Green things

Happy Earth Day!

Today is Earth Day and it makes me want to go out and get some flowers to plant. I did re-pot a couple of my house plants this morning, though. One is a geranium that I was given as a Mother's Day gift at church a week after Hakan was born. It's gotten really tall over the past couple of weeks and is super spindly, so I've had to support it with a couple of skewers. It gets these bright pink blossoms and is about to bloom for the second time this season. I'm hoping that putting it in a larger pot will help it to fill out a little better. The other is a big plant with long-stemmed leaves that are shaped like hearts. I bought it at a grocery store in Rexburg and it's kind of been struggling lately. When I got it the leaves were all really dark green and glossy. Now they've started to yellow and some have gotten tiny spots. Unfortunately, I don't know what type of plant it is and it didn't come with care instructions. All I could think to do was put it in a bigger pot, stick it right in a window and hope it will pull through.

pink flowers & pickles

Speaking of green, yesterday I made Aaron and the kids come with me on my weekly grocery shopping trip to Wal-Mart. As I was putting food away when we got home I discovered one of those big jars of giant dill pickles in with our stuff. I assumed Aaron put it in the cart because I always buy the little jars of baby dills. It made me smile, though, because I haven't had one of those in ages. Pyper was very excited about them and made me promise to let her have one at lunch time today. She always asks for the biggest of the baby pickles and never seems satisfied with just one. It brought me back to when I was growing up- Mom would buy these gallon-size jars of enormous pickles at Sam's Club where everything seems to have been given growth hormones. GIANT bottles of handsoap, GIANT bags of shredded cheese, GIANT jars of peanut butter. Anyway, I remember getting one of those big honkin' pickles, wrapping a paper towel around it and munching away at it for the longest time. I used to eat the skin off first, then eat the fleshy inside, which now seems kinda gross. :) I gave each of the kids one for lunch, and of course Pyper was barely able to finish hers, while Hakan didn't even come close. They did like the novelty of the gigantic pickle, though, and I liked the reminder of my childhood.

One last green-related subject- we got grass!! They finally turned the irrigation on for our neighborhood last week and the landscapers came the next day to start prepping for sod. They'd already laid the sprinklers, so by Friday afternoon we had a beautiful lawn of grass in the backyard. Of course we've been told not to set foot on it for 2 whole weeks while the roots grow in, but it's a heck of a lot nicer to look out the window and see grass instead of weeds, rocks and dirt.

Before

After