Author: Wendy

Yesterday was Small Fry’s birthday party. It was a fairly low key affair, but I thought I’d share some pictures.

He started the party asleep on Grandma (my mom). There were a few guests who thought it was weird/inappropriate that the guest of honor was asleep during the party, but at 1 you don’t argue with baby’s desire to nap.

When he woke up (and after eating half a bagel), he was much happier.

I made 2 cakes. This one is Hershey’s Perfectly Chocolate cake. I got one of those super huge candy bars for the top – cookies and cream. It had 16 rectangles, so I used 12 of them around the outside like a clock and grated the other 4 up and put the shavings in the middle.

This one is a homemade carrot cake. I altered the original recipe a touch, though – I cut the oil back by 2/3 and subbed in some applesauce to make up the difference. For the teddy bear shape, I used my Wilton Puzzle cakes set.

Of course there’s the obligatory eating cake picture :).

And his messy face afterward!

And some playtime with Mom.

I hope you had a great weekend!

–Wendy

Over the next 9 days, three of the five members of my family will celebrate birthdays. Mine is today, Hubby’s is Friday, and Small Fry’s is next Friday. For mine, I thought I’d share one thing for each year of my life (32!) that you may not be able to easily deduce from the blog.

1. I’m short. Extremely short. Like my driver’s license says 5’0″ but if I’m not wearing shoes, that’s not completely accurate.

2. I got married at 19. We dated in high school, but went to different schools. I think that still qualifies as high school sweethearts, right?

3. For the first 3 years of marriage, I worked as a cashier in a grocery store.

4. I quit that job 3 weeks before Seahawk was born in October 2003 and have playing the role of Mommy ever since.

5. Even though I know how to crochet (moderately well), I don’t have a clue how to knit.

6. I’m a member of a Nazarene church where my father-in-law is the senior pastor.

7. My mother-in-law passed away 5 1/2 years ago.

8. I’m not a very good housekeeper, but I’m much better than I was even 3 years ago.

9. I like creating things (stories, novels, quilts, things made from yarn, etc), but I don’t consider myself creative. I almost always have to get ideas from somewhere else and just execute them myself.

10. I never thought I wanted more than 2 kids, but now that I have 3, I think 4 or even 5 would be awesome!

11. I was born exactly 5 weeks before my mom’s 21st birthday.

12. I have one brother and one half brother, both younger (though much taller!) than me.

13. Both of them have 2 kids. My full brother has 2 sons and my half brother has a daughter and a son.

14. My parents divorced when I was 5. My mom married my stepdad, to whom she’s still married, shortly after.

15. My mom and stepdad have no kids together.

16. On hubby’s side, we have the only boys. His sister has 2 girls and his stepbrother has 2 girls.

17. I only wear skirts and dresses, no pants. (I mentioned this once before, but cut me some slack – I’m barely halfway through this list and it’s getting hard!)

18. With each of our kids, we tried to pick an original name. We failed epically with Seahawk. But it’s not our fault. Between when we picked the name (even before I was pregnant) and when he was born, it surged in popularity.

19. With the older two, they got family names for their middle names (Seahawk was named for his father & grandfather and Munchkin for my grandfather). With Small Fry, we just picked a middle name we liked that went with his first name.

20. Hubby picked Seahawk’s and Small Fry’s names; I picked Munchkin’s. It wasn’t planned, and I love all their names. That’s just the way it ended up going down.

21. Seahawk was my only natural (though medicated) birth. Munchkin was an emergency c-section (maybe I’ll share that story when his birthday comes around in September) and Small Fry was a scheduled c-section because I’d already had one. I DO NOT recommend repeat caesarean sections. The second one was MUCH harder to recover from than the first.

22. My favorite beverage is iced tea. Unsweetened with no lemon. The plainest one available is all I’ll drink.

23. My favorite store to shop in is JoAnn.

24. I don’t hate grocery shopping. For a lot of my adult life it was the only shopping we could afford, so I learned to like it.

25. I’ve recently learned to love biking again. It’s been really fun getting back into that habit. I can’t wait until we get Munchkin’s add on bike and a trailer for Small Fry so we can go for family rides.

26. I made Small Fry’s cloth diapers. But I didn’t design them (see #9).

27. We don’t have a dryer. This is a lot less bad in the summer than in the winter.

28. One of our favorite family activities is swimming.

29. Another one is bowling.

30. I play Words with Friends. If you do, too, hit me up. My user name is wmr1601.

31. I’ve used that user name for everything online for ages (until this blog, that is). It’s my initials followed by the day I got married (Jan. 6, 2001: 1/6/01).

32. I like reading. Currently I’m reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series on my Kindle. Hubby tried for a couple of years to convince me to read it, and I finally am.

I hope you’ve enjoyed getting to know me a little better :).

–Wendy

We have a small planter near our front porch, and I’ve always been a bigger fan of veggie gardens over flower gardens. Yes, flowers are beautiful, but they’re the same amount of work without the “payoff” of fresh produce. I might come around next year and do flowers in the planter instead, but I don’t know. We’ll have to see.

Anyway.

So, because I favor veggies, I put carrots in the planter. my thinking was that it’s deep enough to get decent sized carrots, and carrots don’t flower like other veggies (since they’re a root vegetable), so they wouldn’t attract bees to the door – yet another reason to put something besides flowers there. I started the carrots from seeds a couple months ago, and it’s been exciting to watch the tops get bigger and bigger.

Because of their root nature, we’ve all been horribly curious how the carrots have been doing. Hubs even pulled a couple up a month or so ago – they were very spindly and not at all carrot-like, so he carefully replanted them. I decided to take a chance a couple days ago, and guess what?!

A real carrot!! A small one, but a true carrot nonetheless. Our tomato plants have really started thriving recently as well. And we’ve already used our own lettuce on sandwiches and burgers. It’s very exciting :).

So maybe, just maybe, we’ll end up with a good harvest of fresh veggies this summer after all.

–Wendy

P.S. Did you notice my new header? 🙂