Mulch, Mulch, Glorious Mulch*

(Not that it has anything to do with this post, except some spurious connection to the title, but Margaret COMPLETELY ADORES the Mud song.  Those of you who don’t know the Mud song should feel undereducated and deprived, and may wish to consider some sort of class-action suit against somebody who must be to blame.  But before you do that, go here and remedy this oversight.  Anyway, I have sung it to her approximately eleventy-billion times, and am, truth be told, getting a mite sick of it.  But she likes it, and that, coupled with the backyardiness of her life, suggests that she is a decent, sensible, right-thinking sort, and we should keep her.  And now I should perhaps write the post that I came here to write.  Ahem).

As I have mentioned, Margaret loves the backyard and the weather and the playing and all of the things.

One thing of which she is particularly fond is the mulch around the hedges and the flowers and whatnot.  The possibilities afforded by mulch are just endless.**

There was a lot of bathing of the Margaret last night.  She was sweaty, so a lot of mulch dust adhered to her skin, and all the spring pollen in the air has given her a bit of a runny nose, and she refused to wear a hat or a hair bow, so she was pushing her hair out of her eyes, and sometimes that motion pushed snot into her hair and up her face, and the dust and the chunks of mulch adhered to that, and besides that she poured mulch over her head.  So it was a right old mess.

Usually when I bathe her she gets two batches of water – one while we wash her, and one to rinse off in because of her delicate, sensitive skin which doesn’t like having trace amounts of soap left on her, no not at all.  Last night, what with the mulch and the dirt and the hair and whatnot, she got four batches of water, and when I brushed her hair at the end (I’d combed it DURING THE BATH), more mulch came out.  She is nothing if not thorough in her mess-making.

And then this morning, she rubbed butter in her hair, so it looks greasy and like she hasn’t been bathed in weeks.  Arg.  This is actually why I keep this blog.  I can show it to people and convince them that I am not a negligent parent.  Because I have a record of when I bathed her.

*Trust me, by the time she’s done with it, it’s mud.

**Of course, she takes the “roll around in it and put it in my mouth” option every time, but there are other options.