Seriously?

It's been one of those days. Which is kind of how almost all my days have been since that magic day Judah turned three (more on that later) and his sweet little head turned itself inside out and he forgot all his language skills except for the word NO and an inhumanly long scream. I thought two was supposed to be the hard year.

So I was having one of those days, and thank God for MOPS because I got to leave my boys in the nursery for a sizable chunk of the morning. We got home after having lunch with my mom, and I finally put both boys down for naps, and then put myself down for a nap since I was dizzy falling-over exhausted.

And then the unwritten rule kicked in. The one that says that the gardeners hired by your landlord to maintain the hideously ugly, drought-resistant shrubs in your backyard will show up ONLY during naptime, bringing a leaf blower (seriously? for a tiny backyard?), a metal rake, a hedge clipper, and a huge trash can that they will repeatedly, for some unfathomable reason, have to bang against the side of your house. Right below the kids' bedroom windows. And have you ever heard the sound a metal rake makes when applied to bricks? It eats my soul. So of course both boys woke up. And who can really blame them?

And to add insult to injury. They decided that today was the day to prune the podocarpus, Second-Ugliest Tree Known to Man, just when it was starting to leaf out and get shaggy and look halfway decent. Now it's back to the shorn, stubby look. So pitiful. We also have the First-Ugliest Tree Known to Man in our backyard: a huge sago palm that's probably worth, like, $9,000. I find it interesting that the sago palm's Latin name is cycas revoluta, which is oddly close to the word revolting. Exactly how I feel.