Wednesday, the kids were really getting on my nerves, especially in the 3 pm to 6 pm period. It started when I presented my oldest with an Auntie Anne’s pretzel, after school. The younger two and I had been to the mall earlier in the afternoon, and I had the forethought to bring one home for him, since I know he loves them.

He picked up the bag and then let it fall back down to the car seat, with utter disdain. “Ugh, why didn’t you get me something cold? It’s so hot out,” he complained.

I felt like he had kicked me in the teeth. “OK, no pretzel for you,” I said. He started backpedaling. “No, I do want it,” he whined.

No pretzel for you!

Maybe I took it too personally. But I bet he won’t be rude in that particular way again! He eyed that pretzel bag the rest of the afternoon.

So it was downhill from there, with ill will, whining, fighting. It rained, and they went outside to play in the rain, which was cute, but then they jumped in mud, and came back in the house all muddy just as I was putting dinner on the table. So there had to be a round of stripping and scrubbing before we could eat. And my husband was working late. Somewhere in there, my oldest and I locked horns again: the rain turned into a thunderstorm, and he wanted to watch it from the front porch. I said no; he refused to come in; he started to explain why he thought he was safe on the porch.

“I don’t care what you think about thunderstorms! Get in here!”

Oh, the Taurus-Scorpio dynamic is a rough one.

Not my finest moment. Not that I was wrong about the lightning (“light-ling,” he still calls it, hee), but I had passed impatience and headed into nasty, and I didn’t want to be there.

When my husband came home, he looked at me and said, “Why don’t you go upstairs by yourself for a while?” Then he was rocked by a gust of wind as I peeled out of there. Ha! Usually I say, oh, it’s OK, let me finish cleaning up dinner and then maybe I will… Not that night!

Anyway. Thursday was much better. Frankly, any day when it’s just me and baby girl at home is better. And, we had special guests: my friend F. and her daughter and baby son. Kind of funny because it was my second visit from an old college friend in a week. And what was great about both visits is that we weren’t sitting there talking about college and reminiscing. We were talking about life now, kids and jobs and houses and gardens. It just makes me happy that even though we live far away from each other and hardly see each other, we can keep up pretty well (thanks, Facebook). 🙂

So it’s Friday and overall it’s been a good week. Well, in some ways. I made use of leftovers. Wednesday, I got a good deal on much-needed sheets at Macy’s, using a $20-off coupon. But Monday night, I took the kids to Friendly’s for dinner — I was pooped. I also spent $45 on another planter (see gardening news below). There was the aforementioned controversial Auntie Anne’s pretzels. I even lost my mind and bought a $6 pint of Ben & Jerry’s last night at CVS. Then my card was declined this morning, getting coffee. I have it set up so it will decline, since I don’t want to spend money I don’t have. But since I was en route to buy the planter, I paid cash for the coffee and put the planter on the credit card. Not what I want to be doing! It turned out that my husband was late putting some money in my account, but it still shouldn’t have gotten that low. There’s a couple things going on in terms of cash flow and us being on the same page that we need to discuss, so I’ve decided it’s time for one of our Very Painful Financial Summits. Hopefully we can do that this weekend, and hopefully after that the budget will be more in order. Things are just a little mixed up right now. At any rate, today is the last day of May for the budget (anything purchased over the weekend won’t post til June 1). Thank God! I wish I had shown a little more self-control this last week.

Today, I am going to be very good and have a salad for lunch, using baby lettuce leaves thinned out from the garden. I bought the planter because it appears that I will need to plant more corn if I want them all to pollinate properly. Things I wish I had known earlier! I’m not even sure that if I plant more corn now, it will catch up to the two plants that are already growing (I had to thin them out too). But I feel like I should try. I am going to have dirt delivered over the weekend for that planter. I’m trying to look at a lot of these garden purchases as an investment. Next year I shouldn’t need to lay out so much money. Of course, this is the eternal question: is it a good investment, especially if you are busting your budget to do it? Probably not. A CSA would probably be the wiser choice for us. But can you quantify all the fun I’m having and all the knowledge I’ve gained? I think not.

I’m overwhelmed with plant-specific garden knowledge right now. I’ve been looking up stuff about each plant I have because I don’t want to make any mistakes. Although the garden is ostensibly just a fun project and I’m in the learning stage and that’s okay, because I’m your stereotypical competitive type-A oldest child (deep inside, if not always on the surface), I beat myself up for every lost plant and look with jealousy upon other people’s gardens. Cause you know, if you’re not first, you’re worst, am I right?

Have a great weekend. We have no plans and no Little League games!

Not-recent photo; I’m having trouble synching my phone photos to the computer.