a child's garden of...dirt

On Facebook the other day, Dee posted a link to an article about a play garden. George likes to mess around in our fallow raised bed, though between him and the chickens this has proven a bad pastime for the growing season. Our family plot will be locked down with chicken wire this year, high enough to keep a curious toddler and his three clucking cohorts at bay until their "assistance" is needed, but I wanted George to have a place to grow things of his own, to dig and hunt for worms and shovel away to his heart's content. I also wanted it to have some sensory components aside from the squishy mud, and The Imagination Tree's post about their sweet little garden gave me some inspiration. 

Ordinarily, I am not one to recommend shopping at the dollar store, as I usually find thrift shops more fruitful and less, well, crappy, but when you've got about 20 solid, no-cry-guarantee minutes to get supplies for both a garden and dinner, you do whatcha gotta do. At the dollar store, I found:

• a pinwheel
• a muffin tin for mudcake making
• a mat to kneel on
• a bamboo windchime

And at Home Depot, which shares the parking lot with the dollar store -- another place I would not ordinarily discuss patronizing, as there is a lovely local hardware shop and there are myriad pleasant little nurseries around -- I got:

• a mint plant 
• a lavender plant
• two colors of posies
• cedar edging

At home, we already had a little trowel, a shovel and some terra cotta pots. I found some rocks and stones in the yard and piled them in one corner of the garden.

I used some of the soil from our raised bed, as it needs to be supplemented anyway, and made a large-ish dirt pile in the hopes that George might not dig up the plants. The rocks and stones, I imagine, will gather some critters underneath (looking for and identifying bugs is currently a hot hobby around here), and a blackberry branch that needs to be pruned back is holding up the wind chime whose cheapness is, honestly, rather obvious. The dull clinking adds something nice to the space, though; I'm glad I thought to buy it. Already, the scents of the lavender and mint waft around when you walk by...especially when a certain hapless gardener is accidentally crushing the plants with his galoshes. 

An hour of this morning was spent playing in the new garden, a good portion of which "makin' dinosaur fossils!" with his little raptor. Sometimes I am confounded over the fact that two years ago, my full-sentence-speaking, archaeology-interested child was this small and drooly:

His sister enjoyed the view from her little coccoon, and maybe she'll be big enough to dig around a little, herself, by the time summer's really here. Because summer doesn't really get here until August, anyway.

Happy spring!

chag sameach

It's a cliché, but for good reason, I guess: mothering comes with a decent amount of guilt attached. Guilt that you're overindulging, guilt that you're depriving, guilt that you've made the wrong decision. Holidays shouldn't induce guilt, but they often do, and the Spring ones are no exception. This year, George noticed those dreadful pre-made Easter baskets in the stores. Specifically, he noticed the one displayed prominently at our local grocery store that seemed to have been made just to entice him -- containing not one, but two full-sized, "big guy" basketballs -- and he asked to buy it on more than one occasion. When I tried feebly to explain that, actually, those are Easter baskets and we don't celebrate Easter, but rather we have a very long dinner during which we read a story and eat some food ("Noodles?!" Uh, no...) and drink a lot of wine, well, he was unimpressed. Passover has no dreidel and gelt, no presents. It's an admittedly tough sell to a two year old, albeit one I'm more than willing to keep peddling, as these traditions are important. The least "fun" being, arguably, the most important. 

So, as we sat around our hosts' seder table for the second year running -- as our friend led the meal in broken Hebrew befitting a crowd of Athiests, cultural Jews and... others -- my son ran around with his new little friend, having as much fun as a couple of toddlers could have at a Pesach seder. He spit out the maror, passed wholesale on the dinner and didn't live up to my dorky dream of joining everyone in saying cheerfully, "Next year in Jerusalem!" now that he actually could. 

I felt bad for bringing a rowdy child to a seder, no matter how irreverent. I wanted to supply coloring pages, to make a cute felt envelope for the afikomen and pass out masks illustrating the plagues for any guests who were game to wear them, but my shit was decidedly not together. I wanted George to have fun, to see that he didn't need an Easter basket or a chocolate bunny, but I also wanted him to understand the gravity of a holiday without gimmicks. I failed, it seemed, on both counts. And felt guilty. 

Despite all that, after a lovely meal with friends new, old and somewhere in between -- Zelda's first seder -- we came home and went to bed. The next day was glorious. Sunshiny. Springtime. I decided to give myself a break: that our cultural identity wouldn't be compromised if I indulged a little, to celebrate this beautiful season. After all, we've made it through the winter, and our modern, first world plagues: seasonal affective disorder, outrageous heating costs, perpetually damp pant hems and a lack of local fresh fruit, icy roads, waiting for the bus in the rain. Our chickens are laying reliably again -- as sure a sign of improved conditions as any -- so bright eggs may as well be hidden around their yard for a sun-starved toddler to find. 

Find them he did. And he had a ball. More fun than his time playing around the Pesach seder? Who's to say? And does it matter? Cultural sell-out or not, I want my kids to have fond memories of childhood. While that might not mean they get the double basketball grocery store Easter basket, I'm pretty okay with the plain old wicker one, and eggs filled with dimes. And if later they decide to go back outside to hunt for worms?

Yeah, much better than a stuffy church. Or temple, for that matter. Sunday best is relative. 

spring

Our payoff for Northwest winter is Northwest spring. Happy cherry blossom time; my very most favorite. 

The blossoms, the little bits of life peeking through the muddy brown gloom, our tulips and the way they show up somewhere slightly new every year in their migration through the front yard planter, the chirpy little chicks we picked out this afternoon: they all say stretch your legs and dust off! Wear your sandals, even though you'll regret it later. Optimism in pastels, bright green. Later light, neighborhood kids and their bikes on the gravel as the soundtrack to my tidying up.