7 Quick Takes Friday (Vol. 12)

1) He is Risen! Truly, He is Risen! I hope everyone had a blessed Holy Week and Easter. Will and I had a fairly relaxing Easter weekend at home. We went to mass early on Sunday morning in an attempt to avoid a mass that was too crowded then headed over to some friends' apartment for Easter lunch. We had a nice time and I really enjoyed seeing some of my friends back in Annapolis!

2) You know those ads that say stuff like "1 Tip to a Flat Belly" or "Click here for ancient secret for a flat belly?" Yea. Well, every time I see one of those ads I feel like saying "OOHHH!!! ME!! PICK ME! I KNOW! DON'T GET PREGNANT!!!" But, I'm pretty sure that isn't the tip or secret they're willing to share with you if you click on that link.

3) I ran into this while doing laundry last week. 

At least I'm not afraid of killing spiders :)

4) These beauties came out in time for Holy Week! 

They've been so nice to drive home to. They lasted until earlier this week when heavy rainstorms took a toll on the petals. And, yes, one day I will (err...my husband will) move those bags of potting soil :)

5) I watched my very first episode of "Extreme Couponing" this week. It was a little insane. I've started to try to use coupons more often, but find I forget about the ones I have until they've already expired. I'm working on coming up with a system for organizing my coupons, but it just takes so much time and energy that I'm not sure it's really worth it. I use coupons when I remember, but don't freak out if I forget.

6) This weekend is chock full of awesome events! First, there's the royal wedding which I'm actually not ALL that interested in, but I'm sure I'll poke around some of the photos that get published. Then I get to see my niece/goddaughter get baptized and meet her for the first time. And last, but certainly not least, is the beatification of Pope John Paul II. Lots to look forward to! Yay for weekends!

7) My favorite Facebook post of the week goes to Emily - in honor of all the birthday's that happened in her house this week. Both she and her two daughters have birthday's within 5 days of each other (and her brother-in-law is thrown in somewhere pretty close as well). How awesome is that!? She had several posts that made me smile, but I think I liked this one the best:

"holy moly, two 1-year olds for the next 36 hours. im that mom!"

7 Quick Takes Friday (Vol. 10)

1) I finally managed to sign up for a "Childbirth and Baby Care" class this week. Apparently, I called much later than most couples because the next open class was for June 25/26 (unless we wanted to do a 6 week class that met every Friday night). Uhh...that's literally 2 weeks before my due date. Yes. TWO WEEKS!!! I wish someone had warned me to sign up in like the 4th month of pregnancy (I'm only a couple weeks into the 6th month). 

As I was calling later in the week to schedule my breast feeding class and a maternity tour I had the presence of mind to ask if there is a waiting list for classes that were already full. I mean SURELY people cancel on them occasionally! Luckily, they DO have a waiting list. And, in fact, the class for this weekend had one open spot. So, I quickly called and emailed my husband to confirm with him that it would be ok with him if we took the class this weekend. I realize it's a LITTLE early (they suggest finishing the class 3-5 weeks before you're due) but seriously...I don't want to walk into that hospital in labor without having SOME clue as to what I'm about to do/what I'm getting myself in to. Bullet dodged.

2) I tried several new recipes this week. You can find the first one here. The other two will be posted in the near future. One will be for peanut butter pie while the other will be for baked ziti! Yumm!

3) I *think* I've figured out why my back has been hurting, but I'm still in the process of testing my theory. My (current) theory is that it's all the driving I've been doing that's causing this one particular back pain - in one very specific spot toward the top right of my back. I think it has to do with DC traffic and my driving a stick shift. I just noticed yesterday that when I put the clutch in it puts an extra strain in that specific spot on my back. So, I decided to try moving my seat closer to the steering wheel (only by 1 notch even!) this way I wouldn't have to push as far or hard to push in the clutch. I tried it out for the first time on my commute home from babysitting yesterday, and it seemed to help. But, the real test will be if this continues to help and if the pain goes away completely. Only time will tell.

4) The ants are getting on my last nerve. The baits aren't working. Or they at least don't seem to be working. I noticed yesterday that they got into my flour canister (which has a rubber seal!). Those pesky little monsters. I'm sooo ready to enlist the help of a professional to take care of this problem once and for all - even if this means I'll have an exterminator come to my house several times a year. I'm just so done cleaning the counters 2-3 times a day, not leaving food out, being diligent about washing dishes right after they've been used, etc and still finding ants all over the kitchen. 

5) Many of my friends seem to be talking about the start of baseball season lately. Sadly, baseball just isn't a sport I've gotten in to. I mean, it's not that I dislike the sport, but seriously the season seems to last FOREVER!! It's not like we've gone ALL that long without it. I can't seem to wrap my mind around the obsession. Can anyone out there please explain this to me? I just don't seem to get it.

6) Happy April Fool's Day!! There are days when I'm happy to not be teaching and this is one of them - even though none of my students ever did anything bad to me I definitely can't say that about what they did to each other or even to other teachers. I'd like to share one particularly funny April Fool's joke a couple of my students attempted to pull/pulled (you can be the judge of their success) on the entire school community a couple years ago.
To give you a little background the school I worked at was set up much like a college campus in that it had several buildings (6 I believe) where classes took place, and they would go from building to building depending on where their next class was.
This particular year two students came up with the brilliant idea to post a sign on every bathroom door on campus that read "Out of Order go to [insert another building here]." So, someone would try to go to the bathroom in one building, realize it was "out of order," then head to the next building only to find the same sign, then head to the next building, etc. The teachers figured it out pretty quickly. After one teacher went to 3 different buildings in an attempt to go to the restroom s/he emailed the entire faculty asking them to check the bathrooms in their respective buildings for these signs. Sure enough there were signs in every building (which were promptly taken down, of course).
What about you? Do you have a favorite April Fool's joke/story?

7) My favorite Facebook post of the week goes to Lisa. I think it speaks for itself. Oh - and when you're finished reading this you should check out her blog.
"I fly out to Boston tomorrow at 1:00 for Faith & Family Mom's Day Away...I can't get myself to start packing because I don't know how to fit Elena in the suitcase. Should I strap her to the outside or put a little doggie bed in there??"

I'm going to war...

....in my kitchen. Again. Remember when I thought I had my ant problem solved? Yea - thought would be the key word there. This past week they've started mosey-ing their way back into my kitchen. My "wall-o-cinnamon" doesn't seem to work on them anymore. They've learned how to go around it by walking on the wall instead...and a few of them don't even care about the cinnamon - they just walk right over the cinnamon!

I was killing ants daily for a while before Will and I decided we needed a more permanent solution than me standing by the sink squishing ants several times a day. We decided to try ant baits. I had actually bought some last fall when the ants were out in full force, but before I discovered the cinnamon trick. So, we decided to put the ant baits out. Now I'm constantly having this dilemma: do I kill the ants or let them be hoping they've a) taken some of the bait and b) are on their way back to the nest. It's driving me a little crazy just letting the little boogers walk all over my kitchen - although they do stay mostly by the sink. They particularly like our sponges...even when they're brand new - can anyone explain that one to me? Anyway, now I feel compelled to clean the counters any time I want to use them because who knows if they've spread the poison (and who knows what else) all over our counters.

I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to be able to tolerate giving them free reign. I haven't actually seen a single ant go into or out of either of the baits, but Will assures me we need to give it a few days to take effect. Deep breath. If this doesn't work what am I going to do? Simply squish ants for the rest of my life?

7 Quick Takes Friday (Vol. 8)

1) I finished the curtains for the living room last weekend! This was no small feat. It has taken me literally months to complete this project, and I'm so happy it's over. There will be a "curtain" post coming soon!

2) Some creature has been getting into my tulips. I'm not sure what kind of creature it is, but I shall begin my research today. At least 2 of the bulbs have been dug up and a bunch of the tops of the sprouts have been eaten off! Needless to say, I was fairly upset to discover this when I got home last night. If you know anything about what might be the culprit I'm all ears.

3) I was a slacker and did nothing to celebrate St. Patrick's Day this year. I didn't even wear any green. Pitiful, I know. But, until yesterday I only had five maternity shirts and none of them were green. I guess I'm going to have to step it up next year :)

4) My book of Shorter Christian Prayer came in this week. I'm excited to get started using it even if it is over a week into Lent.

5) The ants are back. This means I'm going to have to be ridiculously diligent about keeping the kitchen spic-n-span to keep them at bay. They must have found another way into the kitchen, or maybe I just need to replace the Cinnamon. I now know what the next major item on my "to-do" list is. Darn those little ants!

6) I purchased bedding and paint for the nursery this week. It's exciting to really get started with putting the nursery together. I'm really excited about the bedding because it's so cute (but what baby stuff isn't?). I went with an animal theme and the bumper, quilt, etc are SUPER soft and have lots of different textures. 

7) My favorite Facebook quote of the week comes from my sister, Julia. Yay! I can't wait!

"One more month to go! Expecting our second in mid-April. :)"

Stink Bugs

I'm sure you've all heard about the explosion of stink bugs this year. The funny thing about these little creatures is that they don't have any natural predators in the US, so they just keep reproducing and there's not really anything to control how many of them there are. For any other bug that presents this problem one would typically just squish them and throw them away when they become a nuisance. Unfortunately, as their name implies, they smell when you squish them. Instead I have resorted to simply vacuuming them up. So far, this seems to have worked. I haven't seen any of them hanging out by the door waiting to come in lately.
Below you'll find a picture of my husband vacuuming one of them out of the light in our living room. (Thanks, honey!)

Ants

This past spring I started to see a few ants here and there in the kitchen. It was never more than a few ants at a time, so I never really worried about them too much. I would just kill them and continue with whatever I was doing. I tried to be very conscious about wiping down the counters and not leaving anything that would be enticing to ants laying around. This seemed to work well until one day in August I was really busy. I don't even remember what all was going on but, I do remember that one of the things I was doing was baking some cookies to take to my husbands softball tournament and my friend's party later that afternoon. So, we went to the tournament and I left after their first game to head to my friend's party. When I finally got home it was fairly late so I cooked up something quick for dinner and when I went to wash the dishes (remember, I didn't have time to do them that morning because I was crunched for time) there were ants everywhere. I mean EVERYWHERE!!! Hundreds of them. Clearly they had found the crumbs I had left then gone back to their nest and let the whole colony know about this gold mine. I stood by our sink squishing ants for a good 30 mins. I must have killed at least 150-200 ants.
After that incident they kept coming back looking for more food. It was really frustrating, so I was talking about this at our labor day party and one of my friends said she had a similar problem (with ants in her kitchen). She said she read online that ants hate cinnamon, so she created a line of cinnamon where they were coming from and she hasn't had a problem with them since. She said she even had ants waiting to cross the cinnamon coming out of her pantry!
So, I took her advice and created a wall 'o cinnamon to deter the ants.

As you can see the wall has been messed up a little bit, but it still serves it's purpose of keeping the ants out. They all came from that corner. I have only seen one ant since putting the cinnamon there almost a month ago - and I think he was already in the kitchen when I put the cinnamon there so he couldn't get back to his nest.
Lesson learned: If you ever have ants in your kitchen all you need to do is figure out where they're coming from then create a line of cinnamon for them to cross and you'll never see them again :)

Sawfly Larvae

Just as a forewarning what I am about to write about is kind of gross - especially if you don't like bugs.

My mom came up this past weekend to help me with house stuff. One of the things she helped me with was the front yard - the flower bed in particular. She showed me how to weed more efficiently and effectively than I had been doing before. We also spent some more time trimming the bushes - particularly the ones closer to the ground that I wasn't sure what to do with before. And she helped me clean up the flower bed in general by raking, etc. After about 10-15 minutes into working on the flower beds my mom asked out one of the bushes. Can you tell which one??

Upon further inspection, and to our horror, we found this (or these depending on how you look at it).

Ummm, EEEEEEWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!! WORMS EVERYWHERE!!!! We looked some more and they were all over the poor bush eating it to pieces (if you couldn't already tell from the first picture). 

Mom was adamant that we needed to find out what these were and how we could get rid of them - ASAP. So, we clipped them off the healthier bush (they were just beginning to infest the bush to the right) and put the clippings in a bag. We then took the clippings to Lowe's to figure out what we should do. They had a professional arborist who was really helpful and told us that my bush was infested with "Sawfly Larvae." These little creatures eventually grow into wasp-like bugs, but they don't sting. 

The solution? Spray them with this soapy liquid. The sawfly larvae apparently breathe through their skin, so the soap adheres to them and basically suffocates the larvae (fine by me!). So we bought a couple bottles of the soapy stuff, went home and began spraying away.

I have continued to go out every day and spray any remaining larvae I can find that are still alive. And we now have what I like to call our "Sawfly Graveyard"...

Yes - those are the dead larvae. There are several patches of them below the bush. I don't feel sorry for them at all. Here is what they did to my poor bush:

They ate EVERYTHING! The guy ay Lowe's says our bush has a 50/50 chance of surviving :(

Here's to hoping it survives!! I will continue to diligently go out and search the bush for any more of those darn sawfly larvae. I shall let you know what happens with the bush.

Hopefully it will be strong enough to regenerate...

Happy healing little bushy!