Welcome to New England. We grow rocks.

Sheesh! Pulled two HUGE buckets worth of rocks out of the little 4 x 6 plot I want for a veggie garden in my backyard. There's probably more than that, actually, but we haven't moved them all. Many many many thanks are due to scirocco for his endless and tireless patience in helping me pick rocks. Oh, and for disposing of the mouse that I still don't want to think too hard about.

BUT, they're all out, and hopefully, sometime this week I'll be able to get out there and put plants in the ground. This year, I'm limiting myself to what I can buy pre started from the garden center. If that goes well, though, look out next year!

It was kind of neat - yesterday when I was turning over the soil, I disturbed a couple of any colonies. And they were all running around, mad and confused. This morning, you could see, they had completely rebuilt their homes. Which I promptly went ahead and destroyed again. I felt a little bad, actually.

Weekend recap and a small rant

This was a good weekend. I got lots more done around the yard, which makes me happy (my half a flower bed is all mulched, and my veggie plot is ready), and a bunch of other things done as well.

We had a bunch of people over for the Monaco Grand Prix, and the rain held off until after we had grilled afterward, so that was ALL good. My aunt and uncle offered me a scotch broom plant last week, and brought it over this morning. I'm not sure it's going to do well in the spot I picked for it, so it may need to get moved in the fall. AND, as an extra special bonus, they brought me "new" furniture! They just remodeled their kitchen, and had a table set (with three chairs) and some portable storage cabinets that they didn't need anymore. We've been wanting to get rid of the table and chairs in our dining room, and now we have! For free!

I made an interesting salad for dinner tonight (from Martha); pita bread, cucumbers, celery, mint, watercress, and feta in an olive oil/white wine vinegar dressing. I thought it was yummy! I'm making Betty Crocker Tandoori chicken for tomorrow night. Mmmmm!

And now ( the rant. )

Trials of motherhood

This afternoon, I'm feeding Widget, And she's doing pretty well for her, especially considering that there's a house full of people, and she's very excited.

Anyway, she starts deciding she doesn't want any more sweet potatoes, but instead of turning her head, she starts waving her hands. I get her to stop, she eats a few more bites, and then wham, throws out her hands and knocks the spoon out of mine (and this was quite deliberate, you can tell the difference). And it pissed me off. I took her hand and slapped it lightly and said "No!" and she just started bawling. I didn't hurt her - I certainly didn't smack her that hard. Dada came over, gave her hugs and sympathy, and then we went on with the meal

But I'm still not sure how I feel about it. It seemed to get my message across, and she wasn't *that* upset either. It wasn't an act of rage or anything, I was calm when I decided to do it, and afterwards as well. I know I'm not supposed to do this, but I don't know how I really feel about it. It's just kind of weird. Perhaps I'll have to discuss with Wiley.

It points out something else too - pretty consistently, my friends see me at my very worst with Widget. When I'm around other people is when I have the most invested in having her behave, or do what I want her to do (like eat quickly because we need to leave, or be quiet in a restaurant, or any one of 100 other things), partly because since my friends don't have babies, I want to minimize Widget's impact on our outings, and partly just because that's when I most want to do other things. And because of this, I'm at my very least likely to be patient with her, or accept whatever she's decided to do as perfectly normal whenever other people (besides her daddy) are around. Sometimes I wonder what my friends think of how I'm doing, but I doubt they'd be entirely truthful if I asked, so I don't. And if they were, we might not be friends no more, so it's probably for the best.

In other news, I think Widget is slowly achieving mascot status amongst scirocco's childless male friends. It's pretty cute.