The grasses that grow along the center strip of my gravel driveway (gravel and mud, really) tend to get a little too high for comfort this time of year. I’m always glad to see the yard guy show up, and it’s as much for the driveway as for the rest of the yard. This year I’ll be glad to see this fellow mostly so he can get his dilapidated pickup truck out of my sight line.

But I don’t have to rely on him any more (except for moving his truck, and I might have to take extraordinary measures there, too). I took my new weed trimmer out into the drive this afternoon and shaved away at all the overgrowth. It was good to see the grasses and weeds cut down to a more reasonable level. It looks much better.

So you can imagine my dismay when I got in the car this evening, after doing all that work, and drove off to Tammy and David’s for Thursday night dinner. You can just feel (can’t you?) my disappointment when the grass still scraped the bottom of the car, all the way out to the road. (And all the way back when I got home after Survivor.)

I got over it fast, though. I got to play with D.J. (He wanted to play Incredibles, but we ended up playing rattlesnakes instead, and don’t even bother to figure out how to play rattlesnakes; I was just there to be the victim.) I helped Dakota rifle through a pile of books to find the ones he wanted. (Dinosaurs, duh, although all creatures are fascinating to him.)

And then there’s Aiden. How can you not be in a good mood when Aiden is clowning around. He walks across the room, pushing his baby walker and bobbing his head up and down. He would probably be walking on his own by now, but he can crawl so much faster (and you’d better keep your eye cast in his direction). I think he can walk, but he just doesn’t know it yet.

He’s everywhere, and he’s into everything, and he’s always smiling. (Well, that’s not quite true. He has his moments, but they’re few and far between. Mostly, when he’s not smiling he’s laughing.) He even started a chasing game with me. I was down on the floor, at his level, and he’d pretend to sneak up on me. Then I would jerk around and face him and he’d do a double take, eyes wide, and scramble off the other way, laughing at his own joke.

You’d think a ten-month-old would wear down after such an active day. At eight o’clock (a reasonable hour, I believe), I sat off out of his eye line while David gave him a bottle. All was dark and quiet. I even thought he was asleep, and I kept still so I wouldn’t wake him.

Then he finished the bottle, climbed down off his father’s lap and started playing all over again. When I left at nine, he was still singing and dancing and telling jokes. Everyone else in the house was pooped, but not our Aiden. He might still be going, for all I know.

I’m not quite so excited about my haircut as I was yesterday. I must be doing something wrong, because when I comb it I can see patches of different lengths (sort of like the center of my driveway). I know for sure that when I walked out of the salon yesterday, it was perfectly even. Or maybe I was deluding myself. I should have learned by now that I’m always going to be disappointed the day after. All I can do is live with it.