Our Bold Adventure Continues

• Half a plot is less than half the work of a full plot • The second year really IS easier • Four-year-olds are better at playing by themselves while you garden than three-year-olds • There is no good way to work compost in around a drip irrigation system • It's not worth the fight against bugs to get beans to grow here • Everyone who has rhubarb has too much of it, so don't plant any yourself • Weeds are intimidating, even five months after I last fought the good fight against them Did anyone notice that after a rousing start to last year's gardening season there were NO posts about my community garden plot? This was not coincidence. This was me sparing you from my sinking depression over how Not Fun my Gardening Burden became. Turns out that 528 square feet of weed-infested garden with poor soil in an arid climate is too much to take on while working half time and raising three-year old twins. Weeds in my community garden plot last year. There were several problems, and

Sock puppets! Take a stray sock, some extra buttons, a bit of scrap yard, a dab of Elmer's, and you're good to go. The girls' sock puppets talk to each other. M's is named "Sparkle" and O's is named "Diamond." A close up of Diamond. Diamond had facial arrangement issues until her eyes fell off and O glued them back in a different place, this time below the hair. The cool thing about making sock puppets when you're four is that there aren't any rules.

My kids are growing up in Boulder, which means it's practically a right for them to learn to rock climb. (It's pretty much a right to learn to ski here, too, but we're delaying that for reasons that could fill a whole other blog post.) In this small, one-movie theater town there are two rock climbing gyms -- I mean gyms with nothin' but rock walls -- and apparently that's not enough because they're building an Olympic training facility here, too. When we go hiking on a nice weekend, most anywhere we go will be lousy with folks and ropes and people on a high climb. Rock climbing is big here. Way big. Parks and playgrounds have fake boulders to climb and rock walls on the sides of playground equipment. Our children scramble up those like they're nothing, so we thought it was time to take them climbing for real. They loved it. We met a friend from their school and their mom at a rock climbing gym. The mom just happens to have spent 16 years on the U.S. Women

At work these days I’m spending a lot of time writing exhibit text. The research phase ended a while ago, the outlines and concepts have all been approved. Now it’s the nitty gritty work of finding ways to make the text make sense, connect with the artifacts and images, flow through the story line, and be lively. And, each text block is generally between 35 and 50 words. Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes it’s impossible. Somehow it all gets done. Since I’m thinking in short paragraphs and I’m feeling behind in my blogging, here are some short catch-ups about our lives. All in 50 words or fewer. ****** Our trip to the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua simply rocked. Eleven family members and we all got along. The 400-acre organic farm we stayed on kept surprising us, and we swam every day. There were cool wild (and some tame) monkeys, but there were also big bugs. ****** It’s been in the 70s all week, which has brought on spring fever. Daylight savings time is almost here, which means kiddos wil