Garden Sprite

It's been raining off and on today, so no working in the yard for me tonight. Last night I was out for an hour or so, still working on that edging-each-bed task. As I usually do when I go out, I asked Ian if he wanted to help me garden. And as usual, he said No! But then he was outside playing with the dogs as I grubbed around in the dirt, and I seized the opportunity to suck him into a little mom-time.

Step one: get out the scissors and let him chop. The daffodils are turning brown, and need to go, and Ian loves to cut things. We made a treasure hunt of it, looking at all the daffodil clumps and spying the brown heads, and then making sure each head gets snipped off. One would think he would appreciate my holding up the little plant for him to easily snip away, but he'd rather do it all on his own. Who needs Mom?

Step two: let him take stuff apart. He watched me use the dandelion weeder to lever up a few bricks, then he decided to give it a try himself. He liked wedging the weeder under the brick and raising it up for me to pull the brick out. We had a good time looking at all the things under the bricks. I always notice the worms, but he pointed out millipedes and other little bugs that I didn't know. And we looked at the white snaking grass roots, which he didn't think were very interesting but which are my mortal enemies and therefore interesting to me. We were having a great time looking under each brick until he lifted one and a spider went scurrying away. "SPIDER!" he shouted, and dropped that brick super fast and jumped to his feet. That was the end of his brick-picking. He stayed near me talking for a few minutes until Dad called out that his friend Jay invited him to play, and then he was gone.

My little blonde-haired blue-eyed sprite. It's not often I get his help in the garden, but it's one of my very favorite things when it happens. My tricks to pull him in have been scissors, bugs, and water and it looks like those things will work again for at least one more year. I may pick up a book of garden bugs, I bet that will also help reel him in a time or two. I hope that he learns something from the time he spends with me in the garden; and I hope that it grows in him the same kind of affection for plants and green living things that I have; and I hope that when he gets older he will be walking around some neighborhood with some girlfriend, and he will impress her tremendously by knowing the names of all the flowers they see. And then maybe some day he will cherish the memories of chopping off brown daffodil heads and peeking under bricks to see what lives beneath, and maybe he will also grow flowers, and think of me as he does it.