Mommy, this doesn\’t taste like chocolate…

I spent all of Saturday landscaping our front yard. I’m having such a great time — this is our first spring ever as “homeowners,” and the knowledge that I can do whatever I want with the yard is exciting…(especially since Geoff does not seem to mind paying for my botanical flights of fancy!)

So…Hubby and I headed to Carbondale on Saturday morning and loaded up on tons of annuals to decorate the garden. I bought multi-colored celosia (cockscomb) and white wave petunias to plant around our garden flag, ten Kong coleus plants to line the front of the porch with (to cover up our daffodils which looked beautiful a few weeks ago and are now in the process of dying back), and enough black mulch filler to look like one of Tony Soprano’s thugs on a “business trip” to Lowe’s…

I wound up with celosia and petunias left over, so I’m trying to figure out where to put them. I have an area in the front that gets a lot of sun where I’d like to have peonies blooming, so maybe I could put the smaller annuals in front of that. I’d really like to have some creeping phlox in the yard, because our neighbors down the street have a pond that is completely lined with purple and pink phlox. It takes my breath away every time I drive past it.

Only problem is, I have to buy the peonies first. Shrubs are where the price tag gets high fast. I’m trying to pace myself, but that’s not as much of a problem today as it was on Saturday evening when I went to Wal-Mart and wanted to blow more cash in the Garden Center. Today I’m feeling what the weekend did to my poor out-of-shape body, and I don’t think I’ll be planting anything else for a few days!! I am too stupid to remember sunscreen, so my neck is the color of tomato soup today. My back feels like it is broken, and it takes me three minutes to achieve a sitting position, but I don’t care. I am having too much fun being a gardener! 🙂

Meanwhile, I think Jamie enjoyed the weekend because my projects meant he got to be an Outdoor Baby most of the weekend. I set up his playpen on a shady part of the porch Saturday so he could watch me digging up the front yard. He thought those coleus plants looked pretty cool! And then he spent the early evening snoozing on top of Grandpa’s chest next door on my parents’ porch swing. Geoff’s mom bought him some little baby-sized sunglasses on Easter. Jamie enjoys wearing them, too. And besides, he looks downright hilarious in them anyway, so they’re on his face a lot. 🙂 I think he had a pretty good weekend. He was all smiles when we drove to preschool today, and started doing his “baby babble” when he got there — I think he was trying to tell his teachers about playing in the yard on Saturday. How cute!!

My girlfriend, Heather, happened to be looking out her window at just the right time today to catch a photo of a certain suspiciously familiar-looking garbage man out gathering her trash and getting a behind-the-scenes feature story on city workers. By the way, I think the “SIU Alumni” cap is a nice touch, Geoff…

Oh, these are the people in your neighborhood,

In your neighborhood,

In your neigh-bor-hood, Oh!

These are the people in your neighborhood,

They’re the people that you meet each dayyyyyy….

I’m in a slump.

I’ve had the same headache for three days, I can’t lose any more weight, our finances are stressful, my search for a new student worker is a disaster, I need a haircut, there’s no food in our fridge because I don’t have time to buy groceries, camp season is looming ahead at work, Jamie’s day care is making tons of changes and has a shady new contract for me to sign, I managed to badly injure my right foot, Little Man keeps throwing up everything he eats, the column I wrote this week is crummy, my houseplants are drooping, I can’t seem to please my boss, there are black ants everywhere in our house, and things are so busy at my house that the only time my husband and I see each other these days is when one of us is in the bathroom and the other one is waiting for a turn.

I just can’t seem to get it together on any level. I want to be a good mother, a good housekeeper, a good gardener, a good employee, a good wife, and a good person, but the truth is, I don’t think I have the energy to even be one of those things. 

I wish I at least had the energy for a good cry, but I don’t have that, either. And I can’t focus on making any one thing better because everything else is just flying around, like evil birds pooping on my head.

Sorry I don’t have anything upbeat today and just want to feel sorry for myself. Sue me.

Here’s Jamie looking particularly hilarious dressed as Huggy Bear–which is kind of odd, if you think about it, since there are pictures of Pooh Bear on his Huggies… 🙂

(Separated at birth?) 

 Anyway, I would like to announce to the world at large that my son, James McCaddon Ritter, gave me the best Easter present EVER yesterday:

HE SLEPT THROUGH THE NIGHT!!!

Hallelujah!

We finally have a photo of the three of us together to hang on our dining room wall! Yay!

Emily took this of us last time she came to visit. I love how Jamie’s shoes make his feet look like Mickey Mouse’s…hee hee!