The World Is Not Big Enough For All Of Us

To be filed in the "COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE" folder: There is a snake living in my garden.

I KNOW. This is a thing that is not okay. Not even a little bit. Not at all all.

It's inevitable, of course, that there would be unwanted wildlife in our yard. There are miles of untamed property directly behind us, so we've had coyotes, deer, fox, endless bunnies ... all sorts of things. We've had snakes multiple times as well, but normally it's a once and done situation.

I find a snake. I catch a snake using a net on the end of a veeeeeeery long pole. I escort the snake to a spot veeeeeery far behind our property. We never see each other again. THAT IS HOW IT WORKS.

Except now. I have escorted the exact same snake to NotSupposedToReturnLand three times now and all three times the damn thing has somehow managed to find its way back to the little strawberry patch right next to our patio.

Unacceptable.

I tried putting about 5000 moth balls all over the place to make the snake feel unwelcome, but that didn't work, so WE ARE AT WAR. I will win.

Meanwhile, a certain small person who apparently loves all creatures large and small has decided that she has a new best friend. Oh, that's right. Miss Mila is trying to make friends with the snake.

For the record, it's not a venomous snake. I'm not genuinely worried about this situation, but I am OH HELL NO about this situation. Mila is constantly over by the strawberries checking for her maybe friend. She's leaving ripe strawberries for it to eat. She's even leaving it leaves that she keeps pulling off trees so that it can hide better.

What she doesn't know, though, is that it's an Eastern Garter snake. It eats frogs. It is absolutely the reason the frogs are disappearing from the pond at a mind-blowing rate.

I'm going to have to make Mila pick between her friends the frogs (I think there are two left) and the snake. GUESS WHO GETS TO STAY, Y'ALL.

Still Lovely

One of Those Days

Don't mind me, I'm just going to sit here looking at this photo and taking loooooots of deep breaths.

That child. THAT CHILD. She looks so darn adorable and sweet and innocent in that photo, but she spent the day attempting to murder every last one of my nerves.

She started by trashing the kitchen. For reasons beyond my comprehension, the kid is obsessed with melting chocolate and dipping stuff in it. She's terrible at the whole process and while she manages to do it safely (yay, microwaves!), she ends up with chocolate goop absolutely EVERYWHERE.

The Big Kid spent most of her spare time cleaning the kitchen yesterday, FWIW. She was positively delighted to find her sister had ruined her hard work.

Once the kitchen was trashed, Mila moved on to new forms of chaos. Mostly it involved emptying her closet all over the house. I certainly needed a trail of tiny sundresses spread all through the house, and WOW did Mila deliver.

And then came two hours in the car with the Tiny Terror. Alexis had dance and Mila needed to ride with me because of the timing of it all, and ZOMG MILA TALKED AND SANG THE ENTIRE FREAKIN TIME. Her song of choice was Meghan Trainor's "Me Too" which was swell because Mila only knows the chorus. She sang said chorus at least 9871039812438197501 times.

I now want to do evil things to Meghan Trainor, even though I know it's not entirely her fault.

So basically Mila did all of the little things to destroy me, and now I'm going to stare at cute pictures of her because they don't make noise and maybe I can forget how frustrated I was all day.

Maybe.