Abby decided to try her hand at fibre arts.

Place both hands on yarn … then bring your left hand out like so … and then your right hand out like so! Did you get all that?

Too bad she tries to eat knitting needles.

Abby had quite a few bibs when she was born, but there was one that seemed to make it into rotation more often than the others – or perhaps just elicited more comments so it seemed like it was always on her.

Although the bib itself is cute, it was particularly funny because I hate peas. With a PASSION. Always have. My mother, on the other hand, loves peas and often served them when I was growing up. But not to me. For me, she would make a separate side dish, free of the nasty peas. I fondly remember overhearing a conversation between my mother and grandmother when I was about sixteen, with my grandmother wondering why my mom was going through the hassle of making a different vegetable for me (why didn’t she just serve me the peas?) and my mother responding that she figured if I didn’t like them by the age of sixteen, there was nothing she could do to get me to like them. Smart woman.

Except, I discovered a few years ago that I don’t hate peas (sorry mom!). I hate cooked peas. Fresh peas on the other hand are tasty, tasty, tasty! And farmer’s market peas are both cheap and tasty. So for the past two weeks, our fridge has held a huge number of fresh peas. As has my stomach.

And today was market day. Abby clearly shares my taste for fresh peas, although she will have to wait until a meal at her nana’s house before we find out if she shares my dislike of cooked peas.

We actually use to grow them in our garden a few years ago but never seemed to eat many ourselves. Can’t figure out why.

When we bought our house a few years ago, we knew that it required a few fix-ups. The roof was the first to be done, because no-one wants water leaking into their house (it wasn’t that bad yet, but we like to err on the side of caution). The furnace and A/C were next up, and we were surprised to learn that the furnace was original to the house (about 45 years old?) and the A/C was no spring chicken either (about 25 years old, I think). Both still worked, which probably says something about how things were made, but we didn’t want to take the chance of the furnace dying in the middle of winter when it was minus thirty degrees. The replacement of the windows started last year, and we discovered that they too were mostly original to the house, although, in another testament to “how things were made”, on the energy audit we had done just after we bought the house they still fared better than windows in a 10-15 year old house!

Our house also came with an upright freezer, which was showing its age externally, but was still chugging along. It was always in our plans to get a new one, but it wasn’t high on the list since it still fulfilled the requirement of keeping things frozen. We finally got around to replacing it last week and pulled the old one out from the wall to defrost it before removal.

And found the original delivery tag still attached to the back. From 1981.

They really did make things to last back then.

The suspicion. The horror. The acceptance.