sprouts

Why is it that there are about 2 minutes between waiting, waiting, waiting anxiously for a bit of sun, for warm breezes, and swelling of buds, and then everything in the garden needing my attention at once? Not that I’m complaining.

Last week: yet another snowstorm, several frosty nights, boots and winter coats, trudging through slush and scraping ice from the windshield. This week: butterflies, Creeping Charlie, shorts and sunhats on preschoolers, and worms in the beaks of hens at my feet.

The compost pile needs turning, the garden and kitchen beds need dressing with compost, seedlings need tending and thinning and dividing and hardening off. The garden bed mulch is uncovered, and I’ve already started watering for the season, as the ground is surprisingly dry. It is busy, but it is a wonderful kind of busy, the kind that leaves one bodily tired at night, satisfied from an hour here and there of satisfied puttering. I make my rounds, digging, tending, turning, the clapclapclap of the neighbor kids’ basketball a steady familiar rhythm, the boys and I getting lungs full of musty, gorgeous earthen decay, insistent birdsongs all around us, my whole body leaning finally into a shovel with a couple of willing apprentices by my side.

And willing they are. I am so cautiously grateful for that, as I’m concerned about their someday rejecting the very thing I love so much. I know that a lot of children of gardening enthusiasts grow up to hate the chores and the weeding and the perceived drudgery of helping out with yard work, and I don’t want that to happen. I want it to be joyful, and right now, it really is. If they prefer to play with their trucks and balls instead of helping me dress beds, that’s fine, but at least right now, they love to help with any of it and they also love to talk about it – about vegetables and bugs, and birds. Today, O said, “We have a tiny farm!” This past week, they’ve watered, composted, sifted compost, dressed the raised beds with compost, helped clean out the chicken run and henhouse, and actually accomplished a significant amount of mulching in between rolling off the mulch pile. My only tax has been spending some extra time washing the dirt from behind their ears and washing the stains out of the knees of their pants—a small price indeed. The best part of all is seeing them feel needed, and competent.

After a three-year hiatus from seed-starting, I’ve pulled out the lights and seed trays and gotten starts going again this year, using mostly past seasons’ seeds. Almost everything germinated well, even the seed that were 5 years old, and the seedlings are looking beautiful. The air in our bedroom is slightly spicy and fecund as I wake to the timer switching on the lights at 7:30 AM, and several times a day, I peek to see what is happening. Aside from keeping on top of what needs dividing, the thinning is by far the hardest part.

I’ve read that the Scotts have a tradition of exchanging the task of thinning rows with a neighbor, because who, in the first days of Spring verily bursting forth after months of waiting, can stand taking a sharp pair of shears and felling half of one’s very own perfectly healthy cotyledons? Brutal.

When we aren't mucking around in the dirt, the boys are usually either reading books with us or playing one of their increasingly complex games. This game was called "flying to Holland", made possible by their car seats. As you can see, they hit a little turbulance at one point. No stuffed animals were hurt, thank goodness.

what we do in between snowstorms

We go to the park and avoid the dirty snow and giant puddles:








we complain a little


but we make ourselves feel better by trying on last year's sun hat and this year's sandals*:


We go on boat rides in the living room. "watch out for the water, Mama! It's getting higher and higher!


We study for our upcoming trip to Holland:




We grab two bowls from the drawer and two chairs and have "cake" with our blocks.


Mama has her own diversions, some of which involve vegetable seeds, seed-starting spreadsheets and stacks of gardening books from the library::






We join some members of our church (and hundreds of other people from area churches) and meet on the La*ke Street bridge to ask and pray for peace in Iraq after five years of war.


We get our picture taken with the mayor of Minneapolis while we are there:


And Ollie falls asleep in the afternoon for the first time in about a week:


On the rare days that are warm and not full of rain and snow, we have picnics by the Mississippi River bluffs :










"Look, Mama! What is that? It's green!"


We put on the snowman sweaters one more time and try Daddy's shoes on for size:


*Both fit. Ollie needs a new hat, which I found at Saver's for him, and I bought the exact same Tar*get sandals that worked so well last year, but 2 sizes up. Always good to have covered toes the first year you ride a tricycle!

we are fwee!

Well, I may be 2 weeks late in reporting this news, but the boys are now officially "preschoolers" and not "toddlers". We still don't know for certain where they'll be going to preschool, but they're three, and three-year-olds are not toddlers anymore.

Omie and Opa were in town for a visit, so both sides of the family celebrated together. We dressed the boys in their outfits from Holland, and Auntie Je*n and Uncle Da*ve brought a big boquet of balloons with them.





Ollie has rightly observed that we don't have much pink in our house. He was mighty pleased to have a pink balloon.

They received many lovely gifts, but the most instant hit that afternoon was a pair of harmonicas from Uncle Ph*l and Auntie Me*gan. Mea*gan confessed that she had resisted the temptation to buy them harmonicas when she was still living with us. I figure she has many possible childbearing years left for me to return the favor.


Grandma was the life of the party, since she was dressed in a bunny suit to go pick up her friends from the airport. This type of behavior is a tradition among this particular group of friends. I'm glad she got the coconut bra out of the way before all the grandkids were born. You know, good example and all that...






It was the first time in a while that the boys and Opa had seen each other. They had all kinds of games together, and the boys were very excited to share their toy tractors with him so, as No*ah put it, "Opa would not be lonely for his tractor".





My mom stayed a few extra days, and we had a nice little routine going before she had to leave.



We spent a lot of time talking about and planning for our upcoming trip to Holland. Here, Omie is looking through the Holland picture book she gave us. She and Opa also gave the boys beautiful little backpacks for their trip.



Saying goodbye:






Since their birthday, we've had two sizable snow storms and we're in the middle of a snow/ice/thunderstorm as I write. The ground is still frozen, they're still quite a bit of ice on the lakes, and there is nary a crocus to be seen. I always follow the local advice not to uncover my flower beds until mid-April unless it is a very early Spring, and once again, that advice is spot on. There are an awful lot of Minnesota gardeners who've spent the evening re-covering their beds with mulch in the sleet. It is winter, Mama, the boys say to me every day. I've stopped correcting them. The good news, though, is that the boys play so happily on their own outside these days that I should be able to get lots of gardening done this year if spring ever does decide to join us.

zoo

The boys and I went to the zoo today to see the baby animals. On a beautiful spring day, on the last weekend of the baby animals exhibit. It was lovely – the boys were good, the animals were sweet and accessible, and while it was very busy, as anyone would expect, it was much worse 2 hours later when we left than it was when we actually went through the exhibit.

It was lovely except for the behavior we witnessed. The loud complaining and moaning about waiting in line. The whining about how long it took to see the baby chicks. The bumping other people without saying “excuse me”. The attitude. The bad language. The yelling.

I wish I was talking about the kids. No, the kids were almost universally fine – the appalling behavior that put a serious chink in my own enjoyment of the morning and that my children noticed enough to comment upon more than once came from the parents.

“This is a nightmare – why did we come here on the last weekend?”

“Next time, I pick where we go, and it sure aint here!”

“The next wagon doesn’t come for 20 minutes! What a rip-off.”

“I hate this. We should have gone to a movie.”

“If we go through the door where everybody is going out, we can get to the chicks without having to wait!”

“We have to GO! The dolphins are at eleven and our Imax tickets are at noon! Hurry UP!”

“Just butt your way through, Madison! Tell that kid to move over!”

“Parker, get your damn butt over here and give me your coat!”

Parker, incidentally, looked utterly miserable, and was wearing baggy desert-storm camo pants and a t-shirt that said, “Backin’ down aint even an option!” Does that refer to his parents (who presumably bought him the shirt) or the war? A few yards down, I spotted a toddler wearing a t-shirt that said, "A is for Attitude".

There was a giant beautiful John Deere tractor that would have been a wonderful thing to let lots of kids climb on at once (it was enormous), but the parents were more interested in the photo op, so instead, everyone had to stand in line to get their picture taken in the seat then get yanked out so the next parent could take a picture.

We waited in line because my boys just so very much wanted to sit on the big tractor. This situation repeated itself in any area that was “photographable”. The kids couldn’t just play on the concrete pig or sit between the wooden chickens or talk to the volunteers about the baby chicks; they had to stand in line, get their picture taken, and get out of the way. Most of these kids were little – age 1 to 2ish, and predictably, they cried when they had to get off the pig or leave the climb-able chicken 30 seconds after finally getting to it. I’m sure the tantrums didn’t make it onto the camera, though, and that’s what matters, right? Being a bit older, my boys rolled with it all pretty well, but N said at one point, "Everyone is mad today, Mama."

I heard so much loud griping about everything that it made my head hurt within a half hour of being there. I just don’t get it. Why is everyone in such a hurry at the zoo at ten-thirty on a Saturday morning? I rarely take the boys to any kind of in-demand exhibit. Mostly, I think they’re really happy to go the zoo or the Children’s Museum at all – they simply don’t need any kind of extra-special offerings like that. They really love farm animals, though, and I thought it would be a wonderful exception. And it was. I fully expected crowds, and I and my well-rested children were simply in no hurry, so it wasn’t a big deal. There was plenty of open space in which to catch our breath when we needed to. But I’ve never heard complaining like that at the DMV. I’ve never heard moaning and whining like that at our local INS (immigration) office, where people are forced to wait in line outside the building in the Minnesota winter. I guess when you're getting your driver's license renewed, you're not obsessed with getting the most "bang for your buck" on your one day off. If you're at the INS office, you may just be feeling lucky to be able to be there.

I try to wish these people peace and try to find some love for a stranger within me instead of letting their behavior make me angry. But it’s hard. I take it especially personally when I see my kids looking at the griping and yelling and wondering what that’s all about. When my children visit the zoo, the kids and the animals shouldn’t be a heap more civilized than the adults.

slushy haiku

Horizontal sleet

Expect up to 9 inches

Last day of March; why?

____________________________

In 2 years, a field

Now we have a Metrodome

Nine inches, in March