Heat, Drink, and Be Merry

This past weekend brought a heat advisory to our neck of the woods. Hey. It’s August in Louisiana. Of course there’s a heat advisory. Once upon a time, I would have shrugged it off and queued up a stack of independent films (please read that in a snotty pseudo-British accent, if you wouldn’t mind), ordered a pizza, poured some wine, and just settled in until I had to leave the house Monday morning for work.

You can’t do that shit when you have little kids. As a matter of fact, I’ve learned unequivocally that our little family just doesn’t do well locked inside all day together without some kind of outing or special event. We start to slowly but surely drive each other quite crazy. With that being said, I knew going into it that this weekend might be a tad rough. There were no birthday parties or play dates on the agenda, no lunch or dinner plans to look forward to. Worst of all, Will had to cut the grass at some point, and we needed groceries. That would basically kill a whole day and leave me cooped up with grumpy children for the duration.

PleasegodFelixshutthehellupIbegofyou

And yep. Saturday kind of sucked. As part of his yard work, Will was going to nuke my flower/ veg garden. It was so overgrown with weeds – and to be fair, the edible-bearing stuff had shot their loads – that it was just time to go. Before he got his weed-eater out, I did go pull up the carrots. I figured that they had to be big enough to eat.

I thought they were kind of pretty.

Will made fun of them, calling them the ugliest carrots he’d ever seen. I put them on Instagram and Facebook under #carrotenvy. All of my “friends” sided with him. I was going to peel and cut them up and then serve them glazed with honey, posting a gorgeous pics of my glistening tasty home-grown carrots to taunt the naysayers. They tasted f$*#ing awful. I don’t know what happened, but they had this horrendous acrid taste. So much for carrots. We had hot dogs instead. That’s ok, since Monday (today), my diet begins. I’m tired of being overweight, and I don’t want to be sitting in the carpool lane waiting to pick up my 4^th and 6^th graders bitching about my “baby weight.”

Final flowers from the garden. Not everything I grew was ugly. These probably taste better than those carrots, too.

Anyway, Saturday was long. Saturday was rough. No one was happy. We finally went to a pizza place just to get out. That was ok. Stella actually tried calamari. I was impressed. Of course, she ate the breading off and then became quite intense about the actual meat itself. It ended up spat into my napkin. I guess I can’t blame her. It is an odd texture. The closest thing she’s come to that texture was back in the day when she still took a pacifier. I’m just pleased she tried it.

Sunday was different. Will got up early and went to the store (since the yard work in the heat the day before had pretty much demolished any energy or motivation he had). I had him pick up “picnic food.” I absolutely understood that if we didn’t get the little people out – and the big people, too – that we would possibly kill each other. So, we went downtown to have a picnic and to let the kids play in these awesome fountains.

Note to self: the whole picnic/fountain this is a swell idea. Only don’t spread a blanket out anywhere where you have a line of sight to the fountains. The kids will not eat if you do, instead charging the water features. Understandable, I guess.

Best. Fountain. Pic. Ever.

Much happier than he was 24 hours earlier.

The kids had fun. The adults relaxed. We even brought along an old bottle of bubbly we had laying around and some of those plastic champagne goblets and had a bit of a drink while the kids splashed around. We all felt much better afterwards.

My two soggy children.

But that heat! We were probably only out and about for about 2 ½ hours. The kids were both so wiped out that I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to bribe them with candy to stay awake. Another Mother of the Year moment, I guess.