We had a couple of showers yesterday and are expecting more today. It's mostly cloudy and a cool 72*, a perfect day for cleaning the back porch. I got most of it done and intend to do the rest after lunch, plus finish painting the floor mat I started last week.

According to the message I got from Mamie, Pip is eating much better for her than he did for me. Keeping the snacks out of sight seems to be the trick. Let him get hungry and see he has no options but to eat what's fixed for everybody else. I knew this, but was mainly trying to keep him from crying, so Mike would not scream and yell. The tearful, tiny two-year old is much easier to tolerate than the overgrown baby imitating him. I wish Mike would go spend the week-end with Ron, and leave me in peace to enjoy that delightful baby.

I'm feeling some envy of his other grandparents who are able to help one another rather than one of them competing for the primary caregiver's attention. Mike wasn't nearly this insecure when Clay and Cooper were babies. He even made an effort to bond with them. Now he seems incapable of that.

I dreamed recently of leaving him. He humiliated me by leaving me in a shopping mall while he followed a woman who had been flirting with him. When he came back, I asked for money to pay for my purchases, and he started throwing one dollar bills at me, one at a time with, "Is that enough? Is that enough?" making a spectacle of himself and me. I grabbed the car keys and left him at the mall, determined to have nothing else to do with him.

Last night's dream was equally disturbing. I was in a writing class. The instructor read two chapters of a novel to us and we were to write a synopsis of the rest of the book as we imagined it. I was totally blank while everybody else in the class was writing furiously. We had 4 hours to do this and when the time expired, I had written about 2 paragraphs. I felt like a total failure, and woke up wanting to cry over the loss of my imagination.