Valentine's Reveal: Tart and Sweet

Drum roll please....

Ta-Dah!

Greg walked in from his trip last night to this fine "Valentine's Day Tree" from his two favorite gals.  My Dear GB has been wanting a Meyer lemon tree for ages, and they seemed to be so hard to come by for so long.  I was shocked earlier this week to have heard through the grapevines of Facebook that Home Depot was carrying this particular variety.

The next morning while I was walking down to the creek with the girls, I stumbled upon a Meyer lemon tree in the wildest part of a lot next to the park that had fruit fallen all around the base and hanging ripe on the limbs.  It took all of my strength to summon the will of my Grandma Flanagan ("Angel") to not trespass and grab these delicious yellow gems.  Maybe next time I'll knock on the owner's door with a basket and ask if I may collect a few for my kitchen. Anyhow, I took this as the final sign that I must purchase one for my very own Valentine. I loaded up my boogerdy baby and high-tailed it across town to snag the best looking tree on the shelf.

Meyer lemons are so delicious.  Tart, yet sweet. Bursting with sunshine.  Homegrown citrus has a special place in my heart that leads me back to Arizona.  Not to Tucson where I went to college, no, further back.  To my earliest Christmases in Glendale with my Huddle grandparents, who had their own mini-citrus orchard lining the back wall of their yard in their suburban neighborhood.  Grandma would let us pick, and pick, and pick citrus fruit.  We would juice our oranges for breakfast, and enjoy brown paper grocery sacks full of citrus fruit on the long drive home on I-10 back through New Mexico and Texas.

In college I found a new love for citrus trees.  The beautiful University of Arizona campus and surrounding city of Tucson is chalk full of citrus trees, especially orange trees.  I did a lot of running in and around campus while I was on the swim team and also prior to graduation.  There is nothing - nothing  - quite like running though Tucson in the spring when the orange trees are blossoming.  Sweet, sweet, heaven.

After bringing the tree home, Piercy Joye and I dressed it up a bit with lots of hanging Valentine ornaments. I printed pictures from our photoshoot, backed them with scrapbook paper I had lying around, and used some pink ribbon and thread to tie them to the branches. We stuck a bunch of silk flowers from the dollar store into the base of the tree, and re-used the tulle from my Christmas wreath to wrap the pot.

And there you have it, my dears!  It was a hit.

I hope that this tree will bear the gifts of sweet smelling blooms and sweet-tart tasting fruit for many years to come.

Happy Valentine's Day to the best man I know.

BE MINE, Valentine!

Happy February 16th!

Also known as, the day I'm prepared to celebrate Valentine's Day.

Greg has been blasting off at an airport near you since Sunday morning when he bid me adieu with a short, fizzing glass of Alka Seltzer cold medicine and a kiss on the cheek, lest he be burdened with this disgusting cold that is only just now relenting back at the home front. The day before he left, he came home from running errands with a bounty of gifts for me and Sweet P: a new table, puzzle, a couple of books, and a sweet baby bouquet for the Miss, a gorgeous arrangement of long-stemmed rosies and other beauties for moi, and a bunch of ready-made soup and food for the patients in the house. What a guy!

I was sure to return his generosity in anticipation of the impending V-Day by sneaking him some of these particularly nasty cooties (whoopsie).  Poor Greg called from the road on Tuesday to say that he'd caught the bug, and by today he was struggling through this, the last day of his five-day trip. I am so proud of my hardworking husband, but I sure wish he was laid up in bed here while I could do my best to make him feel better.

On Tuesday Piercy Joye and I took advantage of some beautiful evening sunlight to snap a few Valentine's Day photos.  The wheels in my brain had been spinning to think of what I could do for GB for his Valentine's Week homecoming, and I started with this photo shoot.

The finished product will have to remain a surprise until the big unveiling tonight, but I promise to post a pic of what I managed to get done during nap time today.

X's and O's from the Brownes!

Sick Eyes

Here we are.  Seventeen days, two boxes of Kleenex, two packages of Boogie Wipes, four visits to the pediatrician, countless uncomfortable temperature checks and nasal irrigations, and many does of Tylenol in to a rough dual-bout with the Cold.

Sick eyes

New table Daddy got for his sicky baby

Piercy Joye has been battling one cold virus or another for the last two and a half weeks.  She had about three or four days of very near wellness in the midst of this run, but the second round has proven to be a little harder on both Mommy and Baby. The benefit to sharing an illness with your non-verbal child is being able to anticipate their needs much better when you know those needs first-hand.

Such a good little stander

I'm ready for February to be over, for spring to come, and for health and wellness to be a fixture in our lives again.  I've also never been more thankful for our family's general health.

Can you see how hard our little girl tries?  She's such a good baby, bless her heart.

"ya-ya-ya-ya"

Oh, and in case you haven't seen these, I took a picture of one of my favorite parts of Piercy Joye's nursery:  Her name letters.  When I was about-to-pop pregnant, I found a couple of cute alphabet card sets (boy and girl versions, as we were waiting to find out her gender until birth) at East Side Cafe and picked her letters out once we'd named her. A few frames from Michael's finished the easy project...

Pokeweed-Iris-Elderberry-Ranunculus-Cosmos-Yellow Lady Slipper

Finally, I have to share a few sweet little pictures I snapped when I heard a stirring from the sick room today at the end of nap time:

Little Backyard Peeper

Caught!

Now excuse me while I go snuggle up with a hot toddy and a box of Kleenex.

Inch by Inch

Greg has one of the greenest thumbs I've seen.  His keen ability in the yard and garden is above his obsessive-complusive mowing tendencies.  His passion for culturing the Earth is deep rooted, long running, and unfettered by the most relentless of droughts.  He is a Travis County Master Gardener, the proud adopter of the Browne Family Rose Garden at Lady Bird Lake, and a literal witch at taking plants from the discount heat distressed cart and making them luscious.  He has planned on extensively expanding the already bustling rose (and thorn) garden that sits below Piercy Joye's windows in case any future suitors get wise ideas.  I am thankful for his efforts in making our home and small Central Austin lot a place we love to live and others love to look.  Today a passerby told me he could smell our fledgling rose hedge from the street.  He was not lying.

Always looking fabulous

(love those twisty pecan branches)

Last week as Piercy was finishing up a sad case of the dreaded croup, the three of us spent the day in the yard together enjoying this certainly false spring with which February had opened.  The fresh air and low-hanging clouds were more than welcoming to those of us who had been cooped (croup'ed?) up inside for the last week.  The resident ditch digger made places for our new babies to live, and I spread a blanket for Piercy to explore.

Preciosa

Bow'ed Beauty

There was a lot of dirt and stick eating, a most favorite pastime of many a baby I know. I've given up being the clean clothes (and mouth) police for general Earth eating.  Parental intervention proves necessary only some of the time, and I realized that the reason I was squeamish at the first dirty stick taste test was because I managed to dredge up a memory of that particular flavor from some deep cockle. We played with worms, spread lots of wildflower seeds, planted yellow columbine and blue bonnets, and got dirty: yes, dirty enough to need a bath before our pre-Superbowl-Weekend-Just-In-Case-This-Has-Turned-Into-a-Secondary-Infection doctor's appointment. Sounds a bit like Mommy going into the hospital for labor with a sunburn after being on "bed rest."  Well, at least we know I'm teaching her healthy habits...

I imagine there will be many days and many more pictures of our precious PJ working in the yard with us  making things grow.  It was a wild success of an "outing" and such a sweet memory of Piercy Joye's first day working in the dirt, cultivating, exploring, and loving her simple little life.

Learning

Doing