16 Months!

This month started right as our summer break began, so it's been all Ryder all the time.  Which is awesome!  Ryder is super active now so we've been having tons of fun.  He wants to go outside constantly and tries to go to the river every time.  He loves to play in the sand and rocks.  Unlike last year, he also loves to go in the water.  Holding our hands, he will go right up to his chest.

He is definitely more into his toys and books now.  He will bring us and sit through a reading of every single one of his books in a row.  Some of them more than once in that rotation.  (I know all of them by heart at this point!)  He can, with effort, put together a lot of his toys now; legos, cars, etc...  What he can't put together he brings over to us, then promptly takes them back apart.  He seems to think now that everything in the house is his toy and moves it around or takes it apart.  We're most worried about the TV that he really likes to shake.

He has finally added a few words to his sound vocabulary.  If you ask him a question about something he wants to do, he answers "yeah."  "Do you want to have breakfast?"  "Yeah!"  "Do you want to go outside?"  "Yeah!"  He also says cat, truck, light and bye-bye, although they aren't exactly recognizable.  Well, some more than others!  Bye-bye sounds a lot like "La-la."

Ryder is eating more and more and becoming much more independent with his food.  He's been feeding himself bits of sandwich and pieces of fruit, but now he holds his fork, holds his whole item of food.  He loves bananas; he actually claps and says yay when  you bring one out!  He can hold his own banana and takes huge bites to scare the crap out of his parents.

I do not know what he was yelling about!

"Why do you always take my picture and never let me play with the camera?"

Playing with his toys

Just hanging around

Found one of Daddy's toys to play with

Garden 2014

The garden has been doing very well so far this year.  We added two new boxes and dug a firepit in the middle.  The strawberries have come and just about gone.  It was close to three weeks from beginning to end.  For the middle two weeks, I was picking a minimum of 4 cups a day! I tried a lot of new recipes, almost all of them were winners.

In addition to all the usuals: tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, kale, peppers, peas, beans and herbs, I like to try out a few new varieties in the garden each year.   Last year it was corn and kale.  Kale was a winner, the corn is out.  This year we're trying out purple cauliflower, Adirondack Blue potatoes, purple-husked tomatillos and sweet potatoes.  The first three are doing awesome; the sweet potatoes just started to do something, and only some of them.  Next year I'm definitely doing more potatoes, they are so easy. The tomatillos have flowers everywhere, so we'll have to see how they taste.

Two of our three varieties of kale

The potato mound just started to flower

For the first time, my cilantro actually looks good

Lettuce followed by green beans and purple beans

The Juliet tomatoes have set fruit

So has the pepperoncini

There is one small cucumber, but dozens of flowers

Tomatillo with lots of flowers

The third kind of kale and basil

 One of the tomato boxes in front of last year's compost pile; in that dirt are more and bigger tomato plants than those that I started in March!  We are going to be swimming in tomatoes!

Red raspberries have just started as the strawberries are winding down

We also have tons of wild black raspberries

Our firepit is right in the middle of the garden boxes