“It’s a piece of paper.

It’s a piece of paper.

It’s a piece of paper.

A piece of paper.

A piece of…

And a DRAGON!

A DRAAAAAGOOOOON!!!”

It’s 9 AM.  We’ve just finished breakfast and Cheeks is already jumping on the sofa, pink hippo in hand.  I look up from my coffee…

“Sit down, please.”

“No.”

“OK.  Then, get down.”

“No.”

“Are you going to have another bad day?”

“Yes.  Going time out.  ALL DAY!”

He stands up, stiffens, and falls forward onto a throw pillow.  When his giggling stops he slides off the edge, sticks his finger up his nose, and stares me down.

Seconds later, apparently satisfied with his attempt at taunting, he takes off running, gaining as much speed as he can in the house.  He stops with a skid when he gets to my chair, smears something into my palm, and takes off again.  When he gets to the bathroom he slams the door and locks himself in.

I look down to see what he’s left in my hand.

A booger.  Awesome.

My desk is surrounded by what was once the contents of neatly filled toy box.  The likely culprit is “resting” in his room, with his feet on the door.  He’s singing.  Our kitchen smells vaguely of garlic and dirty dish rag, both the dishwasher and the sink are full of dirty dishes, the fridge is overflowing with expired goods.  The piles of laundry in our bedroom are quickly merging from “clean” and “dirty” into “to-be-sorted” and “this doesn’t really smell dirty.”  Outside, the garden is a tangled mess of bind weed, vegetable, melon, and basil.  The yard, where it gets water from the garden, is growing into a forest of weeds, the rest is brown and dying.  The kiddie pool is slowly leaking out the remaining water from a massive thunderstorm of two days ago.  Two (not one but TWO) sets of kid clothes were left on the porch to dry yesterday after Cheeks decided (twice) that a fully clothed swim in his rain-fed pool was just what his overheated little body needed.  Who was I to argue?  All those cloths are still laying there, suspiciously stiff.  If anyone asks I plan to say, “Oh!  Are they dry already?”  As if they’ve been there for minutes rather than days.

This is how things have been this summer.  If I have to choose between peanut butter and jelly or spaghetti dinner, I choose peanut butter.  If there is a pile of dishes and a new book, I choose the new book.  If there are weeds overtaking my onions I pick the onions and leave the weeds.  My to do list looks like this:

From that I imagine you can understand why when I look to my left I see a book, stripped of it’s binding, hiding under a plastic dog, and when I look to my right I see that binding laying in a torn and crumpled mess on a bike seat.  A book purposefully unbound.  How’s that for metaphor?

Sometime after taking this picture I wrote a short mental love note from me to broccoli.  Then I tenderly washed all five heads of the stuff and we devoured it in less than two days.  We ate some raw, we ate some barely cooked, we curried some, we put some in a nice pasta dish.  And then we wished for more.

We’ve been doing the same with zucchini.  We have four zucchini plants growing in the garden and we’ve managed (so far) to keep up with the supply.  In all we’ve given away four of our zukes to some squash crazy friends.  The rest we’ve stuffed, fried, baked, shredded into bread and muffins, slow cooked in lasagna, and we’re contemplating soups and pancakes.

What’s on the menu tonight?  Black bean and summer squash enchiladas.