Ooooh boy. It’s been a week.

After my house was felled by the stomach virus last week, both my youngest and my husband have developed some severe cold/allergy funk that has made sleep elusive for all of us.

When my youngest woke up with fever on Saturday, (and after I finished banging my head into a wall and lamenting the fact that we can’t seem to catch a break lately), my husband and I still managed to finish the raised vegetable beds we’ve been toiling with for weeks:

Yes, I realize those beds are obscenely high. In our neighborhood, the soil is hard-packed clay, and even if we will till the top layer, the ground remains inhospitable to healthy vegetables. We learned this the hard way last year, and decided to play it safe from here on out.

After my husband finished swearing at his decrepit electric drill, we planted our squash, which had quickly outgrown its’ seed-starting cups:

We had not wanted to plant any of our seedlings so soon; from the get-go, we realized that we would need a truck-load of dirt to fill all our vegetable beds, because buying bags of soil from Lowes was not economically sensible. However, I had just not gotten around to making those arrangements…I blame the stomach virus…work…solar flares…and/or wardrobe malfunctions. The squash seedlings had other plans, as well as a lack of compassion for the calamity of stomach viruses/solar flares/work/wardrobe malfunctions, so we compromised and filled one bed with too-expensive soil.

After lifting 40 bags of 40-pound soil, I am a sore, whiny wreck of a woman.

And all the sudden, my dreams of a picture-perfect garden have a nice dose of reality. I am not deterred, however.

I’ll save disillusionment for the 105 degree days of July.