melvania

My last garden blog was the end of November. Yeesh. So here we go again.

First a little ramble, as usual. All my pumpkins died during the heat wave. As did my strawberry plant. And a little helper yanked out most of my cucumber plants, so I only had one left in the hanging basket. I thought that one died in the heat too, but it's come good again. And when we got new tyres on the back of our car, I kept the old ones and made a zucchini pot. Filled it up with compost, then potting soil, and it looks great. And then the day after our birthday barbecue, Darrin's brother brought over two bales of straw for us. A few days ago I pulled one apart and spread only about half of it on the garden. I've still got the other bale & a half sitting next to the fence waiting to get used for who knows what. I'm planning to eventually get some raised beds built, so it'll be useful then as filler. And I also had to rip out three of my four cauliflowers because it looked like they had something called black rot. The fourth was smaller & looked okay except for some of the leaves, so I just ripped off those leaves & it's still looking pretty good.

Well, that sewing bug I had didn't last very long. But I guess the two week heat wave had something to do with that. There isn't really any air conditioning in the room where my sewing machine is, unless I plug in a fan, but even then it's not enough at 40+ degrees.

However, I did borrow a friend's overlocker/serger last week, and sewed together all the insides & outsides of the nappies I've had stacked up for months. Now all that's left is the leg elastic, turning them right side out, top stitching, and fasteners. And I've already completely finished one, and aside from some trial & error with getting the snaps all in the right places, snaps are a heck of a lot easier and quicker than sewing in velcro everywhere.

So. Now that it's cooler, I'm hoping to get the bug again and finish off some more projects, especially the ones I can sell.

So I'm about halfway through this pregnancy, and so far I haven't really gained any weight. I do have a bump, though.

I still have no idea whether this baby might be a boy or girl, and it doesn't matter what we get in the end as long as he/she is healthy. The only possible indication of the baby's sex is a dream I had a few weeks ago, where I was watching my ultrasound (which I'm not actually having this time unless something weird happens) and the baby had some very obvious boy bits.

Names? Ha. There's only one that I really like, a girl's name, but there's a problem with it. It starts with C. And if we use it, everyone will think we're doing that trendy (tacky?) thing where you give all your kids names starting with the same letter, which we're definitely NOT doing. Still, we've got half a pregnancy plus 30 days past the birth to decide names, so there's really no rush.

We're still baking. But there's an end in sight now. The BOM is forecasting 30 for Saturday, and it's slowly getting cooler (well, less hot) over the week up till then. We were supposed to be having a birthday BBQ today, but because of the weather, we decided to postpone it a week. So next Sunday hopefully it'll be a lot cooler and we can hang around outside. Highest temperature this week: 45.6C (114.1F).

We've had another poo and a wee on the potty in the last couple days. Slowly getting there.

My pumpkins are all dead. My strawberry plant isn't looking good either. And the cucumber plant is partially wilted & dried out. Everything else is still looking okay though, probably because it's all (except the capsicum) planted in the ground. If the strawberry plant dies, I think I'll be transplanting the capsicum into its spot. Oh, and it has one tiny capsicum growing on it! Yay.

Oh, and this is the THIRD keyboard I've used this week. The first one that I'd been using for months with no issues decided the other day that it didn't want me to have working number keys, including a couple keys I had in my password, so Darrin found a spare in his piles of computer stuff. This was actually one I'd had a couple years ago and always worked well for me. And then yesterday that one started working funny with all the directional keys - arrows, page up/down, home/end, etc. And a couple hours later the space bar and two adjoining keys stopped working as well. I suspect this had something to do with a naked toddler standing on my chair, playing with my keyboard, and a mysterious puddle under my chair.... So once again, I couldn't type my password. I had to get Darrin to kill my screen saver remotely so I could get back into my machine, and then turn off screen locking. So this morning as soon as the shops opened, I went to Big W and bought a brand spanking new USB keyboard, and it works beautifully. But do you think I can remember any of the stuff I wanted to post on message boards now that I have a properly working keyboard again? Of course not.

Baby's movements are getting a lot stronger, and I think I can almost feel them from the outside. He/she was awake & pretty active this morning after I went to the toilet at 6 am. Should be soon anyway and I'll be able to put Caleb's hand on my belly and tell him "that's the baby kicking." No bladder dancing yet though, for which I'm thankful. But it'll happen eventually.

Okay, we've all had our lunch, now it's time to get the ice cream out of the freezer. Mmmmmm....