Halloween Festive

We decorated for Halloween in our usual fashion. Giant spiders and skeletons on the porch. A graveyard with hanging ghouls. Festive lights to illuminate our spooky setup at night. 

The graveyard and tree have some new additions this year. Clowns. Well, clown parts. The direct result of my neighbors across the street (who are masters of Halloween decorating) having a garage sale to clean out some of their old Halloween décor to make room for new. The boys used their own money, and to be honest I wasn't really paying attention until it was too late. Did I mention I hate clowns? Especially scary ones. My next door neighbors also now have matching clown parts in their yard because the boys all went "shopping" together. Silver linings. 

After looking at these photos in more detail I'm not sure I'll ever sleep again. *Shivers*

We have another full-size skeleton and a mini this year, thanks to the same garage sale as the clowns. It's a whole skeleton family on the porch this year!

I love how the spider web looks lit up from all the lights. Mike swapped out the porch light bulb with a creepy orange one and it gives the web an eerie glow at night. 

It's less creepy during the day, but not by much... The skeleton family is infested with snakes and other creepy crawlies. 

During the day you can see the bugs and things in the spider web better. 

And we can't forget my favorite - the rats running up the railing! 

Happy Halloween Witches! 

Winter Survival

Winter. Ugh. The cold. The dark. The ice and snow. The polar vortexes. Cabin fever. The germs. The illnesses. The dry air.

The groundhog didn't see his shadow... but after the past few years, what does an early spring even mean around here? That we'll stop having blizzards in April? Flowers might bloom before May? The optimist in me (who totally wants to believe) wants to hope that this year we'll have spring in March. The realist in me that had to walk the dog during that last polar vortex thinks we'll have another white Easter this year.

It's already been a long winter. December was one long cold and ear infection for Matt. We had the sniffles the entire month of January. And in the beginning of February, Matt had his tonsils and adenoids out, ear tubes put in. Oliver had the same thing done when he was 4 and once we were over the surgery recovery aspect, it was LIFE CHANGING and made such a difference to his health. But the actual surgery and recovery is rough. It's fast, it's outpatient and minor compared to other surgeries... but it's still a two week recovery at home. They hurt and it hurts to watch them suffer. And to add to the madness, a few days after the surgery, Oliver came home from school with the flu. The flu-flu, the fever-coughing-runny nose-nausea-muscle aches-general malaise kind of flu. It was rough to say the least. Survival definitely required kombucha cocktails for mom and dad.

To deal with all this, we are combating the winter blues with a few elements of hygge and embracing cozy - fairy lights in glass containers on timers, lighting a candle (in a safe location away from children), making tea, snuggling under blankets together on our new couch. Lots of blanket snuggling (or in Matt's case, dog snuggling). Even the kids are into the idea of embracing cozy - they like to turn on the Netflix fireplace and watch cartoons on their iPads on the big couch. I get to read a book on my kindle (GASP! Time for mom!).

Then to help with my garden withdrawal, I'm hoarding a big stack of seed catalogs and adding blooms to our indoor greenery, indulging in flowers - my Christmas amaryllis bloomed twice more, I bought a primrose for $1 at the grocery store, an occasional bouquet of discount flowers from Whole Foods if nothing else is blooming (seriously they have sales like a dozen daffodils for $1). I've coaxed additional blooms out of the geranium I'm overwintering, but I killed the snapdragons and the hyacinth. It happens - some plants overwinter better than others.

Other things to help survive the winter: Amazon and Target delivery subscriptions so all the essentials magically arrive before we run out. Kindle books. Free grocery delivery. Adult coloring books to color alongside the kiddos. Curated music playlists without ads. Craft cocktails. Homemade lemon rosemary bread in the dutch oven. Soup. Door dash for our favorite Thai place that doesn't deliver. OKeefe's healthy hands cream. Aquaphore. Humidifiers running 24-7. The lotion tissues. Local raw honey. Turmeric tea. Kombucha + vitamins for an immunity boost. Slippers for the cold floors. A puppy that likes to snuggle. French yogurt that comes in terracotta cups that make perfect vases for spring flowers. Consuming ridiculous amounts of citrus.

I will also fully admit to jumping on the Marie Kondo on Netflix bandwagon. Each episode is awesomely motivating to go organize something. In a tiny house with kids there's always something that needs an overhaul, an hour with Marie has me itching to hit up the next spot. I'm also working on our basement, but it's a monster... I'm slowly getting through it a little piece at a time - which with little kids is really the only way to get things done anyway.

Hopefully the kids can stay healthy enough that I can get through the mess by spring (whenever it finally gets here).

+ Garden Border (Part 2 of Morgan vs. the Fence)

See part 1 here.

I might be jinxing it, but so far, the chicken wire is working to keep Morgan from digging holes under the wooden fence. However, it is not keeping her from digging holes in the garden beds next to the chicken wire (MY PLANTS!!!!!) and in other garden beds (MY PLAAAAAAANTS!!!!) and in the grass (Mud pits!).

So my question of "do we add garden border fencing now or in the spring?" was answered with YES DO IT NOW BEFORE ALL THE PLANTS ARE GONE FOREVER BECAUSE SHE DUG THEM ALL UP. (Also if you are wondering how this keeps happening, Morgan loves being outside and 95% of the time she's out there, she's not digging. But when she does dig a hole, she can do A LOT of damage in under a minute... she is a natural.)

So I got out a tape measure and really measured the garden borders. Not just the one on the right side  that's been her focus, but also the one next to the deck, the strip next to the patio, the bed between the driveway and the fence on the left.  Morgan is digging in all these spots. And when we have other doggies over for play dates, they tend to trample things so I think long term a low border fence as a physical reminder is ideal. Plus it will look nice.

I bought 3 packs of the pretty fencing I really like (each pack is 26 feet) and then a 12-pack of the significantly less pretty wire fence, for a grand total of 198 feet of low garden fencing. The pretty fencing will be used near the house - the gardens around the patio/deck, the right side going back towards the tree. The rest will be fenced off with the wire fence, which I'm hoping will blend into the plants in the spring more (because, well, it's ugly).

So here's what it looks like now. We're still using lots of physical pieces to protect things during this adjustment period. Hopefully by the time the plants come back in the spring, this will be a non-issue!

It's going to take time to train Morgan to stay away from the low fence. Obviously she can easily hop over it, but again it's meant to be a reminder of where she's not supposed to go. Plus it will make it harder to dig when there's less room to do it. I still have all the barriers up inside the fence to make it harder to move around.

The wire fence is almost impossible to get in a photo, which I guess is a good thing because it's also subtle in real life. All non-grassy areas are now blocked off.

Here you can see where fancy fence meets wire fence under the red bed tree.

Hopefully this works... otherwise I'm going to be very sad for all my dug up flowers.

Morgan Mayhem vs. The Fence + 4 Dog Friends

Before I get into this post, I need to express that Morgan is actually a REALLY GREAT dog. I know recently when I mention her, it's all about the chaos and destruction she's caused (the garden, my plants, the fences). But really, she's just a puppy. She's wonderful, we love and adore her. She is very well behaved in the house. She's mostly outgrown the naughty chewing phase indoors. Her worst offense is counter surfing, which we are working on. She doesn't even steal the kids snacks anymore. She barks at the back door to go outside and barks to be let back in. Morgan sleeps in her crate at night and when we aren't home to keep her out of trouble. She's learning good things at her weekly dog training classes. And most importantly, Morgan is AMAZING with the boys. She's so gentle with them, she adores them, we never have to worry about her interacting with them. There's 100% trust, even when we've literally caught them jumping on her while she sleeps and she barely bats an eye. She thinks the world of them and she's completely calm in the constant chaos they create.

Outside... outside is where Morgan's naughty side is unleashed. Literally - she's still terrible at walks and won't stop pulling no matter what we try. In the backyard, destruction reigns. She will shred stolen cardboard boxes and plastic bags out of the recycling. Chewing up the boys frisbees, beach buckets, bubble wands. Hiding baseballs in the bushes, stripping bushes of leaves, knocking plants over, climbing tables. Shredding the deer netting around the garden, digging holes in the grass, digging holes in my raised bed garden, digging holes along the fence (including the garden beds with my new plants), digging up my tulip bulbs. Running through the mud, hunting critters, attempting to escape, causing mayhem. Lots and lots of mayhem.

Backstory: Miss Morgan Mayhem was a rescue puppy, her litter was fostered next door on the other side of the wood fence (on the right side of our yard when facing the garage). Our neighbors still foster occasionally still and have 4 dogs of their own. There's a lot of crazy dog action going on on the other side of those wood planks.

When Morgan was smaller she liked to escape under the chain link fence on the left side into another neighbor's yard and wander. It was stressful, but eventually we effectively blocked the chain link fence escape routes. Morgan then turned her attention to the wood privacy fence where 4 of her doggy friends live on the other side. While she can't break through the wooden panels, she can dig under it. So can her doggy friends on the other side.  And if left to their own devices long enough, they can also push the fence pieces out, popping the nails and leaving a gap in the fence that works everyone up into an even bigger frenzy of barking and doggy noses poking through and tails wagging.

When the garden plants were big in the summer, Morgan mostly avoided the garden part of the fence line, opting for the grass further back for her digging adventures. We blocked each hole and my neighbors on the other side did the same. But then I started digging in the garden to add in the new plants, exposing dirt and new smells that triggered her digging instinct. And as the plants died off with each frost, there was more and more area exposed.

I barricaded the fence with every last spare paver (including some I was using as garden borders) to stop the digging. I blocked off the garden flowers the best I could with literally anything I had handy - gates, chairs, spare trellis, rotted porch railing, spare fence, etc.. Morgan did everything she could to work around the barricades. More holes were dug, escapes were made, with the help of the neighbor's dogs digging on their side... plants trampled, roots damaged. She even went under the rose bush with the giant thorns - and she has the scratches to prove it. I was so frustrated.

In the demo of the existing raised bed garden, we had all this spare chicken wire fencing that we dug up. It wasn't in good enough shape for the new garden, but I realized it was a perfect barrier to deter the digging - at least where the garden plants are. I knew I could hold it down with the pavers we lined up along the edge and staple it to the fence panels, as well as using inexpensive ground stakes. We had just enough to go from the rosebush to the blueberry bushes, down the whole line. It won't stop the dogs from digging on the other side, but it would make digging in the garden beds more difficult for Morgan. Hopefully with some time she will learn it's useless to bother trying.

Here's the fence right now... the chicken wire is hard to see in photos but it's there! What you can really see is all the things we're using as barricades.

I'm using the raised bed garden obelisk to block a giant hole she doesn't want to leave alone. For better or worse, anenomes are aggressive enough to fill back in here.

In the spring we'll take up some/half/most of the pavers and just leave the short ground staples and fence staples. And I say that with the assumption that after living with the fencing for that long, she'll be uninterested in digging there anyway and won't need all the weight of those pavers for extra wire barrier stability. This way nothing will be blocking the plants/bulbs/pretty things from coming up through the holes. We'll cover everything with a a nice layer of mulch too so that we won't see ugly wiring anymore either. (Right now things are so ugly!)

Step 2 will be a physical barrier across the garden beds as a physical reminder for where she's welcome and where she's not. It will take some training not to cross it, but if there's no reason to cross (like not being able to dig), it will hopefully work in combination. I like the look of this one, and it covers 26 ft per package and it has good reviews. It's still pricey for the amount of garden we have, but I think I might be able to combine it with a cheap wire one further back.

I'm not sure when to do step 2. Part of me thinks, the sooner the better, but then I also wonder if we should wait. If we do it now, the ground isn't frozen yet and we'll have the winter to train her to stay out of the garden bed area. But... will the freezing and refreezing of the ground hurt the border fence? Will it get damaged or knocked over in the snow? Will Morgan even understand not being allowed in there when there are no plants (and potentially one big snow plain anyway)?

Lastly there's the back part of the fence where the grass meets the wood fence (after the garden beds end. Right now we still have sporadic barricades up, but I'm hoping the chicken wire could be a long term solution back here too. We have to also figure out a prettier option along the chain link, but it's too flexible for chicken wire to work over there (really we need giant rocks...)

Life Update + Morgan + Things

Our lives feel like they are going a million miles an hour these days, I feel like we came out of winter hibernation at full speed ahead. Our to-do lists are still miles long, our calendars ridiculously full. But that's family life right? Juggling schedules, appointments, lessons, activities for 4 people and a dog. Homework, childcare, work. Maintaining and improving an old house. Having fun. Planning for big trips and big events.

So many happy things. My sister is getting married this summer and I have privilege of being her maid of honor. We threw her a bridal shower a few weeks ago and it was so much fun. Her bachelorette is a girls' weekend in Brooklyn and the wedding is on Cape Cod this summer (one of my favorite places on earth); we couldn't be more excited. We're also going on a cruise with Mike's side of his extended family this summer (a generous gift from my father-in-law to celebrate his retirement)... it's going to be a blast. Our pool opened and Oliver is now obsessed with the giant water slide they have there. Our local zoo has lions and hyenas now. We're planning his birthday party.

Mike also changed jobs. We are SO HAPPY that he found something new that fits our needs better. The new job is doing more of the technical stuff he likes to do and less of the managerial drama that was weighing him down. The hours are steady, he can still work flextime to be off one weekday each week (for childcare cost savings) and the pressure to be available to work 90 hours a week is nonexistent there. It's also much closer to home - his commute has changed from 1 hour each way to 20 minutes each way 3 days a week and 5 minutes away 2 days a week. He's even started riding his bike to work when he's in town. It's been great!

We are over the moon for Miss Morgan Mayhem. She's settled into our home and our hearts and we can't imagine life without her. She is such a good puppy and ADORES the boys (and they her!). Morgan loves to snuggle, play and get into mischief. She is a digger and an escape artist, and she steals the garden strawberries. She lets the boys do pretty much anything without batting an eye except getting her wet  (she hates water). We still miss Georgia, but Morgan's affections have really helped.

Overall the kids are doing great. Oliver's almost done with kindergarten. He has nice fiends, he loves his school and teacher, he's learned so much this year. This summer he'll be doing a local day camp in our town in the mornings and be with his grandparents in the afternoons with Matt. Matthew overall is great too - he's such a happy toddler! He is affectionate, smart and loves to play. We're not going to send him to preschool until he's 3, so he has another year at home with our much loved nanny and wonderful grandparents.

Of course not everything is rainbows and unicorns. On top of all the illness (like Matt coming down with pneumonia in June - who gets pneumonia in the SUMMER?!), worries and craziness this year, both kids have (minor) obstacles to overcome that we're working through. Oliver has been having trouble with his vision. We ended up getting him glasses in a very extreme prescription - it's helped him see a lot better (and we've seen huge strides in his reading since), but there have been side effects. Motion sickness on swings, rides and in the car and overall being prone to bouts of nausea that has been incredibly frustrating for him. And then Matt doesn't talk. We ended up having him evaluated by our state's early intervention program and he's now in weekly speech therapy. It's nothing cognitive (thank goodness), but he has a lot of catching up to do. We are very grateful to live in a state with such great EI programs!

So that's where we're at. Lots of good things, busy schedules, plenty of calendar juggling... but I think things are going really well and hopefully will only get better from here.

Meet Morgan

This is Morgan.

She's 14 weeks old, a hound-spaniel (and possibly pointer) mutt mix and a very good girl. She will be bigger than Georgia, but hopefully not too big (she's 11 lbs now and the best vet guesstimate based on parent sizes is 35-45 lbs, but long and leggy). She's fantastic with the boys, 90% housebroken and sleeps through the night. Morgan loves sunbathing, playing with her toys, running around the yard and eating. Hounds can smell food a million miles away - our floors have never been so crumb-free.

We didn't plan on getting another dog so soon. Especially not a little puppy. Too much work. And we've been so overwhelmed this winter - a puppy to care for was the LAST thing we needed. But sometimes things are just meant to be.

It all started about six weeks ago I found a dog on petfinder that looked perfect on paper (not Morgan). This dog was small, raised with kids in a foster home and loved them, good with other dogs, super cute, housebroken. Her foster family lived two blocks away and said she was wonderful. The rescue did a foster-to-adopt situation where we could have her for 1-7 days to decide if she was the right fit. It lasted two hours. Looking back now it's a funny story, like going on a ridiculously bad date. She ran away within the first 30 seconds of coming off the leash in our house - pushed open the front door and bolted - running full speed all the way back to her foster family. I swear she thought we were kidnappers. We brought her back and she was miserable, pacing and looking for an escape. It escalated to her nipping Oliver for gently petting her so I called the rescue, and while on the phone with them she nipped Matthew unprovoked. And when her foster mom came to pick her up from our house I went to scoop her up to hand her off and she nipped ME, thinking I was getting in between her and her real mom. While the kids were disappointed that the dog didn't work out, we were all relieved to have this particular dog gone. She was not a good fit. But I believe everything happens for a reason and this instance opened the door to adopting another dog... Morgan.

Fast forward a few weeks and our next door neighbor was fostering an entire litter of puppies on top of their three dogs. The puppies were all cute, but one in particular stood out. She was so sweet with our kids, loved to snuggle, had a really good personality. Her little white boots and white tipped tail were adorable. The kids LOVED her. Mike fell in love next. Morgan kept coming over for "play dates" with our kids and every time she was here, I fell for her a little more. I tried to fight it, I kept telling myself we didn't want a puppy. Puppies are a lot of work. They don't sleep. They need to be housebroken and we just put down a new rug. They chew everything. They need to be trained. But then when we realized that Morgan was going to an adoption event in a week... and I realized I couldn't let her go. We couldn't let her go. She was totally wrong for us on paper, but her personality was wonderful. She IS wonderful.

Living next door to the foster family has its perks. Our application with the rescue was approved lightning fast with fewer hoops to jump through. Before we knew it, we were signing the paperwork. I got goosebumps when we realized that her birth date was the day Georgia passed away. We've decided to keep her name - Morgan - because it's pretty, I like people names for dogs, it suits her and she already knows it and comes when we say it.

 

Morgan is officially ours, we've had her for over a week and it's been amazing. Yes she's a lot of work, but she's totally worth it. For a puppy, she is very calm and a very good girl. And every day she gets better and better as she gets the hang of the rules at our house. She's very smart, sweet and loving. We are head over heels for her.