He doesn't like me so much

Bow's been misbehaving, off and on, all day today. Maybe it's the weather. It's suddenly so hot outside. Sword got out of school at 12:30. This is her last day. Waiting for her school bus to bring her home, I picked some ripe cherries off our tree. Seeing that the bus was late, I brought the cherries back and showed them to Bow. "Be good," I said, "and you can have them as soon as she comes home." I understood by now that the bus driver must have taken the kids to the store to buy them sodas and snacks. When Sword got home, she handed me the giant snickers bar she had gotten. "Because I love you," she said. And though I did not want it, there was nothing I could do to make her take it back. She knows I'm not happy about the local custom of having the bus driver treat the kids to unhealthy snacks without a parental consent form.

I went back to Bow and was going to give him the cherries, but he had intentionally thrown up on the floor in the meanwhile. (He can regurgitate at will. When he's being nice, he keeps it in his mouth. We call that chewing his cud.)

"But why? Why did you do that?"

"I don't like you so much," he spelled.

Well, that's okay. Some days I'm not so crazy about him, either. But I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying right here in the pen with him, till he changes his mind.

So the Snickers bar and the cherries are on my computer table, uneaten. Eventually, Sword will let me give the Snickers bar back to her. Eventually, Bow will have the cherries. None of it is going to waste. And nobody is going hungry.

Some days are better than others. But we manage to muddle through all of them.