Indoor plants are AWESOME. Not only do they look great, but they also filter the air from all sorts of chemicals and toxins. About this time last year I lived with my wonderful Korean housemate in a house in Delft, which was rented to me by a lady who really loved plants. The room where I stayed was south and taking care of her plants only required watering once a month or so.

Since then -and before that time- both me and N. have lived in houses with bad (for plants and people) orientations or without outdoors space. Therefore I always thought that I could never keep a plant alive in the Netherlands. In our new home however, we have tons of natural sunlight! So there is hope. We have mainly succulents, as they require minimum maintenance and are hard to kill. One of them we have for more than 2 years and has moved with us in 4 different houses.

That is Lenaki, our first succulent 🙂

And this is a pretty sturdy one too, that we have bought from a supermarket 1,5 years ago. I have read that succulents grow in height when they don’t have enough space, but I don’t know if this is accurate.

This is one of our two new additions, a spider plant. It filters the air from some nasty stuff, the names of which I cannot recall.

This is our Jade plant, also known as lucky plant or money plant. We were commenting with N. how selfish it is of people to think that plants are here to bring money to people and the day after we bought it I found a significant amount of money in one of my bags. I have obviously put it there during a plane flight -because I separate my money in different places, in case the suitcase get lost- and then forgot about it. And no, money is not that unimportant to us. We are just forgetful.

This is my favorite plant in the whole galaxy, no, in the whole Universe. Those are my precious lemon trees that I grew from three lemon seeds. Only two survived out of the three and they are now one year old. Their leaves started turning yellow so I used all scientific (change of pot, addition of soil, egg shells for calcium) and non-scientific methods (healing crystals. There, I said it.) to help them, and they are doing a lot better.

Now with the pregnancy I have gone into this propagation madness, as if I need everything around me to reproduce. So I was thrilled when I found out that spider plant will grow new roots if you submerge a part of it in water and you can do the same with basil cuttings. Succulents propagate super-easily, just by letting their fallen leaves on the ground. They will grow roots in a few weeks. I absolutely recommend getting plants for your home, even if it is the easy ones to maintain. For me, it is very calming to water them and I greatly enjoy seeing them grow and develop new stems.

On a -quite important for us- side note, we had our 11 week scan this week and our little alien is growing as he/she should. Our midwife is a great, warm person that explains any question we have in detail, and without being in a hurry to finish. I feel quite grateful that I live in a country where pregnancy and childbirth are considered natural and not a sickness that needs to be closely monitored by a doctor. Of course, if there are multiples or complications pregnant women visit an obstetrician, but when things go smoothly a midwife is considered sufficient guidance. This scan put my mind at ease to a great extend, even though complications can always take place. But seeing the little one moving his/her tiny hands and feet around is a huge reassurance.

Little alien says “hi”.

P.S.: Our due date is 28th of May. I am secretly hoping that the little one will hang in there a bit longer, as June is a month dear to me, since me, my brother and my paternal grandmother were all born this month and our wedding anniversary is also in June. However, as N. says, May is the warm month of spring, flowers bloom and people fall in love. So that doesn’t sound too bad either.

P.S.2: Now go buy some plants!