Welcome Xander!

My brother and his wife just had their first babe yesterday! Yippee! I'm a real Auntie now, not just a pseudo one for all my friends' children ;-)
Welcome Welcome Sweet Xander! Happy Birthday!



There's a trend here.... The last baby born in my family was a boy too! Happy Belated 1st Birthday to Wyatt!!



Makes me wonder if the next lil cuz will be a boy too! ;-) Hmmmmm...

The Quick & Dirty Catch Up...

So the last post was February was it...? Sheesh
Well... Since then the outpouring of support from my friends, family and co-workers for my decision to become a Choice Mom has been down right amazing! I am so blessed. I feel like the countdown is beginning, what with the school year wrapping up here in the next couple weeks and summer always going by so quickly. August will be here before you or I or anyone else knows it! I feel excited and scared all at once! I have so much to do before I get pregnant. Ack!

The highlights of March were my birthday and our annual trip to the Renaissance Fair, which it just so happens were on the same day! Pictures will be up soon. I figure if I got the blog post up then I'd be more motivated to get pics transferred from Kristi's puter to mine since one of the other events of March was the complete and utter crashola of my dear computer. sigh.

Then we have April.... hmmmm.... Oh yeah I made a didgeridoo out of plastic sewer pipe from Lowe's for less than $4 and learned some more in-depth tricks on how to play it from this local didg guy as well as from tutorials on YouTube :-D
The garden got planted by the community college class that's been using our garden for their class project.
AND we had the Great Bee Hive Moving Adventure out here at The Retreat. Many many many thanks to Andy, Ana and Matt for helping to make it as successful as it was!

This is the hive in it's final resting place in all it's ghetto glory-netting attached w/duct tape-so the bees couldn't swarm out during transport, tarped-that's what we dragged it on, braced and tied off-so it doesn't fall over. We didn't get it as far away from civilization as we had wanted but it's at least out of the way and now is draped w/a brown tarp so it 'blends' a smidge better... or at least that's what we're goin for lol


This pic is layers of honeycomb that had cascaded from being tipped and righted twice (with a couple inches of bees in between each layer). It. Was. Awesome.

And caught up to May!
We had our school May Day Festival at Granite Creek Park. It was a perfect day!



This is my co-teacher, Etsuko and her youngest son Oliver. We had fun playing with our cameras between each class's may pole dance.

Since I didn't get a say in what was planted in the main garden I decided to put my own garden in. There's a sweet little nook behind the play house that I can fence off pretty easily, I think. I've been working to clear out all the weeds and I got 3 loads of good soil from a guy on FreeCycle that I will use for my little garden.


Ever the Girl Scout... used the Jeep as a pick-up


Mayana supervises as I unload dirt form the Jeep

So far I've bought seeds for cosmos, hollyhocks, peony, sweet peas, snap peas, moss rose and I have sunflowers from last year's garden. I also want to get some zuchs, bell peppers, onions and garlic.
The main garden has wildflowers, corn, beans, squash, watermelon, and maybe an artichoke if it will grow back from getting munched down to nothingness for the 2nd time this spring.


Charlie snoozes while I get my blog post together on this sleepy sunday.