Thursday: optimal timing

Yesterday I had an ortho appointment because my fixed retainer broke after 20 years.  I was hoping they'd just be able to glue it back in place, but that wasn't the case.  So the removed all of it and I scheduled another appointment for today to get a new one in.

During that time day between appointments I had a dentist appointment.  It was scheduled six months ago, and just happened to fall during the time I didn't have the retainer in.  It's always hard to clean by those teeth, so getting a good clean was ideal.

Wednesday: errands

We had three errands today.  A brief ortho appointment for me, some groceries from Meijer, and a stop at the bank.

While walking into Meijer Joshua clearly declares that he's sick of errands and wants to go home.  We had been at them for all of 20 minutes and he got to have screen time for fifteen of those minutes.  I rolled my eyes.

The pony is back up at Meijer. I didn't have any pennies and so said we couldn't do it even though Joshua had been looking forward to it the whole trip.  He was so calm with the change in plans though that we got some pennies from the car and went back in.

Tuesday: donut tour -Dutch Delight

After the last swimming lesson we got some more donuts.  I'd say the donuts were fine.  The chocolate one was quite good.  The lemon one had too much filling in it.

Really, one of the best things about this bakery is that they're rather close.  If Joshua ever figures out how to use his pedals we could easily bike there.  (I think he's close.  But that jump from a balance bike to actually using pedals is a bit daunting.)

I also finished my puzzle.  The colors were boring, but there's a lot of detail that made it easier.  Oddly enough, the last 50 pieces gave me the most trouble.  They could all fit in somewhere, but they just didn't go in very quickly.

Monday

 Joshua: what kind of pokemon is a pass-a-chick?

Amanda: uh, that says 'psychic'

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Joshua wanted to try programming too, so I at least got a scratch account set up for him.  I don't know how well it'll go, but it's worth a try.  Below Isaac was helping him out with a question...it seemed rather fair since Ben has helped Isaac out with so many problems.

Saturday: news

The day was pretty good, for the most part.  Isaac coded up his first, "Hello world!" (in Java).

But then, at the end of the day, we received disappointing* news as some of our friends now can't join us for our trip.

*disappointing rather understates it

Saturday

 The boys were at the Larry and Cheryl's house last night through this afternoon, so we had a nice relaxing day.  Ben stayed home from work and we just putzed around.  It was nice and quiet.

Wednesday: composting worms

 I haven't talked about my composting worms in a while, but the last few months have been an adventure.

For Halloween, the boys got huge pumpkins and I put them in the composting bins.  They were too big, but I left them in there anyway.  A few weeks later they were decomposing, but not fast enough to bring the bins into the basement like I normally do in the winter.  So I left them outside and brought in the one bin that had a few worms but was mostly castings waiting for spring plants.

I killed all the worms in the garage over the winter.  The pumpkins molded.  It was a small disaster.

I put some worms from the backup container in one of the bins.  They died, probably due to the mold.

I combined the two compost bins into one.  I left that full one in the garage.  I started over with the worms from the back-up bin.  By this time I had about five worms.  If I killed them I was going to have to get more from Nathan.

They didn't die!  They got bigger.  They slowly multiplied.  Things were going well.

I finally decided to deal with the bin that was still in the garage.  I was expecting a massive, moldy mess, but to my surprise it wasn't moldy and it actually looked like pretty good compost.  While I didn't have a ton of extra worms, I threw a few worms in to see what would happen.  They lived!

So now I hopefully have two worm bins going again.  Hopefully starting from a small number of worms doesn't affect genetic diversity too much.  I'm glad to have two bins right now, because it's the middle of summer and we're going through fruit like crazy.  Isaac had a watermelon for his birthday and we made strawberry jam today.  

I'll admit, we almost make enough food scraps for a third bin.  I'm just not sure if I want to deal with it.