Sunday, April 5, 2009

sprouting

Every day as I walk by my dining room, I am amazed that it's working - I am actually growing plants. Because Josh and I have never done this before, it's strictly experimental and we aren't counting on anything turning out. Whatever works will be awesome and what doesn't will be a great lesson for us to try it a different way next year.

On Friday Tim plowed our garden area and the soil is much better than we expected. We are trying to decide whether to build raised beds or plant in the ground this year. With raised beds we won't have to pull as many weeds but it will require more labor and materials up front and more water over the summer. We're leaning towards planting in the ground this year and if it turns out to be a pain then we'll build beds next year. Josh has also been collecting old windows to build a greenhouse. Our goal is to gather enough used windows, storm doors, and old wood to build it for next-to-nothing.



Being the first weekend in April, I needed to start the basil, marigolds and beans. I transplanted the peas and okra into bigger containers (plastic cups I found in our pantry, then nailed holes through the bottom for drainage). The celery and parsley have barely started to show. The tomato plants are looking pretty puny too, but I'm really not sure what they're supposed to look like at this point. The lettuce is pretty hit-or-miss but the peas and okra seem to be doing really well.





I wanted to start seeds for thyme and rosemary but I ran out of soil and space, so I'm going to wait until next weekend and see if anything else looks strong enough to move into the bigger containers. I hope to have the garden tilled and ready for planting around the first weekend in May.

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Ben has not been on the reflux medicine for three weeks and we can tell a huge difference. He has been sleeping so much better and seems like such a happier baby than before. However, we ran out of his medicine yesterday. I had gone to the Ozark Wal-Mart pharmacy four days ago with the bottle of medicine and the dropper we use. I told the pharmacist it didn't seem like there was enough medicine left in the bottle to last a month. I added that he is supposed to have 1.4 ml twice a day, and the bottle only holds a little over 60 ml if completely full, so even if the bottle was full during original prescription, mathematically it can't possibly last a month. She ran some numbers with her calculator and looked up the prescription in the computer and said she gave us enough initially, so we should be fine. She also commented about new moms "not realizing how much medicine is still left in there" and "I'll see it will go farther than it looks..." She dismissed me by saying, "well if you run out, then come back and we'll talk." I wanted to take her calculator and show her that 30 days times 2 times a day times 1.4 ml equals 84 ml, so if we originally received 60 ml, then we're still 24 ml short. However, there were about 20 people in line behind me at this point, so I said I'm sure I'll be back, and grumbled away.

Fast-forward to yesterday. We gave Ben his morning dose and that was all that was left. We then spent the entire day driving and in Sullivan, so when we returned home I immediately went to Wal-Mart to get his prescription. Online, it says the Ozark Wal-Mart pharmacy is open until 10:00pm. That is false. It closed at 6:00.

Ben was up all night and I feel like I slept about two minutes. When I was able to peel myself out of bed, we went back to the Ozark pharmacy and explained the situation. The main pharmacist wasn't working and instead it was some fill-in guy who "wasn't comfortable" giving me 2.8 ml of Zantac to hold us over until we could get the doctor to refill our prescription tomorrow. I tried to reason with him, saying it's heartburn medicine not prescription pain killers. He totally understood my math behind the situation, but said the doctor originally prescribed it for 30 days but only 60 ml, so the pharmacy went with filing the 60 ml part, which only lasted 21 days. I tried telling him how little sleep I got last night, but he was unaffected. He did send in for a refill with our doctor's office, so hopefully Ben (and I) will have some relief tomorrow. If not, we might be switching pharmacies.

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