Singer Heavy Duty and garden update

Heavy Duty Singer machine

We traveled yesterday to Murray and picked up a new Singer Heavy Duty sewing machine. It would have cost a third of the amount just to have the old one looked at, which was nearly what I had paid for it in the first place. It had lasted over four years - so... it was time for a new one. We did get some money for it in trade-in, and the lady showed me how to use this machine before we left. It does not shake like the Advance did when I am sewing - which was something I had grown accustomed to. It does collect a lot more static and dust, but it has more metal than plastic in it. Take the good part of that with the bad etc...

Esme asleep in her bed.
She was quite tired after all of the running around yesterday.

One of the things she said while we were in town was that we were feeding the truck 'banana gas' - because the station we stopped at had yellow pumps and red ones and green ones. We chose a yellow tank. I had to listen closely to get what she meant about that one. She was very talkative yesterday. At the sewing shop she told me that Daddy was 'getting to me he is anoising at me' - because Daddy wanted her to slow down and not run around. She said she was 'mad face' at him and he was 'laugh face' at her so it was annoying. Hearing this new 'spurt' stage she is going through is very funny for us right now! This morning when she did wake up I told her to put on her shoes because downstairs was cold. She said she would go on the porch because it was warm out there. Then she came back inside after a moment and put on her shoes and said she would go downstairs because she had to use the bathroom - and then go back outside because it was warm out there. And I just nodded along and said 'uh huh....' then she went into a whole description of everywhere we went yesterday and all that we did - and on to her plans for today 'take ride to walmart' and 'paint castle'. The castle is what she did with the box and styrofoam from the sewing machine packaging. I told her I was not painting styrofoam - and she is pretty mad and sulking at me about that. She wants to paint the castle with the new pink paint we bought (for paper) last week. This morning when I was getting her cereal ready she told me 'Mom, I think that is not enough. It needs to be here and up and up.' That was different for me -but I did give her another cup and she was happy. She did call the rice crispies 'peanuts' though - said she had eaten them yesterday and wanted to eat them again today.

prototype dress
I didn't finish all of the inside because it was so late last night - but it should do well this summer.

volunteeers

Here are the updated pictures of the garden. The west field has corn about 4 inches high and the fenced garden has monstrous plants! The bed here by the cabbages was planted with carrots. I did NOT plant tomatoes in it. All of those are volunteers from last year's yellow tomatoes.

fenced garden

west field

I intend to plant one more time down here in the west field - and that should be the last succession. There are squash plants doing well beyond this corn and two successions of corn here, three rows each.

bursting

Esme is bursting out all over the place. She had a bath and was 'throwing letters' to me back and forth. She had said she was 'gone' while hiding - so I said 'don't forget to write', which started it. The last letter I "threw" her said 'We will miss you. signed Mom and Dad' and she said 'Ahh.. what a nice letter - oh no! The cat peed on it! ARRGGH CAT! (throw away).' What a character.

She told Dad she was 'just reading a book' and didn't want supper. Mark commented to me that she has graduated from asking him 'what is that' about his books to 'What word is that?' and 'What word that say?' etc etc. He has seen her trying to sound out words before she asks him what it says. When I named her Sims characters for her the other day she was sounding things out some, too.

She washed her hair for school tomorrow and for once in forever - she didn't demand to go to school right then and there once she was dressed. She said it was dark time outside, and she would have to go to sleep, and have it be light time, and then go to school with kids at 8 o clock. YAY! cheers I've been waiting for that!

I weeded the garden and planted the 'pink' popcorn today in the places the red popcorn had not filled out well. It is actually lavendar and tan kernels in the package. We will see what we get. We have flowers on the bush beans and the peppers, and golf-ball sized green tomatoes, as well!

Our little girl is on a roll...

I think she is definitely back 'in fine form' again.  I said that last week - hopefully I am right this time!  She was playing Sims 2 on my computer while I was knitting.  She had set up 'a party' which included selling half the house's furniture to have money to buy balloons, chairs and food banquets outside and then she started digging holes and building 'hills' as she calls them, spikes that reached all the way to the sky positioned all around the chairs forming a wall of 'teeth'.  She got clicked off of the icon she wanted and wanted help from Daddy.  He helped her, and then she needed something else - so I get over there to see this very odd scene while she is saying she needs me to change the viewpoint 'How do I get down there Mama'- because she wanted the 45 degree viewpoint (first one) on and I had the overhead viewpoint I prefer (second one) on when I finished helping her.  The clincher is why she describes needing to 'use the shovel dig a hole'...  She said she had to invite everyone over to the party but the water-filled holes and walls were to keep the monsters out or to have the monsters fall in the holes so they don't eat the people.  ??  Oh my.  She does have her 'own ideas' about what games are really all about.  This one is about throwing parties with balloons, having lots of chairs, avoiding monsters and going dancing!

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the strange Sims2 scene she was making...

you can't see them very well but the rest of the house is surrounded by bits

of 'moat' - large holes dug and filled with water.  

It was also interesting to see her 'snapshots' she had made while she was playing.  At times, she was taking twelve pictures per minute of game time all of the 'thoughts' the people were thinking about while they were sleeping, or reading a book etc etc... I am going to have a lot of files to delete if she plays quite a bit more on my computer!  Also, daddy's 'people game' has fighting. (skyrim)  Mama's people game has people but they are no fighting.  She told me that today...

Her language is improving quite a bit.  We are hearing things much closer to full sentences from her.  We still sometimes have to say 'HUH?' but mostly it is because she is rattling things off so quickly.  When she was on my computer and wanted the headphones on - had them almost in the jack and on her head before I knew what she wanted - but then she said 'they no work for me *sigh*'.  I turned the volume up and she was so happy - couldn't adjust them to her size and she was upset about that...but later a song was on 'something a noise to me, I no like it.'  'annoying' is a word she is still working out, but she understands the concept.

She was watching a bit on a 'grownup' movie in between drink cups and bathroom breaks from being outside and made a on-the-nose comment about the plotline because she has seen a parody of it before on the Simpsons.  Mark and I looked at each other and weren't quite sure if we heard what we thought we did - 'That man try GRRRR and it so heavy. (the bathtub).  The big n'dan man, he do it.'  That is what we thought we heard - but the jury is still out, she wouldn't repeat it and went running back outside.  At the store she wanted 'blue shoes to go sleep in' - fuzzy blue slip-on slippers in the women's section.  She must have seen that in a book or on computer.   We looked, but found nothing in her size in the kids section.  She did pick out a pair of Hello Kitty clogs like her purple croc shoes that we agreed on - there is coming a day soon the purple shoes are going to fall apart!

And there were 'tigers' in our garden according to her - when I was thinning corn.  She wanted to 'come into the grass plants (corn) with you' to get away from them.  Mama wouldn't play that game - because I didn't want her to knock the corn over.  She carried a very embarrassed orange housecat (our PeanutNinja cat) out of the garden in an undignified fashion and told the 'tiger' to stay out.  She was trying to read things on my screen and was very excited about the possibility of getting a box of books she had seen me looking at in an auction.  I told her they would come to our mailbox and she said she didn't want a nail box, no nails, don't need nails.  MAIL box - oh wait, that is a different story - yes books in mailbox, she wants that!

A long week for little girl and for us

This has been a long and stressful week with strep and a four year old.  But it might become easier now?  Esme seems to be getting better and has not given me more scares in the temperature department.  I did not write on here about it - but Wednesday Esme gave me a terrible scare in the bath when she had a momentary shock reaction to the change in temperature.  Later that night she sweated so much she actually got cold and was shivering and had white cold feet.  A bath followed by wrapping up in blankets and sleep brought her temp back up then - and then she was feverish again in a few hours.  With these I watched her so very closely from that point on knowing that this fever was going up and down so quickly.  And she is so much smaller than us it effects her much more.  Also, she does not tell me if she is cold or hot, or tells me the opposite - and I still have to physically check to really see how she is.  One of those nights I was checking her every few hours, waking up before the alarm I had set nearly every time just because I was worried about her.  I checked her several times again last night and she was stable each time.  She was sweating some, but not enough to make her wet and cold as long as she kept her blanket on.

She ate a plate of food yesterday, apples and chicken, and said 'Mama, I eat it and it not hard, it is good!'  And she didn't throw up.  That will help a lot if she is hungry and eating again.  I was getting worried there for a few days when spoonfuls of yogurt and a small chunk of chicken were 'Mama I'm full I don't want to (puke).'  Daddy seems a little down in the weather right now as well - I hope Grandma and Grandpa are not feeling likewise.

I worked a half-day yesterday because I was just so tired from being up and checking on her two nights in a row.. it had caught up to me and my brain was working 'on the back half'.  ie: I was able to answer questions but it took me a long time and it felt like I was translating everything from left-to-right in order to arrive at the conclusion.  I was dialing fax numbers instead of phone numbers when they were both right in front of me, and was not finding my words very well, or at least, the words I was finding were nonsense, or mixes of the foreign languages I know with English that would not have been very comprehensible to those around me.  

Other things Esme has said to me lately:
'I be the happier in the whole wide world you come with me to the big town and I come with you be at work!'
This child build a castle.  I no have a castle.  Can you build this child castle? (referring to the box).
'All at the same time' has been showing up in her conversation.  I can't repeat how she uses it yet - but she gets very excited about all the things she wants to do, names them in order, then at the end tacks on 'And it is all at the same time and we are happy!' or something like that.
'Mama I had a dream, of green juice and medicine and I helped Grandma to put a sheet on the bed at her house, let's go, let's help Grandma at the white house and get green juice!.'

Garden:
I've been out to the garden and it is a scary thing!  Things have jumped a whole foot of growth 'while I've been gone.'  Everything needs weeding - as the weeds are a foot high, as well.  The peppers and the tomatoes have flowers.  The cabbages are about two feet across.  The pole beans need poles and the corn needs thinning.  Now if it will dry out some without the sun being beating down on my back - and Esme is truly better - I will have to get some work done out there.

a bit better

Esme seems a bit better this morning.  She is still coughing.  She was sweating quite a bit last night and I changed her clothes to keep her dry, added a warming blanket on her legs so she would not get cold like the night before.  The wide differences between cold and hot were worrying me quite a bit.  She has not had more tylenol but seems to be doing well without it.  She had her antibiotic and a decent amount of cereal.  She played outside some with her plastic deer in a puddle, watched me weed a little in the garden and walked me to the lake and back - would not admit that she was tired and cried a lot when we got back.  I convinced her in and made her happier with new socks *roll eyes* she had not seen yet.  She wanted a balloon to follow her, but wanted it to fly - she meant she wanted to put a small weight on it to keep it halfway airborne so it would wander around the room.  That is a trick Mark taught her.  I also had to draw a giraffe on it.  It popped after she stuck it with a pipe cleaner she was bouncing it around with... but she took that well and said 'I told you so Mama, now I have to throw it in the trash.'  You told me what?  It was your idea and now it popped!  *ha*  Now she is watching a cartoon and eating a popsicle.  She told me the grape flavor was 'strawberry coffee' and she wanted a banana one instead because strawberry coffee is for mamas.  The garden needs a lot more weeding - things are doing well out there.  Our volunteer tomatoes are half as big as the storebought ones.  Hopefully Esme will continue to improve over the next few days and I will get more time to keep the garden in good condition.  I need to clean in the house more, too - I did some power cleaning last night to calm my nerves, but there is a lot more to do.

back and forth

For a short time last night, after gave her some tylenol, Esme was 'full on', no fever and jabbering up a storm about everything.  She ate some yogurt and soup and held it and the medicine down.  She watched a few scenes of a 'scary' movie and was trying to save the characters from sea creatures.  We turned that off because she was much more awake and thinking about it than we thought she would be.  She played Minecraft for a little bit, fishing rod and bow and arrows and made a cake with me.  Like the other day she was in 'fine form' with all of her imagination and plans, more like the Esme of months ago.  But, I was very tired myself and insisted she go back to sleep after a few hours.  She was cool most of the night but then started back up again about 4 am, topping off at 100.5.  I woke her up a few minutes ago to give her the second dose of the antibiotic.  She is not coughing half as hard as before, either.  She kept the medicine in and went back to sleep.  I think it is working, but she didn't get enough of it yesterday to do a good job.  I have to work this afternoon into the night so I am hoping she shows more signs of improvement before I have to go.  I may need to catch more sleep this morning as well, while I can.

It rained very hard twice yesterday.  I am wondering how much the garden liked it - and if anything got beaten down by it!