Happy Mother's Day

Mother’s Day is pretty cool, I must say, now that I am a mom. Not only is Lily one amazing, goofy, smart, cuddly kid, (okay, she’s also Crankenstein when she’s teething which just happens to be right now,) but I got to spend the entire day in the garden. My friend, Joie, and I planted gorgeous flowers in containers, vegetable seeds in the raised beds and strawberries a plenty, yum! We dug up stubborn, unwanted grass, and mulched. Oh I love how the yard looks with a little bit of mulch. Lily was there, along with Joie’s seven-month-old daughter, Molly. But so were the dads. I know it’s Mother’s Day, but HOORAY for great dads!

Gardening with Lily is a whole different thing than gardening alone. And I’ll be honest, I like to garden alone. I get into my place of Zen; gardening is meditative for me; it’s exercise; it’s therapy. Gardening with Lily means completely changing my expectations of what’s going to get done, or rather undone, as she prefers to take the flowers out of the dirt that we’ve just planted them in. She’d rather rip the pea sprouts in pieces with her little hands and shovel dirt onto her dog’s nose.

But speaking of noses, gardening with her forces me to appreciate things in a whole new way. She’s just learned where her nose is and while I know she doesn’t get the same pleasure we do from the scent of lemon thyme or lilacs, showing her how to stick her nose into the Nemesia, (instead of ripping the flower heads off), and watching her do it over and over again, was priceless.