Success!

Yeah!!!! We grew something besides weeds! Here's a look at how our garden project progressed. Hopefully next week I'll have some sunflower pictures and tomatoes and I'll take a picture of the baby pumpkin/squash (can't tell the difference because they've kind of grown together and taken over the garden).

Dinner Party

Yesterday we had our first dinner party in our MD house (having Georgia, Todd, and Mike over doesn't count, they are practically family). Kurt invited all the people on his team at work to come over and he cooked a Puerto Rican feast. While overall it was a success, there were a few SNAFUs:

Making mofongo is a little bit tricky and apparently a little bit dangerous. This is the result of hot old splashing up onto Kurt's hand (a pretty nice blister):

Next, we noticed a strange car driving up and down our cultesac about 20 minutes before we expected people to arrive. Eventually Kurt realized that it was one of our guests who was having trouble finding the house. The reason for his confusion... Kurt gave everyone the wrong address. Yup. That happened. I don't know who lives at 1404 (our address is 1409), but sorry for all the people knocking on your door last night! Oops.

Third SNAFU... forgetting to take the Mofongo (that was soo painful to make) out of the fridge until after everyone had finished thier dinner. It wasn't needed though, dinner was great without it. Kurt was pretty pissed though since it was so hard to make.

And finally, Kurt was proud to show off his geeky office to all his friends, but he forgot that this was laying on the endtable downstairs:

Perhaps I should explain... it came with my mother's day gift, but we don't know how it's supposed to be used, so we just left it next to the machine and forgot about it until last night. Too funny.

Overall it was a great night. The food was great, the Weaver cake (chocolate cake eaten in a bowl with milk) was a hit, and enough beer was consumed that we got all of Kurt's coworkers to do a round of Dance Central on the Kinect (which is always fun). Here are the rest of the pictures:

The reason for the party was to farewell Joe who is going to work in Texas for a few months. This is Joe blowing out the candles on his Lucky 38 cake.

Oh yeah, and as an early Birthday Party for Micaela / Going Away party for Avalon I took the girls to a spa and got them the "Little Beauty's" package where they got their hair, makeup, and nails done. It turned out really nice and the girls like getting spoiled by the hairdressers who thought they were adorable.

And just when I think the girls are 11 going on 16, they say something like this - "mom, can we rescue the frog that's stuck in this hole?" I said yes and they proceeded to play with it and chase it through the yard for the next 30 minutes until I make them put it on the other side of the fence so it can live in peace.

Progress

I told Mari I was going to put up a post, so I'm going to update you on our garden. Kurt got the idea he wanted to turn our side yard into a vegetable garden so we rented a big rototiller and this is what happened:

It was a little messy at first and had a lot of grass mixed in, but after two rounds of seeds, I think we are making progress. I can't quite remember what we planted, and there was some mix-up between the first time we planted and the second, but I think this is mostly correct:

Only one beet plant survived the first round of planting, but there are a lot of seedlings now, they are just hard to see. I'm not sure why we planted beets though, they are one of the few foods that I hate. I'm not so sure the peppers and onions are going to show up, but that's okay because the pumpkin is going to take over their rows anyways :)

Here is a better view of the far side of the garden with squash, tomotoes and peppers (that we bought as plants instead of seeds). We planted cantelope and something else below the peppers, but they haven't sprouted yet.

I like geraniums (at least that's what I think they are) because they are hard to kill and they are pretty. Too bad they don't have much smell to them.

Marigolds I think, or maybe petunias. It's more fun when you don't know.

I was having a little trouble focusing the fancy camera that Kurt has (as you'll see in the next two pictures) but here are my little chive sprouts in one of our left-over plastic pots.

Micaela and her BFF Avalon. We're sad that Avalon is moving next week, she fits in pretty well.

And finally... Jon. I wanted to show you his new haircut (thanks Georgia!) that makes him look like a little boy instead of a baby, but it came out a little too fuzzy. I think he's watching Dora and Diego, those are his favorites these days.