

Tonight we were doing our mid-year garden review and here's how things stand:
-Great corn (looks like we'll be in business for a long time due to Austin's strategic successive plantings)
-Bumper crop of cherry tomatoes
-Regular tomatoes are bouncing back nicely from some rot issues and look like it will be our best crop yet
-Beans are a much better variety than last year, but we could easily eat double what we've planted
-Malabar spinach is a new type of heat-resistant green that is working out really well and is tasty
-The pepper plants we grew from seed turned out to all be weeds and so we have no peppers
-Our basil has been slower than hoped for--next year we'll jump start things with starters rather than growing this from seed--we haven't been able to make any pesto yet (and my boys can't eat the store kind because of nut contamination issues)
-Not nearly enough okra
-All of our squash (winter and summer) shriveled up and died--this is the same thing that happened to all but the earliest squash that we planted last year. Next year we'll have to do early squash, and the hardiest types available (zucchini and butternut)

As for the fall, we're set to plant four old stand-bys: mesclun, spinach, kale and brussel sprouts and we'll try three new things: rutabaga, turnip and fennel. We've also decided to switch back to buying all our seeds from a local mail-order seed company rather than scrounging packets together from the hardware store and big box stores. I think some of our lackluster garden performers may be due to seed quality and choice.

A couple videos from Spain

Here are a couple videos of Tucker getting into the birthday spirit, celebrating GoGo's birthday (he missed the party because it was too late at night but he certainly had enough birthday enthusiasm with all the party remnants).