Wordless Wednesday - Cloth Diapered Butts

QUAKE! and the power of the internet

Yesterday I experienced my first Southern California earthquake. It happened at about 1030AM and the kids were both sleeping on the floor in our living room.  It was like something had exploded. The house shook for about 5 seconds.  I was like, wait, was that an earthquake?  Should I grab the kids and stand in a doorway?  So of course I jumped on Twitter and searched for earthquake. Sure enough, there were other people trying to find out what just happened.  Then I posted on facebook. Within a few minutes a geologist friend of mine on the East Coast sent me a link to this:

So it was a 3.9 quake. Small for California but relatively powerful for this area.  Usually, I am told, quakes this far south are less intense but last longer.  I just did a little more reading and apparently this quake originated off of a newly discovered fault called the San Joaquin Hills Thrust.  It is not visible at the surface like the San Andreas Fault but evidence of ancient sea life in the hills of this area led researchers to hypothesize that this area was underwater and the fault caused the hilly terrain of this area.  Fascinating!

Now I feel like I should get my Earthquake Preparedness Kit together just in case we get "The Big One."  Better start watching Doomsday Preppers. HAHA.

Mommy Gardner, how does your garden grow?

So it has been about a month and a half since I started seeds indoors to plant my vegetable garden.  I ordered all my seeds from the Seed Savers Exchange.  Here they are:

Yep, that's 7 types of tomatoes, cucumbers, watermelon, snap peas, beans, carrots, beets, parsley, and lettuce. I purchased my square foot garden frame from SquareFootGarden.com and read up on the internet about how to plant the squares of the square foot garden.  The day after I put in my seedlings we had torrential downpours in Southern California and little sun so a few of my plants did make it, probably due to root or stem rot.  So I quickly started some new seedlings to fill in the gap and they are doing well now.  Here is how the garden looks about 1 month out.  Peas and beans are doing great.  Beets and carrots look good.  Cukes are behind because I has to restart the seedlings and lettuces are also behind because i had to restart them as well.  Most of the tomato plants look pretty healthy and the watermelons look good though they grow pretty slowly. Parsley is being grown in a pot not shown here.  Can't wait for the summer to harvest all my crops!

My first real scrapbook page

Happy Spring!  That is the theme of my first ever, created from scratch, scrapbook page.  I received the most beautiful Scrapbook with about 20 pages created by a friend of the family when I had my twin sons in August 2011.  All I had to do was add photos, which I thought was the most thoughtful present.  Only now (8 months later) have I been able to sit down and actually do that.  I was invited to go to a Crop session with some friends at a local scrapbooking store.  We were there for 6 hours!!  It was so much fun and having the run of the store was really neat. I was hooked.  So I thought, well, I better start getting creative and do my own pages, from scratch. Now I'll admit that even being a "creative" person, I have always felt overwhelmed by scrapbooking. SO many options!!!  And then I thought, with Earth Day here and all, that I could probably use what I have around the house (along with my meager stash of stickers, papers and embellishments) to create a cute page.  So here is what I came up with:

I thought it came out pretty cute.  I used a couple of easter cards the boys received to create the flower and circle details - upcycling!!!  Here is one of the cards that I used. I can't wait to get started on my next page!