David and Goliath: She Loves Her Green Beans

It has been such a joy to have Kaylin in our lives. Her mother often has games to coach in the evening so I get to tend her quite often. She is a very happy baby. She has barely started to eat solids. She just loves her green beans. When I tend her I get absolutely nothing done. I am content to feed her, change her, play with her, love her, and just hold her for hour after hour.

Kaylin loves to get butterfly kisses from all of us. In this picture, her Uncle Patrick is giving her butterfly kisses which brings a squeal of delight from Kaylin. The last couple of days Kaylin has just started to crawl. She puts her little "booty" in the air and rocks back and forth. I'll have to get a few pictures to document her unique crawling style.

Last week, we celebrated Kaylin's Daddy's birthday and this past week we celebrated Andrea's birthday. Ty and Andrea went to Cucina Toscana for a delicious birthday dinner celebration and then came over to our house for cake and ice cream.

On Saturday, my husband called me while he was listening to the radio on his drive to Timberlakes. The garden show was at J & J Garden in Layton. I had never been to that particular nursery before. Wow! For a flower and garden lover like me, it was sensory overload. Very much like when you go into a scrapbooking store, this garden center was greenhouse after greenhouse of beautiful plants. I spent a couple of hours there enjoying the site. The Garden Center had brought in 40,000 tomato plants for their tomato extravaganza. I bought the tomato varieties: champion, celebrity, beefmaster, roma, and sun sugar cherry tomatoes. The gallon size tomato plants were $1.49. What a great price! I was particularly pleased to find out that they had a pond department. When my daughter, Nichole got married she wanted the reception in our backyard. Our backyard has a very steep hillside that was totally covered in Pyracantha bushes. If you are not familiar with that bush it has very sharp thorns and it grows like a weed. We put in a beautiful waterfall and pond in place of the hillside of the Pyracantha bushes. We have enjoyed our backyard so much. We put Koi fish in the pond. Every winter we lose some fish due to raccoons and other natural predators that live in the nearby canyon.

J & J had some Koi fish for sale. We lost about 12 of our favorite fish a couple of winters ago. They were beautiful butterfly fish that we had gotten from a vendor from Arkansas at a local Koi Show. My 2 favorite were about 24 inches long and were scaleless and had a beautiful light blue coloring. J & J Garden had some butterfly fish for sale. They were only about 6 inches long but some of them were the blue color that I love. Koi fish are not very colorful when they are young fish. As the fish mature, the color intensifies. So, we look forward to enjoying a summer watching our new fish grow and mature. I love spring and summer. I'm not fond of the heat but I love the beautiful flowers that thrive in the yard.

Now in Utah, you cannot plant tomatoes until after May 15th. However, for the last few years we have planted our tomatoes with walls of water. The walls of water insulate the tomatoes from the cold and you can get tomatoes about a month earlier than if we waited until after the danger of frost. So this week we have a lot of planting to do so we can enjoy the harvest.

Have a great week and think SPRING!