I’m packing the boys up for summer camp, which means the room that used to be my office now looks something like this:
.. and this:

Bennett leaves first — on Sunday. It looks like I’m going to be a pretty pathetic empty-nester, because I’ve actually convinced myself that I’ll miss the little bugger. I wonder if I’ll be glad to see him go on Sunday or just really glad to rid my office of the mountains of cheap t-shirts, sharpie pens and crap I hope and pray does not come back from camp with him. (Consequently, if life has taught me anything it’s this: I am certain that the only things he’ll lose are the things I wish he wouldn’t… and all that Walmart crap will make its way home with him. I just know it.)
I think he’s trying to make the separation easier for me by driving me absolutely bat-shit with all his creatures. I’m glad that hamster up and died last week because as it is, I’m going to spend the month playing Dr. Doolittle to the rabbit and the effing tadpole.
The tadpole, by the way, lives in this palatial tub, which until this Sunday was used to house some of the clothes Fiona had grown out of that will one day be Sidney’s:

Those clothes are now in a heap on the basement floor. Oh, and that little terracotta pot was going to be used to grow a dahlia but apparently tadpoles need homes within homes.
I haven’t even mentioned that he’s got me ordering ALGAE TABLETS for it on Amazon and this afternoon I found him boiling a beautiful head of butter lettuce on the stove top.

“Tadpoles like boiled lettuce,” he said.
Do they now? Do they need a whole head of fresh butter lettuce because I’ve got a few leaves of some wilting crap at the back of the fridge. Goodbye, fresh salad.
Yesterday it was kale. Goodbye, green smoothie.
His last words to me before bed last night were: “You need to cut the bunny’s nails while I’m away.”
Come again?
You could clearly do a lot worse than to be a pet in this house.