The Beauchamp FamilyYes, we really are this geeky…

Sometimes dinner doesn’t go so well (like last night when I tried to make a non-crockpot recipe into one and we ended up eating sandwiches). Sometimes it does… like tonight. We are playing in a Recipe Zaar game where you “tour” different areas of the world. This week we were doing Central America… we had the most amazing dinner tonight… I am not really big on steak, so I made shrimp in addition to the steak. We had some friends over and had a great time (wine too!)

Black Bean Salad – http://www.recipezaar.com/213207

Peruvian Rice – http://www.recipezaar.com/310204

Beef & Chimichurri Sauce – http://www.recipezaar.com/307536

(same recipe, just a view of the sauce after I made it – yes, me, Candy, made the sauce – and the bean salad actually!)

Shrimp (I’ll link the recipe when it posts)

Jamie, I think, was the only one at the table that liked it ALL. That child will truly eat anything And yes, he drops food on himself — just like mom. I’m forever making a mess. LOL

Okay, non-lurkers too… I want you to cook something. Well, except for you, Dy, you are as scary as I am in the kitchen, so you just bring some sweet ‘taters over and Tom will cook for you.

Go, get the ingredients and make these (no nuts, yes to raisins for me). We’ve been making them for a few years and they are to DIE for… trust me.

Disappearing Sweet Potato Muffins

Now, go cook.

That is all.

Just an update on the window sill growing stuff… These are the strawberries in the little bitty craft kit. I think we need to transplant them into the big pot with the tomato/strawberries mixture (anyone know, should we separate out those plants or something? HELP! We don’t know what we are doing!!!!)

Here’s the avocado… if you look behind the water drop, you will see a green thing. I think that will eventually grow out the top. I think. I do wonder about that root turning brown… Hmmm…

And here’s the rosemary Jamie gave me for Mother’s Day… we now have 4 little shoots instead of just one! We are scared to try to move them to the center of the cup… LOL

Yes, we are afraid of our plants.

I am an idiot. I’ve never grown anything from seed. I honestly didn’t expect any of this stuff to actually grow. So, when we did them, I told Tom to just kind of throw them in there and whatever. Well, we mixed the strawberries and tomatoes in one pot because we were running out of pots and really, it’s not gonna grow… right?

Then I thought the squirrels dug up the tomatoes/strawberries, but now I think it was probably the sunflowers, cuz Denise confirmed what I was suspecting – these are TOMATO PLANTS. LOL! Yeah, so, we are growing tomatoes. And strawberries. Mixed. This is should be… weird.

These are the flowers we transplanted from the pot we got them at the nursery. Now we are scared to move/touch them cuz they keep growing!

We think these are straw flowers.

Oh who knows… dude, I’m clueless. The kids picked out some wildflower seeds to plant in the dirt-only one. Hey, we might be growing stuff and stuff! Maybe some neighbor is taking pity on us and going behind our back and fixing what we are screwing up?

Remember when we planted stuff? HERE is a link to remind you. Let’s check in, shall we, and see how everything is doing:

The strawberries and tomatoes are dirt. Something dug them up and ate the seeds we think. Probably one of the squirrels.

The pretty flowers we bought all died, and the plants are getting huge. I’m not sure what to do with them. Some are annuals and some are perennials. I dunno which is which and I don’t know if I should break them up or let them keep at it. But they are huge now. I’m so scared to touch them because as we all know, I kill stuff.

And these… we planted from seed! Lookit! I’m not sure which is which, but one is a sunflower mix and another is a straw flower mix. Stuff is like, growing! I think it might too late to see ‘em bloom, but look! They are growing! Green stuff in dirt!

One of the nice things about our neighborhood is all the birds! We have everything from cardinals to mean bluejays to little brown birds. I even have a bird feeder and watch them from my office. We also have annoying pigeons. This year… we have this new bird. I *think* it’s the same one bird, but I’m not sure. So… bird people… what is this bird? It’s too big to be some random “little brown bird” LOL.

UPDATE: Some thought it might be a mockingbird (albino), but a friend of mine also said albino grackle, which I think is probably it. Looking at the picture of it against a regular grackle and that’s it.

Look! Green! I think it’s like actually something! I took this a couple of days ago and there’s more of them! (I’m pretending not to notice that the other 3 haven’t done squat). Look! Look! Look!

The avocado split and I took off the covering because it was slimy because I’m an idiot and didn’t know to replace the water every day or two. It also had mold on it, but I think I cleaned it off… hopefully…

I’ve been trying to find a health-ish cereal the kids will eat. They’ll eat some of the standard stuff, but still… was wondering what they’d eat… they’ll eat this one here, they both like it! Yay! Neither will touch the one with Clifford on the box though. LOL.

Small steps!

I work odd hours. I work a LOT of hours sometimes. So that my butt doesn’t start becoming one with my desk chair, I move to the living room and work on my laptop if I need to work at night. I use this product that let’s me “log in” to my desktop computer and work on it like I’m sitting right there. It’s pretty cool. Of course, if anyone moves anything on either computer, both screens see it. So, I was watching a movie with the kids in the living room, cutting some checks. I needed to come into the office to grab them and decided to mess with them.

So, I opened Word and typed “I love my kids” and inserted smiley faces and hearts and stuff, made them different colors. The kids were laughing, I typed Jamie’s name and he nearly freaked out that the computer knew HIS NAME. *laugh*

Eventually, they figured out it must be me… so Jamie got brave and decided to type back… yes, he wrote “poopy”. Great. Just great. ‘Course at least it’s a word. Cassie just did gobbly-gook afterwards.

We had a good laugh AND it got Jamie interested in learning to “write” using the computer. He’s not interested in learning to type (when do they learn that nowadays? I think I taught myself around 10 or so, but we “learned” it in high school maybe?). Anyway… so now he’s allowed to type his spelling words once per week. Which he thinks is AWESOME. We let him use Wordpad and he changes the color and font and stuff. Such a smart kid!

So yeah, I scared my kids.

Oh, the avocado seed started getting white and pink mold spores on it. I ended up washing it off and the seed covering came off. It was all slippery. Uhh… duh. Tom and I are idiots and haven’t been changing the water. Yes. Laugh. Go on. Feel better? Anyway, the seed is cracked all the way around… hopefully we’ll see some roots start to form… the kids will go crazy if we do!

So, at school Jamie is learning about the life cycle of a plant. Cassie is all flower crazy. Me? I’m scared. I kill everything that I look at sideways.

So, we have the avocado seed thing – that I’m convinced isn’t actually going to do anything, and now we have several other things going on…

These are some little $1 mini pot things we found at Target. 2 are tomatoes and 2 are strawberries. I’ve been watering these things for over a week now. There’s a little tiny green shoot sticking up, but I’m starting to wonder if it’s a weed or something. Nothing else is happening. On the right is a cutting from a wandering jew plant to see if it roots. If it does, I figure it will be cool to show the kids. Then I can plant it and kill for good.

We ended up moving the little one into the pot with the big one… but these are flowers the kids picked up at Red Barn. I knew we needed something already flowering because there’s little to no chance of something we sow actually growing. The others have sunflowers, straw flowers, snapdragons and other strawberries/tomatoes in them. One of the pots (don’t know which one) has already had something digging in it (I bet a squirrel so I’m thinking they are eating the seeds. The kids keep watering it though. So far the flowers are still alive, and we have big pots of dirt.

These were my idea. I know I’ll have to replace them when they die. Plants die at my house. It’s what we do. But they are really pretty now! We put out hanging plant(s) once or twice a year… but haven’t here yet, so this should be interesting…

… this all started because the kids decided they wanted to plant a veggie garden and dude, there’s no way… so we compromised on this.

Oy.

We are trying to grow an avocado tree from a seed – long story, but it was basically Cassie’s idea…

So, I read up on it and the seed has been sitting in water for a couple of weeks (suspended). It’s actually starting to crack! If this thing actually gets a root and all, I’m gonna be amazed…