Milwaukee Bound!!

SO how excited was when my mother-in-law called me this morning to verify if the news she had heard about Southwest Airlines opening up in Milwaukee were true? Words cannot express! I verified it in my employee website and it was true! I was practically jumping up and down and couldn't wait to call Andy.

We have been going back and forth on what we were going to do with ourselves. Do we buy a house in San Diego or don't we? Are we going to send Jack away to school or try to find a good one here? We both are earning our degrees so that we could be prepared for what the future holds and now it looks as though we are meant to go to Milwaukee.

Andy's parents live there and they are retired and don't get to see their grand kids like they would like to do, so it is an obvious plus for them. If I transferred with my work it would be easy for my parents to still come and visit as they would still receive their free flight benefits. It is just as easy to get from their home in AZ to San Diego as it is to get to Milwaukee. The schools are ranked better in Wisconsin then California. I could stop working this crazy schedule of mine and actually see my husband. Plus, I wouldn't have to look for a new job.

This has been some of the best news we have had in a long time! Stay tuned for more details as they develop!!

A new addition... to the garden

So we (I) decided that we needed to add to our little garden and since we had so much unused space near the back of the yard where the yard slopes down towards the fence, we decided to level it off and put in another little box garden.
I have to admit that it was incredibly difficult getting the yard level enough to put in wood for the box. Andy dug most of it out and I tried my best to get the sides straight so that we wouldn't have to fill it in much to make it stay put. The kids helped by picking out the rocks from the dirt we were going to reuse.
They were more hindrance then help, but it made them feel good to be part of the action, plus it is good for them to work a little. You can see how dead our yard is compared to a few months ago when the weather was moist and the grass was a lush green. Summer is good in San Diego for some things, but because we don't want to waste water on a lawn that will die eventually anyway, ours goes earlier than most. The only thing we use the water for is our garden.
Nothing is nailed in. It is all pretty much just buried and the outside wall is held in with stakes. We don't like to invest too much into a house that we are only renting. So we try to use what we have without buying too much. We did buy some soil to fill in the box as the dirt in our yard is terrible, but Andy found a pretty good deal at the Home Depot.


This is the finished product. We put more strawberries in with the hopes that they will do better with more sunlight and we also planted carrot seeds. The package on the seeds said they were guaranteed to grow so we'll see how they do. This whole garden thing is a bit addicting, but in a good way. The boys love to come out and help water all the plants and when we finally do get to start harvesting, it will be amazing to just be able to go out to the backyard and get what we need rather then going to the store.

Most of this is thanks to my handy man husband, but lest we forget that I actually do some of the work but am not pictured because I am behind the camera, here is my proof.
You can see the blister is circled. That's from digging and evening out the ground. I am also the person who does most of the weeding. I got another one on the inside of my left thumb, but I couldn't get a good picture of it.

Update on our little garden

First a little update on how our garden is doing. The cucumbers seem to be doing great... so great in fact that we had to fence them off from the strawberries and the tomato plant so they don't overrun them. That's a good thing though, because I really like cucumbers and so do my kids.

Sad to report that the strawberries and the onions don't seem to be doing so well. Maybe they don't get enough sunlight where they are or maybe the ground is too hard for them to do much; whatever the reason they seem to not be growing very much at all. The strawberries are at least flowering and we will probably get a few that are edible in a couple weeks. The onions, I found out today, have been run over several times by Alex and his little trucks, as he uses this area to turn around in when he is driving on the sidewalk. This may be a huge reason as to why they don't grow.

The corn is doing excellent and I hope to get enough grown that we can give a little bit of it away. I really can not wait until we can have fresh corn on the cob. I did have to prop up one of the stalks as some little boy felt the need to roll over that one also. Hopefully it will survive. If it does we can label these as Alex proof corn.

I had Jack come out and stand by the sunflowers again so we could measure how tall they had grown since the last post. They are now completely over his head. The corn by the sunflowers will probably have to be thinned out again before too long as they are getting quite big and are in such a small space.
The tomato plant now has two big tomatoes on it as well as five small ones. I found another small one laying on the ground about a foot away from the plant that I can only assume Alex worked his plant magic on. I think I want at least one more tomato plant, possibly in a pot that can be moved to follow the sun so it does a little better.

Mary, Mary Quite contrary

I am so surprised at how fast nature works. Our garden is growing by leaps and bounds and it is so nice that the kids enjoy it as much as we do.

The cucumber plants are doing really well. One in particular has grown much faster then the others and I think we will have to fence it in so it doesn't choke out the other cucmber plants or the totmato plant next to it.

I wanted Jack to be in the pictures so I could have a comparison to how big the plants have gotten since I last posted.

Jack was so excited that he spotted two tomatoes growing on this plant. You can see the big one on the top, but he also saw a smaller one on the inside which I didn't even see at first. I am a little surprised at how sturdy this little tomato plant is. The stalk is very rigid and it does not move even when you push it.

The sunflowers are growing by leaps and bounds. In another couple of weeks I am sure they will be taller than Jack. You can barely see the corn to the right of Jack, but these are the ones we grew from seeds and now they are huge. Andy even had to thin them out a little because all of them grew in and started getting large so quickly that there was hardly any room. I can't wait until we can actually start picking the vegetables and eating them. There is nothing quite like fresh corn or cucumbers or tomatoes.

Modifications to the playset

After a little persuasion, Andy did a little modification to the kids play set. It was open on the bottom where the sand box is and he was able to enclose it like a play house and put a hinged floor over the sand box so the kids can pull it up to play in the sand or leave it down to play in the house.


We used a closet door that was pre framed and cut it down to size to fit the height of the play set and then used the remaining pieces to make a window on the opposite side.

He put siding up on all sides except for the side with the table on it. The kids love having a place they can call their own and it gives them a little protection from the wind or cold when they want to play outside.
I am very impressed with how well it came out. Andy really did a good job.

Ravioli Face

Just some random pictures of what happens when you don't monitor Alex when he is eating anything mixed in with tomato sauce.

The Carlsbad Flower Fields

It was a little hard trying to come up with things to do while my mother in law was in town considering I had to work the majority of the time she was here, which is actually the whole reason she was here to begin with, but we managed to get out to the flower fields in Carlsbad. Neither of us had been there before and it seemed we came at just the right time as the fields were in full bloom. I have never seen that amount of flowers all in one place before.

It was pretty amazing. We took a tractor ride up and around the 40 to 50 acre lot of flowers and the kids really enjoyed that part. One of the employees at the field was nice enough to take a picture of us and I didn't even have to ask.


It was hard to get a picture because of the sheer size of the field, but this particular picture of the blue background with white spots is actually a floral rendition of the American flag. You can see the stripes in the background.

After the tractor ride we walked around to see the different attractions. There was a cute little Lego garden (pictured below) with little Lego flowers and a sweet pea maze for the kids to try to find their way through.

There was also a little playground for the kids and good for them, but unfortunate for me, there happened to be a couple of classes out for a field trip and so Jack and Alex got to play with them , but all I heard was mass chaos of thousands of kids and had a difficult time keeping track of my own. It was beautiful and the kids had fun so it was a success.

I would definitely suggest a visit if you are up that way, but try not to go when there are mobs of children... unless you like that kind of thing.