The mosquitoes…are everywhere.

For those who don’t live in Dagobah the greater Houston area, you might be unaware of how steady the rain has been over the past 3 weeks.  

The normal, “turned up to 11” humidity has doubled down this month, and  the almost daily thunderstorms have created an oppressive blanket of airborne muck that has swaddled our fair city.

And all this water has, in turn, brought the mosquitoes.

They’ve gotten so bad that instead of holding hands and leisurely walking to the car in the morning, I now pick Daphne up before opening the door and we run to the car amidst a whirling, whining cloud of winged bloodsuckers.

I actually just went out to see if I could get a picture of all of them, but obviously they’re too small to photograph and I ended up with a rather unexciting picture of my front door.

The only thing this accomplished was to rile up the dogs Alex, since he thought someone was creeping around the front door.

Jib, however, has remained unfazed.

I also couldn’t help but notice that there haven’t been any mosquito trucks out spraying recently. After a quick perusal of their website, it seems that Fort Bend County doesn’t spray for mosquitoes unless there’s a “public health hazard.”

Well what do you call this?

That’s not a bug, it’s exsanguination with wings.

Okay, I think I’ve ranted about the mosquitoes enough. Suffice to say, they’re bad right now and I’m very ready for the first cold snap to come and wipe them all out. Moving on.

Daphne is doing well. She’s settled down into a pretty good school routine. And we know this, because we get these little sheets from her teachers every day:

Those numbers are how many times it takes to convince Daphne to do a thing. So if she had to be asked twice, they’d circle the 2 before putting the “+” sign for successful completion of the task. 

If she completely refuses to do an activity, she gets the dreaded “–” mark, which is actually what we’ve been getting for “puzzle time” all week. (Apparently she doesn’t want to sit down to do them…)

Honestly, I’ll take the negative marks there rather than during lunch though, which is where she had been refusing to sit down the past couple weeks.

Overall though, she’s doing very well. 

I, however, completely screwed up swim classes yesterday.

I’d had a moderately busy morning, doing the dishes and laundry, making the bed, scheduling the A/C check-up, and replying to a couple potential new clients for my nascent business...

And in doing so I became distracted and forgot the damn swim bag on the bar stool at home, which held Daphne’s bathing suit, towel, hydro-diaper, etc.

Naturally I didn’t realize this until after I’d picked her up and we’d just started to pull away from school.

“Oh no…”

Oh yes.
Totally spaced it.
Duh.

Unfortunately that meant we had less than 20 minutes to make it home, run inside to grab the swim bag, and then zip back over to the swim academy.

Now I didn’t break any speed laws attempting to do this…but I might have bent them to a point of being slightly misshapen. 

Still, we were still 5 minutes late for a 15-minute class (by the time I got her changed we probably would’ve only had 6 or 7 minutes left); fortunately, her wonderful instructor rescheduled her for 1:30, so she was still able to get a full class.

I, however, was fuming by that point. Given that my absentmindedness might have contributed to Daphne being unable to take her swim class, which she loves…  Ugh.

I’m still a little aggravated with myself over it, to be honest.

Okay, see you guys next week.

j.s.