• Baby Teddy,  Family

    Postpartum Thoughts

    General Thoughts Sometimes I wonder who the person in the photo is. It’s me, of course, but a different me and yet the same me. It’s odd, motherhood, parenthood. We’re the same people yet completely different. Part of me feels like Forest has always been with us, but of course I know he hasn’t been. There was a time that I couldn’t have even fathomed him. The other day I had placed him on the Boppy to sleep which was situated on the ottoman to our oversized chair in the living room. Leo was sitting with him and I reminisced for a second that Forest was sitting where Samson used…

  • Outdoors

    Backyard Leopard Frog

    About a week ago I was coming in from hanging up diapers and noticed a leopard frog on our back porch. It hung around for a few days and let me get a photo of it before finally disappearing into the garden. We have a healthy frog population around our house but this was the first time I had noticed a leopard frog. Southern Leopard Frog information from TPWD

  • Baby Teddy,  Family

    Forest at Seven Weeks

    Every week that goes by I get just a teensy bit more sad. The dude continues to grow like a weed, making me wonder just when these leaps and bounds of poundage are going to slow down. This morning at my final Wednesday morning breastfeeding group that I will attend before heading back to work next week, I weighed Forest before feeding him and he was 13 lbs 7.6 ounces, which is about a pound more than he was last week! He has his 8 week pediatrician appointment tomorrow and I was expecting him to just be near 13 lbs, not over and beyond it! We keep telling Leo that…

  • Gardening

    Harvesting and Saving Roselle

    I was thrilled that this year the roselle plants (Hibiscus sabdariffa) grew enthusiastically, almost too much so. Frankly, and I knew it at the time, they were planted too close to a few other plants and ended up shading those plants out. Next year I’m thinking that maybe they deserve to be in the perennial herb beds instead, just to give them more room and sun. Last weekend I decided to trim back the branches that had fallen over and were heavily shading out our variegated hydrangea. I clipped off most of the calyces, the red pods on the stalks, and they lingered there for several days until I could…

  • Gardening

    Random Garden Bits

    The area where the brug’s are has turned into a complete jungle. The brug’s themselves were over 10′ tall at one point this summer, but the weight of the stems has caused them to lean over to the ground. I really need to clean up this area of the garden—and forget looking near the bees, it is absolutely overgrown with weeds. I avoided going over there while pregnant and Chris was too busy working on the guest room and Forest’s room this summer to get over there and weed. Perhaps it is time to dig out the bee suit and clean up over there! The bottle gourd in the vegetable…

  • Baby Teddy,  Family

    Forest at Six Weeks

    Forest is slowly morphing out of the newborn stage and into the general baby stage. At somewhere near 12.5 lbs I’m pretty sure most people wouldn’t think he was only six weeks old just by looking at him. He’s now far more engaged with his surroundings and has started doing more smiling and light laughing, though it is more like cooing with a smile. His cooing and talking has picked up more, too. Last week I meant to mention one big milestone that I started working on but didn’t get around to writing about here. I started elimination communication around the middle of 4.5 weeks. It was mostly on a…

  • Outdoors

    Giant Swallowtail Caterpillars

    Over the weekend Chris was out in the yard and came inside to tell me that I had to go out and check something that was on the citrus with him. It didn’t take me but a few seconds to decide he was probably showing me a caterpillar that was munching on the citrus. At the time I couldn’t remember which caterpillar used citrus as its host plant and I had to look it up later. Sure enough my hunch was correct! There were several small caterpillar nibbling on our citrus trees. I’m sure that in a citrus grove this would be considered a pest, but considering that the caterpillar…

  • Gardening

    Garden Cleanup

    My parents were down for the weekend which meant that Forest had two people who wanted to give him attention so yesterday I was able to spend almost two hours piddling in the garden. I first took some time to trim up the roselle bush that had fallen over and started shading out our variegated hydrangea. I clipped off all of the red calyxes from the branches I trimmed back so I could make hibiscus tea from them—more on that later this week. Then I began weeding and trimming the flower bed directly in front of the house, which was/is still quite overgrown. I’ll try to get out more this…

  • Gardening

    Dancing Daturas

    The daturas have really grown well out on the side garden this year. We purchased several small containers of them from a nursery just outside of Nacogdoches back in February. The plants have already set seed this year and I suspect we’ll have a lot of volunteer daturas next year. Chris wants to get some more varieties as I think these were the double or triple purple variety. The plants themselves are probably 4′ tall and have survived being barreled over by the armadillos earlier this summer. I love seeing them when I take something to the compost bin.

  • Baby Teddy,  Family

    Forest at Five Weeks

    So, last week you remember I wrote about those 15-20 minute nighttime feedings?? Well, of course that got switched up this week. I think it was Saturday night/Sunday morning there was a lovely 3 hour stretch of a not sleepy baby from 12:30am until 3:30 am. The first hour was spent feeding him, with the second 30 minutes of that hour being needed because he’d fallen asleep after feeding one side and then woke up as soon as I put him down. So I picked him back up and we went back out into the living area outside our bedroom and I fed him on the other side. Same thing…