Friday Recap 7/20/18 - Empty beach, milkweed in bloom, strawberry tantrums, Pearce's corn, help from our neighbor

Yahoo for a Friday that initially was forecasted to be rainy all day...........and didn't get rainy until after 3pm! Made for a perfect beach day!

1. Empty Beach

You can see our bike trailer on the boardwalk.....and a lifeguard by the water. No one else!!

See above re: horrible forecast to understand why literally no one else was at the beach today! Admittedly when the Bug & I arrived it was drizzling a bit, but we were planning to swim - so who cares?!? Our friend drove in from the far western burbs with her 3 kiddos and we had an absolute blast. The only bummer? I didn't take near enough photos! 

3 of the 4 kiddos rocking out

Lulu was headed out a bit prematurely :)

We had pizza delivered, played in the water, on the sand & on the playground - did it all really! Made it home safely well before the rain started too!

Literally no one else in sight! Amazing!

2. Milkweed in bloom

We bought this swamp milkweed plant at a native plant sale hosted by the Evanston Garden Club 2 years ago. It is so pretty in bloom! Theoretically it would be a nice place for monarch butterflies to lay eggs, but so far we haven't seen any caterpillars :( It is currently infested with aphids - I'm working on an aggressive removal campaign......more on that next week!

3. Strawberry tantrum
So Lulu loves our strawberry plant. She loves eating the strawberries straight from teh plant. She does NOT love waiting for the fruit to mature and ripen on the plant. 

Just did the sign for "please" - strawberry plant is out of the frame on the left

She uses the baby sign for "please" and stands by the pot and it makes me realize I have no idea how to teach patience to my little bug. I say a lot of "they're not ready yet", "they'll be ready soon", "growing strawberries takes a long time" but she has no idea what time is yet!! So I just go into the house to get some out of the fridge to appeal to her desire for instant gratification. See below for how that tends to go over. Spoiler alert, not well.

Trying to appease her with a store bought strawberry. Going really well as you can see.

4. Iced Coffee

Coffee+almond milk+a teaspoon of simple syrup = heaven

Because summer.

5. Lulu's first ears of Pearce's corn

Pictured with my sweet niece, Anne, who is a little horrified by how Lulu eats :)

Holy moly Lulu loves corn on the cob! Like a lot. A lot A LOT. So much so that her first dive into Pearce's corn turned into 1.5 ears........because she ate most of mine too!! 

We've been going to Pearce's for as long as I can remember & it is really fun to pass their deliciousness on to the Bug. They have grown and expanded so much in the past decade - we love them all the more :) The thought of Fall at Pearce's makes me so excited.......Lulu will be big enough to play on the fort/climbing structure they construct out of hay bales, there is kettle corn, pumpkins as far as the eye can see, and delicious donuts. For now I will settle for the delightful produce they grow on their land & that that they buy from other farms. It is after all the best time for produce, right??

My mom & dad brought it down so we technically ate it in IL, but the WI flavor was there :)

6. Help from a neighbor/friend
I've blogged many times about how much I love our neighborhood. It is a supportive place, safe, friendly, welcoming. Well, it is full of amazing people - that is really the best part about our neighborhood! So when I went to take HondaPants to the shop on Tuesday and she was dead as a door nail I knew why. Rewind to Saturday, I got home from a solo Costco run & started unloading a ridiculous amount of food into the house. A month or so ago, our 14 year old HondaPants lost her first important function as a car......the "ding ding ding" that alerts you to your headlights being left on when you take the keys out of the ignition stopped "ding ding dinging". Which probably wouldn't have been a big deal a year ago. But my brain is packed with a lot more than it used to be & for the 2nd time in ONE WEEK I left my lights on. A couple hours later our neighbor a few doors down, Jack, knocked on the door to ask me if I knew my lights were on- which of course I didn't know. I was in the middle of something, so I didn't even bother to see if the car would start. I guess I didn't need to use it until Tuesday when our mechanic told me I could bring it in..........oops. Long story all to say I texted both of our next door neighbors & they both responded right away that yes they have jumper cables & yes they have a car with which to jump HondaPants. The 2 non neighbor friends that I texted responded the same way :) 

Blueberry goo explosion!

I sometimes struggle with keeping all the balls in the air. After all, adulting is hard, there is no way around that. I am actively working on being kinder to myself in those moments of difficulty - there is really no value in beating myself up over mistakes I make - I need to work on fixing them, not ruminating in the mess I made. Kristin Neff's book Self Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself came highly recommended to me and I started reading it this week. It seems like a valuable read for me so far :) Part of fixing my mistake was thanking my neighbor for her help........with food, duh! So I used some of my remaining 10 pound box of blueberries and made blueberry scones. Yum. 

7. Salad Spinning Bug

I dream of the days when Lulu has the interest and capacity to help me in the kitchen. I so hope she is interested in food & cooking because some of my fondest memories throughout my life really are working in the kitchen with my mom. We made a lot of chocolate chip cookies when I was little, so much so that I had the recipe memorized as a munchkin! Lulu was so interested in the salad spinner this week, so I let her work with it (while sketchily standing up in her chair that attaches to the counter.....see above re: adulting being hard! I can't win them all). It made me abundantly happy to see her take interest in a kitchen task. Plus she's just so damn cute. Added bonus!

8. Why the delay?
So my Friday recap is coming on Saturday morning. Why? Because on the way home from a local playground last night (where I met a delightful new mom friend!) Owenn stopped to play with his dog neighbor Bear. Our human neighbors kindly invited us to come over for a glass of wine! They've been hosting Friday night porch nights for years & years. Far longer than we have been in the neighborhood. Rare are the Fridays that we can stop over, but I am mindful of the fact that an invitation that is never accepted will, in all likelihood, stop being extended! We adore these neighbors & were thankful for the chance to have a delicious glass of wine and visit. But when we got home, put the Bug to bed, ate PB&J on the couch for dinner, I was zonked and not in a place to finish this post! So, I'm late is posting for a great reason - was hanging with some neighbors who we are so lucky to have.