This Year, Art Project, and Garden

This Year

This year has been the oddest year so far. I know everyone keeps commenting on it, but I must agree. I mean, look at the insanity that has happened, and it’s only late August. It feels to me like this year has dragged on and on. I’m hitting a point where I’m almost numb to the craziness that has happened. My husband got moved shifts, then got laid off. Then COVID hit, triggering stress beyond belief at my clinic, including a two-week furlough. Thankfully, I got to break it up some over the year or I don’t know how I would have managed that. After that the George Floyd protests hit, and my hospital is in the heart of the area for those protests. We packed up my mother-in-law and moved her out of her house, but her new house isn’t finished yet. So, she’s come to stay with us on several occasions. Then we found out my grandfather has a fairly rare and serious autoimmune disease that will cause him to go blind if left untreated. The treatment? Immunosuppressants. Did I mention he’s 89 years old? I’m not sure how much more of this I can handle. My hope is this year will slip out like an unwanted guest dodging the bill.

Art Project

I don’t understand what I’ve done to deserve my son. Sure, we have our moments, as all parents and children do. But he’s such a tender-hearted and kind little boy. This weekend we were working on a project from his Kids Art Box I talked about last week. It’s a painting of an evening sky with the moon and stars. One thing the tutorial talked about was making the stars spell out your name. Well, instead of putting his name in the stars, he used the first initial of his “immediate” family—me, his Daddy, his Meemah, his Papa, and his Auntie (my sister). This is the family with whom he spends the vast majority of his time. This was unprompted and his choice. I did my best to stay out of his project and let him create it however he wanted. Made my heart melt when he told me about what he’d done as he showed me.

Garden

There’s big news from our garden! We’ve grown a rather good handful of cherry tomatoes and grape tomatoes. And we’ve got two Purple Cherokee tomatoes, one almost ripe and one still growing. For some reason, my spinach got all weird. Oh well. But we have a lot of bunching onions that I’m hoping will get bigger yet because they’re more the size of chives than onions. The best news of all, at least according to my son, is that his bush green beans grew three beans on them! I had to laugh at how excited he was for his beans when he saw them. They’ve had a bit of a rough go of it for a while because they were getting over-watered. Once we adjusted that and accounted for the rain, they did better. And now they have beans, and that’s the best thing in the world to my son.