Things are looking perkier and perkier in the garden this week.

My mini roses are now in bloom, having survived the merciless destruction last summer that came from certain basketballers not noticing that there were plants in my garden.





The lavender one is my favorite.  I really want a lavender standard-sized rose, but I haven't yet found one that has a good, strong fragrance.

My full-sized roses are blooming like crazy.



I can't seem to get a good picture of this bed--I don't really know enough about photography.  Any suggestions?  How do I get a picture that shows how floriferous these roses are, but still looks interesting and . . . interesting?

My pinks are going gang-busters, too.



I want lots more of these.  I only bought three, because that's all the cash I could bear to part with, but I think they'd look really pretty lining the driveway.  What do you think?



I have some annual pinks there toward the bottom left, and the perennial ones are up in the top left.  They'd look pretty coming all the way down, I think.  Maybe I'll get more next spring.

The flowers aren't the only thing flowering around here.  My peas are in bloom, and I even have a few pods.  Yay!  Just enough to add a little something to my stir-fry tomorrow.



My arugula is blooming too, but that's not good news.  I had to pull a bunch of it out.  But that just made room for the Swiss Chard that I'm putting in its place!

Our freezer is pleasantly full of things we did not buy.

I don't know whether it stems from pity (grad student poverty-lite) or fear (are we feeding the grandkids properly?), but every time they or we visit, my mom and my mother-in-law make contributions to our diet.  The most recent influx of foodie goodness was over the weekend of Theo's baptism.  Both grandmommies were there at the same time, so my freezer was bursting: shrimp, scallops, steak, scrapple, more steak, mussels, ground beef, ground chicken, and a little bit more steak.

(You can tell which food group they think we're most deficient in.)

Mom C makes fun of my propensity to ration these generous contributions.  ("Did you let Stephen have any meat this week?"  "Yes, we split one steak among the three of us.")  But I like how my judicious use of these dietary indulgences keeps us in Thanking-Mom mode for weeks at a time.  Since Theo's baptism, I've used something from one of the grandmothers at least a dozen times.  And every time, I say, "Hey, this is the _______ that Mimi (or Grandmom) left us!"  And the boys all say, "I love Mimi (or Grandmom)."

Mom C left us just a smidgen of shrimp, which became shrimp and artichoke pizza (for company even!), a full serving of scallops, which was asparagus-scallop stir-fry last night and will be spicy seafood pasta some time next week, two big London broils, half of one of which will be grilled tonight and the other half of which played a starring role in a stir-fry two weeks ago.  The organic chicken was particularly tasty as roast chicken one night ("No, you cannot have seconds on the chicken.  Have some more green beans."), barbecue chicken pizza the next, and chicken lo mein three days after that.

Mom S left us scrapple, which I cannot manage to stretch or ration no matter how I try (if anyone knows of a scrapple-eating contest, let me know, because Isaac could win it in his sleep), some steaks, one of which became beef-and-mushroom stroganoff, and some chili, on which Isaac commented at my failure to stretch into two meals.  ("C'mon, mom, why didn't you add more beans and stretch this over two nights?"  "Kid, do you really want to bring this up before you get seconds?")

Mom S also left us carcasses.  Stephen makes fun of my propensity to get excited about bones.  In fact, I believe he even tried to bar me from accepting or soliciting carcasses in the future, and he's threatened to refuse to transport them across state lines.  (We usually visit Mom S in Virginia.)  But with the two ham carcasses Mom S left us, I've made lentil soup, ham risotto, black beans and rice, and potato soup with ham broth and a wee bit of bacon on top.  AND I still have about ten cups of ham broth left.

I didn't notice him complaining any of those nights.