Before I became a mother I was pretty sure of one thing--that whatever else may happen, at least I would be a *fair* parent. You always hear that the first-born gets the most attention and the youngest is constantly babied and the middle child is neglected. None of that would be true in my family--I would always treat each child equally and love them all exactly the same.

Two years ago, when my firstborn started kindergarten, I cried. Not big tears, not lengthy tears, but tears, just the same. And now, this year, my middle-born started kindergarten AND my youngest started preschool and not only were my eyes entirely dry, I didn't even get around to blogging about it until two weeks after the fact. That's how not a big deal it was, the second time around.

So here's the truth: you really DO give more attention to things the first-born does, because with the first-born everything is all brand-new. She's always sailing off into uncharted waters, and you feel like you're just throwing her to the lions all the time (please excuse my mixed and cliched metaphors here--I'm not sure why there are lions in my uncharted waters). When Beth started elementary school, I didn't know if it would be a good school, if her teacher would be nice, if she'd learn a lot and make friends and have fun.

Turns out the answer to all those things is yes, yes, and yes. And so when I dropped Lucy off at the same kindergarten this year, with the same classroom and the same teacher, it wasn't nearly so scary. In the past two years of walking back and forth to this school every day, we've gotten pretty intimate with the place. The staff members, from the crossing guard to the principal, know our names. As I stand at the door, waiting to pick Lucy up, listening to the sweet-faced five-year-olds inside singing the good-bye song that they sing every day, I already know all the words.

My own sweet-faced 5-year-old

And Evie. Little Evie, who is starting preschool a full year younger than either of her sisters did (and, I will admit, that's partly because she really wanted to, and she's the baby and the baby tends to get what she wants). She's in the same preschool classroom that not one but two older sisters have been through already, with the same little tables and the same story-time rug and the same cubbies by the door. When we walk up the big set of steps to her school, it doesn't feel like we're embarking on some grand new adventure. It feels like coming home.

My crazy Evie-child, off to preschool.

Sure, I had some slight concerns about each of the younger ones. They are different people than my oldest. Would my sweet Lucy be intimated by the louder kids? Would my brilliantly bold Evie be able to remember that she's not the boss of the entire classroom?

So far, it seems, the answers to these questions are yes and yes again. All three of my children seem to be thriving in their classrooms--and this happened even though I didn't shed tears or fret or lose an ounce of sleep.

And my oldest, who gets to be last, for once, just in this post.

Does my lack of angst this time around mean I love them less or that I'm not mothering them as well as I did my oldest? Let's hope not.

I actually think it's the opposite. My oldest child always has to deal with this cautious, worried mother who is concerned whenever it's time to go off and do new things. My younger kids get a confident, relaxed mother who can send them off to school with a hug and a kiss and a dry-eyed smile.

Poor first-born. It's just not fair.

A couple of weeks ago the editor of my local newspaper (a man I like, and respect, and whom I happily worked with for five years) wrote an editorial about home gardening. After a few sentences in which he damned gardeners with faint praise, saying growing your own food was probably a source of self-satisfaction, he moved on to the gist of his editorial: that growing your own food is an unnecessary waste of time.

"...it's often a far better use of time to leave the growing of food to those whose business it is to do that, and whose production benefits from certain efficiencies of scale, while you do something else to earn a living, whether it’s developing software or driving a truck. Sure, there’s a huge amount of satisfaction in making a meal out of something you have grown, especially if you don’t have to do so out of necessity. Just don’t think of what — in terms of personal effort, time and also cash — each of those delicious tomatoes has cost."

I've got to say that on this point, Hasso is just plain wrong. He seems to think that gardening is an expensive and time-consuming hobby. But that's just not true. I am cheap, and also lazy, and yet my small home garden produces pounds and pounds of beautiful food for my family. Personal effort, time and cash are almost nil.

Every year my efforts in the gardening spectrum vary. This summer, we were gone a lot, and I was busy a lot, and I basically did nothing to my garden. I put less work into my garden than I ever have before, and yet it kept on growing without me. Here's a true summation of the personal effort, time, and also cash I've spent on my garden:

May 1: I planted a bunch of lettuce starts (purchased from Tom's Garden Center, and I think it was something like $3 for a six pack of starts)

I also planted sugar snap peas, Brussels sprouts, carrots, green bush beans, and broccoli from seeds. Seeds are something like $1 for a package, and I certainly didn't use an entire package for my little garden.

My final planting on May 1 was 2.5 pounds of purple seed potatoes from Tom's. Again, I didn't save my receipt from that shopping trip, but I doubt I paid more than $1 or $2 per pound for the seed potatoes.

I had mixed in some compost (which I produced myself in a compost bin from food scraps and yard debris, which means it was basically free) and some fertilizer that I had purchased a few years ago--I got a medium sized box of it and I haven't run out yet.

May 18: I planted zucchini and yellow squash and butternut squash from seed--I believe they were leftover seeds from a packet I didn't use up last year.

I also bought some tomato starts from a nursery in North Albany, and they were a great bargain: $2 each for large heirloom tomato plants. I planted six of those, and a couple of strawberry plants as well (they were somewhere between $1-3 each, I believe).

At some point later in the spring: I planted some basil and a cucumber.


The rest of the summer: I ignored my garden almost entirely. I watered it every 2 or 3 days. When the sugar snap peas and tomatoes got big enough, I put stakes and tomato cages around them to support them.

I fertilized the whole thing again one time when I thought it needed it. I pruned the tomatoes once when they were getting really huge. I weeded occasionally when I spotted big ones that looked like they were taking over. I sprinkled some slug-killer stuff down a couple of times.

Pretty much the extent of my time and effort is watering my plants with a hose. It takes me about 10 minutes every two or three days. My water bill has been, at most, $5 per month more than it normally is in the winter.

Now: I just go out there and harvest.

This is some of what I got from the garden yesterday: squash, beans, tomatoes and basil.

Yesterday I got three pounds of tomatoes--enough to make a quart and a half of homemade salsa. The plants are still loaded with green tomatoes and I expect to make several more batches before the year is over.

A few weeks ago I dug up pounds and pounds of potatoes. I didn't weigh them, but it was enough potatoes to fill up an entire cooler. (I still have some out in the ground that I haven't dug yet, too). I'll save them and my family will eat potatoes for at least a few months of the winter.

We had an entire spring's worth of salads for free from the lettuce. My kids pick cherry tomatoes and sugar snap peas and green beans for a snack any time they walk by the garden.

I've gotten enough green beans to have fresh beans on the table at dinner several times, plus freeze a couple of gallon bags full of beans for the winter.

My yellow squash is flourishing and I'm putting it in omelettes and salads and dinner dishes every day. I will probably make some zucchini bread or muffins with it soon to use up some of the excess.

The cucumber is doing okay, but not looking especially robust-- still, we've had several fresh cukes from our one little plant, and there are several more on there ripening.

The basil is doing great--best batch of basil I've ever grown. I've made one batch of pesto already, freezing the extra for winter, and I expect to make at least one more batch, if not two.

There's butternut squash ripening, plus a surprise plant that I didn't plant at all--it appears to be a pumpkin, and I think it must have been from a rogue pumpkin seed that survived in the compost bin from last year and decided to propagate itself when I put the compost in the garden.

Did everything take off? No. The broccoli has so far been disappointing, with very low yields. So have the strawberries. The brussels sprouts got eaten by slugs or something and didn't grow at all. The carrots didn't even sprout.

If I were a better gardener, perhaps I would have done more about that. But I'm not. I'm a lazy gardener. I put stuff in the ground, and wait for it to grow. If it doesn't grow, too bad. If I wanted to spend more time, more care, more money on sprays and fertilizers and weeding, I could. And maybe I'd get even better results.

But as it is, I'm pretty darn happy with the results I do get from my garden, and it costs me almost nothing in amounts of time and effort, and very little in cash. (Next year I'll have to save my receipts so I can do a more accurate cost comparison.)

I think that perhaps Hasso has a misguided idea of how much work gardening is. Do I actually feed my family entirely off my produce production efforts? Not even close.

Do I provide my family with fresh, mostly-organic vegetables (I did use some Miracle-Gro once this year) for a far cheaper price than I could buy them for at a store or the farmer's market? Absolutely.

It's fun, it's easy, it's cheap, and my kids get to see the miracle of nature in action, over and over again.

Is it worth it? Without a doubt, yes. Maybe next year someone needs to get Hasso a few pots of tomatoes, and he can try it out himself.

A long, long, time ago, we moved into this house (OK, four and a half years ago). And when we did, we knew from the start that we wanted to fix up the master bedroom. It had been converted from garage space into living space, but it hadn't been done very well. There was no closet. The floor was covered with cheap tiles, stuck directly to the uneven cement that had previously been the garage floor. And the whole thing was grey.

But here's the thing about the master bedroom: most of the time, nobody sees it except the couple who lives there. When you invite guests into your home, you hang out in the living room or the dining room or the kitchen or the back yard. Kids play in kids' rooms. Everyone uses the guest bath. But visiting the master bedroom usually isn't part of the equation, unless the hosts are specifically giving a tour of the home.

I'm sure that if the floor of my living room had holes in it and was peeling up and sticking to everything, we would have gotten that swapped out immediately. You don't want to have people come over and walk on the dirty concrete visible through the holes in your floor. But when it's only yourself being inconvenienced? You find you can live with that for awhile. I can, anyway. And so we ignored it and hated it and finally saved up the money and carved out the time and FIXED IT.

Starting a year ago, we (by we, I mostly mean my husband--though I did do most of the painting) completely transformed our bedroom into something ugly that I was ashamed of into something beautiful that I love.

Now, if this happened a year ago, why am I just sharing about it now, you ask?

Because, just as with getting the project going in the first place, it's taken me that long to FINISH the job. All the major work happened last year, but I just had one last thing to do--just one tiny little bit--get around to re-finishing the dresser. And it took me a year to get it done, but I finally did, and so now I can reveal my bedroom in all its new prettiness.

Sadly, I have virtually no "before" pictures. I think this is because the bedroom looked so bad that I didn't even want to take pictures in there at all, ever. The closest thing I can find is this:


Yes, this photo of the evil unicorn. This shows you a bit of how the dresser looked before: white, chipped, and faded.  You can also see a bit of our old bedspread in the reflection, and the color of the walls.


And then there's this--taken just as we were starting to get to work. See those holes in the floor? They weren't because we'd starting ripping up the tiles. They were just there, because the tiles were crappy and started peeling up almost as soon as we moved in. The closet had been built, at this point--you can see the closet wall in the left-hand side. Before that we kept all of our hanging clothes in the closet in the office and had to walk across the house to get them.



Now work is really getting going--here's Beth helping pick up the old tiles.


And Eric spreading leveling compound on the floor so that our new flooring would actually lay flat.


Here's the lovely new color we picked. I don't remember the name of it, but it's such a pretty blue. There's nothing really wrong with gray--I think it can look kind of sophisticated. But the gray walls and gray floor and everything just made it all look so blah. I like color!



Here's Eric laying the first row of flooring! So exciting. We choose bamboo flooring. Partly because it is beautiful, and less expensive and easier to install compared to hardwood. And partly because we had two different friends who both had done bamboo in their homes, and both had remnants left over they were willing to let us have. We bought the remainder of what we needed.




I had intended to have this pictures posted in order, as though you were coming in the door and slowly turning in a circle. But Blogger didn't upload them that way, and I certainly don't want to go back and re-do it. So here's our bed, and the east wall. The bed is from craigslist, bedspread for Kohl's, nightstand from Ikea, lamp from a garage sale. Curtain fabric from Ikea. Blue wool throw on the end of my bed was a Christmas gift to me from my parents the year before I left for college. I took it to Linfield with me and slept under it every night. The picture above the bed you can't really see, but there's a quote superimposed on the picture by photographer Shaun Sundholm. It says "Let's find some beautiful place to get lost. You can see a bigger picture of it here.


Little overflow bookshelf from Target. It holds some of the books that won't fit on the big bookshelves in the living room; mainly old college textbooks we couldn't part with. The picture of the loon we bought at a gallery in Missoula when we visited Meg in Montana last year; the jar with corks from wine bottles we've been working on filling up for several years now :)


I know this one is blurry, but I didn't want to go back and re-take it. This is the corner closet Eric built. I think I'd like a door to go in front of it or a curtain or something though. Alas, is any project ever really finished?



This is the east-facing wall again, with a door to the outside. And, you get your first glimpse of the thing that took me so long to complete--the dresser!


And here it finally is. The dresser was originally from my mother-in-law, and it bore the marks having been used by a busy family for many years. But I loved the curvy lines and funky look it had, and I knew I wanted to fix it up. When I told Eric I wanted it to be yellow he said, "Yellow?" But I knew I wanted yellow. I like bright colors. I had to strip all the old white paint/shellac off, and sand it, and re-paint it twice, and take all the handles off, and strip them, and replace the round ones in the middle because some of them were missing. I told Eric originally that I thought it would take me a day or two. It took me a year. But I stick to my statement--if I ever had taken a day or two and done *nothing* but work on the dresser all day, I could have gotten it done. I'm sure I'm right.