The Blood Suckers

You might have noticed that I'm not exactly what you'd call an in-the-outdoor-elements-nature-loving-gal.  If you hadn't, let me be clear- while I love to admire the beauty of the outdoors, I myself do not like to interact with it unless there's a camera in my hand.  But I have a little girl who loves to be outside and so I find myself interacting with nature on a daily basis.

photo © 2008 dr_relling | more info (via: Wylio)

In the last month, I've found four ticks on Spencer, three on me, and four and the dog! And now I can't shake the feeling that there's always a tick on me, which is kinda driving me crazy.  I do NOT like ticks and my initial gut reaction each time I've found one is to call my dad.  Then reality and sets in, I mean I am 29 years old, I pull up my big girl pants, and do what needs to be done. 

Luckily, the first time I found a tick on Spencer we were in the Middle of Nowhere, North Carolina and Spencer's Great-Gran taught me the best way to remove a tick that's currently engaged in sucking the lifeblood out of you.  I've since removed ten such ticks and her instructions have been so helpful. So if you'd are out in nature and find yourself with one of these little suckers attached to your body, here is what Spencer's Great-Gran says you should do.

The Best Way to Remove a Tick

1.  Don't just pull it out!
2.  Saturate a cotton ball with alcohol and hold it firmly over the tick for at least two minutes- longer if necessary.
3.  Remove the cotton ball and use tweezers (your fingers will work fine if you don't have tweezers) to gently pull the tick out.
4.  If it does not easily come off, saturate another cotton ball and hold it over the tick for another two minutes. Make sure you don't pull too hard- after the alcohol kills or knocks it out, the tick should be fairly easy to remove.
5.  Repeat steps three and four until the tick is off your skin. 
6.  Once the tick is in the tweezers, light a match and burn it.  There's good chance that if you flush it down the toilet and it's not 120% dead, it will work it's way back up the toilet and into your bathroom.  Once you've burned the tick, you can either flush it down the toilet or immerse it in a small sealable container of alcohol and then throw that away.  If you don't have matches readily available, sealing it in alcohol is just fine.
7.  Saturate another cotton ball with either alcohol or some other type of disinfectant and clean off the bite. Ticks carry a lot of diseases and you want to get the area as clean as possible as soon as possible.

I realize that some of you who find a tick on yourself or child will not have immediate access to alcohol, so if you don't, the best thing you can do is use tweezers and try and grab the tick as close to it's head and mouth as possible, and pull it off.  If you don't have tweezers, cover your hand with something like a baggie or paper towel, and then attempt removing it.  Ticks are nasty little creatures and you really don't want to touch them with your bare hands if you can at all help it.

Hopefully you'll never get a tick bite, but if you do, I hope these tips will help you! 

Closeup Learning Curve

Last week Spencer and I went to the Middle of Nowhere, North Carolina to visit her great-grandparents for a few days.  It was the perfect time to go because the flowers were at their peak and everything was blooming and gorgeous.  I took the opportunity to get in some practice with my new macro lens. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but the learning curve is a little bit more steep than I thought it was going to be.  It took me awhile, and a few hundred pictures, before I started to get anything that I actually liked.  I still have a lot to learn, but here are some of my favorites.  I would love to hear any tips from those of you love macro photography!

The second picture is a closeup of the flower in the first one.  See that yellow stuff?  It's pollen!  Just looking at it makes my nose start to itch!

The Best Spencer Story Yet

I think this is the best Spencer story ever, although the pee/car keys incident is a close second!   I can't wait for her to read this one day, ha!  We are still up here in the Middle of Nowhere and this weekend we drove up even farther to the Middlest of Nowhere, like no cell phone reception and no bathrooms except for outhouses; the real Middlest of Nowhere.

There is an old family house high up on a mountain, where Spencer's Poppy was born and raised, and we drive up there every time we visit.  But this was the first time we've been there since Spencer was potty trained. About an hour after we got there she told me she needed to go to the bathroom- except there was no bathroom.  So I did what any normal person would do- I took her around the back of the house (don't worry, there are no living souls for miles around) and showed her what to do.  Spence thought it was a pretty funny and she peed like she'd been peeing that way forever.

Fast forward one day.

Spencer is outside walking Leah on the leash when Leah goes to the bathroom.  I guess Spencer really had to go, because in two seconds, and without saying one word, she had pulled up her dress, pulled down her underwear, and was squatting right beside Leah.  Yes, Spencer and the dog were both peeing in the yard.  I was frozen- it was like the perfect combination of horror and hilarity and all I could do was stare, mouth agape.  When they were both done I explained to her that we don't use the bathroom like that, we go in the toilet- then she reminded me that I told her go pee at the Old House in the yard.  She also asked me "why can Leah pee outside?"  It's kinda tricky explaining these things to a three year old, ya know?

We haven't had any outside mishaps since then, thank goodness, but it is certainly an image I will never forget.  Tomorrow we are going home and I'm sad; it's so peaceful and calm here and I love being with PGGPs.  They are really going to miss Spencer, although I don't think they're going to miss watching Pippi Longstocking 15 times a day. 

'Cause Earl Had to Die

Na na nana naaaaa na...  The main thing in the news this week is Hurricane Earl.  I'm a weirdo, I love hurricanes.  Not the destruction they cause, but the coziness that comes with everyone hunkering down together.  We always make soup or chili, play board games when the electricity goes out, all the while listening to the storm howl outside.  My senior year of college Hurricane Isabel come tearing up the East Coast; W&M was evacuated and we missed two weeks of school.  It was a great little vacay even though we lost our Fall break.  But back to Earl. Earl is nowhere to be found up here in the Middle of Nowhere.  While the Outer Banks, NC looks like this right now:

Up here in this neck of the North Carolina woods, it looks just like this:

Not a cloud in sight, bright, sunny, and warm.  I guess hurricanes can't make it this deep into Appalachia. 

How Does This Happen in Six Months?

The last time we were in The Middle of Nowhere, North Carolina was March of this year.  And, to me, she still looked like a toddler with a dash of little girl thrown in.  It was a little less than six months ago that I took these pictures of Spencer with Leah, the puppy.

Leah is now officially a dog, not a puppy, although she looks exactly the same, and Spencer is, well, see for yourself:

I can't get over how much she's changed since March! How does that happen?  I think she looks like such a grown up little girl now and that makes me want to cry.  Maybe it's because she's starting preschool in less than two weeks, but I'm feeling all kinds of sad and nostalgic about how quickly she's changing right before my very eyes.  About the only thing that hasn't changed is how much Spencer loves Leah. The other night she yelled to me from the bathroom that she needed me and I went in there, and there's Leah on her leash and Spencer on the toilet.  Yep, she even brings the dog to go to the bathroom with her.  Last night she woke me up when she started sleep talking and sleep laughing about something she was dreaming.  It was a little incoherent, but there was no mistaking that she was dreaming about an entire hilarious scenario involving her and Leah. Yep, she even dreams about the dog!

The Air Up There

There is something about this "cun-tree" air that just makes me want to sleep and sleep.  (that's how they say country down here in the Middle of Nowhere, North Carolina)  I think it has something to do with how quiet it is here combined with some unknown sleep factor.  We wake up early every day and do farming type things, then we eat lunch and everyone takes a nap. Today we went into town and at about 2pm, Spencer, Great-Gran, and I started yawning and all we could talk about was how much we wanted to take a nice long nap.  Since town is about a 30 minute drive away and we were smack dab in the middle of errands, there was no nap to be had by any of us. 

But that didn't stop me from being productive- in fact, I actually baked one of the best things I've ever, in the history of time, made.  It's for breakfast tomorrow, but when it came out of the oven it just smelled so delish that we had to have a slice before wrapping it up. Want to see?

It's the most delicious cinnamon and sugar bread and I think it's the best thing that I've ever made.  I used the Pioneer Woman's recipe and made a few tweaks to it.  Here's my version for your viewing pleasure!

Ingredients

• 1 cup Milk
• 6 Tablespoons Butter
• 2-½ teaspoons Active Dry Yeast
• 2 whole Eggs
• ⅓ cups Sugar + 2 Tbsps
• 3-½ cups All-purpose Flour
• 1 teaspoon Salt
• 2/3 cups Sugar
• 3 Tablespoons Cinnamon
• Egg And Milk, Mixed Together, For Brushing
• Softened Butter, For Smearing And Greasing

Directions 

• Melt butter with milk. Heat until very warm, but don’t boil. Allow to cool until it's very warm, but not quite hot. (Should not be steaming) Sprinkle yeast over the top and stir gently. Let it sit for 10 minutes.
• Combine flour and salt.
• Blend sugar and eggs with a mixer. Pour in milk/butter/yeast mixture (after it's sat for 10 mins) and stir to combine. 
• Add half the flour and beat on medium speed until combined. Add the other half and beat until combined. 
• At this point it might be too difficult for you to use your regular mixer.  If you have a KitchenAid mixer, you will be fine, but if you don't, you'll have to knead the dough yourself for at least 10 minutes. The dough should not be too sticky and if it is, add a little more flour and keep on working the dough until it's right.
• In a large bowl, drizzle in a little canola oil, then toss the dough in the oil to coat. Cover bowl in plastic wrap or a with a clean cloth and put it in the microwave for at least two 2 hours.
• When the two hours are up,  Turn dough out onto your work surface and punch it out.
• Roll into a neat rectangle no wider than the loaf pan you’re going to use, and about 18 to 24 inches long. 
• Smear with 2 tablespoons of melted butter.
•  Mix sugar and cinnamon together, then sprinkle evenly over the butter-smeared dough. Starting at the far end, roll dough toward you, keeping it tight and contained. Pinch seam to seal. 
•  Smear loaf pan with softened butter. Place dough, seam down, in the pan. Cover with plastic wrap, put in back in the microwave and allow to rise for 2 more hours. 
•  Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
•  Mix a little egg with milk, and smear over the top. 
•  Bake for 40 minutes on a middle/lower rack in the oven. 
•  Remove from the pan and allow bread to cool

After all that work, you'll have the best cinnamon and sugar break that you've ever tasted.  And you can do fun things with it like this, haha!

Power Tools

We were in North Carolina all of last week.  On Friday evening Spencer's cousin came up to spend the weekend with his grandparents, who live just down the mountain side.  They'd met once before when she had just turned one, but they were both completely oblivious to one another.  This time they were both fascinated by each other.

After tagging along with the grown-ups while they were walking the dogs, Spencer and her cousin moved right on to the next logical thing:  power tools!  To be more specific, a Fischer Price "Power Saw."  His grandparents had already split a piece of wood for him, so he could pretend that he sawed all of the way through the log.  They took turns, but Spencer just couldn't quite get it.  So her cousin gave her little lesson and how to best wield such a powerful piece of machinery. hehe

Showing her how to do it "right"

Then they decided they'd had enough of that and they moved right along to Poppy's tractor.  Spencer might have been willing to be more demure where the power saw was concerned, but not when it came to the tractor!  She was going to drive it and that was that.  (The engine was off and the keys were not in the ignition)  He didn't seem too mind too much and provided a nice soundtrack of tractor noises while Spencer was "driving"

She's thinking that this sharing stuff is for the birds...

Edging her way over

Making her move...

And going in for the win - a toddler on a mission.

And when the day was over, they weren't just cousins- they were friends, too.