Dear Pann,

Just over a month ago, our 10th anniversary came and went, without either of us taking much notice. Oh sure, we knew it was happening, and we wished each other a happy one, and we received well-wishings from families and friends. But on the actual day of our anniversary, I was traveling home from a business trip, you were recovering from two weeks of running summer camp (with a visit from your nieces in the middle), we were getting ready for the onslaught of OT, summer freelance work, Cammie’s trip, and the kids being home all the time, not to mention Carla’s birthday, and we just didn’t have time to celebrate properly.

I’m hoping we can make up for that during our upcoming vacation. I’m doing my damnedest to tie up loose ends before I go away, so we can really enjoy the vacation when it arrives. I’m hoping we can take some time for ourselves during that trip to celebrate:

• 15 years since we met
• 14 years since our first date
• 13 years of living together
• 10 years of marriage
• 8 years of parenthood
• 2 wonderful children

…along with all the other, more mundane aspects of our lives– too many meals, school drop-offs, loads of laundry, doctor visits, and so forth to count.

After all this time, it’s important to say that I love you more than ever. And I think you and I have gotten better and better at having a life together, and understanding where we each are coming from. Our communication has improved. We’ve gotten better at asking each other for what we want. Not to say that we are perfect– we both have our flaws, and they come out most acutely when we are trying to communicate about our feelings. But we’ve gotten better over the years at figuring out how to do this, and I can only see us continuing to get better.

It’s been exceedingly difficult watching you go through the pain of depression. I wish there was some way I could reach into you and take away your pain. My heart bleeds every time I see you struggling with self-doubt, self-blame, and self-hate. I’m confident in you, I forgive you, and I love you– I wish you could do the same.

Our lives are going to continue to change, and it’s clear that figuring out how to make everything work is going to be an ongoing challenge. But after 10 years of marriage, I know I want to keep facing those challenges with you.

Happy anniversary.

All my love,
Drob

C (making homemade sock puppet toy talk): Sweetie, we have to get married! I’m pregnant!
A (holding other puppet toy, talking for it): It’s okay, you can just have the baby. You’ll see, everything will be alright. You can have a baby first, before you get married.

Memo to self: have that birth control talk with the girls before they turn, what, 10?

I think cooking with a crock is awesome… even though I don’t know what I am doing, things seem to turn out yummy.

(Hey, kids, this isn’t a restaurant. You’re getting what I cooked for dinner and you’re going to like it.)

That approach isn’t all that successful, but hey, if they’re hungry, they’ll eat, right?

De-Clutter: (verb) 1. “to painfully throw away tons of stuff that you thought you should keep for the past fifteen years but turns out you just left in a huge heap in your closet causing you to be unable to find the few things you actually wanted, and then later forgot that you even owned.”

2. “To Take neatly stacked piles of things from closet and spread all over room, causing your skin to crawl and mind to explode and dinner to not get made even though you are really, really, really hungry.”

3. “Reclaiming emptiness from mess.”

I had an anxiety dream about my job that starts in the fall. In my dream, the school year had begun, and I forgot to show up to work. Instead, I tried just picking up my kids and going home. I was greeted by all the kids there at school, who were all hungry and tired from their first day of school. What’s for snack? was the constant refrain. It was then I realized that I was supposed to be their after school teacher.

And I’d kind of forgotten to prepare for that, as I also forgot to show up to the job. I rooted then through the pantry, trying to find some snacks left over from camp. Then I tried to get the kids to do some kind of activity. The hostility from the older kids was intense. They rolled their eyes at me, walked out of the room, snickering behind their hands. It was awful.

When I woke up from this, my heart was beating kind of fast. I realized with a jolt that the summer is halfway gone. What am I doing this summer, I asked myself? My life is so disorganized. I have no structure. I am not taking care of business, and I’m not getting this place ship-shape. I am not planning ahead for the fall.

That dream was a wake-up call. I need to get myself in order. But I feel really stuck, paralyzed. I don’t know what I can do to get out of this feeling of trying to move a mountain. I am just able to get to OT appointments and provide three meals (sometimes just two) to the kids each day.

This is not an easy place to be, mentally. I feel really stuck.

Seems that Mondays are when I do the running around. Making a lot of stops with my two gals in tow is tiring under the best of circumstances. Doing so in 90 degree summer humid heat is really tiring. And doing so after a long (very fun!) weekend at the beach is really, really, tiring.

No wonder I am sitting here feeling utterly wiped out. We picked up our CSA delivery today, and oh my! What lovely freshness! What beautiful produce. At long last, the tree fruits are hitting their stride. We received five pounds of peaches and two pounds of little sweet plums this week. Tomatoes are in, and we have two beautiful pints of assorted cherry / grape tomatoes along with four generous slicing tomatoes.

The squash are here and threating to take over the fridge. Good thing I managed to make Carla into a squash lover, simply by not calling the stuff “squash”. She refers to them by fancier names. For example, she’s OK with eating courgettes but definately not zucchini. She loves Crookneck but not so much plain yellow squash. She’ll eat Straightneck, too. She was very hesitant to eat PattyPans but came around once she realized they taste just like crookneck.

Marketing. I tell you, it’s all in the marketing!

So my fridge is stuffed to the brink with all these great veggies (lots of lettuce, cucumbers, green peppers, green beans, new potatoes) and so I need to plan for some good cooking. My own garden looks like it’s coming along at last, too, with some cukes, lots of basil, some purple green beans, and tomatoes are getting started.

Unfortunately, it’s so hot down in the kitchen that it really puts a damper on my excitement about cooking. I mean, who wants to be in the kitchen when it’s 90 degrees out? We have no air conditioning in the kitchen, you see. As a matter of fact, our kitchen is my least favorite part of our home. I fantasize about fixing it up someday, but it’s a big, big project. It needs a total overhaul. Walls need to be taken down. Floor needs to be replaced. Ceiling, lighting, cabinets, everything should be replaced.

We just don’t have the dough right now to hire a contractor for something huge like that; and we’re not handy ourselves.

So for now, I just make do with what we’ve got. And what I’ve got a is a lot of squash. Er, courgettes and crookneck, I mean. Yum.

I think I have some kind of freakish aversion to packing. Unpacking, too. I just do not like it. I avoid it.

That is why, here I am, after midnight, without any clothes packed or organized, and maybe not even clean. And we’re hoping to leave for the shore First Thing After Breakfast tomorrow.

Part of the problem stems from not knowing what I want to wear. That alone can keep me stalling for hours. The other problem is when clothes aren’t washed and ready to be packed anyway. A huge pile of laundry in the hallway suggests it’s not very promising.

Plus the car is a mess (again!?) The only good thing about that is that most of the stuff in there is quite useful. I mean, other than the garbage. I can usually find a spare pair of undies for one of the kids should they happen to need it, by rooting around in the clothing in the car.

I just don’t like being disorganized, but at the same time, I am really mired by the messes that are in the way. They just stop me, in my tracks. I do something else instead.

I was actually extremely active today, which is weird because it was so damn hot. Not the kind of day where you feel like being out and about a lot, but we were.

Carla’s new filling has been bothering her, so we were off to the dentist this morning to have it adjusted. She did incredibly well, making only a few pathetic whines when the dentist used a noisy tool to reduce the size of the filling. Noises scare her, but she was brave and it was over pretty fast.

After the dentist, we headed to do some grocery shopping, and then brought it home and put it away. By then it was time to head to Annie’s occupational therapy. Annie did great work, as they always say at OT, and it’s true that she is a very cooperative kid. She throws a heavy ball, does animal walks, scoots on a scooter on her belly, and draws and cuts in the ways she is supposed to. We are trying to get her to increase her strength and use her hand muscles so that she can write more effectively. I wonder sometimes if it’s really going to be relevant in her future — how she hold the pen. But the therapy is covered by insurance, and much of it is fun, and she doesn’t seem to mind it, so I figure it may help. And it’s certainly not harmful.

After an hour of OT, we headed over to the swim club, and to my garden. With this hot weather, I knew my plants would be thirsty as heck, so while the girls frolicked and swam in the pool, I sweated like crazy under the sun in the garden. I am delighted to report that there are jalapeno peppers, purple greenbeans, itty bitty tomatoes, itty bitty eggplants, and a wee little pumpkin! There is also hope that maybe the bunnies won’t eat all of it before I get to! A few more cucumbers are growing nicely, and the pumpkin vines are lovely even if we don’t get a 100 pound pumpkin out of the deal.

After the swim club, we went shopping! And to McDonald’s to use the bathroom, which prompted my kids to beg for food (oh yeah, food! Right! Sure!) and of course an LPS toy with the happy meal. I convinced them to only get one happy meal, this way they’d not get two of the same toy again. (which is so boring!)

After McD’s, we headed home. It was a lot of stuff to do.

So you see, I had no time to pack. All day. And now, I’m kinda wiped out. But I’ll swing into action at any moment. Just you wait and see!

This year I had extra ambition and rented two plots in the community garden, rather than just one. And they are bigger plots than last year, because when we tilled at the beginning of the season, we tilled right into the path. This is the path along the edge of the fence, so it’s no big deal.

I’d estimate our patch is about 23 feet by 12 feet. Big! Very Big! There is still one big bed that is basically empty. I put in tomato seeds, way late into the season. But who knows? Maybe these little seedlings will grow and give us a late harvest.

My free time to plan and organize this big garden was pretty limited this spring and early summer, and we got off to a late start.

So now that we are into July, I’m feeling a bit impatient and also frustrated by both insect damage and rabbits who seem to like bean plants, cucumbers, nasturtiums, and more. We are free of damage from deer this year, as far as we can tell. The new fence seems to keep them out. How else could I explain the fact that there are actually tomatoes on the vines?

We must have been invaded by rabbits last year, too, but because there was so much deer activity, we blamed it all on them. Now I know that bunnies are brutal.

Today I went to the garden to harvest my first cucumber, knowing it should be about ripe. I found that about half of it was left; the rest clearly chewed away by Peter Rabbit. There are three more still growing on the vine, within a few days they should be ready to harvest. I sure hope that the bunnies will chance to leave them be.

Bunnies also are responsible for chomping down little bean plants all throughout our garden, all except one little patch in my plot, where I am starting to see some little tiny purple green beans. (Purple green beans, you say? Are they purple or are they green? Well, they are a lovely shade of purple right now, but if you steam them, they turn green.)

Meanwhile, insects have eaten every bit of leaf off of the sunflower plants in our plot. Just really left nothing but stem, and the little buds at the top where the flowers will be.

I have several tomatillo plants that are coming up nice and fast. They are a quick growing item. I haven’t seen yet any signs of blooming. Part of me keeps wondering: gee, are these really tomatillo plants or just some clever weed that grew here instead?

My tomatoes are blooming, and a few have little baby tomatoes on the vine, and that’s encouraging. I’ve got a crookneck squash plant with blossoms. I’ve got great looking basil, and a few marigolds to brighten up the place. My cayenne pepper plant has peppers, and so does my jalapeno plant. I’ve got a few eggplants that aren’t blooming yet, but are growing taller and looking more promising. And carrots that seem to be growing, though slowly, their little curly tops visible by the pepper plants.

So there is a lot of life happening in my garden — many varieties of veggies, and clearly it’s going to offer me something for my trouble. It’s really pretty hard work maintaining a garden. I really appreciate how much work it is to grow your own food.

I keep thinking: WHAT DID THE INDIANS DO? About pests like insects, deer and bunnies. They probably did something smart like trap the little bunnies and deer and eat them. That is not something I can reasonably do at the swim club.

Meanwhile, the pumpkin plants are looking fiesty and strong (let’s hope vine borers don’t attack them) and the watermelon plants are just getting started. I can tell you, though, in another plot I saw a baby melon that a rabbit had gnawed in half. EVIL RABBITS! If you touch mine, I really will KILL YOU! Ok, maybe not really.

I think I will invest in another fence to deter the rabbits further. Maybe even put in a Hav-a-heart trap. And then eat the rabbits after I club them to death.

Kidding.

I think.

The last few weeks have been kind of hectic, in a summery kind of way. I’ve been driving Annie three times a week to her occupational therapy sessions. It’s kind of far from home, but not really far from the pool where we swim, so we’ve been trying to fit going there to swim into the day’s plans. Of course this requires planning ahead, making sure we have food with us or eat before we go. It’s all good things, but the driving is still pretty tiring for me. Happily, where I swim is also where I garden. This year’s garden got started a lot later than last year’s somehow. I don’t really know why or how that happened. Actually, I do know. I was working: having two jobs really took a lot of time away from when I would usually do my garden planning and planting seedlings.

In between, I am trying to keep up with email, and phonecalls from clients. Thankfully the requests have been light. Earlier this week I spent several hours catching up on way past due book-keeping: I realized that it had been more than six months since I’d balanced the business checking account. Not good. I’m still not caught up with that.

On the good side of things, I am finding time to cook, and this is a good thing, given that a) I love food b) I’m responsible for feeding the lot of us and c) our CSA is staring to come through with some lovely produce. I’d bought some beef stew cubes on discount — these were not just any old feedlot beef cubes, oh no! From a small farm, naturally raised, humanely treated cows. Happy cows. I can eat happy cows. As long as they have a good life before they’re killed and I eat them, I don’t have a problem with beef. Strange logic behind food, isn’t it? I still keep the meat that I eat fairly limited, and don’t eat it that often. I don’t feel like I have the moral fiber to be a vegetarian. It requires such self discipline.

Anyway, I finally pulled out the crockpot and made some beef stew, using the onions, cabbage and potatoes from our CSA delivery, along with the delicious basil they included. I’m looking forward to eating this stew today — it’s supposed to be even better a couple days later. I used this and that as the liquid in the stew: some mystery stock I found in my freezer, some sherry wine, some chicken broth, a little wine vinegar. A shake of oregano and pepper.

Unfortunately, the girls aren’t as keen to try things like this, but when I prepare the fresh produce simply, they are more apt to enjoy it. Carla, especially, has had a real turnaround in trying the fresh foods. She’s come to understand that fresh, local, and organic are all adjectives that seem to go with “tastes good”. I have had to be a little bit deceptive about it, though. I know she’s said in the past she does not like squash. Period. Yuck. Ick. Blech.

So the other day when C came downstairs to the kitchen as I was pan frying some crookneck yellow squash, I thought fast when she said “Mmm! That smells delicious! What’s for dinner, Mama?” I knew if I said, “this is squash” she would turn up her nose. Instead I said, “This is called Crookneck. Wanna try a piece?” She loved it. Ate several pieces, and then next night asked me to make her some more. I decided to call the zucchini by their French/British name, courgettes. This did not entire her to try it, unfortunately. After all, the girl does have her standards: courgettes, are after all, GREEN. GREEN means “be wary, be very, very wary.”

Now that’s she’s 8 years old, I expect her to be more mature. And she is, though she’s also developing that pesky sense of injustice that you seem to find in older children. She got a new virtual interactive pet for her birthday (I gave her a gift card to Target, and let her pick her own present). This requires being able to go on their website, and by the time we got home from her birthday dinner last night, it was too late at night to log in. We also gave her a bicycle, which she was too terrified to try riding. In the morning, she proceeded to get up early (in spite of going to bed late last night) and nag me about getting up so she could log in. I finally told her that we’d do it at 9 am, but that before then I was not getting up. When we finally did try to login, their stupid website was down. “Thanks for stopping by! The Hasbro Web sites are undergoing routine maintenance and are temporarily unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience and welcome you to check back after midnight Eastern time (GMT -5).” She rolled her eyes and said, “That is so stupid! This is supposed to be a website for kids! We’re not allowed to check back after midnight!”

The squabbling continues. Annie has taken to humming to herself, in a tuneless kid kind of way. This gives Carla a headache. And C’s birthday presents caused A to cry that she herself wasn’t getting enough toys. And back and forth. Oh, the nuisance of this! Thankfully, this is only sometimes, and generally not at all if we’re out and about. I guess they get bored after a few hours of occupying themselves.

I find myself alternatively grateful to them for amusing themselves and then annoyed with them for quarreling. Writing this down just now made me realize I’m kind of being a whiner.

I think it’s because I haven’t been getting enough sleep, too. Whatever the reason, I’m kind of just floating along. My thoughts aren’t really that organized. This post feels like a rambling mess, which is about what my life is like. In spite of all this whining, I am still quite grateful for the life I have. It could be a whole lot worse.

Reminder to myself: future posts on early tweenish-ness… and on the garden update … and fears about the future.

I’ve had a couple of posts brewing in the back of my head lately.

I’m really wanting to write about my surprise that my first born is turning 8, and all that it implies. It seems like the tween years are nearly upon us, somehow. She’s so … sophisticated for her age. This can be delightful at times, but at other times the eye-rolling and “yeah whatever” can be off-putting. Also, am I the only one around here who’s already tired of her birthday and it’s not even come yet?

I also wanted to write about, um, something. Uh, what was it?

You see, I’ve been thwarted from writing over the course of the last several days. I don’t recall all the reasons, but often it was because someone else was using my computer.

And now — JUST NOW — I am thwarted because my computer just let me know that it’s tired and would like to recharge its batteries or else it’s just going to sleep.

Which is what I should probably do, too. In the meantime, I will try to gather my thoughts and save them for later.