Here I Am!

Well, hmpf, I did not mean to go 2 weeks without posting, but there you go. What is new with us, you kindly ask? We've gotten back into a school-year kind of a schedule, transitioning from the unstructured summer laziness that I love so much to getting out the door at regular times with a lunch packed and closed-toe shoes on, at least a few days a week. Violet is now the proud owner of two tiny nubbins of teeth, wee razor-sharp shards poking through her pink gums. She turned into a bit of a needy, clingy baby during the worst of the teething, refusing to sleep if not physically touching/being held by me, and then succumbed to a maelstrom of nasal congestion at nearly the same time. I suspected the teething may have been the culprit behind the runny nose, but then I spent a few days under the weather myself, so who can say?

Grace and Violet are in such disparate places in communication right now that it is downright comical. Grace is so verbal these days, chatty chatty chatty, all the time with the chatting. Her brain is just full of ideas and thoughts and musings, and it all just spills out in a perpetual stream of speech and song. By contrast, Violet is this little close-mouthed sphinx of a person; she seems like such a enigma to me sometimes. What is going in her little mind? She smiles and cries and laughs and shrieks (no real babbling yet), so of course she is communicating in a totally age-appropriate way, but it's just so different.

Favorite subjects of Grace's right now include rhyming (you know, what rhymes with what else) and spelling (she is starting to grasp the rudiments of phonics and wants to know how to spell things or what word is spelled by the letters, for example, "X-T-R-S-O-S-O-S-O-K"). Also very popular right now are signs. She is especially fond of the international sign for "no" and notices it everywhere with her keen toddler vision and attention to detail; this means that we get to spend a lot of time discussing U-turns and smoking.

Speaking of smoking, I have started running again, in the morning before it gets too dreadfully hot and Rob leaves for work. On weekdays, this means that I am heading back to our house past the same few high school students waiting for their bus every time and several of them are always smoking. "No!" I want to yell. "Don't do it!" They probably wouldn't really take seriously the advice of a red-faced, unshowered 31-year-old fighting off her pregnancy weight, though, so perhaps I shall refrain.

We are still eating a non-negligible amount of eggplant, but it has definitely calmed down. At the peak, we received 22 eggplants in our weekly share-- out of control! Eggplant beyond reason! Beyond imagination! We are down to just 5 eggplants a week or so now, which is easier to deal with, and the decrease in eggplant has been met with an increase in peppers (yum!) and melons (yum yum!). I have eaten a tremendous amount of watermelon in the past few weeks, but you will get no complaints from me on that score. In our own garden, it appears that bitter cucumber season has drawn to a close and tiny tomato season may be on its downward descent. Jalapeño season may still visit us, however; our pepper plant looks really lush and gorgeous with these beautiful leaves and a handful of diminutive emerald green jalapeños dangling down. I think the window for planting a fall garden is passing us by. If we don't do something ASAP, it will be too late for us to get anything going before the first frosts. That may be OK with us, though. Perhaps we'll just smother the garden in compost once everything is done and let it rest for the winter. A long winter's nap for the garden. And maybe a nap for me? At some point?