whip cream/garden failures/free woman

First of all, the whip cream. Mostly I just wanted to post the pictures because Bryce is just too too cute without a shirt. We were painting with whip cream on Thursday (must have been a no-Daddy-day), and as you can see Bryce loves it, but I can't get my silly Brynn to get her hands dirty no matter what I try. I guess Myxophobia (fear of sticky things - I looked it up) starts young.

If she didn't have fun getting messy, at least she had fun encouraging Little Brother to do so. There's a fine line between Brynn encouraging Bryce to do things she doesn't want to do, and Brynn throwing Bryce under a bus. Such as:

"No, no, Bryce can get messy, he likes messy."

or

"No Daddy, throw Bryce in the air. Brynn doesn't like that, Bryce likes that." (which is true)

OR

"NOOO!! Give BRYCE a shot!!! Bryce WANTS to have a shot!! Don't give it to Brynn!"

Ok, the garden. Look at all the beautiful carrots we pulled out of the garden yesterday!

Well....I guess you win some, you lose some, because this is how big those carrots really are. Whoopsie, we planted them way way way way way too close.
On the plus side, Brynn thought the "twisty" carrots were "sooooo cuuuuute!" that she immediately wanted to run inside and eat them. So getting my 3 year old excited for vegetables has to count for something, right?

Our second failure was this: You can't just leave a broccoli plant to keep getting bigger and better, because they just bloom.

Which is what happened to our last broccoli plant. And it brought lots of bees.

So we purged our garden, ready to try a whole new set of crops...

when we came to our third disappointment of the day. After we had gotten our runaway lettuce plant, broccoli plant, and everything else out of there, we got a closer look to see that our garden was pretty severely infested with tiny green bugs which may or may not be termites, so we'll have to look into that (immediately, I know, I know). We sprayed the heck out of our garden box and decided to wait until the bugs were under control before we planted the new stuff. By the way, we decided, after lots of compromise (mostly Marty talking me down from 6 squares of eggplant to only 2) to try eggplant, beans, strawberries, tomatoes, green bell and jalapeno peppers, and we'll keep the spinach, parsley, and cilantro going.

And as for the free woman thing, if you'll allow me to get a bit personal, I weaned Bryce this week. He turns one next month, he is cutting his two front teeth, and I just thought it was time. I've been telling Marty for a while that when he is officially weaned, I am going to get the ABSOLUTE SPICIEST thing I can find. I told him that I didn't even want to be able to enjoy the food because my mouth was burning, THAT spicy. Well, Saturday night we were pooped and we didn't want to go to far for food, so we went to the Burger King hoping they had something like the FLAME-THROWER (the Dairy Queen burger that was my ceremonial wean meal with Brynn). No luck at Burger King, just the crummy spicy chicken sandwich. I was so bummed and I told Marty "That's not how it was supposed to happen!" So my patient Marty took me to Fry's where I ran in and asked the man at the sushi counter to give me the spiciest thing he had. He seemed excited, like, overly-eager to oblige. So, short story long, I had my spicy sushi that was both miserable and blissful all at the same time.