Innocence

When we first moved to the area, one of my main priorities was safety.  Columbia was in the top ten for crime per capita in the nation and with Rowan entering school, I wanted to make sure that he would be protected as much as possible.  It seems my fears weren't unfounded as I recently found out that a new student to Rowan's class had been transferred to his school because of problems with being bullied.  The new kid is super sweet and reminds me of Rowan in a lot of ways, so I felt assured that we had been guided to a good place where Rowan would be safe. 

Last week when I went to pick up Rowan from the bus stop, the bus driver mentioned that someone had been killed in the ritzy neighborhood next to us and that the buses weren't going through there.  When I got home, there was a recorded message on my phone from the school that was cut off, so all I was able to hear was there had been "an incident."  In talking to some ladies in the ward, I found out that a man who was involved with gambling (a bookie apparently) had a disgruntled client come to his house, kill his wife, and threaten to do the same to him if he didn't open up the safe in their house.  The husband ended up killing the client with a gun he had stowed away in the safe.  The details are still a bit muggy, but suffice it to say I stopped feeling so safe.  That only increased when I found out that the couple's son is in Rowan's class and they are good buds.  He's another sweet kid that I've worked with multiple times when I volunteered in the classroom.  There is also an older daughter who has been affected by this tragedy.

The school has handled the situation well and even had the school counselor come and talk to Rowan's class to help them understand the situation and to properly help the boy when he returns to school.  They wrote cards to him and gave him a gift to hopefully help with the loss of his mother.  Rowan doesn't seem to realize the gravity of the situation.  When I asked him about it, he told me how his friend's mother got shot and how he hoped that wouldn't happen to us.  Otherwise it hasn't bothered him that much. But I can't help realizing that as time goes on, I will be increasingly unable to protect my son's innocence from this world.  Perhaps Steven and I will avoid having a lot of problems enter our home by adhering to what we know is right, but I can't control the choices of others.  I'm just alarmed that it is happening this early.

Rowan came up to Steve and me last night and told us that he knows 3 bad words.  In the aftermath of all of this, we braced ourselves for the worst.  I remember the things I heard growing up, most of the time not even fully understanding what they meant.  I would repeat some of them when I didn't realize their true meaning.  So I looked at Rowan and asked him to spell them out for us so we could talk to him about it.  The first one he told us, had been written on the Smart board in his classroom.

B-R-A-T
The next one was:
S-T-U-P-I-D
and rounding it out was:
D-U-M  (presumably "dumb")

Can I please just keep him this way?

Scenes of strawberries, across crisp farmland

Strawberry season is here in SC! I bought a pressure cooker a little while ago from a garage sale and decided to embark on the adventure of canning. Little did I know, pressure cooking is mostly used to can meats, but it worked out fine in the end as the one I purchased could also be used in a water bath method. So Nadia and I hit the road early one morning to go to a local farm and get some strawberries for jam.

The fields were packed with beautiful red strawberries!  I didn't even have to supervise what kind of berries Nadia was putting in her bucket because 90% of them were good to go and she had no trouble leaving behind the green ones.  We went down 1/3 of a row before we had 3 overflowing ice cream sized buckets full of these red beauties.

 We might have sampled a few along the way too.

 After Nadia had filled her bucket, she decided to be the photographer.  She seemed to have a propensity towards taking pictures of people bending over while they were picking strawberries.  I edited most of those out.  :)

 

At some point, she decided it wasn't fun anymore.  Probably when I took away the camera.  Or when she rightfully decided three buckets was more than we would ever need.

In the following three days we made 24 jars of canned jam, 10 cans of freezer jam (including one big tub full that I had no more jars for), strawberry milkshakes, strawberry waffles, and we still had one big bucket left over that I just froze as is.  I've never canned before, so I was kind of proud of myself for figuring it out on the first try.  And I'm starting to see that if I get serious about canning my produce from the garden, I'm going to have to come up with some good storage solutions!  Also, I might need to find someone willing to clean up after me when I'm done.  It took 3 cleanings of the kitchen to get it back to normal when I was done.

 

Oh, and it tastes divine!

Wannabe Green Thumbs

Steven has decided to embark on being a green thumb this summer and so he has started a garden in our backyard. His dad had some great tips and we were able to put one in without too much labor or cost since we don't know if we'll be around next summer and didn't want to invest much into it. So he laid down some extra weed barrier fabric that we had, cut holes for where the plants will go, and dug out the old dirt and filled it with better soil. It's looking pretty good and I'm impressed with him for all the work he's put into it. I mostly just sat and watched. Nadia was pretty into it though and goes out with Steve every time he's working on it.


That's one dirty little girl
Rowan was about as interested as I was in the physical labor.

Classic Steve pose. He's almost finished here. Later on he added some large planters with strawberries against the fence. Way to go hun.
Hopefully we'll get some success with something here. There's pumpkin, watermelon, cantaloupe, corn, tomatoes, peppers, strawberries and probably some other things I've missed.

The Perpetual Babysitter

I swore off babysitting other people's kids for money after we moved away from Illinois. Too many bad experiences and some hard feelings that took a while to let go of. After being in South Carolina for a year, I guess I'm ready to get back on the babysitting bandwagon. At least until our impending arrival decides to show up. I've been watching a neighbor's kids Wednesday through Friday after school until about 6:30pm and it really has been a great experience. The kids are well behaved and the parents pay me on time and without hassle. It's an ideal scenario and my kids love having these guys come over. Nadia loves the older girl, Rebecca, and follows her around everywhere. Josh is in kindergarten too and Rowan and he could play Legos until the cows come home.

Helping me refill my flour container after making cookies. It got a little messy, but they had so much fun doing it. 8 year old girls rock!!
I love my playset. I know it was horrible to transport, fix up and put it in, but I don't regret it for a second. That thing gets used daily!

Why I Love Beanie Babies

A few Easters back, my kids got some beanie babies that I picked up at a garage sale the day before. Little did I know how loved these animals would become. Their guts have had to be sewn back together time and time again, especially Rowan's dog when he developed a habit of chewing on it. Nadia doesn't want to sleep without hers and takes it everywhere we go. We've made it through many trips and hotel stays without losing them, but eventually our luck ran out and they both got lost. Nadia lost her kitty at the state museum here in town when we went with Aunt Chandra a while back (I suspect the dinosaur dig area) and Rowan recently lost his at a hotel stay with Grandma Dorothy. Luckily, beanie babies have become not so fashionable to collect and I can buy the exact toy for next to nothing. I really couldn't resist replacing them when Nadia cried for her kitty every night it was gone and Rowan resorted to other measures.
Thankfully his dog is a little cuter than the illustration. I just had to wash the replacements a couple hundred times so they looked a little more authentic and the kids wouldn't suspect that they weren't being handed the original. Thank you beanie babies!

Consistently a Month Behind

Hopefully I'm consistent in other areas of my life beyond just being behind in blogging. The past few holidays have been kind of a last minute attempt to pull something together. Rowan was really sick before St Patrick's Day and was still recovering, so his leprechaun trap was put together 30 minutes before he went to bed. I'm glad we managed to pull it off though because they have such fun with this little tradition.



After the little ones went to bed, the leprechauns did all sorts of mischievous things around the house. They foiled the trap with a gondola type contraption and tearing out a escape door with their handy tools, but not without leaving some treats for the kids.

There's a string tied to the chair that allowed them to slide down in their blue container to help rescue their fallen comrade and to get that elusive golden egg. (Couldn't find chocolate covered coins at Walmart, so we improvised with our bait this year)
I happened to have these little treat boxes left over from a baby shower I went to and they worked perfectly. The cutest thing about the next day was how the kids went running all over the house finding the silly things the leprechauns "did". Sometimes they were deliberate, like the green toilet and the graffiti on their white board.

Other times, they just found things out of place and blamed it on the leprechauns, like the empty ice cube tray in our room (my internal temperature is running a little high these days) or the "mess" in our backyard (apparently their memories of their own sloppiness are very short term).

Rowan immediately wrote them a note promising revenge next year upon seeing their taunts on the board. We'll have to see what they'll come up with.