How did a whole week go by?

This past week just flew by. It was supposed to be "my" week, since I was going to have kid-free time on my hands for the first time in three months. Z started child care, but instead of lounging around on the couch reading trashy novels and eating bonbons, I spent most of my time working in the garden. [OK, I did spend half a day at a spa, and I got all my hair cut off one day -- so short that I have to wear makeup now, so people know I'm a girl.] We had a huge load of compost delivered on Monday:

We ordered the same stuff last year when we re-landscaped the backyard, and the gardens back there went absolutely berserk. They're like little jungles. I'm hoping my front gardens do the same this year. They're nice, but have always been a little anemic. There was rock in this garden when we bought the house, which the previous owners had put down when they removed 30 year-old juniper. I hate juniper. It's scratchy, stinky, dirty, and full of spiders in late summer. Not to mention ugly. It's the lazy man's answer to landscaping. And it leaves the soil very acidic for several years after you remove it. That's my excuse for why this garden hasn't thrived. I'm hoping that four years' worth of gardening plus this infusion of lovely, dark, rich compost will help. If I don't have the happiest gardens in the neighborhood this summer, I think I'll give up on gardening entirely. Here's how the front garden looks now:

I'm going to photograph it again in a month, just so I can compare and see if the compost made everyone happy.

We had some friends over for dinner last weekend. They have a son who is one month older than Ben, and another who is about three months younger than Z. We get together with this family every now & then -- they're fun -- but hadn't since we'd both had two kids. It was CHAOS. Crazy! Kids everywhere. Constant screaming. We adults shoved our dinner into our mouths in under five minutes so as to continue supervising the monsters, making sure the big ones didn't injure the little ones. We wound up the evening by roasting marshmallows on our backyard fire. Here's B and his friend, whom he calls Bashi:

M is getting a new bike, and it's arriving at our house in bits and pieces. One of the bits came in a very nice plastic box. I saw it in the trash and pulled it out for B, thinking it would make a nice place to store markers or action figures or something small like that. What did he decide to put in it? His snuggle animals:

That's Underdog (actually a fire-safety dog given to him by my brother, with his fire department's name on the t-shirt, renamed by B arter he saw the movie), Pink Panther, and Beak. These are the three animals he sleeps with every night. It's a bit of a problem sometimes, because they are so small that they are easily lost. About once a week, he wakes us up in the middle of the night because he can't find one of them.

The first night he had this box, I went in to check on him before I went to bed, to make sure he had his blankets on. He was sound asleep, clutching this:

Not very snuggly, in my opinion, but I guess it's not mine that counts.