Jenn asked me to watch the kids tonight.

As of 12:22, when they got home, Ana was still awake.

Between 8:30 (bedtime) and 12:30, I tried literally everything. I tried singing and swinging her in her hammock. I tried *not* singing. I tried *not* swinging. I tried totally ignoring her. I tried (back when it was the somewhat reasonable hour of 10pm) talking to her a little on the theory that maybe she was really upset about something and it was keeping her up. (She wasn't.) I tried taking her to the bathroom. I tried singing and swinging *again*. I tried ignoring her *again*. And, for the last half hour or so, I tried letting her do whatever as long as she stayed in bed, because her parents would be home soon anyway and they could deal with it, why not?

I wanted to just play a game of Sleeping Queens with the minx, because she seemed to be actually awake instead of "so overtired she can't sleep" - she was really good about staying still and trying to sleep, although it was all in vain - and I figure that as long as we both have to be up, I might as well not be bored to tears. There's a plus side to not having to deal with a kid every night! But I wasn't sure how I'd explain a midnight game party to my sister when we were inevitably walked in on, so I didn't do that.

Incidentally, if you want to contact the school board in Port St. Lucie

Contact information is here.

I think I may just email them about this appalling situation. No idea what I'll say, but I'll send an email or several.

Wish I could write to that little boy. I'd send him a book of some sort. (I grew up with the idea that books make everything better, and anyway, they never make things worse.)

So, we're used to the little plantains in our yard.

Not the plantains that are like bananas, the plantains that are plantago and native to Eurasia.

Well, we've got right now some huge giant plantains - big enough that I didn't believe they were plantains before, I kept going "They look familiar, and I think they're edible..."!

Think they must be Greater Plantain. And if google is serving me well, they're not only edible, but extremely medicinal as well. Well, I dug most of 'em up (my god they have deep roots!) and I left one in to grow, because I knew before I googled, from reading, that the little plantains are valuable (much though people pull them up as weeds!), so I thought the big ones might be as well.

HUGE plants. Remember I told you about the giant milkweed of doom? Well, this is the giant plantain of doom. Those roots alone were as long as my arm from wrist to elbow, and they're only about half the height of the plant at the middle - and most of the leaves don't stand up, but flop over, and *they're* all about half to entirely as long as the root.

This is a weird year. We have a lot of birds, more than I think we've had. We've got a chickadee, and I know what it sounds like! Don't have any dragonflies. When we were in Brooklyn, we always had dragonflies in our yard, all the time, and lots of slugs. When we moved to Staten Island we ditched most of the slugs, but we don't seem to have any dragonflies! They have them in Battery Park City, even, and they have them over in Snug Harbor I think, but we don't have any near us where I live.

Used to have a lot of trees up and down our block, too. Lots on the sidewalk, and lots in our yard. We had our big maple, and the one in the corner that fell the year we moved in, and one in the OTHER corner that I think was a cherry, and in the middle of our yard we had our dwarf peach, and our crepe myrtle, and by the edge we had a... something, I think mimosa, though that doesn't make any sense this far north, does it? But when the big maple fell it took out everything, everything, EVERYTHING but the crepe myrtle (which plays dead every year until May), and for the past seven years or so we've been losing all the trees on the block. All the little ones anyway, the big ones, the maples there and the london planes? They're still standing.

So anyway, last month the city made a big push to get people to commit to having trees in front of their houses, which my mother refuses to do because it's the worst deal - you're liable for if the tree pushes up the sidewalk or drops branches on a car, but you can't trim without permission from the city! - and all around our block, in our neighborhood, every street has lots and lots of these little trees. And we lost three, four trees in the past year alone, and we didn't get any :) I think, after the tornado, people saw the sense in not having more excess foliage.