Thankfulness is in Order
© Linda Mazar
As we close out the autumn season this month, it is a good time to think about all the things in our lives that we are thankful for. We have had an unusual growing season and a busy year. We have made it through the good or bad and that is itself is reason to be grateful.I am thankful for another year of gardening with my kids. It was a year of adjustment and learning as we had added a new member a year ago. She loves the outdoors, but gardening and the toddler is a bit more challenging than gardening with a 10 year-old who has been at it a number of years. Of course living with toddler is a major challenge as well!
She loved the gardens. She loved bending down and touching the flowers. She loved picking cherry tomatoes right off the vines and sucking the juice out - later discarding the rest of the fruit. (Remind me to plant more next year!) She did stomp some seedlings into mangled masses occasionally, but she also loved picking flowers and playing with them. She would sniff the flowers and then smile so sweetly. It made all the hard work well worth it to see her enjoy the gardens. It even makes having dandelions desirable as she loved those just as much as my cultivated blooms. I hope the neighbors understand! I am thankful for this new opportunity to see the gardens through my little girl's eyes.
I am thankful for the maturity and helpfulness of my 10 year-old son as well. He was more on his own this year since mom was busy with our new child. While he did complain occasionally, he did plant his own garden and care for it mostly on his own this year. That was a big step for him, but he did do it. Some things were done differently than mom would have done them, but they got done and he was proud of his work and his garden. He was also proud that he was able to do it himself. Just seeing him succeed on his own made it all worth it. I am thankful for the opportunity to see my son grown and develop into a real gardener!
I am thankful to have these two busy gardeners and that we can share time in the gardens together. Now that winter will soon be upon us here in Minnesota, we will have the winter to think about our next season together. We will have fun thinking of ways to make the gardens more fun for our little one while at the same time, make them interesting and challenging for the older one. I guess we'll get down to the business of planning once the new catalogs start to arrive! That is when those garden juices really start working.
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