Weekend notes

This weekend I got a bug up my butt about the yard. On Saturday, I spent five (!!) hours outside - weeding, putting down bark, cutting off dead leaves from the elephant ear plant thing near the front door (which left no leaves at all; we'll see if it survives), planting stuff in the pots in the backyard, and cutting back the fuschias on the other side of the front door that were also doing quite poorly thanks to the hard freeze we had a few weeks ago. On Sunday I had someone come out to dethatch and aerate the front lawn, and they will be reseeding it today. So at least the front yard will look presentable in a few weeks. I'm also definitely getting a gardening service, because God knows I don't mow often enough (or fertilize, or weed, or anything).

As a result of working my butt off on Saturday, I was pretty sore yesterday. But I dragged Rugrat out to get some new clothes (pants are a particular issue with him, as we have a hard time finding jeans that fit the length while still being small enough in the waist to fit his skinny bod), and to the grocery store. Rugrat's friend K came over for a little while to play, and when I told the kids that it was time for her to go home, Rugrat shouted "Oh, shit!" He is EIGHT. That is way too young to be cursing at the top of your lungs. Soooo...to punish him I made him not speak for an hour (and if you know my Rugrat, you know that this is very difficult for him, since he's a major chatterbox). I told him if I heard him curse again, he'd be getting his mouth washed out with soap. Of course it doesn't help that I'm a complete hypocrite and curse fairly often myself; when he brought this up I told him that when he is twenty-five years older than someone (as I am older than him) he can curse all he wants. Heh.

The weekend ended on a good note though, as we made homemade veggie pizza for dinner last night. I bought one of those thin-crust pizza shells, and we filled it with ranch dressing (instead of marinara, because neither of us like tomato sauce on our pizza), baby spinach, mushrooms, olives, marinated artichoke hearts, slivers of onion, garlic, and standard bagged "pizza mix" shredded cheese. Rugrat's side only had spinach & olives, but my side had all the goodies. And BOY was it good! It earned one and a half thumbs up from the Rugrat, although he said that next time he'd prefer it without the ranch dressing.