Laundry Jackpot, Voots, Mulch Gardening Theory, Bribes

Getting ST (6) to take vitamins has been an eternal battle. We’ve got him to take what we call “dots,” which are small pink B12 chewable pills. Anything else I’ve had to sneak in. At Costco I just found Voots, which concentrate 3 servings of fruits and vegetables into 2 chewable pills we’ve been calling Giant Smarties. ST has been taking them for a week! It’s a big deal around here. His diet is so self-limited that I’ve been worried about his health. Last night, for the first time in his life, he said he didn’t want any milk before bed. You have to be around our house to know that he’s been very attached, addicted actually, to milk and cutting it down to one cup at bedtime has been a marked achievement that took a long time. To have him say he doesn’t want milk----that’s huge! I consider it a large step on his road to recovery from autism.

Our soil is decomposed granite—which is very useful for making roads, but not so good for growing gardens. My outdoor garden area is currently grass. So I have two things I need to do: improve the soil, and not till it because I’d be picking grass out of the garden beds for ages. Plus we have unknown amounts of underground pipe and wires that we’d have to till around. This has led me to mulch gardening and raised beds. In Utah our raised bed garden had so few weeds I could keep up with it pregnant (and with my sick pregnancies, that’s saying a lot). This week we laid down cardboard over the grass (to kill the grass and to decompose eventually) in three large garden beds. We layered in four inches of leaves, and put a couple inches of a garden soil/compost mix on top. I’m very excited for these large beds (we’re going to have a huge garden this year) and I’m hoping that all the theoretic information I got from books really works in real life. My favorite gardening books are: The Mittleider Method, Square Foot Gardening, Lasagna Gardening, Jeff Ball’s 60 Minute Gardening Book, Four Season Harvest and The No Dig, No Weed Garden. Any ones you think should be on the list?

A’s (10) job is laundry. The deal is, if he finds any money, up to $1.00, he can keep it as a tip for doing wash. Any money over $1.00 is returned to me—since it’s probably mine (if my children have that much money, it’s either in their bank or in their pockets on the way to a store). Adam found a whopping $20.00 floating in the washing machine. He asked Hubby if he could keep it, and a distracted Hubby said, Yes. It was spent soon after on a Lego set (A, SL and ST pooled their spending money to buy two Lego sets). I was appalled that I’d lost that much money (although pleased to see my boys combining resources…) and I re-iterated the laundry tip rule with A. But since then, I find myself checking my pockets before throwing my jeans into the laundry pile. It was a $20.00 lesson, but I’ve finally got it down----Check Pockets Before They Are Washed. Tuition in the school of life.

We got a truckload of compost and that hill has turned into a cool bicycle track and jump. That bike track/jump has increased the risk level of our household to level Orange. SL got a huge, bruised goose-egg (and scraped up everywhere else), and E’s foot got caught in bike spokes so her ankle is swollen and bruised. Normally the first-aid needs of our family is just burns, but with this track we might just make it to broken bones.

E(3) has been putting herself to bed for naptime this week. I made her a deal, I’d give her a treat if she did. Before, after I’ve put her to bed, she'd sneak around and quietly play instead of napping, and as long as she stayed upstairs I pretended not to notice. But since she pops out of bed at 6:45am, she’s been needing the sleep. Yah for bribery—I mean positive habit re-enforcement!