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.

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.

Here I am, a week into my summer. A full week or so I estimate it.

I am discouraged at the moment. The weekend was busy, and we spent it doing mainly fun things, camping out at our swim club and hanging out with friends from a community group that we are part of. Swimming, gardening, camping = fun! Hitting my ankle by accident with the claw end of a hammer while trying to pry a tent stake from the ground, not as fun at all. Going to the ER to see if it was broken last night, was actually not bad at all. I was greatly relieved to learn that the hammer had not managed to fracture any bones. In fact, it didn’t hurt all that badly at first, so right after I hurt my ankle, I went swimming, packed up all the camping stuff into the car and put in a few hours in the garden. It was after doing all that, about four hours later, that the pain got so severe that I wondered if I had somehow fractured the ankle, as I could no longer walk on it.

Today I can walk again, so that helps! It doesn’t hurt nearly as much as it did yesterday, when I could not walk. It is still quite tender, though. Gladly the pill I took for the pain seems to really work.

But I am so overwhelmed. My home is a wreck, still. It’s been a full week since I finished camp and I am still not anywhere near caught up. My long distance service has been shut off because I neglected that bill for so long. There are late fees on nearly every bill I pay (for the business I “run”). I discovered flea bits on my cats and need to get them some anti-flea stuff, that liquid I squirt on the backs of their necks from time to time. My recycling piles are over-flowing. My hedges are too bushy. My lawn is tall and tickle-y when I walk on it. Everywhere I look, be it upstairs, downstairs, in my email (overly full inbox), in my bookkeeping software, everywhere…. it is a mess.

I am having so much trouble just seeing where to begin. And of course, tomorrow we are back at OT for Annie. She has three sessions each week. And both girls are starting twice weekly swim lessons tomorrow. Plus, I’m supposed to do home exercises with Annie as well. I want to. I know it will help her.

When am I going to take care of business? When am I going to transform this place from a dung heap to a live-able home? I hate how things are. I feel so discouraged and overwhelmed. I need a huge bustle of energy to come along. How can I make this all happen?

One little thing at a time, I guess.

Today was Monday.

I keep forgetting that, though. Somewhere over the weekend, I realized that summer is really here at last. So begins what kind of feels like an eternal weekend. There is no school. There is no After School. There is no childcare.

Plus, Cammy is off in Florida doing wild-n-crazy schtuff to celebrate reaching age 21. Plus visiting her mom, and sisters. She’ll be back within 3 weeks, so it’s not that dire or anything.

But anyway, here am I suddenly — going from the high intensity of running camp for two weeks, to the completely different world of being here. And I have no childcare.

I am not a stay at home mom. I never have identified myself that way. I think it’s more apt to say that now that it’s summer it’s my kids who stay at home. Although that is not strictly accurate either.

Today Annie had her first session of occupational therapy, thus beginning a sixty day treatment period, in which she’ll have about three sessions each week. Her therapy is located about 40 minutes away from home (by car). Annie is healthy and developmentally advanced for her age in many ways, but for one. She seems to be a bit delayed in developing her fine motor skills. This is mostly showing up in the way that she grasps a pencil: with her hand in a fist, rather than with her pointer and thumb working together in a tripod.

While she’s quite talented at drawing with this grasp, it’s something of a red flag. Upon getting her evaluated, I was surprised to learn that her “core strength” and “upper body strength” are in need of development. This “laxity” as they call it is one of the reasons that she is so darn flexible (she can put her foot behind her head!).

Luckily the therapy began in the summer: I can’t imagine how I’d ever manage to do this during the school year! It is also reassuring that the therapy is really pretty fun for Annie. I watched today as she got to swing in a big inner tube (working on balance and core body strength), roll on an exercise ball, and color with special shorty crayons. Her therapist was positive and friendly and good at establishing rapport.

Thus begins my summer. I will also be taking my kids to swimming lessons. And I’ll be working in our corner of a community garden, which over the last few weekends Drob and I worked very hard to get started. We still have a good deal of space to add things to, and I’m still in the dreamy phase of “what ELSE is fun to grow” even though at this point, I don’t think I’ll start too much more by seed. Maybe some cukes if the ones I put in two weekends ago still look sad and pathetic. I may have started them (indoors) too early and waited to long to put them in the ground.

Oh yeah, and of course I have a lot of catching up to do with the business that I still run. Clients still send me updates for their websites, and I still have to send out invoices for web hosting and other services, and call people back when they have a question or two. Making return phonecalls is one of the worst challenges, now that the kids are home from school. I just despise making phonecalls when I will be interrupted by squeaky lil ones. I feel terribly unprofessional when that happens, so I often don’t call people back.

Instead, I try to address their message by responding via email. This is not always possible, naturally. I would not be able to do this if the reason for their call is that their email is down. Hah!

Meanwhile, there’s a ton of catching up to do around the old homestead where laundry and dishes and grocery shopping fell completely by the wayside during the two weeks of frenzied day camp activities.

Summer is here, oh yes. Time to relax, garden, do bookkeeping, pay bills, wash clothes, do dishes, cook and clean, mop floors, clean catboxes, organize children’s rooms, generate invoices, go to occupational therapy, and swim lessons, and update client websites.

Summer… that time of year when there’s just nothing to do but sleep late and laze about the house drinking iced tea and eating little cucumber sandwiches.

In spite of the difficulties, I do love my job.

Nevertheless, on days like today, when it’s warm but not hot, and the ground is nice and moist from yesterday’s rain, I would normally have had the leisure time to do some gardening after picking the girls up from school. I would normally be able to be there for them, to get C to do her homework after school, and to get together some dinner for them at a reasonable hour.

This doesn’t happen too well if I am not home after school! I miss being able to cuddle and hang out with my kids in the afternoon. I miss having that extra time at home when I am not scheduled to be working.

It suddenly dawned on me this week that I have two jobs now. Well, three, if you count “Mom” as a job title. No wonder I am feeling kind of overwhelmed. I was struggling to get things done before I was working in the afternoons and early evening. Now I have even less time to do my freelance / business keeping — and it shows. The bookkeeping is in an atrocious state.

There are bills unpaid, late fees, work unbilled… It is not good.

I feel stretched and sad and I’m second guessing myself. Should I really take on this job as After School teacher? Is it worth it? Is my family’s loss of my time and energy in the afternoons and evenings worth the pay I get from teaching? Does my own personal satisfaction with the work make up for the fact that I miss my old life?

I think it does. It is just so hard to adjust. I keep reminding myself that summer is nearly here. Then I’ll have dropped to one fewer job and I will be able to garden and play and cuddle and cook. And work on my business bookkeeping.

Putting aside my tissue box for a while, I decided to bring my kids to an event called a “Propagation Party.”  Doesn’t that just have a lovely ring to it?  What does it MEAN, though, you ask?

It so happens that this was my first time at a Propagation Party, so I didn’t know what to expect either. It had been advertised as a family friendly event, so I brought my girls with me. It was going to be held at a nearby urban farm, but the rainy and cool weather pushed the group into the greenhouse.

Inside the greenhouse, a handful of people were busy carefully spooning little seedlings of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants (many varieties of all these), plus basil and lettuce, into planters so that the seedlings could continue to grow indoors, waiting for our outdoor planting season to begin in earnest.

The purpose of a Propagation Party is to get people to help with this manual labor process, carefully transplanting each seedling into its own little space.  This takes time and careful effort. If the farmer and his help had to do it all on their own, it would be time consuming in the extreme. In exchange for our help at the party, we were able to buy — VERY cheaply — whatever seedlings we chose to buy.

I picked out some hardy looking tomato starts, some exotic sounding eggplant varieties (Fairytale, Snowy White, Orient Express), and C picked out some bib lettuce.  She explained that she wanted to grow it for our guinea pigs!

The little tiny baby lettuce is currently so small that I am sure one of our piggies could easily eat it in one bite. And not even notice!

The party was something of a let down for the kids, though.  They heard the word “party” and were expecting something more than a few hippie types in a greenhouse, listening to jazz and getting their hands dirty.

There was, in fact, ONE activity for my kids (the only ones there, aside from one babe in arms) to do.  There were cute little terracotta pots that they could paint (only two colors of paint, for some reason: green and gold… which makes me think of “nature’s first green is gold”…. coincidence??) and then after the paint dried, they each got to pot their own little seedlings.

One of the farmers was really wonderful with the kids, though, and especially was able to engage Annie in planting.  She personally transplanted at least two dozen little baby tomatoes plants in addition to the one she put in her own little pot. This was a very sweet scene. I was told they got some pictures, so I will be watching to see if she makes it into the farm’s newsletter!

I liked the event very much. Inside the greenhouse it was warm and humid. It felt so cozy and snug. I got a big kick out of trying to guess what each variety of vegetable would look like when it was all grown up, and producing fruits.  It still amazes me, and probably always will, that a handful of tiny seeds can really grow into such wonderful and diverse plants.

Tomorrow — if all goes well tonight and in the morning — I will finally get both kids back to school. Thank goodness this fever business seems to be over.  I still have an impressive snot factory residing in my sinuses, but other than that I feel pretty good.

When the kids are sick, there’s an inherent laziness that takes over. They don’t need to be taken anywhere, and they hardly eat. So my main duties are snuggling them, comforting them, and sometimes cleaning up the messes.  In some ways, this is a lot easier than getting them up and out the door in the morning, then working like a madwoman to complete a bunch of stuff. But thank goodness I can’t just stay in bed everyday, my life would be a mess! I need their routine to guide mine, or things get really disorganized. More than anything, I need a little time away from them, as I cannot seem to adequately plan or do anything while I’m hanging out with them.

So while snuggling up in bed was fun for a while (ah, urrmm, except for all that whining), it’s time for real life to start up again. Thank Dog!!!

I have not been writing very much lately. It’s not for lack of thinking about it, though. I have a lot of different things I’d like to write about, but my mind is feeling scrambled.

I did get back on my meds, which is of course a very good thing: but I think I am not quite myself yet. It’s funny how at one time I really felt opposed to taking any anti-depressants, for fear they would erase that part of me which is me. It could not have been farther from the truth: they actually just take away that part of me that is NOT me, the depression that I mistook for a part of myself.

Have you ever had to deal with someone who isn’t rational? (well, who hasn’t??) Being depressed (for me) is like dealing with an annoying irrational person all the time, one you can’t get away from, and it’s yourself. Yeah, annoying as hell. Plus, I get extremely irritable. I mean, really anything at all can make me feel annoyed (including myself).

Things that are usually cute or sweet: a hug from a child, a caress from D, a cute little trick that a child wants to do to show off. Instead of reacting in a pleased and friendly way, my internal irritation is extreme. Get off of me, I think. Go away. Stop it.

Because I know these reactions are NOT what’s expected of me, and I don’t even like myself for reacting that way, I try to cover them up, but really I doubt that I fool anyone.

I hate depression. It’s a lot better than say, cancer, or schizophrenia, of course. But it is its own kind of hell, and it feels like it will always be there, lurking.

Right now, though, I am not terribly depressed, but maybe a little under the weather. I want so much for it to be warm, sunny, and I want to be out in the garden, amending the soil, building some new plant beds, checking on my tulips and other bulb plants. Instead it’s raining, and I have been spending way too much time on the computer (and this blog post might just be one of the most productive moments of all the computer time I have spent.).

This wasn’t the blog post I thought would arise from my title “Spring Break Musings.” What I thought I’d write about would be the baby quilt I’d like to make, the plants I would plant if I’d gotten the new beds made, the program I want to create for the summer camp I’ll apparently be running. Instead, here I am nattering on and on about depression.

A nap might just be the ticket, but I have to go to my mother-in-law’s house and tinker around with her dead PC. Joy, rapture, bliss. Then again, maybe we can get dinner there, which would cheer me up, as well as getting out of the house.

Another good remedy: shower. Oh the brilliant ideas that arise when we blog!

Our freakishly warm weather led me out to the compost bin in back of my home. I turned it and was ever so delighted to watch warm steam coming up from within.  It smelled kind of good to me.

Sick, sick, sick!

Anyone else out there starting to scheme and dream about future gardens?

FACTS that are making my mind awfully full. I’m the kid raising her hand in the back row asking, “May I please be excused? My mind is full.”

One of my best friends is in the hospital, recovering from surgery. What they removed was not a benign cyst at all, it was cancerous. A rare one that they’re not sure how to treat, but surgery was certainly the first step, and she is recovering. I am really sad, and angry that this is happening to my friend, and I feel very powerless to help.

Meanwhile, a cargo ship hit the Bay Bridge, 58,000 gallons of fuel into San Francisco Bay not too long ago. I’m powerless to help.

Within the last couple days, a typhoon / cyclone in Singapore Bangladesh claimed the lives of more than 1500 people. Can’t do anything about that either.

I have a proposal to write, that was due yesterday, but didn’t get to finish because my grandmother in law apparently thinks I’m a free taxi service and calls me at random asking for rides… right now? Not powerless in this situation, just frustrated. I do not usually work when my gals are with me, so how will I get this proposal written?

My mom wants me to pop on over to the Italian Market (30-40 min car ride to south philly from where I live) in order to pick up a few christmas gifts for friends of hers, and some fresh pasta. Uh, in my copious free time.

There are way more dirty articles of clothing here in my home than clean ones. Gah.

My daughter wants me to take her to a nature center this afternoon. Sure hon, just as soon as we get back from the Italian Market?
My other daughter’s friends want to come for a playdate today, but my house is such an embarrasing heap of dirty things that I can’t bear the thought of their mom seeing it. Sorry honey.

The 100-days-of-flowers bulb assortment I bought sits on my front porch, and I don’t know when I’ll plant it or even WHERE I’ll plant it. Guess those bulbs will just sit another week. Hope it doesn’t freeze yet out there.

My yard and other outdoor spaces are in bad need of raking, but I don’t even have a rake because someone made off with ours. Maybe I can get a rake in the Italian Market.

I have two clients who require phone calls from me today. One is someone whose laptop I was supposed to have worked on sometime in the last month when it was sitting up in my office, forgotten and ignored. The other is someone who bought his computer from me over a year ago, and it’s now giving him some horrible error message and not starting up anymore.

My gutters REALLY need to be cleaned out. This is something that I can do, but it requires wriggling out the attic window onto the flat roof.

The cat litter boxes in the basement are so bad, that half my readers will want to figure out where I live and call the ASPCA and report me as a bad cat owner. Plus my wild, evil cat was out all night and she is still not back.

Plus, Swistle is going through her blog and deleting a ton of things that might offend her unreasonable and obnoxious relatives. Which is her right, but is so sad to me… such a good blogger, having to censor herself. Bleh!

I guess you could say I am a bit overwhelmed.

As jumbled as this post is, so many things of different weights roiling around together, that is how my mind is. Just not in a very effective mood, not an ideal way to be when you have a lot to do, people to call, proposal to write, friends to think of, and gutters to clean.