Thirty Things in Thirty Days - Update 3...

So here we are already with update number 3... actually I'm a little bit late, since July ends on Sunday!!  But I wrote this post on Monday (just didn't get around to finishing and publishing it!) so I'll give you my update as of the Monday just gone!  This month is absolutely flying by….  Where does the time go?

We've just had a lovely visit from Poppy & Nanny (aka my Dad & Stepmum) which we all enjoyed very much - particularly Alex!  I know he will miss them a lot.  Fortunately they will be back in a months time (along with several other grandparents, aunties, uncles, cousins and friends!) for his Baptism, so that is something to look forward to.

But back to my thirty things in thirty days list… here we go:

1. Go on a date night with Boofy
2. Cook something with an ingredient I've never used before
3. Use the massage/ pedi/ facial voucher Boofy bought me for Xmas
4. Write a letter to Alex about how funny he is at this age and put it away in his box of treasures
5. Spend a day totally unplugged from the internet
6. Organise the cupboard in the spare room
7. Cull Alex's toys (soooo overdue!)
8. Plant out the vege garden
9. Do something special with Alex, just the two of us
10. Complete some new sewing projects
11. Have a movie night at home with my 2 favourite boys
12. Read a book
13. Put on a BBQ brekky for our friends Julie & Tony and their kids
14. Go and see my Grandma
15. Go op-shopping in my local area
16. Revamp an op shop find
17. Clean up my desk at work and make it look a bit nicer (at the moment, it's just depressing!)
18. Look after Julie & Tony's kids for a day so they can have some kid-free time
19. Try a project I've seen in Blogland
20. Try a project I've seen on Pinterest
21. Organise and send out invites for Alex's Baptism (in August)
22. Redecorate the area where my random cupboards are
23. Finish off the cabinet of Nanna's treasures (as started in this post)
24. Go out for dinner as a family
25. Take Alex to mini golf
26. Write a long letter to Jo Jo
27. Hang painting in the laundry
28. Go and see the new Harry Potter movie
29. Bake some savoury muffins to take in for my work mates
30. Print and frame a free printable from the internet (there are so many to choose from)

So I haven't managed to cross too many off my list this week - because one of them was a really BIG one!!  But I crossed off another three, so that's better than a kick in the pants!  Here's what I've been up to:

4. Write a letter to Alex about how funny he is at this age and put it away in his box of treasures
This was an easy but also hard one to do!!  It's easy to recall what is fresh in my mind, but when I actually sit down and try to recall those funny things he's said over the last few months, its difficult to conjure examples of the hilarity!  Never mind, I decided half way through that it didn't have to be perfect - it just was what it was.  So I did it - he will know some funny things, in detail, about his 3.5 year old self in years to come…  I've got an idea for a way to remember more things, but I will cover that another day!

8. Plant out the vege garden
OK so if number 22 is the whale of the list (and trust me, it is!) then this was the baby whale for sure!  I may have mentioned before that we have an 11m x 1.2m garden bed at the side of our house.  When we moved in, it was a grassy, patchy, unimpressive mound of dirt about 60cm high.  I immediately spied a huge vege patch, and put my talented brother Mick to work on building me a mighty 1m tall chunky wood retaining wall.  Anyway, as I've previously explained, we had a great first winter crop, then the floods hit up here and our summer crop just laid down and rotted :(  We were so disheartened that we haven't planted anything since - until last Sunday!!  Heather (my stepmum) and I spent the afternoon toiling in the dirt - digging, turning things over, raking, planting, watering and mulching…. Until we were finally done!

So just to refresh your memory…. Here is how it looked after we pulled out the rotten plants and totally neglected it for the next 4 months:

And our poor little turtle buried in the weeds!

And this is what it looked like after we killed most of the weeds and were getting ready to start planting again:

And this is what it looked like at the end of Sunday - hooray!!

It's hard to see the plants amongst all that mulch…. But they're there!  I actually prefer the look of the garden with no mulch at all - but all the experts say its best to use it, so use it we did.  Here are all the things I have planted:

:: nasturtiums (white, edible)
:: cos lettuce
:: iceberg lettuce
:: snow peas
:: sugar snap peas
:: dwarf green beans
:: baby carrots
:: capsicums
:: broccoli
:: thyme
:: coriander
:: parsley
:: basil
:: aloe vera (been meaning to plant these for ages - there is an end that doesn't get much sun so nothing grows there well - this will be perfect here!)
:: lemongrass
:: strawberries
:: grape tomatoes
:: marigolds (to keep pests away)

So there you go, one baby whale down, one mamma whale to go! :)  (On that, I've decided the only way to eat an elephant is piece by piece - so I'm going to try to do little bits every other day to get through number 22 on my list…. Hey did you just see how my whale turned into an elephant?  No idea where all these animal comparisons are coming from!)

28. Go and see the new Harry Potter movie
Done and done! 

My friend Julie and I have had a date for some time to do this, and as it turned out, Dad & Heather were in town also, so we all trundled off to see it together.  I loved it, and cried in many places!  Julie clapped in many places (as did a lot of others).  I'm not much of a clapper, I'm a total sook!  It was quite different to the book in places, and I felt it left out quite a lot of the explanations, but it was fantastic nonetheless!  Made even better by the yum-cha lunch we had afterwards - very yummy!  So the last Harry Potter movie has been seen… the end of an era really…. Sniff sniff….  I can't wait until Alex is old enough to watch these and read the books, then I can enjoy it all over again with him :)

And that is the total update for this week....  not much progress i know, but the vege garden really was a massive effort (thanks Heather!!!!)  I will show updated pics next week, because I kid you not, some of the plants have doubled in size, the little peas have dutifully wound their little vines around the climbing structures and the beans are going crazy.

I'm linking this post (in honour of my new vege garden) up to the lovely A Beach Cottage blog's Good Life Wednesday :)

Bye for now :)