The weather was so beautiful today that I spent a good chunk of time outside.  Today's big job was to fill the two wooden boxes Papa built for me with compost.  Over the past few days I have also planted six azaleas, several shrubs and Rebecca planted some flowers. 

Here are my "Square Foot Gardening" boxes.  I am really excited about trying this method by the book this year!

Here is one of the azaleas:

These are the flowers that Rebecca planted:

This is a plant that we put in a few years ago, but is blooming beautifully right now and I can't help but show it off.  The leaves come in kind of a light pinkish/green color, change to a light green, change again to a bright red and finally end up a dark green.  There are also beautiful white, dangling bunches of flowers.  It's a really cool plant.  I just wish I could remember what it is called!

A few weeks ago I raked the mulch from one of our raised beds and found a rather large patch of parsley that I had planted last year.  I thought it had pretty much died off in a big freeze last fall.  It is thrving and growing bigger it seems like every day.  Is parsley supposed to do that? 

I also watched a really cool gardening show on PBS called Gardening in Georgia.  It's nice to get informatoin that's especially for your region in a TV show. 

I love this picture of Rebecca when she was three.  Apparently she had a rough day.

Last Christmas Joshua bought a Santa hat that had black trim instead of white.  He thought this was very cool and occasionally will wear it even though the season is most definitely over.  I thought this instance somewhat strange, however.

We had yet another thunder storm last night and I caught this photo of our dog, Harry.  He starts shaking and quaking and trying to climb into the nearest lap at the first hint of foul weather.  We always know a thunder storm is on its way long before it gets near us because this big chicken dog meets us at the back door just groveling to get in. 

No one would pay any attention to him and so he climbed up into a recently abandoned chair and tried to get attention by leaning over the kids working on the couputers. 

The Southeast has had its share of fun weather this spring.  We had hail one day that was about an inch in diameter.  This made a deafening roar on the tin roof over our back deck!

One of the biggest blogging blunders of my blogging break is not blogging about my dear daughter's 15th birthday.  She is such a wonderful daughter and I am so proud of her.  She is kind and helpful and works very hard at whatever she does.  

This is a typical "haul" for Rebecca when we visit the library.  I can remember foolishly thinking when she was an early reader that soon, when we left the children's department behind and were exclusively into chapter books, we wouldn't have to have wheeled transportation to get us in and out of the library.  Ha!  That hasn't happened yet!

I attached luggage wheels to that black crate years ago to give us a way to move the books back and forth between home and the library and also to have a place to store her books in between trips in hopes of reducing my library fines.  The former was successful, the latter not so much. 

I blogged a while ago about the destruction of one of my favorite, most-used kitchen essentials.  Well, I'm thrilled to announce that after taking my poor board apart, regluing it and then sending it through a planer multiple times, my dear old cutting board is back in operation good as new, albeit a little thinner.  Thank you, Papa!

When we finished the first 100 lessons in the Henle Latin I book we had a "Latin party".  As we were finishing our Analytical Grammar program the girls really wanted to do something to celebrate that milestone and so we hatched a plan to have an English Tea.  Knowing nothing about tea (American or English style) we headed to the library to do some research. 

I found a couple of books about proper teas--there are MANY varieties apparently, but we decided to just concoct our own as some of the food was pretty weird sounding and I did want the children to actually ENJOY the experience and not get bogged down in the whole "do I HAVE to try this" complaint.  On the other hand, i wanted it to be something different and memorable, so I went through the book and picked out eight recipes which mostly contained indredients we eat/have heard of and then we went shopping.

Well, the chosen morning dawned and and we began cooking.  We made scones with Devonshire Cream, Mushroom cups, Cucumber and Watercress sandwiches, Chocolate Dipped Strawberries, and we also had store-bought Ladyfingers (some of which Rebecca dipped into the chocolate) to save some time. 

Actually, I realized as we were cooking that we should have store bought more things because just those few items took ALL morning to prepare!  We ended up dropping several dishes just because the preparation was turning out to be a lot of work.  Anyway, we sat down for our tea at lunchtime and it was a very enjoyable experience.