We were lucky to spend this Father’s Day with family at one of our favorite places, Filoli. Lucy got to romp around, dance and sing with her grandparents, and cause a ruckus in the café. We had a wonderful time. Here are some of our adventures.
The tree house…a room made by hanging branches
Trying out cameras…she sure has some trusting relatives!
lounging by the pool…phew it was a hot day.
(Anyone else notice how much auntie resembles G’Mommy these days…almost thought it was her in some of these pics. maybe it’s the hair…)
Here’s a video of from last weekend of me and the kid just goofing around. Though it starts innocently enough with Lucy introducing me to some parsley from her garden, things get competitive when the kid issues a challenge to a race. She takes her racing pretty seriously! Keep an eye out for a Wubie cameo!
One of the goofier things Lucy and I do most days is snail racing.
a likely contender and they're off!
We go out to our garden, and check for snails on various plants, esp. the lemon tree. We pick our contenders. After watering the racetrack, we place the snails in a line with a goal in mind, usually the top of a nearby pot. And they’re off!
Racing snails is similar to cats…they take naps, go the wrong way, turn around a lot. So it can be quite exciting…you never can tell who will win.
We went to the Mountain View Farmers’ Market yesterday to pick up assorted foodstuffs. Lucy had fun looking at all of the colorful produce, taking time to smell any flower or fruit she encountered. (I’m sure Jill will post more pictures on her Flickr page in a bit. ETA by Jill: here they are!)
It’s actually kinda funny; ever since we put together a small garden on our patio, we’ve all gotten a bit of the gardener’s bug. We now have dreams of a future where we’ll have “a big backyard where we can grow all the fruits and vegetables we need!”
I cared little for gardening until I grew accustomed to snatching lettuce leaves from the patio whenever I wanted to add some green stuff to a sandwich. Now I look forward to trips to the farmers market and quality time with Jill and Lucy in that (hopefully not too distant) big garden of ours.
ETA by Jill: Mike has been doing a lot of research on grass-fed, one-source meat, and local, organic and humane food, and found there was a farmer with ‘pastured‘ eggs at this market. So we got some, and I stuck in a pic of fresh eggs. Ask him about ‘cowpooling‘ too!
Lucy and I had been wondering what was eating some of her plants…and yesterday we discovered an inchworm. We had a lot of fun getting it a leaf, watching it eat, and inch. We left it on the table overnight, and in the morning it had eaten a small hole in the leaf.
Afterwards we looked up some cool videos of caterpillars turning into butterflies…and the inchworm song.
Lucy’s garden has been growing rapidly since we planted it last weekend. Seeds have sprouted!
Around mid-week, the cat grass showed the tiniest of sprouts before we went to bed…in the morning they were much bigger, almost half an inch!
Each day they grow several inches…and Wubert has taken an interest.
The other plants are sprouting too, the catnip, wildflowers, and lettuces each show tiny sprouts. Just waiting on the alpine strawberries to shoot up…they were planted a bit deeper, so we hope to see them soon.
Every morning Lucy checks her garden to see how her plants are doing, if anything has sprouted, and to water as needed. We expect to see some shoots within a week.
She has mostly edible plants, and likes to test the lettuces especially. She also has strawberries, parsley, dill, basil, cat grass and catnip, some flowers, and a lemon tree. Not a bad garden!
