Spring Break

This time of year has always done something to me.

In college I would sit in steely cold seats, giving professors blank stares in between longing glances out the window, dogwoods and cherry blossoms in full bloom pulling me to come outside. That is if I made it to class. I frequently opted to drink giant blue cups of skunky beer under the clear Carolina blue skies to broaden my educational horizon, counting the days until
Spring Break.

When I was teaching college-aged students I would resent their blank stares in between longing glances out the windows. I would have carpal tunnel from grading giant stacks of English papers and found their lackadaisical attitudes toward their assignments particularly egregious; everyone (myself included) in desperate need of a break.

Today, I am not twenty-one.

I am not a teacher.

I am a stay at home mom and I could really use a break right about now.

How do you get a vacation when you are in the trenches of the 24-7 deal?

The kid’s preschool has been closed this week. Yep. It’s Spring Break. From Preschool.

My parents offered to take Heath and Stella to the park, and Forest offered to take a long, luxurious morning nap. I took the opportunity to clean up the pit that has become Heath’s room and put away winter clothes. Doing this type of activity without interruption has become a luxury; a Spring Cleaning Break, if you will.

There was enough sand on his floor to make a sandbox. Odds and ends of Transformers, Legos, and Matchbox cars were tucked in every nook and cranny of the floor. Pictures of Dinosaurs, planets, and aliens crammed under the mattress. Pieces of his United States puzzle were tossed in a drawer full of mismatched and too small socks. Acorns marked important pages of books. At least I hope they were acorns.

I’m embarrassed to say how long it took me to put that puzzle back together. Let’s just say no
matter how hard I tried to jam North Dakota UNDER South Dakota the pieces wouldn’t fit. Just when I was ready to call Melissa and Doug and give them a piece of my mind, I realized what I was doing. Apparently I don’t have a piece of my mind left to give anyone.

Looks like I should’ve skipped those beers instead of classes. Good thing Heath is going to Kindergarten next year. I have a lot to learn.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

My five year old would make an excellent son of a farmer. Most days he beats the sunrise
and before he can rub the sleep out of his eyes he is spouting out various heavy-lifting plans for the twenty-four hours ahead of him.

Can I build a canal around the house?

I think the front yard needs a mote.

Can we go to Africa after school and dig for stegosaurus bones?

I have an ice skating rink on my mind. How big does my hole need to be?

I’m ready to make that teepee.

Let’s go get some chickens for the backyard and have eggs for breakfast.

We can use goats for milk and for eating the grass. Where do we buy one?

I’ve got my fishing pole. Let’s get going.

I’m going out to cut all the bark off that tree stump. Sound like a plan? I’ll be back with a knife.

I am truly grateful to have a child with incredible imagination and energy to back it up, but at 6 o’ clock in the morning, post-middle of the night baby brother waking, I am quite certain there isn’t a large enough cup of coffee I could guzzle to match Heath’s project ingenuity.

Thank goodness for four hours of preschool. He’s able to engage in transcontinental
dinosaur excavations with his pals, and I’m able to tank up on whatever I need to meet his creative interests when he’s home.

Several weeks ago he woke up with the desire to plant a garden. The original 5:45am plan
was to start digging in the yard immediately and plant rows upon rows of sunflowers, but I was able to talk him down from having to head out into the moonlight and at least wait until we could get the proper equipment to build some durable garden boxes and take some time to investigate what plants could be planted without the unnecessary angst of one last freakish freeze.

So Heath sat at the kitchen table and wrote out his list of plants, while I tried to inject coffee directly into my eyeballs to wake up. Tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers,
squash, watermelon, and red peppers made the cut. He worked hard on convincing me that he
shouldn’t go to school that day so he could complete the garden, but I reasoned
that it the next day was Saturday and he could go with Daddy to the hardware
store to get the materials for building the garden boxes. Reason actually won this time, and it worked in all our favor. I happened to catch a few minutes of NPR’s Science Friday while en route to a birthday party that very afternoon and was given a reliable thumb’s up on going ahead with the planting. Bees and mosquitoes are already in the midst. The time to sow our seed had come.

The following Saturday morning both Heath and Stella joined Daddy at a local hardware store.
They purchased 8 pieces of pine wood for two boxes (1x12x4), and 12 bags of potting soil. When they returned home Heath mightily hammered the pieces of wood together for the garden squares, while Stella happily hammered nails into the potting soil bags. After the boxes were complete, we dumped in the potting soil. Fortunately our fall and winter was consumed by taking care of one newborn and two preschoolers, so our ever-growing pile of backyard leaves had become some of the wormiest, mushroom-filled compost ever. We added
that to complete the boxes.

After school on Monday I took the kids to the hardware store and let them pick out plants.
At the time the store’s supply was low; they had yet to set out some of the heartier late-spring, early summer plants, but I figured a slow start was best. We got three tomato plants,
including one Golden Jubilee variety. Heath picked a red bell pepper. Stella wanted strawberries and broccoli. I chose romaine lettuce to round off our spring garden menu. We each picked out a new pair of gardening gloves, some organic plant food, and a small can of ruby red paint to brighten up our wood boxes.

The kids could hardly wait to get planting, but I was able to pacify them with some juice and animal crackers, while Forest nursed. I put him down for his nap then set out for an afternoon of gardening and painting. The kids wore their gloves for a total of two minutes, preferring the opportunity to squish the soil between their fingers, taking extra care to not squish the plentiful worms doing their fertilizing job.

I kept my expectations low with the garden box painting, but was surprised that there were no arguments about who gets to paint which side, and minimal leaves and grass blades were painted red. We do have a small patch of pinkish brick on our house when Heath thought it would look better red.

Every day we take time to survey the growth of our plants while we water them. This morning
I had a delightful sighting: flowers on the tomato and broccoli plants. And last night, just three weeks after we began our garden, we ate a salad that had our homegrown romaine lettuce in
it. It really was delicious.

I think Mark and I were more impressed than the kids, though. Stella really could care less about eating a non-cookie vegetable, and Heath has a new obsession: climbing the enormous
magnolia tree in our front yard. That’s fine, as long as it occurs after the rooster crows.