Early 3rd Trimester

Here are some recently taken 3rd trimester photos. It's hard to know how to pose for these kind of photos, what often happens is I find myself awkwardly standing in front of the camera, asking Cam, "What should I do?" "I feel weird posing."  And he says, "I don't know, ya, do that." So I've included some other models in these pictures to take the pressure off of myself. The models include Kindle (our little French black kitty) and Lion (big U.S. kitty), this way they can share in the 3rd trimester photo shoot as well. By the way, the cats are handling pregnancy pretty well. Although they do have a fascination with climbing up on my belly that I tend to get rather frustrated with. We have heavy cats, so I've made a "no belly rule" they sometimes decide to follow. Most of the time it goes like this: Lion or Che jump on what's rest of my lap, then they try to sneak up on my belly, I say no and push them down...30 seconds later they try again. Repeating this pattern until I get so frustrated Cam has to come over and take them off my lap (while laughing of course, b/c I'm not able to get them off myself due to lack of ab muscles and sitting up power...I'm sure I look like a turtle lying on her back just getting more and more pissed off). 

Garden July 2011

This year our garden has grown (both vegetation-wise and size-wise). Back in February Cam and our farmer neighbor (Christian) got motivated to enlarge our garden. Now, when I say "enlarge", I mean enlarge Cam-style. This means there was no moderation in the enlargement process. We went from having a big garden to having an enormous garden! After that Cam went ahead and planted about 200 potato plants right away. Following the potatoes were a TON of onions (red, white, yellow), shallots, garlic. Little by little as the months wore on, the plants we sowed were transfered from our living room to the garden.

Included here are some recent photos of our garden. As a sidenote, the weather here has been rainy and cool for the past month or so...a perfect environment for weeds to prosper, which they have! As fast as we can pick them, they grow. We tried an experiment with the onions, just let the weeds take over...maybe their growing power would transfer to the onions through osmosis or something. Well, the result of the plan was: weeds don't help your garden after all. As a consequence of our anti-weeding spell, Cam and I basically spent an entire 3 days hand-weeding very sharp and thorny weeds from the onions. Gardening gloves are no match for the ferocious weeds at Le Taux!

Here's a pic of some of our "leftover" tomato plants on the left and our eggplants on the right. To the far left is the green house shack we are currently building for the pepper plants, more to see on this later.
This is an artichoke that's way past ready to eat. Quite beautiful...
Pumpkin plants growing along nicely.Our cheasnut pumpkin patch, which I'm super psyched about. Can't wait to see what it tastes like!Ruby, the delicious rhubarb. Bettey and Diane contributed this little beauty to the garden this Spring!
Some cabbage and green beans (keep ignoring the weeds, they are only a figment of your imagination...)

Due to the cool temps, the tomato plants have been taking a really long time to ripen. We have a bunch of green tomatoes, but just a few that have changed so far.

The pepper greenhouse that's still being built. Tomato plants on the left and right of the pepper house.

A red pepper in the pepper house!

Hmmm, can you guess what this is? It's a medly of beans, cabbage, flowers, weeds, seeding spinach and lettuce. Somehow we have random flowers that have popped up all over the garden. It's kind of pretty.

Some of our beets, got lots of those too...


This is where I sit when my baby belly gets to heavy for me to continue gardening. I take a break and look out over Cam working in the garden. I'm not the best gardener...but I'm a great encourager! This bench and table were made possible through the efforts of Cam and Ben-jammin'. Once a dead tree threatening to fall on those below, now a pleasant garden attraction inviting butts from above.



Some basil in the little green house. We have lots of basil all over the garden also.

With the shallots and onions we started braiding them...

But then we realized we have enough onions to feed an army, so we had to get more creative. So we spent an entire afternoon creating a net to hang the onions so they could dry. Now I know how to build a net if I'm ever lost in the wild with rope and I need to make a net (a useful skill I'm told...) These are the onions in the net in the woodshed by the house.

A close up of the onions in the beautiful net...

Lion enjoying gardening time. Our cats have never been so happy, this is cat paradise!

Stam & Ceph's Newest Adventure

So, looking at our last blog entry I see it has been almost an ENTIRE YEAR since we wrote! Somehow time has passed quickly in the slow moving region of Ariège. A lot has happened in our lives since this time last year, so here we go...

I (Steph) am still working in the towns of Muret and St. Gaudens (France), teaching adults English. It's an enjoyable profession. I have had the opportunity to meet many quality people that are excited about learning, which is a refreshing break from teaching Public Speaking where I had to convince my students that learning was important! ;) I recently went to Helsinki, Finland for a work conference/project with the European Union. It was an incredible opportunity to be a part of the progressive development of intercultural communication within the EU. The project consisted of creating a resource website in which teachers and trainers could find teaching tools to further intercultural communication training in the classroom. Exactly my kind of project. :)

Cam's work life has changed quite a bit since last year. He is now an official computer programmer! He's been super busy working away on several projects, and amazing me with his incredible knack for learning anything he sets his mind to! He's having a ball, and it's really been fun to see his progression in his new career path.

Here's a few pics of Helsinki...

The veggie garden is back, bigger than ever, for the summer! Cam decided to enlarge are already very large garden to accomodate for...us two. Whatever the reasoning, we have a VERY big veggie garden this summer. We planted approximately 200 potato plants, a plethora of tomatoes, beets, carrots, spinach, onions, garlic, shallots, cabbage, peppers, pumpkins, cucumbers, artichokes, rhubarb (thanks to Bettye and Diane), rasberries, strawberries, blueberries, zucchini and a couple types of lettuce. Whew! We should be set for a summer filled of weeding and eating delights!

Garden pics:


As you can probably tell from this last photo...my physique has changed quite a bit since last year too. Hmmm, what's the news...

We're having a baby! Cam and I are expecting a little baby (girl) around October 2nd. Preparing for parenthood has been an adventure in and of itself, we can only imagine what the real deal will be like. We are super excited about this new adventure, it makes moving to France seem like nothing. :) So far a challenge has been figuring out how to work our new (used) super stroller that transforms into 3 different things. Talk about confusing. But we've also been trying to enjoy the down time we have by climbing, traveling just a bit, and playing with our super funny kitties. They're going to be in for a big shock when the little one joins the family! :)

More Pregger Photos:
To finish off this blog post, I'm posting a picture of our last construction project. After having finally finished the hardwood floors in the house (great job Camicito), our next project was building a systems board (wooden climbing wall) in the garage. It's a very nice addition to the garage that Cam is super psyched on. I can't use it during pregnancy, but I'm all about it when the little one arrives. She'll have something to train on too! :)

The Garden...

I love experiments, but hate moderation for some reason.  We have an entire field below the house, so when it came to rototilling time, it seemed like a good idea to keep making the "garden" area a little bit bigger.  It's a bit hard to get scale, but the main section is about 40ft x 60ft, with a long area for all the melons, artichokes, etc.  

When I went to buy potato starters, I didn't speak French at all.  Our friend Patricia had told me to buy "a little box" of starter spuds, so I went down to the local gardening store (by myself).  It was prime potato buying season, so there were 10 different varieties, all of which came in "little boxes".  Not being able to read the labels, I just more or less blindly picked one and returned home after much bumbling about at the cash register.  When Patricia saw the box she laughed...I had unwittingly purchased 100 starter spuds, which turn into about 250 kilos (500+ lbs) of potatoes!  

Needless to say, I pawned a few of the spuds off on her and planted the rest... about 75.  Now the spuds have all come up and are flowering (pictured above).  Who knows what we'll do with all the taters...I'm guessing a lot of fries, gnocchi, and random potato gift baskets to friends.  Maybe we'll have Mr. Potato Head decorating contests...

Our very first bean, beets, radishes and pumpkin and watermelon plants which have begun flowering. 

Getting pepper plants started has been hard...I just finally moved them into the garden.  Just in time for it to be rainy and cold for an entire week.  To compensate, Patricia and I built a really ghetto shelter out of scrap wood and pallet plastic wrapping that seems to be working ok to help keep them a little bit warmer. 

I also found a French gardening book that had some cool, innovative tricks in it.  This one is to bury a perforated container next to the plant and simply pour water into it.  It allows the water to penetrate quickly and easily to the roots, making watering a ton easier overall.  This method also seems to waste less and is considerably quicker.  

You can use any number of containers, but I have been using old 2 liter plastic water bottles.  I punch a few holes in them, then bury them next to the root ball of the plant.  Thus far, it has been very effective and most people seem to think it's a cool idea.  However, one French guys scoffed at it and said I would never get any tomatoes if I tried to do it this way.  He was adamant that I should build a Roman canal irrigation system in the garden instead.  I think there may be some downfalls, but I'm fairly certain the idea will work well for the most part.  As for tomatoes....

Tomatoes seem to grow really well here.  It was like a giant tomato plant swap a couple of weeks ago and somehow I ended up with 30+ plants (after giving away about 20).  Many of the plants are starting to get fruit and I'm psyched for the salsa this summer. 

I totally mixed up the seeds of several plants, so thought I was planting Cantalope ("melon" in French) when actually it was Zucchini...  To make it more amusing, I gave a random assortment of people some of these super quick growing "melon" plants, so now a bunch of people have stray zucchini plants where they don't want them.  Patricia has dubbed zucchini the "melon Americain" in my honor. 

Eggplant and a small glimpse of a whole lot of lettuce plants crammed into a really small area.   After losing the entire first planting of lettuce to snails and slugs, I went overboard and planted way too many seeds.  Now we have a smashed salad party in half of the garden that needs to get resolved soon.