It's March--Cue Schizophrenic Weather

Last Saturday? Cold, gray, and lots of snow.

Today? Sunny, warm (well, warmish), and lots of melting snow*.

Next Saturday? Forecast calls for cold, gray, and more snow.

Maybe the Saturday after THAT, it'll be ninety degrees with a tornado! You just never know about this crazy upstate New York weather! So fun and exciting!

Or not. Bah.

* And laundry on the line! Clothesline time is here again. Wheee!!!

Speaking of Dogs and Their Beds . . .

It's Mia's one-dog open sleigh.

Yes, My Child Sleeps on a Dog Bed

That was possibly my favorite comment on yesterday's challenge to identify Cubby's warm bassinet covering. I guess it does kind of look like one of those fake fleece dog beds. But it's not a dog bed. And it's not fake fleece. It's a REAL fleece.

Oh yes.

Remember this? Well, this last fall, we had a Merino cross lamb hide that we sent away to be tanned. We specifically planned for it to be used for Cubby, because Merino fleeces are incredibly dense and warm, and yet the length of the fibers is shorter than that of the Cotswold fleeces, so he wouldn't get his fingers all tangled up in it. It arrived about a month before Cubby did.

I was initially a little afraid to use it, because of all the unbelievably fear-inspiring advice from doctors/nurses/Internet strangers/you name it about newborns suffocating if there is ANYTHING in their sleeping space besides, like, a hard board surface and a tightly fitted thin sheet. But . . . he was cold. I mean, this is a cold house, you know? We can only get it so warm inside when it's 20 degrees outside. And that bassinet thing is just a thin piece of nylon suspended in a playpen. That's not at all cozy. So we put the fleece in there and MAN. That kid sleeps well in there now. I kind of wish I could curl up next to him.

But then he'd just wake up and want to eat, so it's best I keep my distance.

A Failure to Communicate

I tried to be reasonable. I tried to be patient. I tried to explain to Cubby that Mommy had a wicked headache this morning thanks to his insistence on waking her up every hour for four hours so that he could satisfy his frankly obsessive addiction to milk. I further explained that the piercing shriek he kept uttering made Mommy feel as if someone was driving an ice pick into the base of her skull and that none of this made Mommy very happy. And do you know what he did? He ignored me.

The nerve of that three-week-old kid. Honestly. You'd think he was a needy newborn or something.

It's a damn good thing he's so cute.

P.S. Can anyone identify what it is that Cubby is napping on in that photo?

Songbird

You may have heard that babies like to be sung to. Or rather, they like to hear singing. I'm not sure if it matters if they're the focus of the singing. Cubby is no exception. Singing will sometimes make him quiet if he's mad.

And sometimes not, but we're focusing on the times it works here.

Luckily for me, I have an unending store of song lyrics in my head. The space that should be filled with useful information like A.'s Social Security number or my PIN for that one bank card I hardly ever use is instead taken up with all the words to the Alaska State Song, a.k.a. the Alaska Flag Song ("Eight stars of gold on a field of bluuuue, Alaska's flag may it mean to you . . .).

This is not a marketable skill. Except now I have a baby to sing to. I knew I was cataloging all that useless stuff for a reason. Songs I have serenaded him with so far include:

1) The Rose
2) The Sound of Silence
3) The aforementioned Alaska Flag Song
4) Scarborough Fair
5) Amazing Grace
6) A Life Uncommon (a Jewel song)
7) The Absence of Fear (also a Jewel song)
8) Good Mother (Terri Clark)
9) Remember When (Alan Jackson)
10) Silent Night

I'm sure you get the idea. I like to think he's impressed by my incredible voice, but I suspect I could sing the jingle from the Hamburger Helper commercial ("Ay yi yi yi, we've got two new Mexican flavors . . .") and Cubby would listen. It's nice to have an undemanding audience.

We Are Officially In Like a Lion

Though I wouldn't hold my breath for March going out like a lamb. March is kind of a miserable month in upstate New York, in my experience. It seems like it should be spring, but March is almost invariably more a winter month. It's very dispiriting.

So let's talk about gardening! Because that's a spring-y kind of thing, and we all need to be thinking Spring Thoughts right now in the dregs of winter.

We ordered our seeds some time ago. Not too many this year, as we ordered a lot last year that can still be planted this year. The garden is, by necessity, going to be a little scaled back this year. We always rotate the location of our crops, and that's going to be even more important this year since we're following The Year of the Blight. Because a lot of the garden space last year was taken by the blighted tomatoes and potatoes, our options for growing locations for those crops will be more limited this year. Not to worry, though. We'll still have double-digit numbers for tomato plants, and I'm sure you'll see more than one post in which I bitch about the damn potato hilling.

You know you would miss the hilling bitching.

Also this year, I will have a small child, which may cramp my gardening style a bit. I'm hoping that by the time the garden is in full swing, Cubby will be big enough to bring out with me and put on a blanket in the grass while I work. We'll have to see about that, though. Cubby often has his own ideas about how things should go. A little dictator, that one.

ANYWAY.

I'm not going to be starting a whole lot of seeds this year, either, as I discovered a local nursery that has a lot of really good seedlings for most of the things I want to grow. I will start some of the varieties of tomatoes we really liked last year, like the Black Krim and the Stupice. And I'll be starting some eggplant seeds in a couple of weeks. Let's hope I manage to not kill them in the cold frame this year.

Modest hopes this year, indeed.

This Is Getting Repetitive

It's still snowing. And will be forever and ever, amen. Old Man Winter sure is a stubborn old bastard.

Let's just ignore all that mess out there (and I do mean MESS--this is some heavy, nasty shit that's fallen out there) and instead look at another photo. Not of Cubby this time, fascinating as he may be. No, I feel the need to cheer myself by looking at a photo from last spring.

Soon, my lovelies. Soon . . .