Stuff

This week at daycare they made Mother's Day crafts.He told me, "I paint it!" See the cute fake flowers? Which are, curiously, rooted in real dirt. It's a mystery.
But I'm not going to judge. Because my real plants are in real dirt. And they're all dead. In this picture you will behold a dead boxwood (you can't actually behold that because I already dug it up and haven't managed to find a replacement, but you can see the blank spot), two dead azaleas, and a mostly dead rhododendron. In the backyard we have a butterfly bush that I suspect is dead. All of these plants were bought locally, from a local nursery. And yet, now they're dead. What to do? No really, what should I do, gardeners? I need your help. I think our neighborhood is just too windy for the azaleas and rhododendron (you can see two living azaleas around the corner, where they're slightly more protected). I have no idea why the boxwood died, and I'm at a loss for the butterfly bush as well. I wish I had a staff like Martha Stewart who could wrap all my plants in burlap in the winter.

We had a brief respite from the rain this evening and Little Man and I played some soccer and took a wagon ride. Then the skies opened up. Here we are looking like drowned rats (this was the first picture, but he thought the self-portrait thing was really funny).

And here he is telling me that the Kiss in his hand is chocolate. I don't know how he knows that.Speaking of "I don't know where he got that," tonight we were singing along with one of his kids' CDs, and all of a sudden Little Man said, clear as day, "Shake your booty!"