Quarter Century

Week of July 19 through 25

This weekend I turned twenty-five. In my head, I'm still 21. My age-lapse memory makes a little sense, I guess, since turning turning 21 is an event in and of itself. "I can drink now, bitches, whooo-hooo!" And then the drinking wiped out the next four years of my life, and here I am, now 25. Or something like that. I can't wrap my head around this whole quarter-century-old concept. Is 25 the point at which one is considered a full grown adult? I'm not in the 18 to 24 age bracket anymore. Since my 21st birthday, the numbers just keep going up, but I feel the same. I hope I feel like I'm 21 for the rest of my life. It was a good year.

In case you didn't notice, internet, I just cursed on our blog. The blog my grandmother reads (Hi, Tata!). I've also talked about sex. But I can do that because I'm 25 now. A full grown adult!

So my birthday lasted for four days this year. That's probably another reason I can't ever remember how old I am. There is so much celebrating that I think I'm having more than one birthday. And that somehow voids the original birthday, like how two negatives make a positive. Or something. I can't do math.

My birthday started when my lovely and talented co-worker brought delicious cupcakes to the office on Thursday. Homemade lemony-goodness with whipped frosting and fresh lemon zest. Oh em gee. And the precious cake stand was a gift for me! Anyone who knows me knows that I have a slight addition to tableware. Ok, I have an entire closet full of dishes. Plus a china cabinet. And our everyday plates. But each of these dishes and serving pieces are vitally important! I might need to throw together a dinner for 12 AT ANY MOMENT. And I will be ready. And then no one will think my hoard of mix-and-match tableware is anything but essential.


On Saturday, my entire family gathered at Perry's Steakhouse (dear God, the deliciousness) to celebrate my age by eating and drinking and eating some more. The food was amazing, and the company was perfect. The Husband called ahead and had the restaurant fancy up our table with rose petals. He also ordered a special dessert for me that came with my name written in chocolate. If you've never seen your name written in chocolate, I highly recommend it. Once you've had your name written in chocolate, signing your name with a pen seems so mundane. And if you try to eat that signature, you might have to go to the hospital for ink poisoning, or insanity. Chocolate is always better.


Sunday morning, The Husband made Belgian waffles with fruit and whipped cream and bacon. Mmm, bacon. We then proceeded to sit around in our pajamas and watch movies all. day. long. While drinking grape martinis. There were also some naps thrown in for good measure. Perfect day. That evening, The Husband made my favorite dinner. Barbeque Chicken. Not just any barbeque chicken, oh no. This chicken is my great-grandfather's recipe, passed down through my family and taught to The Husband just last year. We had to be sure he wouldn't run off with the goods, his plan to marry into the family so he could hijack the almighty Barbeque Chicken recipe now complete, so we waited until we'd known him for a good six years before sharing.

He also made asparagus topped with a poached egg. A poached egg. My husband poached an egg for me. And put it on asparagus. A little trick he learned at Grace in Fort Worth. And a big deal, because my husband doesn't particularly enjoy eggs unless they are of the scrambled variety plus, he'd never poached an egg before. So sweet and so yum.


After dinner, I opened all of my wonderful gifts and we ate cake. Mmm, cake.


Since the day I came home from the hospital, my dad and I have had a birthday tradition. Every year we take a picture together on the front porch of our house. We've missed a few years, here and there, but for the most part, we have a chronological look, year by year, of just how much hair I've caused my father to lose. In this picture he is headless, and therefore has no hair. I think you can imagine what kind of holy-terror I must have been to cause this amount of baldness.


Really, my twenty-fifth birthday was all about eating and drinking and spending time with family. Just like every other birthday. Just as it should be.

All Around Our House Next Week: A Kitchen Shower for the Bride-to-Be

A Gardening Hootenanny and a Flower Bed

Week of March 8 through 14

The Parents came into town for a visit this weekend and we had so much fun! We originally planned for their visit knowing that my mom would be coming to town for a bridal shower. But, when we realized that our parents could be coerced into manual labor, we knew that this weekend would also be the perfect time to build our garden.

My dad has the greenest thumb. He inherited it from my grandparents, who have the biggest garden plot I've ever seen. Sadly, I think the emerald-phalange genetics skipped me, though I did inherit the crazy. Having a backyard garden was inspired by my dad's natural ability to coax vegetation from the earth. Growing up, we always had squash and tomatoes and blackberries from the backyard plot that my dad lovingly tended. It seemed only natural to me that when The Husband and I finally had a yard of our own, we would plant our own garden.

For the last month we have been in the final, serious, planning and preparation stages for the installation of our garden in our backyard. We've done our research: picking out the best location, the best plant varieties and the best soil for our area. We also spent a day driving around our neighborhood to determine what kind of retaining walls we liked, and what kind we didn't (ahem...the lip on those concrete landscaping bricks is supposed to go down). After determining that we liked the rock wall look (and why wouldn't we, since it was the most expensive option) we chose a pallet of moss rock at our local landscaping supplier and arranged to have it delivered. We were all set for our Gardening Hootenanny (with free labor!)... then it started raining.

Since the beginning of the year our area had gotten a total of 2 inches of rain, over 8 inches behind the average for this time of year. As the weekend approached, the skies darkened, the temperature dropped and the meteorologists began predicting drizzle and rain for the entire weekend. And over the weekend we had carefully and thoughtfully set aside for our garden, no less! Still, we were not going to allow this to deter the hootenanny-ness of our hootenanny.

The 1.5 tons of stone we ordered was delivered via bobcat to our driveway on Saturday morning. I asked the delivery driver if he wouldn't mind just driving it on back into our backyard for us and he just grinned. I think maybe he had heard that a few times before. Meanwhile, The Husband drove off into the rain with a trailer to pick up 2 cubic yards of some kind of special soil.

Drizzle, drizzle, drizzle...

The Parents and I ventured into the backyard, and after much deliberation, staked out the plot for our garden. It so happens that the spot in our yard posing the least grass resistance was also located between the two sad, lonely and haphazardly positioned plants that existed in our yard when we moved in. While my dad tried to rescue the few lone patches of grass that would soon be covered by our garden (to fill in the bare patches in our poor, sad lawn), my mom and I loaded up the wheelbarrow with stones and started shuttling them from the front to the back of the house.


Sprinkle, drizzle, sprinkle...

My dad, expert stone stacker that he is, had the front wall built three courses high by the time I loosened my mom's shackles and allowed her to stop toiling long enough to get ready for her shower. I continued to move stone, and Dad kept stacking, and occasionally breaking, stone (think: chain gang in a old prison movie). I think he enjoyed breaking the stone with the sledgehammer a little bit too much. In his defense, though, some of the stones did need to be broken in order to make a stable stack, but the determination of which stones those were was a bit willy-nilly. Soon, The Husband's Parents arrived to lend a hand (and some tools) and shortly after that, we had all four walls of the garden built.


Sprinkle, rain, rain...

The Husband returned with the soil just as we were finishing the walls in the backyard. Thanks to The Husband's Parents, we had an extra shovel, an extra wheelbarrow and two extra people to help us haul the stinky, compost rich soil to the garden. Little by little, The Husband, my MIL, FIL and I filled the wheelbarrows and then the menfolk hauled them into the backyard and dumped them into the garden.


Rain, rain, pour...

When the garden was full, we still had about a quarter of a trailer full of soil. We also had some left over stones. Even though we were all wet and tired, and the rain had really started coming down, we decided to take on the front flower bed. (Bonus project! Order now and we'll include some rain absolutely free!) We laid out a garden hose to mark the shape of the bed, and then my dad and MIL dug out a shallow trench while The Husband and I followed behind, filling it in with stones.

One would think this would be a much easier task, since it was certainly smaller. But, I'm an organized, anal retentive, methodical planner, who needs to think things out before making a decision, and since I hadn't even considered the possibility of tackling the flower bed, my crazy started showing. As the project progressed, all of our lovely assistants were thoughtfully asking me if I liked how it was looking. I think this might have been because at one point during the construction of the garden, when my dad asked The Husband if he was happy with the progress thus far, I said, "He doesn't care what it looks like, as long as it grows tomatoes, I'm the one who approves aesthetics around here." Thus, my approval was needed on the front flower bed, quickly, before everyone gave up and went inside where it was dry. And my head nearly exploded from the power/unplanned disorder of it all.

No sooner had we placed the last rock, than it started raining in sheets. Thankfully, we were finished, sadly, everyone would later die of pneumonia.


The next morning, we visited our local nursery to pick out vegetables for our garden and plants for our front bed. We still needed expert advice on plant selection, though, so we requested that the king of all things agricultural help us. Of course, it was still raining, and the nursery is not covered. In true royal style, my dad stood under the only dry overhang at the nursery, while we ran out into the rain and grabbed flats of different plant varieties for his perusal. The king then decreed which plants were the best specimens, all the while staying perfectly dry.

Drizzle, rain, drizzle...

We spent the afternoon ducking in and out of the house, avoiding the downpours, and planting our garden and flower bed in the drizzle. We planted tomatoes, bell peppers, yellow squash and beans in the back. Then we designed our front flower bed with shrubs, begonias and impatiens. We got dirty, and wet, and we got some invaluable garden advice from my dad. And we finally got our garden finished. Over the weekend of our Gardening Hootenanny, our area received 2.5 inches of rain. We got more rain while we were outside working in the yard than we had previously gotten all year!


We are so excited about how everything turned out. It is more than what we were even hoping for. We can see our garden when we wake up every morning, and we love it. We can't wait for our first harvest!


We truly could not have accomplished what we did without the help of our families. We are so grateful that they live close by, and that they were willing to give up their weekend to stand in the rain and deliberate over each and every stone placement with us. Everyone worked so hard, and we are so appreciative of the effort and energy they put in to help turn our dreams of a garden into a reality.

When we were looking for a house, we knew that we wanted something with a lot of space and an open kitchen so that there would always be room for company. We really enjoy having all of our family together at our house, and we wanted to have a comfortable gathering place for everyone. This weekend was one of those times when we felt so grateful for what have. Our family, all together, cozy in front of the fire, spending peaceful time together in our happy home. Perfect.

All Around Our House Next Week: Transplanting our Herb Garden and Bikes