Roses, cakes, faces, pretzels

Maybe it is all the rain we have been having, or maybe it is just that our soil lends itself well to them--our Rugosa Roses (beach roses) are doing so well this year in terms of both size AND flowering. We seem to have tons of flowers this year. What we have been doing is picking up all the fallen petals and putting them into a basket that we then are using for a potpourri of sorts. They smell great!!

I havent written much about our garden yet, and maybe that is because it hasnt really DONE much yet! But we are doing the best we can with the crappy clay soil we have (dont forget: we live, essentially, a quarter mile from the biggest river in Maine!). We tilled it, added sand and manure, and planted lettuce, carrots, beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, and squash. It is a small garden, but hopefully it will yield a lot! Amanda is doing some planting....

Amanda and the kids got me a wonderful cake for my birthday last week--a trail running cake from Shaws. Shaws USED TO have THEEE best cakes in terms of frosting and actual cake. But they must have outsourced their cakes to china or something, because they suck now. I will stick with Hillman's, thank you. But the design was great!

Maira just being really cute with the hat she hates to wear! Her language, we have noticed, is really taking off during the past couple of weeks. She is starting to string together short worded phrases, and her elocution seems to be getting better. Furthermore, she is suddenly REALLLLLY into books. GoodNight Moon, Biscuit, and GoodNight Maine are her three favorites by far!

And, finally, here is Callum the Pretzel Man! I dug deep into the vault of cookbookdom to find my 10th grade home ec notebook! This was a great class. Jason Ponticelli and I ruled this classroom, writing the research papers of the year on ROSEMARY. We had a great soft pretzel recipe, and Callum loves pretzels, and so does Maira, so I figured HEY, LET'S BAKE SOME. It went really well. Callum thinks his santa hat is a chef's hat. We baked them last Saturday morning while I LET AMANDA SLEEP LATE (i wrote that in caps so everyone could see that...). Callum really loved making letters and number out of  the dough, and even Maira loved rolling the dough around!