It's Amazing the Difference a Few Pansies Make

Pansies. I love the color for fall and for winter- especially with the dreariness of it in these parts. I considered planting mums in the urns at the front of the house but since I know that pansies last the whole winter and they have a greater variety of color than the mums I planted them instead. Actually I'm a bit disappointed in myself because I didn't do enough research before I hit the garden center at Home Depot. I put some of the cheap pansies in the cart but was concerned that they wouldn't be tall enough to actually be able to see them from the road so I searched the aisles hoping to find something to give the planter some height. I thought about ornamental grasses but I didn't see any that could handle winter here. Then Chloe came up to me with her hands full of a package of Karma Blue Butterfly pansies and they were perfect, or so I thought. I'm usually pretty good about researching flowers and seeds *before* I make a purchase but I thought that a pansy is a pansy, right? Well apparently not. The Karma Blue Butterfly is a perrennial instead of an annual that blooms in the fall and spring. Which is very cool because they're beautiful (they're the tall violet/blue/yellow flowers in the middle of the pot) but they're also the height in my planter. I know that regular pansies survive the whole winter even with snow on top of them so the shorter ones will survive (assuming I'm able to avoid killing them) but that sort of defeats the whole purpose of buying the KBB. They are really pretty though and if they bloom for the whole fall then that will buy some time for me to figure it out. I don't imagine that I'll be too terribly stressed out about it though.

I also somewhat straightened out the big planter that's attached to the house. I thought I needed a new liner-thingy but it turns out it was just mashed down and I was able to unfold it and mostly fix it. It doesn't come all the way up the sides though and I didn't have quite enough potting soil to fill it out. So there are a few pitiful looking little pansies that can't quite peek their heads over the top of the planter. At least it doesn't still have those awful silk flowers in it.

Potty training here is at a standstill. I've never met such a stubborn child in my life. Sometimes she puts herself on the potty and says, "I need to go potty". She'll even sit on the potty every two minutes- and then she pees in the floor. I'm ready to just put her back in diapers. I can't imagine having a three year old that isn't potty trained since I've never been in that boat, I just really don't know what to do. Oh and she didn't actually "go" in the hat, I just thought it was cute.

On the other end of the spectrum I've got my little Chloe who decided she wanted to help me sand the walls. I think I'll get a bunch of pictures of all of us remodeling the house a make a little scrapbook out of it.