Ye gods I hate peeling. The itching is even less fun.
This weekend starts the Great Outdoor Project. I kid, it doesn’t have an official name. We have sorely neglected the roses and they need to be beaten into submission before they start stealing local children. One already had a go at the Girlchild, I shit you not. Of course, her abnormally inflated fear of wasps might have had something to do with it…she insists they herded her into the rosebush on purpose. Mmmyeah.
Speaking of the Girlchild, ever since her viewing of the Nancy Drew movie (which was quite amusing…Jim, your girls will love it), she has become Detective Girl. She had previously recruited her school friends into a group of Spies (this after reading the Daring Book for Girls), and has since converted them to Detectives, bent on Solving Mysteries. Each team member has a title, and a job description. The organizational skills of this child are already legendary. When she was three she had an entire playground’s worth of kids gathering acorns for her.
So, last night while reading her Daring Girl book, Girlchild heaved a sigh.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“My Detective team is not getting all this detective stuff,” she replied.
“Well, sweetie, you have to understand not everyone you know is going to be as smart as you are.”
(huge grin) “I know.”
“So you have to give it to them in a way they can understand.”
“Yeah. It’s just…I think they’re getting bored. We need a Mystery to Solve!”
So, I did some googling and found a neat little site that actually has short mysteries for kids to solve. When I showed it to her, her little face fell.
“Are those REAL mysteries,” she asked.
From across the room, Boychild spoke up, “They’re not going to let you have access to crime scene evidence.”
(Yes, he talks like that.)
This had apparently never occurred to her. In her mind, everyone should be able to run around solving mysteries like Nancy Drew, outsmarting grownups and Saving the Day.
Anyway, back to the Hunormous Garden Restoration Thinger (no, that’s not it’s name either)… That last frost we had apparently murdered everything planted in the main bed out front. The shrubs in front of the windows are simply not coming back to where they were, and the lily things are toast…brown, crusty, overdone toast. Plus the gods-forsaken weeds and legitimate grass are laughing merrily at the stone border as they plow right over it and into the planting bed, so we need a demarcation zone reestablished, preferrably with gasoline or a flamethrower. And then I’m going to cottage garden the motherfucker. Screw you, weeds, see how you do when you don’t even get sunlight, ya bastards.
Hedge roses will go against the windows, that should be installed with a custom window installation near me, also coreopsis, shasta daisies, black-eyed susans, vanilla pokers, bee balm, foxglove, salvia, lupines in front (tallest to smallest), and bordered all around by heurcherella.
So, wanna come help us dig and plant? We’ll feed you ribs, corn on the cob and baked beaaaannnsss…..