Flowers

My volunteer flower bed is overflowing with dahlias, asters, cosmos, some bachelor buttons (but they're mostly gone now), basil, and cherry tomatoes! I planted the dahlias and asters (from seed), and the Sweet 1,000,000 tomato plant, but everything else came up on its own.

I still haven't received Nathan's letter from bootcamp, telling me his mailing address. I'm hoping it will come in today's mail, or that Mom and Lee will receive their letter today and call me with the address.

The boys are doing great in school: Sean is getting an A in Math 8, and as far as I know there are no "problem classes" for him. He's on the Grade 8 volleyball team, so he's busy after school Monday-Thursday. On Monday and Tuesday evenings he has cadets, so he's keeping his schedule pretty full! Dylan has scaled back his music involvement to 3 early mornings and 1 or 2 afternoons each week. We are carpooling with a family that lives around the corner whose son is in the exact same programs, so that really helps. We also broke down and bought the boys bus passes so they can take that if they're going or coming at the normal time. Their bikes have worked great for the first couple weeks of school, but already it's still fairly dark when Dylan would have to leave for an early morning choir or jazz practice.

The girls are quite content with their quiet little routine: preschool twice a week and church on Sunday. They're happy to stay home and play with each other...it's really nice to have them so close in age. Patience is practically shaking with anticipation of her new baby coming in less than two weeks. She and I organized the bathroom cabinet yesterday. She was the perfect partner...she can bend down and reach all the way to the back. Don and I went shopping on Sunday and stocked up on lots of toiletries so now they're all organized and we can see what we have.

We've been having wonderful weather. Sunny but not too hot. Don's been working a little everyday down at Radnai's, slowly getting the work done and the trees sold. He just sold 600 trees to a contracting outfit in charge of the new bridge that's going across the Fraser River, replacing the quaint little ferry that currently takes you from Ft. Langley to Maple Ridge. The nice thing about that order, besides the quantity, is that they want the trees to be more natural, which means Don no longer needs to cultivate them. That'll save a lot of work in the next two years.

He's decided to run a little retail operation this year...just Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 10-8. Right out of our driveway. Yep, that's scaling back quite a bit, but that means he'll be able to keep up with this computer clients and wholesale orders while still getting top dollar for some of his better/bigger trees. It's a nice compromise that I think I can live with.

Today after I drop the girls off at preschool I'm going to go have coffee with a friend. I haven't done anything like that in a long time! I have this very little window of opportunity to be kidless for a few hours at a time, so I need to take advantage of it...I think I'm going to try to make a hair appointment for Thursday.

Cheers,

Cathi