We're Back!

We're back! Lily and I finally got out and played in the garden today. I know it's only the 2nd week of January, but it sure felt like spring had arrived and you bet we took advantage. I got out the pruners to cut away dead twigs, stems and flower stalks that I should have pruned back in the fall, but tried to ignore instead. I guess ignoring them didn't make them prune themselves, did it.

Lily brought her baby doll out with her in the baby doll's stroller and wheeled her around the yard showing her things and picking off the soft dried-up buds of the Japanese Anemone.

For a while she was content until she got this look on her face like she was contemplating something way too serious for a 20-month-old. All of the sudden she smiled and said, "Picking tomatoes," and "Lily wants tomatoes." Sometimes I can't get over how amazing her memory is. At the end of last summer we came outside every day in August and September to pick tomatoes from our plants and Lily gobbled them up.

I tried to explain to her that we have to plant them and wait for them to grow, but her toddler mind wanted them pronto. I sensed a min-tantrum coming on, but as quickly as she was starting to get upset she saw my pruners and wanted to use them. She loved them and called them "sarps" for sharp because I kept saying, "Be careful, they're sharp." I think if we hadn't eventually come in she could have squatted down and played with them for hours, which is more than I can say for myself. After five minutes hunched down my legs were killing me. Guess it's time to get back into gardening shape.

We are back, but I'm not exactly sure what that will mean for our garden this year seeing as April is a big month when it comes to planting out here, and I’ll be ten months pregnant, i.e. due any day, which means completely unable to bend down and dig, and more important, completely unable to get back up by myself.

So we know when the real spring arrives, we'll have a new baby. As for the garden, I guess we'll have to wait and see, which really isn't all that different from most years.