The lyf so short

Before the past months disappear entirely in the mists of nursing dementia and/or being busy, I'll try to post at least a few things. Not at the length they deserve (probably) but hey, better than nothing, right?

~ Life without the tenants from hell continues to be a relief. On the minus side, we can't start renovating the flat (which they left, unsurprisingly, in a mess. Not quite as dreadful as we expected -- nonetheless, there's something to do in every room) before we haven't settled what part of the damage they have to pay for. An exception is the kitchen, which was in a less-than-stellar state even before they moved in (fugly tiles, mix-and-don't-match plug sockets and switches, wallpaper that's been painted five times), so we kept that off the damage list. Accordingly, the past week was used for removing the tiles and wallpaper - and, on my side, with the help of an interior design program try to get all the mother-in-law's kitchen furniture into the new room. (Which is larger than her old kitchen, but as the door and kitchen are in the middle of the walls rather than at two different ends of the room, there's a little less space for cupboards.) It was kind of like playing "The Sims", just without the little people and their silly little needs!

~ Mother-in-law is helping nobody by panicking. OMG SHE HAS TO MOVE HOUSE. BY SEPTEMBER. IT IS ALREADY JUNE. WE WILL NEVER MAKE IT. On the other hand, instead of already packing stuff that she doesn't currently need (like winter clothing? Or the majority of her books? Or car stuff?) and bringing it over bit by bit, she keeps driving to and fro without a single box in her trunk. Le sigh. I wouldn't mind if we didn't have the same discussions over and over again about how OMG THERE IS NO TIME vs. YES THERE IS TIME BUT WHY DON'T YOU JUST START every other day.
Mind you, she is being exceedingly helpful by babysitting a lot, so I actually manage to look after the garden and bees and stuff on a more or less regular basis, so I shouldn't grouch! And the fact that she's moving in next door means that we can now use the full extent of our grounds (except for the meadow that's rented out to people with horses, but as I don't (yet!) have any animals that I'd want to put there, that's OK. Felix can now get a swingset for his birthday!

~ The "babies" are growing. Oh so much. It is shameful that Julian is two months old today and I haven't posted a single picspam or baby accomplishment update since right after his birth, I know! For the moment, suffice it to say that he is still a very good-natured, patient little fellow. He only wakes me once at night (sometimes, as late as 6 am!) to drink and otherwise sleeps until around 8! He can actually spend a while in his cradle rather than needing constant physical contact! He has an amazing (well, for his age) attention span - he can spend more than half an hour looking at his suspended toys (and making sweet little noises at them) and waving his arms! He smiles and grins a lot and interacts very nicely. He has grown rather more chubby than Felix ever was!

~ Meanwhile, Felix can now reproduce all (capital) letters and numbers in handwriting. His fascination for numbers continues, but to my delight he also likes playing with language now - be it "words starting with a particular letter" ("P is for Papa! And Pampers! And Post!"), or replacing all the vowels with a single one, or rhymes, or telling little stories by quoting lines from his books and replacing the names. He can express himself really well (aside from some difficulties in pronouncing consonant clusters), so I sometimes forget that he is, well, not quite three years old yet and I shouldn't expect the logical and analytical facilities of a five-year-old. So I'm sometimes quite unfairly expecting that he'll understand (or even anticipate) things that are well beyond his grasp. Poor no-longer-baby-but-still-very-young-child!
He has taken up thumbsucking since Julian arrived, to our slight annoyance. Towards his little brother, he is still very loving (if a bit overbearing, and sometimes too rough-and-ready for my comfort).
He'll start attending Kindergarten in August. I'm very curious how that's going to go.

~ Bees are also thriving. I do hope I'll get the main colony through summer without swarming - they haven't, so far, but only because I took away brood to make fledgling colonies. Now three of my four boxes are in use, and I'd like to keep the fourth empty just in case of... whatever. After Midsummer, they should in theory breed less and stop wanting to swarm either way, but I'm not sure I can rely on it. (Remember, I got this colony because it was an August swarm. August is well after Midsummer!) On the other hand, I don't want to give them an additional breeding box at this point because they'll likely just use it to mix honey and brood, which means I can't easily get the honey out, and aside from the fact that I WANT HONEY, it's also actually unhealthy for them to keep honeydew honey in winter (it tends to give them diarrhea. Too much honeydew honey was likely what killed my very first colonies.), and July and August are when there's the most honeydew. Blah blah nobody's reading anymore at any rate, I just have to hope that they won't swarm while I'm away. I gave them an additional honey super today so hopefully that'll keep them busy and convince them that there's enough room and no need to swarm. -- The first fledgling has been queen-right for about two weeks now. Yay! In the second fledgling, the new queen apparently didn't return, but as I had a lot of brood in the main colony and had to do something about that anyway, I gave them a frame full of young brood last week and they've started to make new queen cells. Hopefully, one of those new queens will manage to get laid and find her way back to the colony...

~ The garden is doing what it wants. Some plants are growing well, others are not growing at all. I've given up trying to encourage them, and just scrapped the intercropping plans I lovingly made last winter. They've been ruined anyway because all sorts of people dropped their potatoes off with us before they went on their Easter vacation. I don't know why anybody believes that it's a good idea to buy 40 kg of potatoes in SPRING. Yes, they're getting cheaper, but that's because they're due to germinate. Which most of them promptly did. Even more stupid if you know you're going on vacation soon... Oh well. I had to make additional patches to plant all those germinated (= no longer edible) potatoes but, unless the potato blight or potato beetle visit us, we'll probably get enough "new" potatoes to last all winter. We just didn't get to eat any of them in Spring. :P

~ Childbed time is officially over. (Mind you, this time it was child-kitchen and child-garden, anyway.) Aside from my flabby belly and the still-present scar in my nethers, I feel much as ever, too. No paranoia about prolapsing wombs this time, thank God! Fitness is returning, too (as much as can be asked for without actual training).

~ Truth in LaCE: I've observed that after the birth of both my children, I had absolutely no mind for creativity. Or fiction - not my own - in general! Like, not just "no time", but genuinely "no mind" - I honestly couldn't care for the lives and times of made-up people. If I hadn't regularly had to read up stuff for the Silmarillion re-read, I'd only have consumed gardening books, travelogues and the beekeeping primer in the past two months. After Felix' birth, this state lasted for almost half a year, but this time, it ended last week. As a result, I was swamped by plotbunnies: For two The Tempered Steel spin-offs, for that Nerdanel-and-Anairë story I started for the B2MeM Bingo two years ago, for Golden Days, for - good grief! - Wardens of the North (a.k.a. TTS Two). And oh, there's year-before-last's NaNo which I also meant to re-work...
So we've firmly left "no mind" territory and are back in "no time" territory.

~ But before any progress can be made on any front, we're going on vacation. No, we're still broke! But my parents, in a clever bid to spend more time with their grandchildren, have rented a holiday home in Denmark and have invited us along. We just have to get there by ourselves. (About five hours by car.) So I'll see the sea soon! (When we bought new sandals for Felix a few weeks back, he - to our great surprise - actually tried them on without complaining. Then when we'd found a pair that fit, he declared - to the delight of the shop assistants - "NOW we can go to the beach!" Soon, sweety. Not quite yet...)

And that concludes your hurried update. Off to make black-and-redcurrant jelly. And dinner. I've become such a housewife. :P

On a happier note, even though it was a long winter, bad spring and weird summer, my bees appear to be thriving. I have two colonies again, one fully-fledged one (grown from the swarm I got last year) and one fledgling one.
They won't give me much honey, due to the long winter, bad spring and the fact that everything flowered at once (= too much for the bees to handle), but they're doing well otherwise. The fully-fledged colony is still in more brood than it should be at this time of year. That makes sense to me, as the seasons are all tardy this year. They have hardly any pollen left so I expect them stop breeding soon, anyway. At any rate, there appear to be very few varroa mites in that colony. There are more (that is, numbers that are unfortunately "normal") in the fledgling, but that's probably my fault because I didn't change the drone frame as regularly as I should have. >_>

And the irrational fear of bees that befell me after Felix' birth appears to be abating at last.
( and the rest goes under a cut for those whose fears are NOT abating. Only text, no images, but I don't know just how bad it is for you? )

I'm not doing quite doing things according to the textbook, I'm too nervous for that yet - but then, my bees aren't sticking to the textbook either. But I'm getting things done again, and that's a good start. And hey, 5 kg of honey (if my guesstimate is correct) are better than nothing.
So, yeah!