Rarrr.

Yes, I've been gone a while. Blame Christmas and Pennsylvania and visits to relations and getting unpacked, etc. There's a LOT to show you at the moment. We've got Christmas pictures and bottle calves and a puppy - and Big Jim, of course. Unfortunately, the pictures are all on my camera and not on the computer, so there aren't any pictures in this post. All I've got for you today is some ranting.

So today I took Jim to the playground. Sounds like a good idea on a Sunday afternoon, right? It's actually kind of a trial to get a toddler from the parking lot to the playground (we had to pass the baseball field and a super-cool water fountain and a picnic area full of teenagers and a smaller semi-broken slide and many other fascinating things before we got to the real playground), but by the time we got there, he was excited and raring to go start sliding. Alas, just as he started climbing the stairs to get to the slide, here came the teenagers. The whole gang of them just descended on the playground like a flock of loudly-dressed acne-ridden crows. Great. Every time Jim tried to do something, one of them would block him. He heads for the slide? One of the gals throws her backpack on top of the slide. He goes to climb the ladder? One of the guys sits down on the ladder and starts kicking his legs back and forth. So Jim and I just went back to the tiny crappy slide so he could at least have a little fun. Then they came over to take over that one too, so we left.

I know that sounds unfortunate enough, but oh, it gets worse. Jim was understandably not pleased to be leaving, so he decided to have a tantrum by the parking lot. On top of a fire ant nest. So he starts stomping and hurling himself to the ground, and ants start swarming up him, which makes it even worse, and... Gah. What can you even do in that situation? I hustled him away, stripped him down, locked him in the car, and sealed his clothes in a grocery bag until such a time as I could figure out how to get the ants off his clothes without actually burning them. Any advice? I still can't think of anything that won't end in pain and despair.

But wait, there's more! So at this point Jim is buck naked in his car seat, hollering because I apparently missed an ant or two (or because he still wants more slides, who knows), and can you guess what happens? Of course you can. Shit. No, that's not just an expletive. It's what happened. At least smearing it all over his chest and face cheered him up for the rest of the drive home.