Weekly Round Up - with tomatoes

This week has been full, in a really good satisfying way.  

Here is my life. This Week. In pictures:

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All the pictures in this post were taken with Instagram.  I love Instagram.  Follow me to see more great pics. I'm hollyoshesky.

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This has been a super wet summer so far.  We got so much rain on Monday the street flooded.

Little Dude and Zippy enjoyed the structure of homeschool.  It just really makes the day go smoother.  This week Little Dude worked on counting with an egg carton and with clothespins.  Both help train those fine motor muscles.

Wednesday we celebrated my Mother-in-law's birthday.  My youngest nephew enjoyed the chocolate cake a lot.  {This is my favorite picture this week}

We got our first tomatoes. In case you were wondering, they were as tasty as they look.  They lasted for about 3.5 seconds after this picture was taken.  Zippy's sweet banana peppers are also coming along great.  All that rain is really helping out the garden.

Zippy had her last appointment in Ann Arbor for her finger.  It is healing, but will take years, (yes years) to completely heal.  She can ride her bike and swim in the lake again, though, and that makes her happy.  This whole process took so much longer than any of us expected.

After we saw the doctor we headed over to Matthaei Botanical Gardens where we enjoyed the conservatory, the Bonsai garden and the children's garden.  The hubs took a vacation day, so we thought it would be a good idea to do something fun with the family.

{Linking Up}

Our Little Garden

I didn't exactly plan to have a garden this year.  The hubby got {me?} a huge potted tomato plant for Mother's Day and he has fun keeping it watered and sunned and I thought, that was that, we are done.  Until last Friday Zippy, Little Dude and I went to the local Farmer's Market.  Zippy likes fresh sweet banana peppers and had a few plants last summer, so she asked if we could look to see if anyone had any.  They did.  Four plants for $1.00, can not beat that with a stick.  So the hubby dug up a little patch of dirt next to our fence and he and Zippy planted her plants.

 Then on Saturday the kids and I went looking for a Father's Day "gift" of a hanging flower basket for the porch.  Zippy found a pear tomato plant (with tomatoes already on it) on clearance, so we got that too. 

Now our garden consists of 4 pepper plants and 2 tomato plants and everyone is quite happy. 

Wordish Wednesday - leaf

It has been a wild and crazy week so far.  I captured this little piece of peace last week on a drizzly fall day out of the garden...

Did you take a great photo this week?  Link up!  Use the handy linky below.  Your photo can have words...or not.

For even more Wordless excitement check out these other WW:

Spring Garden Sensory Bin

This is my first sensory bin and a very simple affair.  I wanted a bin with lots of texture and a way to move it around.  I also wanted a bin that had some natural colors, conveying the idea of a spring garden with dirt, seeds and buds.   The ingredients are:

• Lima Beans
• Black Beans
• Split Peas
• Pasta
• A spoon
• A cup (with a picture of a bug)

Little Dude had a blast using the spoon to put the contents into the cup.  One of my big goals for this is to keep the contents in the bin, and we succeeded. 

Wordish Wednesday - Roots

 There are two lasting bequests we can give our children.  One is roots.  The other is wings.  ~Hodding Carter, Jr.

A Garden Challenge

I was inspired to do an enrichment unit with the kids. This inspiration came after I read all about the Garden Challenge.  I have been thinking about doing something that would involve both children.  This is a little difficult as there is a vast world of difference between them.  Gardening is the perfect solution, enough interesting things for the big girl and well, dirt, outside, and probably some sort of crawly things for the little boy.

Our family has dabbled in gardening off an on over the years.  I decided to make a new fresh start with our old pea trellis.  We will make a small garden from scratch, drawing out the the plans to decide how big it needs to be to include what we want to plant.  I really want to include Zippy in every stage of the garden.

 

Planting - I want to plant three types of things
(1.) Seedlings that we propagated ourselves - probably peas and chives
(2.) Seeds directly into the ground - green onions
(3.) Plants we buy from the nursery - at least tomatoes, maybe a pumpkin and some herbs

Resources - The thing I really want the children (particularly Zippy) to get out of this experience is to understand where food comes from, and how the cultivation of food is important in many different places. To expand on the garden experience we will be reading several books - some for Zippy some for the Little Dude, some for both.