Seedlings

Denver’s February has been mild, to say the least. It hit 67° today, 65° yesterday. The entire month has been like this with no end in sight. So, I got complacent and maybe a tad overexcited with the sunflower seeds we picked up at Home Depot a couple of weeks ago.

To be fair, I did wait a week before ripping open the package and, by the time I thoroughly thought through the whole “threat of frost looming until April” thing and “these suckers may pop well before April” thing, I’d already added water to the dirt pellet and had talked up the, “oooh, we’re going to PLANT SEEDS” thing to the boy. I had no choice but to go forward with the “planting too damn early” thing. I just hoped and prayed that these little seedlings would either be duds, or sleepy. They weren’t. Less than a week later, that picture is what we have.

I’ll either be needing to transplant those little suckers into their own clay pots very soon, or follow my nearly uncontrollable urge to plant them, along with my anniversary lily bulbs, and kill them all when the inevitable big March dump comes. If I’m going to slaughter new plants, I may as well do it all at once. Efficiency, people, efficiency. I am so very close to officially losing all semblance of sanity that I went out on Monday, armed with a rake and a one year old wielding a shovel, and raked all the mulch off of my flower bed, making many worms very, very angry at me in the process. I raked for an hour only to pull out a devil weed with a root as big as my freaking fist, rake all the mulch back into place and try to talk my screaming, shovel wielding toddler into coming back into the house with me. Forget Freddy Krueger, trying to take a mini plastic shovel away from a 19 month old that’s screaming and shaking is entirely more terrifying.

Since the weather’s been so nice, Tuesday we took advantage of the last free day at the zoo. And so did everyone.in.Colorado. We spent 30 minutes grumbling and and hollering curse words (the boy was sleeping) at the mass amounts of raging idiots capability-challenged drivers who either couldn’t figure out a stop sign to save their lives or thought it was perfectly acceptable to stop dead in the middle of the lot (with 30 cars piled up behind them) in order to drop their 4 trillion family members off and/or wait for a spot where the family (with 3 kids in strollers) has newly arrived at their car, because putting kids into car seats? Totally only takes 10 seconds. My favorite was the entire family that was having a tailgate party just so they can piss off the entire state of Colorado trying to find parking in order to, I don’t know, maybe ENTER THE ZOO. At right around the time I stuck my head out the window to yell how stupid people were 30 minute mark, it dawned on us that there was a near empty parking lot just down the block. Unfortunately, I cannot share this spot information with you, dear reader, because all 7 of you may make a beeline for that spot next time, which will be good for neither of us, what with my screaming rage and all.

Elephants!

We parked in our Super Secret Spot and ended up in the zoo in 10 minutes flat, that’s including pulling out a sleeping child, removing the stroller, opening the stroller, having a fight with the diaper bag in an attempt to fit it into the giant-but-not-giant-enough stroller basket, placing said (now awake) child in the stroller, getting through the insane amount of strollers, laughing at the people still trying to park, getting through the gates, and receiving our map along with a, “There’s a baby giraffe.” To which the boy looked completely unimpressed and I hooted, “OOOH! BABY GIRAFFE!” because I’m working on embarrassing the crap out of him now so I don’t have to put in as much work later.

We got to see the gorilla eating a banana, the elephant pretend to nearly commit suicide (because it’s gotta be hilarious to just take a step near the edge and hear a billion parents gasp at once), and the bears trying to rip out each other’s jugulars. The boy go to tell every child within ear distance what it was they were looking at over and over again. “OOh! Dat’s…dat’s…dat’s an el-phant! Look at dat! Ooooh! Dat’s…dat’s a big bear! Wow! Look at dat! Dat’s…dat’s…a gowilla! Gowilla eat banana! Wow! Look at dat! PEACOCK! PEAAAAAAACOOOOOOOCK!” It was quite a bit more memorable for the boy than our first visit, if only because he has not stopped reminding us there was a gorilla! And it was eating a banana! And there was a peacock! PEACOOOOOOOOOCK! Because we absolutely would not be able to remember that had he not hollered it 2 inches from my face at 3 o’clock this morning. Absolutely not.

ETA: I almost forgot the high-low-light of the day. There is a Nemo-esque clown and blue tang fish mini-aquarium at the zoo. A seemingly sweet 9-or-so year old little girl was standing, alone, next to us screeching, “HI, DORY!” at the blue tang fish. This seemingly sweet 9-or-so year old lone, little girl then proceeded to SMACK the tank, Darla style, scaring the shit out of the fish in the process. To which both Eric and I exclaimed, “WOAH!” and stared at her like she was from another planet. Would the proper response then have been to tell her not to do that? Or would it have been to, I don’t know, walk away while questioning where the hell her parents were and discussing how sweet she LOOKED until she went all Osama Bin Laden on the fish? I’ll let you guess which one I chose.

Hint: I did the second one.