Carrot Soup and Carrot Seeds

We went to the White House Egg Roll in April and came home with some lettuce and carrot seeds that the girls have wanted to plant.  Here's the thing: I know NOTHING about gardening.  My last experience with growing something, well, besides two babies of course, was a sunflower in my backyard.  It grew so high I needed to get on a ladder to reach the top of it.  But I'm pretty sure I had nothing to do with it growing.  I think my parents were behind that project.
I'm just not what you'd call an outside kind of gal.  It's a major flaw, I know, and I try to work on it.  Take this post for example.  I garden suited up and we planted us some carrot seeds. (We were going to plant lettuce seeds too, but Harper insisted on carrying the pot we were going to plant them in and promptly dropped it on the sidewalk before we got any soil in it.)

First, we had to go to Home Depot to find pots and soil. 

Who knew there were so many kinds of soil?  And who knew they were in an "outside/inside" area of the store?   With birds and bees?  Not Callie.  Don't worry, I chose the 25lb bag of soil for a pot this size:

I absolutely know what I'm doing.  Nobody had to go back to get a smaller bag of soil, and nobody had to go back for gardening gloves and a small shovel to put the soil in the pot.

"What are we supposed to do with all this dirt, Mom?"

Anyway, we figured it out with the help of my husband.  His grandpa was a farmer so I think it's in his blood.

After we saved the day, I do what I do (better) and found some books to go along with our carrot seed- watching.

We took a look at Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss, and I'm afraid Hadley has huge expectations now for how big our carrots are actually going to be.

We also read Carrot Soup by John Segal, a cute story about a rabbit who plants carrot seeds in the spring for his favoite dish, carrot soup.  Throughout the book, all his friends take the carrots behind Rabbit's back and surprise him at the end with a carrot soup par-tay.  Hadley and Harper love this book because at the end all the animals yell, "SURPRISE!" 

I had Hadley make a chart so she could track the carrots' progress, also helping her to answer her own question, "Are the carrots here yet?"

The other thing we did while we waited was try to make carrot soup.  In the back of John Segal's story, there is a recipe for it and Hadley and I thought it'd be fun to try it out.

Hadley and I also made cheddar/parsley bread to go with it.  That's not in the book, but nobody in this family can just have soup for dinner.  And by nobody I mean Callie.

Hadley didn't want to crumble the butter into the flour, so she took a picture of me doing it instead.

It all turned out pretty yummy.  Plus, it's fun watching the carrots grow.  I admit that I'm the first one out in the morning checking on their progress.  That seems significant since I'm usually standing behind the porch screen looking for wasps.