where we spend our days now

as i mentioned last post, we have never spent as much time in our backyard as we have so far this spring/summer season. ethan requests "backyawd" practically as soon as he's halfway through breakfast. after we set up the kiddie pool last week, he convinced us to take off his pjs during breakfast this morning and almost made a break for the pool in his diaper before i realized the back door wasn't latched shut. he's a sneaky one.

we've been working on not picking all the flowers or trampling the garden. he massacred one of my peony plants, picking every single bud before they'd had a chance to bloom. we're having a bit more luck with the other two, as well as some of the other flowers that are slowly beginning to bloom. he seems to be slowly getting the hang of being gentle with the plants and is now excited about watering them all, including all the weeds, walking around dutifully with his little pitcher repeating "agua pants! agua pants!"

i decided to go all out and plant almost exclusively tomatoes this year. i've got a healthy variety of yellow pear, matt's wild cherry, roma, ace bush, big rainbow, and my all-time favorite: cherokee purple. i started them from seed in mid-april (a few weeks late for our region) and didn't get them planted until a few weeks ago, so they're all still quite small. i'm hoping for a healthy harvest come august, though.

i'd still like to get over to a garden store or the farmer's market and get some more flowers to put in pots and my flower boxes on the front porch, but we'll see if that's going to happen or not. my garage wall garden is going strong and overflowing with nasturtiums that i cannot wait to bloom. especially knowing that these are safely out of reach of small toddler hands.

as much as i truly loved growing up in the middle of manhattan, i'm kind of excited that ethan will get a bit more of the outdoors in the everyday of his childhood than i did. eating tomatoes and strawberries straight off the plants, digging in the dirt, "swimming" everyday...if the past few weeks/months are any indication, it's going to be a really great summer around here.