Too Much TV

The Husband is very good at a lot of things. He works hard to take care of us. He walks the dog every day. He volunteers in the community. He loves Jesus. He’s a good guy. One thing he does not enjoy doing is yard work. This is one of the main reasons why we have fake grass in the front yard.

Of course, we live in California. It is not easy to keep real grass alive. We won’t even talk about the cost of watering or trying to figure out what day of the week it’s even legal for our street address to actually turn the water on without the fear or an exorbitant fine.

On Saturday, The Husband was busy with a Search and Rescue training event, so I took the girls to see the Captain Underpants movie (don’t judge, it’s free entertainment on Base).  After the movie, we drove around downtown for a little bit to ogle at the folks dressed up for Comic-Con (again free entertainment!).

After weaving through the mess downtown, I decided it was time to head home. The Husband’s training finished up early so he beat us home. As soon as we rounded the corner onto our street, The Husband came into view. He had a shovel in his hand and the green waste trashcan right next to him. (Yes we have THREE different colored trash cans for collection on alternating weeks. It’s almost as bad as trying to determine your watering day!).

Before I could even say a word, the Little One exclaims from the back seat, “WHOA! What did he do? It must’ve been REALLY bad!”

It took all that I had to not fall over laughing. The Little One’s comment coupled with seeing that The Husband was in fact doing yardwork was almost too much.  I did not ask him to. I had not nagged him incessantly. I had not passive aggressively hinted at anything needing to be done. Yet there he was in the front yard, shovel in hand.

Back in 2012 when I first planted them. They were so cute!

A little background here…. Yes, we have fake grass. But I wanted some living plants as well. So we have a planter area that butts up against the house. In my infinite wisdom I planted succulents including fire sticks there. I thought the hearty cactus plants that change from green to yellow to orange to red would be a fantastic pop of color in the front of the house. In my defense it was a great idea! They looked beautiful for the first few years. And then they decided that they were really, really, really happy where they were planted and they began to multiply and grow larger and larger and larger. They really started to take over. It was a challenge to get to the hose. The flagpole access was being impeded. I could barely get to the electrical outlet to plug in the Christmas decorations. My lovely fire sticks were becoming a huge nuisance.

So one day I decided they needed to go. I began hacking at these poor plants. It took us several weeks of filling our green waste trashcan, along with about six or seven trashcans that we borrowed from our fantastic neighbor.  The Husband got sucked into the joy of hacking these things down because he does love me and didn’t want me to kill myself alone in the project. Did I mention that the sap that oozes out of the fire stick plants is toxic? Yes, it will burn your skin and people have reported temporary blindness when they’ve gotten the smooth milky white sap in their eyes. So for several weekends we worked on chopping down the plants that really had become like trees.

We finally got down to the roots. I spent another several weeks dousing the roots with RoundUp (again don’t judge, after many hours of research I discovered it’s really the only option for killing the darn things.) The roots have been pretty dead for several months now. I have been to chicken to try to dig them out because, of their location. You see the one challenge of my little planter box area, is that the water and gas mains to the house run right through the middle of it. So I admit I am little paranoid and did not want to be the one who struck the water main with the shovel so I have just been ignoring the ugly planter box with dead cactus roots for months now.

AHHHH! They’ve taken over!

So back to Saturday afternoon, The Husband, who hates yardwork and quite honestly, thinks plants and flowers are pretty useless was digging out the roots!  But again, I have not said a word about it. Yes, I may feel like I am dying a little each time I notice the ugliness, but I figured one of these days I would get tired of it and try to work on it. But so far that day hadn’t happened. Now here he is working on the ugly roots!

As I tried to stifle my laughter from The Little One’s comments, she runs up to him and says, “What did you do?”

The Husband was baffled by her comment thinking at first that she insinuating that he had destroyed or broken something that was hers. Before he could say anything to her, she continued by saying something to the effect of, “Did you cheat on her or something? You are really sucking up!”

Oh my gosh, y’all I do not always understand how her brain works but this was hilarious. Clearly my child has watched too much TV, although I am not sure what show she’s watching where she picked up this little gem.

Alas, The Husband is not cheating on me or sucking up. He was already sweaty from his SAR training, so it was a good time to put in some work on the mess. Plus the neighbors across the street have spent countless hours re-designing their entire front yard so I think it was more about a little peer pressure, combined with knowing that his wife would have probably started nagging very soon. I mean it’s only been seven months or so!