like garden gnomes

i really do love to garden. right now we have only the patio garden, with a few big pots. i'm on the waiting list for a community garden space at many community gardens in our area, but for now it's just the patio. seeing as i love to garden, and have a deep yearning for trees and lushness, you'd think i might strive to keep our plants alive? we'll you'd be right about the striving part, but sadly mistaken about the living part! i have one green thumb (the planting one) and one wilty thumb... our tree and plants from earlier this spring didn't like the psycho hot weather any more than we did, and i think our watering chain of command broke down sometime in august... (that would be me asking jamie and cole to water the plants and lots of times not).

so, i bought some fresh greenery yesterday on a whim (i was alone and driving and hey, let's go to the garden shop, self!). cole helped me, which was a lot of fun, a lot of mess, and some help. ;-) but fun! he likes to sweep and dig and transfer soil from one pot to another - we just need to work on what is swept into whose shoe and which soil should be taken to where... seriously though, a great afternoon.

we even planted some crocus and mini daffodil bulbs so we have something to get excited about in the springtime! now all i have to do is take down the dead tree to the garbage room incognito (too bad i dumped our old gorilla masks in the goodwill bin yesterday) and then wait for rain so i can wash the balcony off discretely...

randomly, since they kind of go with the topic of mud and gardening - here are a few shots of cole from our trip on friday to queen elizabeth park and the bloedel conservatory (which i always garble and call the bird observatory).

we loved looking at the birds and fish inside, but i think cole was even more impressed with the loose soil outside. he dug and dug, brought me handfuls and got entirely grimey.

and i was going to crop the dude and stroller out of this photo, but it's too funny. his whole family was motioning wildly for him to get out of the way of the camera, which i had perched on the wall and on self timer mode, but he didn't even notice... and yet i'm still fake smiling and giving him the "get a f'in clue and out of my photo" look... cole is dropping a handful of dirt onto the ground and trying to escape. too perfect.

Gross things I love about Cole (this week)

I was saying today to Grandma B that Cole is the only person in the world who could get away with some of the adorably gross stuff he does on a daily basis. This morning I took him to bed with me around 3 in the hopes of getting some more sleep. Jamie is away on business and Cole had been up and down all night (I'm thinking more teeth - I need a reason!!). He woke me up for the millionth time at 5:30 by kicking me in the stomach repeatedly, scratching my underarm while he ate and then ripping out more of my hair (from my head, not underarms thank you very much!) and kicking me in the mouth while we were playing. Seriously - if anyone else did that stuff, they'd be sleeping on the balcony. IF I was feeling generous!

Other weird and/or gross stuff he's doing, that secretly I love:

• His knack for playing with the food already in his mouth... Reaches in immediately after nearly every bite of food. That's if I manage to sneak the food in without him hijacking the spoon! I think it means he gets what's going on with the food and all, but still, very messy and gross. But a sign perhaps that the home-made baby food is delicious? I do cook up a good batch of unseasoned steamed and mashed veggies, I guess...

• His fascination with the toilet. It's just so funny. Every chance he gets, he makes a beeline to the toilet. And yesterday he discovered that toilet paper is delightfully playful. On the plus side, I doubt that the outside of our toilet has ever been so clean as it is now that I know he's interested in it.
  

• When he sucked on my entire nose yesterday and really gobbed it up, I thought I'd show him what it was like and sucked on his. Well, he loved it. Laughed like a crazy person. We went back and forth for ages - it ceased to be gross when it became a lot of fun... However, I still washed my face thoroughly when we were done!

• Lifting him way up high only to have baby drool land in my mouth. Mostly I can dodge. I'm fast like that... Not always so lucky with sneezed milk.
  

• The fact that he peed on me after his bath tonight. It was gross, but really funny. He doesn't do it very often at all so I totally didn't expect it. Holding him in his towel and jotting notes about groceries on the fridge for a second (for cole - prunes to help the poop and baking soda to cover up the smell of poop coming from the diaper pail) when that weird warm feeling cued me in pretty quickly.

PS - the hat photo isn't gross, I just love it and didn't have a reason in the last couple days to post it. So there it is! Cole got a good laugh at himself in that silly hat. It makes me laugh too.

Bananarama

Cole has been steadily adding new foods to his diet for the past four weeks. We've tried rice cereal, pears, butternut squash, apples and bananas now. The mighty banana is king with Cole - he loves them.

I, on the other hand, detest bananas. They might be nature's perfect food and all that, but I can't stand them. The devil's fruit! :-) I will eat one, because they are convenient and healthy and whatnot, but gak - there's that horrible texture, the odour, that slimy peel. Blech.

He's been blowing a lot of raspberries lately, which he definitely likes to do with them in his mouth. And he likes to blow them into his hands, smear them on his face and grab the spoon. So of course they get everywhere...