Oliver Reunion

I am late in posting this, but that's what happens when you have a busy life. This past weekend (17th-19th) we went to the Oliver Family Reunion...Matt's side of the family. It's held each year at Camp Frame in Hedgesville, West Virginia, the Saturday before Father's Day. Not only do we see Matt's immediate family, but we also see his extended family, and relatives that have descended from one of the six Oliver sisters that were around in the early part of the 1900's. There are no more Olivers...they are now Millers, Frys, Frankenberry's, tbd, tbd, tbd. Each year a different family branch hosts the reunion, and there is an auction (people bring stuff to donate to it) to raise money for future events. Everyone brings a dish to donate to the buffet. There is a pool on site that the kids like to partake in. Mostly people just sit around eating good food and talking.

Here we are at Pappy's house, the day before the reunion. This is the only good picture, unfortunately, given that Liam wouldn't sit still and the lighting was kind of dark.

Here are the actual Reunion pictures:
Granny is holding Maia


A friend of the family, Candy (I think).

There were lots of little souvenirs and decorations sitting around on the tables. Liam seemed to like the carrots-filled-with-bubbles.

Mommy! (finally, some pix of me. There are a few of me holding here here, but this was the best one and there are already an overload of Maia pix).

Sherry (she is Matt's cousin, so not sure what her relationship to Maia is).


Maia with her Aunt Debbie.

Sherry and Debbie chatting.

More of Granny holding Maia.

Liam is being a detective, courtesy of a magnifying glass that his aunt Dawn got him. He went outside with Dawn and her husband Greg and they showed him how to find fossils and how to use the magnifying glass to see them better. Pretty awesome.

Liam socialized a little, entertaining Debby, Jimmy and Juanita, and Pappy.

Liam somehow had enough energy to just keep running around and around at the Reunion.


Liam and I are enjoying a dip at the hotel pool after the reunion. Although it was pretty darn cold, so that's really as far as I got into it.


Maia is poolside, with Granny.

Aunt Dawn finally gets a chance to hold Maia.


After a long day, it's great to just take it easy back at the hotel with something tasty.

Happy Two Months, Maia

Today, my daughter Maia is two months old! Part of me can't believe it's been that long already, while the other part of me feels like she has been around forever and my life without her is starting to seem far away.


I have TONS of pictures of her, but since I already posted them on her journal, I am not going to post them all again here. Instead, you can visit the link above to go directly to that post.

Besides pictures, there are also some details about her, like her smiles and attempts at talking, her weight, and such. I'll just say that I am totally in love with her. I loved her when she was born, but as with Liam, it took a while for it to become the deep love that it is now...to get to know her enough that my love for her makes me breathless and giddy when I think about it. *happy sigh*
Excuse me...I am going to hug and kiss her again. Go enjoy pictures!

Happy Summer Solstice

Just wanted to acknowledge the longest day of the year, a milestone in nature.

Berry picking...

I had meant to put a post on here regarding our berry picking excursion on Monday. We took Liam and Maia to Johnson's Corner Farm and scored us some yummy cherries and blueberries. I posted on Liam's journal since we mainly did it for him and that's what most of the pictures are of, but I had wanted to include a link from here. So...here it is...check it out.

Happy Birthday, Grandpop

Today is my grandfather's birthday. It causes me grief that he is no longer here to celebrate it. It's the first birthday to pass without him. He would have been 80 today. That suddenly seems way too young to not be around to celebrate. I feel like he had so much more life to live and should have had the opportunity to live it. I feel like life cheated him and took it away, giving him cancer-caused pain and suffering for the last year of his life, and then just letting him slip away one night. My mother, a few of her siblings, and her mother were there as he passed out of this world...and every time I think about that, I really wish I had been there as well. In his last moment, to see him off, I guess. It still feels somewhat unreal. One day he was here...and then he wasn't, and I missed that moment where it changed. Heck, I wasn't even in the same state...I was camping in PA and dealing with a leaky pavilion tent in a torrential downpour. (I like to think of it as nature mourning his passing) I didn't even see him until a few days later, for the funeral...looking different than when I had last seen him, and than what he used to look like before the cancer whittled away at him. It didn't quite seem like him, and I am still left with a slightly "unfinished" feeling, that I can't quite believe that he really is gone, that he was stolen away, that something like this could have happened.
But it did...and today is the day he was born, many years ago. And I wish him a happy day of birth, wherever he may be. Love you, grandpop. So very much.

Nature tamed (well, sort of)

I finally got my new gardens! The landscapers came and turned all those nasty weeds into prettiness. I am SO happy with how it turned out and I can't wait to show people! I just have to make sure I do my homework and keep up with it. Hopefully these side gardens are easier to take care of due to the smaller amount of plants, the fact that they are all supposedly low maintenance, and the rock bed instead of mulch (makes it harder for weeds to grow).

So, if you remember, here is the shady side of the house BEFORE (shady weeds, bare earth, no mulch, no stacked stone border):


And THIS is what it looks like NOW! (click to make pictures bigger)

Left to right: cherry laurels, coral bells, hydrangea, more coral bells, another hydtrangea. There is one more coral bell coming on the left, and two deutzia plants to go in front of the hydrangea on the right...landscaper is just waiting on them to come in.



Okay, and now here is the sunny side of the house BEFORE (lots of (now dead) weeds growing up in the mulch, stacked stones kind of messy, stumps from the cut-down arborvitae visible):


And here is the garden AFTER! (again click to enlarge) (and this is taken when the sun is going down so it's not all that sunny here)

Left to right: Two burning bushes, a crape myrtle, with salvia in front, two more burning bushes, and a butterfly bush (tucked in that back corner)


During the work on the sunny-side garden, a rabbit's nest (or scrape, to be correct) was discovered, with five baby bunnies in it. We couldn't just leave them there, not with all the work that had to be done, so they had to be moved. I dug a new scrape out of the way about 15 feet away, donned some gloves, and Matt helped me transport the bunnies, along with the fur lining the nest. According to the article I read, the human scent actually doesn't bother the mother, but given that rabbits can't move babies on their own, they usually assume predators got the babies when they find an empty scrape. If the babies aren't too far, they might find the new location. So I was worried that the mother wouldn't find them, but was hoping that she just hopped along the side of the house towards the back, because then she would stumble across them. And that some stray cat didn't slink along the side of the house from under the deck and find the baby bunnies right there on it's doorstep.
(this is them briefly uncovered when I counted to make sure they were all there...that the disturbed floss wasn't because a predator had gotten a tasty snack)


Following the advice of the article, I put four strands of unscented dental floss across the top of the nest in a tic-tac-toe pattern to see if it got disturbed overnight, which is supposedly when the mother returns to feed the babies. Sure enough, it WAS all disturbed and all five babies were still there...so I am thinking she managed to find them. I plan to try that again tonight, and maybe yet one more night, to make sure she is returning to feed them. Otherwise, at the suggestion of my sister, we'll take them to the local wild animal shelter, to see if they can be cared for there.

And the icing on the cake...the landscapers weeded and trimmed up our front garden, which was in much need of it. Here are the before and after shots. Kind of hard to tell in the pictures, but it IS nicer. Look at the shapes of the plants and the spaces between the plants.
BEFORE:



AFTER:



You know what? If you are local, why don't you come over and take a look in person. SOOO much better. And hop in the pool while you are here. Heh.

Memorial Day Pix

Just realized I never posted any of these. A bit late, but still worth putting up. Most of them are the kids having fun. In fact, all of them have a child in them. Heh. Kids are cuter than adults.

Lots of pool fun. (yes, Liam and Xander are wearing the same shirt. And if they had had the jolly-roger swimshorts in Liam's size at Target, they would be waring the same shorts too. Twins! Heh.)





Maia is taking a nap outside, despite the heat.


Photoshoot with the inflatable dolphin... (couldn't get them to really sit still)




Liam is testing out Cole's new pool float, to see how well it works on land.


Dudes, if I could only just get him to do this all the time. Wonder if I can convince him it's fun and that he always wants to do it.

MONKEY!

So...if you remember back to the post I made about the project I was knitting. You know, the one with the knitting shaped like...um...well...a...well, it was a long tube of knitting, brown with tan at the end. You know...this one!


I had promised to show you the finished product. I finished it over a week ago, but as it was a gift for a baby-soon-to-be, I wanted to wait to post in, just in case someone read the blog entry and saw it and they found out about it and somehow guessed it was for them. Which is silly because how would they guess that, and who would think to tell them, and...well, besides, no one actually probably reads this blog. (sad, isn't it...I am talking to myself). Well, okay, I think every now and then people read it, but not all the entries, and not the people that would talk to these friends (seriously, though, if you read the blog...PLEASE leave a comment now and then. So I don't think I am talking to myself).

So, without further ado, I give you...









(obviously the long tubes were the limbs...come on, people!)
For a baby due July 1st, whose gender is to be a surprise...hope you enjoy the monkey, little darling!

Nature rampant...

I love nature (most of it, most of the time). I love gardening (again, most of the time). I have several garden beds around my house and I usually getting out in them to clean them and plant new things and watch them grow. However, as the years have gone by I have gotten less and less time to work on gardening, and as a result, my gardens have gotten a bit...untidy. They are too much for me. I have too many garden beds, too many flowers, etc. I really should only have one garden bed at this point, but most of them were already part of the house when we moved in. We added one in the back corner of the backyard because it really needed something back there. But there were also four other garden beds already...well, five if you count the hosta border around the pool deck. So that's six total, which is a lot.
Which is why I was happy when one of them (on the side of the house) was cleared out of the huge arborvitae that had taken over and was just a bare patch ready for anything I wanted to put that might be easy to maintain. I foolishly attempted blueberries and raspberries, since I love eating those, but they didn't last very long (barely had leaves on them). That bed pretty much was bare by the end of the summer. On the other side of the house was also cleared out when the foundation on that side had to be repaired. I had intended to put the stacked stone border back and lay down mulch, but never got around to it on account of becoming pregnant and also dealing with indoor house renovations (computer room and family room).

Well, Spring rolled around...and being very pregnant, I just could NOT get out there to take care of the garden beds as much as I wanted. I managed to get to the other four and remove the dead stuff and straighten up, but that was it. But I figured it wasn't a big deal, because the side beds were just empty and bare and...well...one of them wasn't even a garden bed. I could figure out plants at some other point.

Except...well...I forgot about weeds. Yeah, um...if you leave bare earth/mulch on it's own and don't have any plants there to compete with...well...

I give you side garden number one...the shady side of the house:



Not TOO horrible, nice and green, but still not what I would want there. (This is the side where the foundation work was done, so it's just bare earth, no mulch or anything).

Then I give you side garden number two...the sunny side of the house:



Holy growing weeds, batman!
This is AFTER my husband sprayed it with Round-Up and it died. Before this it was almost two foot tall in spots and looked like an small abandoned field. Thistle and hairy watercress and such abounded.

As the weeks rolled by and I couldn't find time to get out there to address it in any way, aside from having my husband spray the crap out of it (newborns don't really like you abandoning them in favor of weeding)...I got panicky. I didn't want to do much to it, just get rid of the nasty weeks and make it look a little nicer and prevent any further weed growth. But I knew I wasn't going to have time for that. Having built up the sunny side garden last year after the trees were cut down the previous autumn, I knew how much work it would be to remove the weeds and mulch, lay down weed barrier fabric, and then a layer of stone/gravel that would make it harder for weeds to grow. And then do the same thing on the other side.

So...we are hiring a landscaper to do this for us, and he is even putting in some nice snazzy perennial plants that are low/easy maintenance. And for just a tad more, as a complimentary service, he is even going to weed and trim the big front garden, which I haven't been able to touch in almost two months now and is starting to look frazzled.

Pictures over the weekend/early next week when it's completed (he is planning to do the work on Friday or Saturday).