This post is an entry for BritMums’ #KidsGrowWild Challenge (find the linky here) with Moneysupermarket
I love gardening. No, really, I do. Or at least, I love the idea of it. The reality, with two small children, tends to be rather different.
I imagine popping out into the garden, doing a spot of digging, sprinkling seeds about, chucking a bit of water on, and then wandering off for a few months while nature does its thing, and coming back at the end of summer to harvest the fruits of my labours. Sadly, that’s not how it works. Instead I take two small children outside, spend what feels like hours redirecting them from digging up the wrong bit of garden or beating each other around the head with the sharp pointy digging things. There’s also a bit of lifting the baby out of the freshly dug flower bed repeatedly, until I give up and decide he can be washed, and at least he’s not sitting on the seed bed any more, and some rather determined explanation of what to do with the seeds to the three year old.
Is it just me? Or does gardening work like that for other people too? Here’s the photo version anyway.
What I didn’t get pictures of was Tigerboy trying to eat the seeds. (Sunflower seeds are edible anyway, right?) Or the wind blowing the packets away before I’d got the seeds out. There’s no picture of him turning the water butt on *without* the watering can underneath it, or of Smallest trying to water him when he wouldn’t get out of the way.
Oddly, I didn’t get any pictures of them laughing in the sun. Which surprises me, as we did a lot of laughing. When I gave up lifting him out of the mud and just let him paddle, bare feet in the soil. When he trailed little footprints across the patio through the spilled water.
And she really enjoyed the planting. We counted seeds as we put them in holes. She took such care of each little embryonic plant and she’s thrilled to be watching them come up a little more each day. (I do kind of wish we’d managed to plant them so we knew what was where, but I guess that was asking too much of a 15 month old.
I really hope we get some flowers. But even if we don’t, it was worth it for the fun.