reorganization

Currently Jonathan is into reorganization. I am looking at this as a welcome and distinct stage from the stage where he just took every thing off/out of a shelf/drawer/bucket/etc and threw it willy-nilly around the house. Now he has started systematically moving all of the things from one locale to another. For example this morning he removed all of Jim's shorts and swim trunks from his bottom drawer and one at a time relocated them to the laundry hamper. The whole project took him about 15 minutes of concentrated effort and many many trips across our bedroom- impressive for a 20 lb little squirt.

This afternoon while I was at yoga class, he emptied the drawer where we keep his sippy-cups and bowls carefully onto the floor on the other side of the baby-barricade

Later (when the barricade was removed) he reorganized again,

Perhaps he can come up with some sort of scheme that will work in my closet...

when a mommy flower loves a daddy flower...

I'm learning a lot in my garden this summer. For example, squash flowers are gender specific. The boy flowers have just a stalk and a flower:

But the girl flowers have a tiny immature squash looking thing just below the flower:

To end up with a baby squash, pollen from a boy flower must reach the girl flower. Then the immature squash will be able to develop into its own seed-bearing squash. One of the problems I have been having with my squash is that it seems to be producing only one flower at a time. Mostly boy flowers. So when I noticed yesterday that there were three flowers blooming at once and that one was a boy and two were girls, I was super excited. But the other garden-wide problem in our yard this year is that there is a serious dearth of bees to do the pollenating.

The bee shortage has also been affecting my tomatoes, who are producing heaps of flowers but no fruit. Many tomatoes are self-pollinting, but still require insects (bees) to either carry pollen around or to stamp their little feet on the flowers, vibrating enough to knock the pollen off and into the right spot. For the past few days I have been out with my paintbrush buzzing from flower to flower tapping on them and transferring pollen from tomato to tomato.

So rather than trust that one would bumble its way into our yard yesterday for the squash, I rolled up my sleeves to do the dirty work myself. I took my little paintbrush and carefully transferred pollen from the boy flower to each of the girls. I'm hopeful that my efforts will pay off, but a little annoyed that the bees are falling down on the job. I may have to start investigating plants that will lure them back into our yard.

expanding vocabulary

,Jonathan's vocabulary keeps surprising me. In addition to being fascinated by shoes, he has recently picked up the ability to say the word "toes". "d" and "t" are pretty similar, so it sounds a lot like how he says "dog", but he definitely means "toes" and thinks it is fun to hang a toy from his toes, or grab something with them like a little monkey and then proudly declare "toes"! It makes me laugh almost every time.

We were at the small park by our house recently and for some reason, there was a large tractor/back-hoe/bulldozer parked near the playground. Jonathan was immediately in awe (I think this must be a universal little boy thing) and spent the entire time at the playground trying to enunciate "tractor". Most of his attempts sounded like "car-car", but by the time we left he was making a slightly different vowel sound for the 2nd syllable: "car-cuuuur".

no words necessary...