Bucket List Numbers 7 and 16

We took our first official family vacation to the beach a couple weeks ago.  We rented a house on the beach on Folly Beach which is near Charleston, SC.  My sister and her husband, and my aunt and uncle joined us for the week and we all had a blast.  Harper really lived it up on the beach collecting shells, building sand castles and "frolicking" in the waves.

Item Number 16: Go the the beach!

Item Number 7: Ride a boat - 

While in Charleston we decided to explore a little using the public transportation.  They have a free trolley that goes throughout the city and a water taxi that can be ridden across the Harbor.  We hopped on the water taxi and were treated to views of dolphins popping their fins out of the water, sea turtles and awesome closeups of the military vessels dry docked there.

We had a great time on the trip and we will definitely be taking another beach vacation soon.

Summer Bucket List

At the beginning of the month Harper came home from school talking about making a summer bucket list.  Of course I indulged.  Having things to do each day helps make me less of a crazy mom. Here are the items we came up with.

1. Go to the pool.
2. Go to the splash pad.
3. Play outside.
4. Go to a new park.
5. Go to a farm.
6. Have a picnic.
7. Ride a boat.
8. Go to King's Island.
9. Go to the fair.
10. Make fresh lemonade.
11. Bake something new.
12. Watch fireworks.
13. Go bowling.
14. Read 40 different books.
15. Fly a kite.
16. Go to the beach.
17. Go to a concert.
18. Paint a picture.
19. Go to a baseball game.

Most of these are designed to be fairly easy for us to complete, but there are a few I'm going to have to work for.  Going to a farm is going to take a little research.  I'm not sure what kind of concert I'm going to take her to.  I suppose the Picnic with the Pops counts, but we've done that a few times already so I want to try something new being a bucket list and all.  These should make for a fun summer.

The art of the selfie

Joe decided that teaching Harper what a selfie was would be a good way to spend a Sunday morning. Here are the results.

She needs a little work making sure to get her face in the photo more, and I think the next thing we need to work on his her duck face, but all in all she's well on her way to being a self-sufficient member of this social media world.

How does your garden grow?

Now that Spring has finally decided to show up we hit our backyard hard over the weekend.  We bought our house from a guy who lived there for two years and did nothing with the landscaping for the whole time he was there.  Needless to day it was completely overgrown.

We have three fantastic raised beds that needed cleaned out.  There were way overgrown raspberry plants that we dug up.  And theres a perfect little spot to grow herbs.  We had to pick up all the pavers and lay new stones and weed guard.  We planted lettuce, spinach, onions and carrots, but I'm pretty sure the squirrels dug some up already.  I'm not exactly sure who they sniff out those tiny little seeds, but they did.  I have zero experience with gardening, so I will take any advice to keep critters out.  Especially my cats who think the garden beds are really fancy litter boxes.

I also pulled out all the vinery that had completely overtaken the front yard.  All in all after one weekend of work, we had a lot of sore muscles and this giant pile of yard waste.

Living like the 1%

Last Friday I got the chance to watch a Columbus Blue Jackets game from the owners suite.  To say I was excited was a bit of an understatement.

We walked in to the amazing smells of our own chef cooking made to order fajitas.

During the first intermission, we were entertained by some Zoo folk who brought in a cheetah for us to hang out with.

The dessert cart was entirely too enticing, and I tried to be good.

Oh yeah, there was a free bar that I enjoyed as well.

While I was rubbing elbows with Jack Hannah, Joe and Harper were down with the common folk trying on jersey's that were too expensive. (Seriously, $85 for a kids jersey.  No Way!)

I could definitely get used to the life of a wealthy sports fan!

Is anybody there….

Well it's been a really long time since I've posted anything.  I was looking back though and realized this is like my baby book for Harper.  I've documented everything on here.  I don't want to lose those memories, so I'm going to try to be better.

Today Harper's fish died.  It was one of those beta fish that somehow managed to live two years even though I was terrible at cleaning it's little tank and remembering to feed it.  Part of me just wanted to flush the thing down the toilet figuring Harper probably wouldn't even notice.  But I knew this was my opportunity to talk with Harper in a not so scary way about death.  We just told her that Red was really old and had lived longer than little fish like him were supposed to.  Joe had the good idea of taking him to the river and saying goodbye to him there.  So we walked down to the path and said one nice thing each about Red and then put him in the river.

I tried to avoid saying Red was sick because I wasn't sure if she would think that if she or one of us got sick that we would die.  All in all, I really don't know how much she understood anyway.  But I figured it was a small chance to start talking about something really big.

I know that we will have many big talks in our future.  I just don't think I'm ready to have such a grown up little kid.  It's too bad we can't shelter them from scary things forever.  I'm glad we took even just the littlest bit of time to talk with her about death.  I hope that we won't have to talk about it again for a very long time.

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