An End of An Era

About eight weeks shy of four years ago, I handed over my precious newborn baby to you know…people that weren’t me. I was nervous about heading back to work but I knew Wyatt was in good hands with the loving women at Doodlebugs.

Last Friday, we had a graduation to celebrate his class moving on to big boy/big girl school in Augusts…*sniff sniff*. I am so glad Wyatt has had these beautiful, smart women in his life to teach him, love him, get on to him the many times he needed it, help him spell and read sight words, write his name, go to the potty, and a million other things.

 

 

Mrs. Becky, Wyatt’s teacher, referred to him as her “southern gentleman.” I think she hit the nail on the head with that one because he told me, “Mama, we need to go to Public (Publix) and buy them [teachers] some flowers.” So I bought tons of roses at Publix and made small bouquets for each of his teachers.

 

Mother’s Day and Nanny’s 90

This Mother’s Day was busy for us! We visited Mrs. Desiree and Mr. Sheldon first thing and then went over to Aunt Terri and Uncle Louie’s house to celebrate my paternal grandmother, Nanny’s 90th birthday. I am terrible at remembering to get pictures with me in them. I think it’s a miracle that I managed to end up in two of these, but not one SINGLE photo of me with my own sweet Mama or Mrs. Desiree.

Four generations of Mastrarios: Nanny, Daddy (Pop), me, and Wyatt

These are four of my Nanny’s six children. Aunt Phil passed away more than ten years ago and Uncle Tony still lives in New Jersey.

Sami managed to get the three of us together for a selfie. I don’t get too many pictures like this with my sisters!

I told Justin I couldn’t believe that it was just four years ago that I had a four-day old newborn baby on my first official Mother’s Day. I can still remember he had on a blue onesie that said, “My mom rocks” with guitars on it. Now he’s fiercely independent, so smart, and very much like his Mama and Daddy in every way. I’m thankful I had such a great example to look up to in my own mama and hope to do best by him!

May Flower Update

The timing is great right now to be outside and enjoying all the flowers.

Mrs. Desiree bought this mother-of-thousands plant and I have planted some of its babies. I hope it doesn’t take over my yard!

These beautiful roses are growing all over the ditch banks in South Georgia right now. I was prepared to go dig some up off the dirt road only to discover I had some around one of the pine trees in my yard. I didn’t even see them bloom last year!

I have magnolia blossoms all over my trees now! I love the smell of a magnolia. I try to take note of when they’re blooming. Sami has always said she wants a wedding full of  big smelly magnolias so I want to make sure the dates line up for when she plans a future wedding!

Aunt Faye’s clematis is gorgeous climbing up over a wagon wheel! I told her I definitely want to do one of these on each side of my driveway.

  

Wyatt brought home a flower pot for me he made at Doodlebugs for Mother’s Day. I love it and it was immediately the perfect place to plant my ranunculus bulbs. Hopefully I’ll have big beautiful blooms  like these soon.

 

My hydrangeas have put off their first blooms of the season as well. I think these are some of my favorite flowers!

    

In the garden, things are looking well. We have baby green tomatoes starting to grow and the bell peppers are forming as well.

Justin, Wyatt, and I spent a few hours last Sunday digging all of the potatoes from the garden. We ended up with 121 pounds of potatoes from our <50 pounds of seed potatoes. We shouldn’t have to buy any for a whole year!

 

I got the prettiest succulent from my in-laws on Mother’s Day. It’s like a morning glory—it only opens up during the sunlight hours. It’s nice hanging in our bay window right now!

Chicken Update #3

My brother-in-law, Michael, told Justin that our local feed store had a deal that they would give you ten chicks for each bag of feed you bought for a few days last week. Of course, Justin said challenge accepted. We were due to restock the chicken feed at the house so he went to the Red Barn, our feed supplier, and grabbed up two bags of feed and came home with 19 chicks. He wiped them out of all the chicks they had.

These little fuzzies are so cute. They chirp all the time. We did have one die, but we still have 18 cheeping away all day long.

We hope to sort out the rest of the chickens we have and end up with around 24 layers and four or five roosters for breeding and hatching out eggs.

On another note, our guineas started laying. Justin discovered 2 eggs in the nest box on Wednesday night. We have five eggs now! We thought we had a male and a female guinea and we were going to let the female hatch babies out, but the timing is such that we might actually have 2 females!

With the addition of the new chicks, we now have a total of around 50 mouths to feed at the Cook home place. That includes the chickens, roosters, chicks, two guineas of indeterminate sex, Doc Bunny, May Dog, Mama Kitty, the tom cat, and the three kittens. To add to the craziness, we bought Wyatt a beta fish for his birthday. The poor fish still doesn’t have a proper name. It has been “Umbrella”, “Silly Jilly,” and “Silly Billy” so far. Poor fish!

 

 

We thought the original fox was gone, but it seems we have another fox, this one a darker color, creeping around and Justin and I heard a bobcat in the woods yesterday. Life in the country is so fun!

Mastrario Cousins 2015

For Mama’s Mother’s Day present, Suzi, Sami, and I got the three boys (Wyatt, Liam, and Pax) together in a pecan orchard and got Sami to work her photographic magic to get an updated picture.

I love seeing Sami in action. There is usually mass chaos getting all three boys to look at her, smile, and look semi-normal. She snaps away, always managing to get a great shot.

This is usually what we hope to get—shot on my iPhone:

 

…but this is usually what happens; Pax moves, Liam squints, and Wyatt rolls around like crazy.

 

Somehow, Sami manages to get a shot like this with three crazy boys:

This is what we got printed on a canvas for Mama!

T-Ball With a 4-Year Old

This is Wyatt’s first year playing t-ball with our county recreation department. My crazy friend Saye talked me into coaching with her and two other women despite only one of the four of us having a child that has ever played before.

Wyatt is still getting the hang of things. He really likes hitting the ball. Everything else, notsomuch. I stay on the field for the entire game with the kids so I don’t get to take very many pictures. Thankfully, one of our team mamas got the most amazing action shots for us! I am so thankful.

You can see Wy loves hitting the ball.

Sometimes he runs to first base after hitting the ball, but most of the time he dawdles. Uncle Louie tried to tell him to run fast like a deer. That didn’t make him move any faster.

 

When he gets tired of running the bases, he just plops right on down, sitting on the base.

And then, he merrily skips his way home.

 

This is me reminding him to touch home base on his way in.

Bless his heart, this is my boy in the field…sitting down…at least he’s not playing in the dirt like everyone else usually is…this time. He did manage to take his glove off and throw it in the air before I caught up with him!

 

I know one day he might be a baseball-crazed boy with big MLB dreams. I am going to look back one day and laugh at his crazy antics. I wouldn’t trade them for the world.