Things I've Seen Lately

A face at dinner time:

A tiny boy in a tiny tie:

A "loaf" of "bread" baked without yeast (oops):

The dreaded interior of the baby's booster seat:
A baby washing dishes:
Pony hair. Yes, I said pony hair, arranged by color:
A boy sleeping with a teeny tiny ear of popcorn under his chin:

If there's one thing I want to do . . .

Last night we were out working in our yard (i.e. weed patch, as some would have it) when some neighbors came by on a walk (good neighbors, not faux pseudo-neighbors who leave anonymous letters in the mailbox). They have 8-year-old twins, and the boy twin was in our Sunday School class a couple of years ago. He is delightful, if a bit of a handful. For example, one Sunday he escaped from me and started doing ninja rolls up the center aisle of the Sunday School. Sigh. He was always bored, and I didn’t blame him, because I was often bored in there, too. His little mind was too quick for the Church Ladies.

Anyway, the kids were poking around in the garden asking Marmot Dad the Latin names of various plants. Apparently, apropos of nothing, Twin A said to Marmot Dad, “If there’s one thing I want to do, it’s stop global warming.”

Let me repeat that: “If there’s one thing I want to do, it’s stop global warming.”

The kid kills me. He went on to explain that it was all about the sharks (he spent a lot of time drawing sharks when he was our pupil). Global warming is not good for sharks, I gather. He let Marmot Dad in on a little shark trivia, though: “Bull sharks are the only sharks that swim in fresh water. There was an unusual incident (sic) once where someone was attacked by a shark in a creek. It was probably a bull shark.”

Then he rollerbladed into the sunset. Sic transit gloria twinboy.

The Garden (of Eden)

Here is our glorious garden for this year (see previous post--yes, this is in part compensation for the fact that SOME PEOPLE don't like our gardening style).

Collards. Have you ever grown collards? You should. They are impossible to kill and they make lots of tasty dishes for weeks.

The staging area, where Marmot Dad keeps his hopes up that these plants will be planted somewhere this year.
The Great Onion Massacre of 2009. 
True Love. Marmot Dad does not care for rhubarb, but he brought home FOUR plants for me.
Squash-a-rama.
An eggplant! Houston! We have an eggplant!
Holy Sqash Bugs, Batman!
My climbing cantaloupe. Marmot Dad says cantaloupe doesn't climb. I say it does. So far he's winning. 
Peppers. Hot.
Arugula a-goin' to seed all over. And a cabbage.
Popcorn! Tooie can hardly wait to put the ears in a bag and "'tomp the corns off."
The garden from a distance. Not bad for the back half of a very very very small lot.
Amen.

Weeds, Glorious Weeds

I came home from swimming lessons today with the kids and, as is my habit, checked my mailbox. I found a little packet from a "neighbor" inside. Let me quote the letter, as written, poor grammar and all:

This property is a eye sore to the neighborhood. please clean it up! the weeds and flowers are out of control. if you are overwhelmed. please ask your neighbor's or church leaders for help. we have decided to give you a few days before we contact the city and start filing complaints. thanks for being a responsible neighbor.

Yes, someone actually left this in our mailbox, along with a pamphlet from the city ("weeds cannot be higher than twelve inches") and some photos of our home from the street, taken from inside a car.

Well, suffice it to say that I was shocked and appalled. And really annoyed. For so many many many reasons. There's the passive-aggressiveness. Then the patronizing-ness. And the high-and-mighty-ness. And the insulting-ness. And the fact that we do not have 12-inch high weeds in our yard. What we have is a yard that does not conform to the idiotic golf-course aesthetic of our white-bread-eating, American-Idol-worshipping, ATV-riding, pious-church-going neighborhood. Allow me to illustrate.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:
Exhibit C:
DO YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THAT???

Here's the thing. I think I know who sent this to us, bless her little heart. She calls the city all the time on people (despite her own city code violations). She even turned my neighbor and friend, a wonderful parent, into DCFS because she didn't like her potty-training techniques (said friend then picked up and moved because she couldn't stand to be in a neighborhood where people would do such a thing).

So this is my plan. I'm planning to put the letter (just the letter) back into her mailbox. If I'm wrong, no harm done. She'll just think some crank put a letter in her box. If I'm right, she'll know that I know it was her. 

Passive-aggressive, meet passive-aggressive-ER.

We Scream for Bugs

I just finished cleaning the baby's booster chair. Some BONEHEAD designer designed it with about 2000 nooks and crannies, each of which can harbor a week's worth of discarded food that will fester and ripen to an alarming stench in no time at all. Especially when one's child does not so much eat food as tuck it under his bottom. Then some BONEHEAD novice parents bought it for their first child and couldn't bear, in their silly frugal way, to discard it and have been cursing it ever since. So this parent in particular feels she deserves a little blog break before she goes to freeze some kale and grind some wheat for her daily bread.

So the kids were all playing happily in the playhouse earlier this week while I worked in the garden. Suddenly M began to scream in her usual histrionic way that "there was a bee on my hand! there was a bee on my hand!" Well, I say her usual histrionic way, but there was in fact a true sense of urgency in her scream. I asked her over and over, "did it sting you? Did it sting you?" She didn't know, and after a few moments of back-and-forth I realized that this was not helping the situation at all and that if she was still screaming she probably had been bitten. Which she had. Stung twice on the wrist by a wasp or wasps. Ouch. So the usual remedies were applied (baking soda, frozen peas, hydrocortisone cream, kisses, lying on the couch) and the brave mama went out to investigate, trailed by two not so brave as curious and reckless boys.

I opened the door to the sink of the playhouse and saw what looked like a basketball-sized wasp nest (my skin is crawling right now as I think about it). Wasps started buzzing and whizzing around, so I picked up the baby and hustled the toddler into the house pronto.

Now, I do not believe in applying poisons all over the home for no good reason. E lectured her class about the evils of fertilizer in preschool, thanks to my evangelizing. To spiders, I say live and let live. BUT when you sting my baby, you forfeit your rights (let's not even talk about what happens when you hit my baby on the head with a baseball bat), and I keep a secret can of wasp spray in the garage for just such an occasion. So I dispatched the nest and the wasps with rapid if not entirely eco-friendly efficiency. (And when I went to remove the nest saw that it was not quite as big as a basketball but probably the size of my fist nevertheless.)

So poor M, the very next day, came running to me from riding her bike, screaming this time about a spider. On her hand. Once again, the dumb question, "did it bite you?" This time she was sure it hadn't, but while I was trying to calm her down she realized it was crawling on her leg, so she screamed some more, shook it off, and ran inside. I have to admit, it was pretty big and hairy. (We have these big hairy spiders living in our air ducts--we looked them up, and they are harmless Daring Jumping Spiders, a name you have to love.) Well, that was just too much for M. She spent the next two hours lying motionless on the couch, staring at the ceiling, no doubt thinking evil thoughts about bugs.

She is recovering nicely.

KEEP OUT

The neighbor kids drive us krrrrrazy. There's the usual annoying kid behavior. Then there's the entire lack of supervision by parents. A couple of weeks ago we were sitting down eating dinner--eating dinner, I tell you--when one of the girls said, "hey, is that a puder [special marmot language for something unmentionable that you can no doubt figure out]  on the back porch?" And indeed it was. IT WAS, I'm telling you. The youngest and most revolting neighbor child had taken off his diaper on our back porch and let it all hang out, so to speak. On another day, an awful day, this same puder-boy hit Tooie on the head with a bat (which I confiscated and still have in my pantry) and then moments later pushed over the Marmot Babe into the grass and sat on his head and bounced up and down until I grabbed him and shoved him off. This child is now banned from our home because he shoves the Babe over backwards every time he sees him.

Today the next oldest child (female, age three) pulled up about half of my onions out of our garden and broke off all the stems of the others. The children have been appalled at this shocking behavior. E decided that a fence would be the best option to keep her and her ilk out. E and M were talking at dinner about how best to fence off our yard when Tooie piped up, thoughtfully, "we should put up a sign at our house that says 'keep out.'" Then he beamed at his own sagacity while nodding repeatedly. The girls kept up their fence talk (electric or conventional? gate or no gate?). Suddenly Tooie cut in with his coup de grace: "And we should put up at sign at Ella's house that says 'keep in.'"

Would that we could, my blue-eyed boy. [Actually green-eyed, but that doesn't sound as good.]

Hilarious or disturbing . . . you decide

Here's the backstory:

E always likes to get presents for people for their birthdays, bless her heart. So when the kids found this horse at a yard sale, she knew it was just the thing for M's birthday. The people selling were happy to get rid of the Cinderella coach (which Tooie picked out for himself), as well as I think three other horses, for the low low price of $1. Birthday happiness was assured.

But we had no idea just how happy this particular horse was going to make us. The kids finally prevailed upon me to put batteries in it, and everyone commenced screaming "IT WALKS!" It was only a matter of time before the idea of harnessing the Cinderella coach to the horse and perching a naked and bald Barbie doll on its back made its way into the little marmoty heads we have around here.

p.s. please don't judge me for how my kitchen floor looks. If truth be told, it usually looks a lot worse.