annnd... baby photos!!!

[dragonlady7]

People have hassled me for baby photos of my dearest nephew, but I haven't felt comfortable reposting photos his mother chose to email to me rather than post online herself. But here are photos *I* took, which I am comfortable sharing. (Actually they were chosen by his mother, so she's evidently comfortable with it too.)

He's six months old, and can sit and stand but hasn't any balance so has to be steadied most of the time. He is a very agreeable baby and loves new people, loves people he recognizes, loves his doggies most of all, loves kitties, and loves cameras-- he reacts to the flash, and reacts to shutter clicks and the like. He is probably about to start teething, because he chews a lot. He shows a slight preference for his mother, but beyond that is friendly to all people who act friendly towards him-- in the rest stop in Virginia he was flirting with some lady over my shoulder, much to her delight.

So here are a bunch of photos of him and my family, at Mom and Dad (now Grandpa and Grandma)'s house in upstate New York. Click the photo to see the rest!


Mom and baby and dogs in our grotty but comfortable hotel room in Pennsylvania. The hotel was called, and I am not making this up, "Rte 81", in what must have been a painful spasm of creative naming.

Comments

[heebiejeebie.livejournal.com]

I ended up keeping some of the strawberries in large pots, deluding myself that the rats would ingore them.

This is not the case. As soon as a berry starts to turn the slighest bit red, it is obtained by a rat.

The plants - the are large, healthy, and productive. There are tons of berries on them just waiting to ripen.

Would you like to come take the pots? They don't need to be planted, they seem happy as is. I'd be sad to see them go but they'll just be rat food here. And I'm sad every time I lose a berry.

I'm not home this weekend, feel free to just go and take the pots from my yard whenever you want. They are behind the house, and to the front and side of the front door.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Oh no, rats!

I may come take them, then, if they're happy in the pots-- and then when I visit my mother in a couple of weeks, I may bring them to her. I know she doesn't have any strawberry plants left. And my little sister is a crazy gardener-- she's working on a big organic farm at the moment, but has been augmenting my mother's garden in her spare time. (Like with the 30-foot stakes for the hops!)

Mine are still all green, but huge! I didn't know they'd be such big berries. They're beautiful. I thought I saw a rat in my yard last month but if it was one, it hasn't been back-- maybe the neighborhood cats took care of it. Or it was really just an unwell squirrel...
But the strawberry plants are beautiful, and one of the ones out front has a two-foot-long runner that's trying to take over my front walk. It's cute, I'm thinking I'll stick the runner into a pot full of soil and once it's established, cut it off and plant it somewhere else. :)

[heebiejeebie.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they seem very happy in their pots.

Dude, they'll send runners out all day long. I've pulled at least 50 runners off this week. But a 2 foot runner is impressive!

You should introduce me to your sister. I'm thinking of maybe quitting my job and volunteering on organic farms next year.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

My sister works on a farm in Schaghticoke, NY-- over near the Vermont border. They'd love to have you, but it's not close to here at all. I do not know the local organic farm scene at all.
My sister (Ann) went to Cornell and majored in Natural Resources, and most of her classmates have gone on to work as park rangers and the like. She did an internship with the Chicago Botanical Gardens, inventorying rare plants in the wild, but found it a little too heavy on the paperwork and just not all that interesting. She's a total beast at field botany-- just insanely good at identifying plants in the field-- but isn't terribly interested in doing that for its own sake.

So she's working this summer on a Community Supported Agriculture farm, of which my parents have long been members, just to see what that business is like. She might found her own farm, or get involved in management, or she might yet decide that this area of study isn't that interesting either-- she just figured that since she can live at home for nothing, it doesn't matter if she's earning almost nothing there either.

If she comes out here to visit me, I'll totally introduce you to her, but she probably won't have much time off. There's a shortage of farm labor, as evidenced by the fact that my father's spending his retirement doing odd jobs for desperate local farmers (both the organic farm where Ann works, and the neighboring farm which mostly raises feed for livestock and is owned by a member of Dad's church). The going rate for farm labor in that area is around ten bucks an hour, which is barely enough to live on nowadays and the local kids won't take it, so you wind up with migrant workers or interested yuppies. It makes for an interesting workplace.