The Pets in July

 I know that my blog posts have become pretty predictable and routine in the last few months, but I don't have a problem with that because it's how my mind works and it's how I stay organized with my pictures, and it also means that I'm continuing to get caught up with being "on time and present" on the blog here, which hasn't happened in about a decade. 😄 I'm determined to be all caught up by the end of October, with Election Day being the final deadline. Then if everything blows up after that and life get crazier than ever, at least my blog will be current and all will be right there. 😂

It's hard to leave the pets to go to the Cape each summer. This year I didn't spend the whole month of July at the Cape like I usually do because of COVID and my garden, so we got to spend the first half of the month together. 

It's wonderful to look out of the front door windows and see this:

Boo Boo is our guardian and protector, and I couldn't ask for a better, more lovable one.

Bentwood was still loving on my shoes.

We started letting Bentwood go on supervised trips to the backyard. He kept trying to go outside so we indulged him but someone had to stay with him the whole time. We're not going to be lost pet victims and neither is Bentwood!

John is really good with Bentwood and so he was great about taking him out and following him around the yard. Or just laying out there with him. It was the perfect thing to do during his screen-free times. 

They were having so much fun that Boo Boo and Violet decided to join the party too.

🧡🐕🐈🐕🧡

The Yard and Garden in July

July was warm and sunny as usual, and I loved it! The only problem was that drought struck so the lawn got parched because we had to turn off the sprinkler system (town mandate), but given everything else going on in the world, it wasn't a big deal. As for my little veggie garden, I made sure that it got enough water each morning, and my love affair with it continued to grow as the garden continued to grow. 💓

Tropical yellow lilies of early July.

It turned out to be a great summer for hydrangeas in New England.

We needed more rainy days like this one!

The cucumber plants continued to be the darlings of my garden. 

They were coming in hot! (Literally, ha ha!)

This was my first harvested cucumber! I felt a little guilty eating it, I really did. 😂 It was delicious though!

For scale

One of my favorite snacks: fresh veggies and cheese slices and dip 😋

The bush cucumbers were a lot bigger and bushier than I realized they'd be. They were producing too--short, fat, lighter colored cukes. The green pepper plants on the left were growing nicely too, but no peppers yet. This bed was definitely overcrowded. Next year I won't do bush cucumbers, I'll just do the regular ones.

The carrots were growing well too--at least above the soil, anyway.

I pulled one when I thought it might be ready, but clearly, it wasn't! They're bambino carrots but that's a little too bambino! 😅

The garden bean plants were growing fast, but no beans had appeared yet. And spoiler alert, they never did. 😔 My guess is that this bed didn't get enough sun. Good to know for next year.

The onions were growing really well.

These hanging tomato planters from Wayfair were pretty much a disaster. First of all, they took months to arrive. Then when they finally did arrive, they had NO DIRECTIONS. I searched for directions online and they were nowhere to be found. So I let Wayfair know and they sent me another set--WITHOUT DIRECTIONS. 😠 So I attempted to use the planters on my own, but, another spoiler alert: they grew, but they produced nothing, which is disappointing because I love cherry tomatoes. Next year I'll just grow them myself (hopefully).

My garden really was my happy place. 💚 It was hard to leave it when I went to the Cape for the second half of the month!

June 2020 Randoms

I don't know why I took a selfie of my weekly face mask. But here it is for your viewing pleasure. 😂

These weeds in the landscaping looked like rogue pot leaves and I wondered if one of my relatives had played a trick on me!

Fourth of July and summer decorations on the bottom two shelves

Hello, hello again!

I might do this! Ballet will always have a special place in my heart.

A good reminder of what the Bill of Rights is. Thank you James Madison!

Milton Hershey is one of my favorite businessmen from history and he has been since our first trip to Hershey, Pennsylvania back in 2004 which is when I first learned about him and his life story. I love how he didn't give up. His chocolate's not bad either! 😋

I see this view a hundred times a day.

I don't know why I took so many selfies in June. 😂

An alarmed expression from the paving stones in the backyard. What did they see up in the sky that was so shocking? 😮 LOL

Sam's letter to his 4th grade teacher for the end-of-year scrapbook that was made for her by the class. 

He was really blessed to have this teacher. She was a genuinely wonderful, caring, kind, creative, thoughtful person, and the perfect teacher for him to have after a rough 3rd grade year when he didn't feel like the teacher liked him, and then she was awesome with the whole coronavirus/lockdown situation. She'd do things like write fun songs for the kids and play the guitar as she sang to them over Zoom. She still emails him sometimes just for fun and he emails her back. They have a fun banter going on. She is a gem of a person and I'm so thankful to have known her.

I took a family history class online and one of the assignments was to photograph possessions of my grandmothers and post them on Family Search under their account names.

This was my maternal grandmother's sewing box. (I do actually use it on occasion!) It reminds me of her every time I see it on the closet shelf.

My paternal grandmother was a gifted seamstress and this is the baby blanket she made for me when I was born.

"Wise as an owl" 💕

Still lifes from around the house:  

I took a picture of the lovely Native American woman on the Land O Lakes box before she got "canceled" a few weeks later in the name of cultural appropriation. I try to be thoughtful about these things and to see the other side of it, especially with everything that's been going on, and I've considered my "white privilege" and what that might entail, but even after all that, I think this is ridiculous. Especially because I read that the Native American community at large had no problem with this illustration that's been on the boxes for decades. 

Sigh

My customary newspaper reading spot.

We hosted a family party at my house for my sister Jennifer's birthday and my brother's girlfriend made these beautiful and delicious cupcakes. They were so good!

Hello Mr. Moth. Or Mrs. Moth.

I was on a roll! I guess I liked the way my hair and complexion looked in June or something.

Last day of school! At home, of course. What a strange and unexpected school year it turned out to be.

Inspiring words from the FranklinPlanner catalog. 😄 I love planning!

I want to get something like this so that we can have movie nights in the pool.

I read an article about this author named Jennifer Scott who embraces homemaking as her career and I loved that, because I do the same thing.

"Be frugal, but buy the best within your budget, and use it in your daily life. Enjoy what you have, and treat the mundane aspects of life as meaningful (doing the dishes is a valuable contribution to creating a beautiful home), because they really are the little things that add up to create the whole."

By small and simple things are great things brought to pass!

🙌 I'm glad I made the choice to be a stay-at-home mom. I love it and find it very rewarding. 🙌

Fathers are so important in families and in societies.

I'm an environmentalist in that I believe it's important to help take care of our beautiful earth and I try to do my part by recycling, not littering, not wasting water, etc. But I think the climate change/environmental alarmism movement is wrong and that we humans are like little ants compared to the power of Mother Nature and the earth and what it does on its own and has been doing for eons of time. We have an impact to be sure, but I think it's much more minimal than the climate change people do. 

"For him and so many others, environmentalism offered emotional relief and spiritual satisfaction, giving them a sense of purpose and transcendence. It has become a substitute religion for those who have abandoned traditional faiths...Its priests have been warning for half a century that humanity is about to be punished for its sins against nature, and no matter how often the doomsday forecasts fail, the faithful still thrill to each new one." 

Now there's a lovely environment! This is Sam and his friend riding bikes along a trail in town.

I found this in Sam's school papers. I thought it was cute that the first song he listed on his "Stress-Relieving Playlist" was a Primary song that he likes more than I realized.

In my daydreams (and catalogs, ha ha) 😍

There I go again. This time it was a garden selfie.

Not good, and not a surprise.

I was curious about world populations. China and India are HUGE. I don't know how God keeps track of so many of His children, but somehow, He does!

Chillin' poolside on a beautiful June afternoon

One last selfie to wrap things up! Because I'm a dork.

P.S. I'm wearing that same shirt today as I write this!