Mother's Day and Another Planting Season

When Chris asked me what I wanted to do for Mother's Day, I insisted I didn't want to do anything more than start the garden. This pregnancy has taken so much out of me that when Chris heads out of town most Monday mornings, I wonder how I'm going to make it until Friday when he arrives back home. And then despite how much he's worked during the week, Chris puts himself on near full-time Oliver duty on the weekends. He takes him to the zoo, goes on walks and pushes him on the swings at the park. I don't have to be in charge of every snack, meal and clean-up, can go out at nap time and don't have to be home by Oliver's 6:30 p.m. bedtime. For those two days, at least, I remember how much easier and more enjoyable parenting is when you have someone else to trade off responsibilities with. So honestly, I just want Chris to keep doing what he's doing whether the calendar says it's Mother's Day or not.

With my low energy due to both pregnancy and a cold, gardening was a perfect activity. We ended up making two trips to the garden store, and while we're not quite ready yet here in Minnesota to plant anything other than hardy crops, we finally planted some flowers. Our house came with flower boxes lining the length of the porch, but I never got around to planting anything our first summer last year. After getting what turned into a pep talk from an employee at the garden store near our house who pointed us towards annuals that were inexpensive enough to plant and just see what happens, we settled on Impatiens. They look pretty dinky right now in the flower boxes - you can barely see them from the sidewalk - but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that if I can keep them alive, (that's the hard part for me!) they'll be looking beautiful in a few weeks.

As for the rest of the yard, we made the first step in our modest plans for adding color to our small city lot. Although the former owners had done simple and tasteful landscaping, Chris and I were so unfamiliar with plants that once we got behind on maintenance, we lost track of what was a weed and what was not. Last fall, we decided it'd be less stressful to start with a clean slate, even if that meant undoing the work the former owners had put into the yard, and we completely ripped out some of the garden plots. The empty patches of dirt committed us to putting something new there this spring. Whereas I had previously been overwhelmed with all the options for flowers and how to make the garden look good, I realized that something was better than nothing and adopted the strategy of picking plants in varying heights and colors, and like the flower boxes, will just have to see what happens.

I finished planting what I had planned for the weekend before the thunderstorm and downpour started. The rain ended up altering the one official Mother's Day celebration we had planned, a picnic my brother-in-law organized in honor of my mother-in-law and me. Instead, we "picnicked" on my in-law's living room floor (picnic basket, blanket and all). Our indoor location had the advantage of the big-screen TV, on which my father-in-law showed us the videos he had taken of Oliver the last couple of months. It was almost as much fun to watch Oliver watch the videos as it was to watch the videos themselves. I really think Oliver recognized himself! Either way, he enjoyed sitting in Dad's lap and having some rare television time.