Maybe everybody else already knew about this brilliant method of creating a new flower bed, but it was new to me last year, and my friend Lisa, gardener extraordinaire, said she hadn’t heard of it either. If you want to make a flower bed somewhere on your lawn, but you don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to dig up the grass, here’s a neat trick. Use a garden hose to outline the bed, then lay down a thick layer of newspaper (five or six sheets thick) right on top of the grass. Cover the newspaper with mulch. Lots of mulch. If you do this in the fall, by spring the grass will have rotted away underneath the newspaper, and voila, you’ve got your nice new bed ready for planting.
So claims Mrs. Greenthumbs, and I took her at her word. Except it was spring, not fall. Last spring, I wanted to extend the flowerbed that runs along my front walk. It was a boring rectangle, and I like curves. We had a lot of mulch leftover from another project and a mountain of newspapers in the to-be-recycled section of our garage. I followed Mrs. Greenthumbs’s instructions and turned that severe rectangular bed into a graceful double curve.
Of course then I had a funny-looking contrast between the empty new curves and the original bed full of spring flowers. On a whim, I bought a flat of moss roses (portulaca, my favorite flower) and planted them in the new mulch area on top of the newspaper. I just scraped away the mulch in places, made little pockets of potting soil above the newspaper, and stuck a plant in each pocket. I wasn’t sure if it would work, but it did. The moss roses spread all over the new section of the bed. I was thrilled.
Portulaca isn’t hardy here, so I planted bulbs in the new sections of the bed very late last fall. This year you can’t tell where the original bed ends and the additions begin. It has blended into one cohesive bed. I dug into the mulch and found that both the newspaper and the grass beneath it have indeed rotted away. It’s just a flowerbed now.
“Just” a flowerbed. Now there’s an understatement. The girls and I spent our morning painting (very bad) watercolor pictures of the hyacinths and anemones that are blooming between the withered stems of last summer’s moss roses. What a universe there is in that little crescent of land. Last year’s news is nourishing earthworms and windflowers, which in turn are nourishing the imaginations of small children. Not to mention their mother.
“It’s good, workin’. I’m happy. I love helpin’ you.”
It’s not hard to make a four-year-old happy. There are hundreds, thousands of ways. This morning it was that most reliable of kid-pleasing activities: cleaning the bathroom.
I don’t know why I forget, sometimes, how much a small child loves to help with the household tasks I least enjoy. I remember vividly my own joy when my mother first let me clean a toilet with the long-handled brush all by myself. It would have been sometime between second and fourth grade, because we were still living in the house on Uvalda Street. 767 Uvalda, I think, and what I remember most about living there is worshiping our pretty long-haired babysitter, Nadine, who lived next door and whose favorite songs were “Afternoon Delight” and “You Are the Woman I’ve Always Dreamed Of”; lugging my beloved rental cello to school across a pedestrian bridge that rose to Himalayan heights above busy Sixth Avenue; despising as the embodiment of all things evil a squirrel who ate some baby birds in a nest in our front yard; and embracing with jubilant pride the awesome responsibility of scrubbing the toilet with Comet and that Very Important Brush.
The couple of times I’ve watched that Supernanny show, I’ve had to chuckle over her earnest instruction in the use of the “Involvement Technique,” which is a concept so common-sensical one wonders that any parent needs to be formally instructed in its use. And yet I so often forget to use common sense in running the household. I can work faster if I work alone. “Allowing” children to help takes time, patience, and a high tolerance for accidents. I had more of all those things when my first child was little. But common sense says I need more help now than I did when there was only one small person underfoot. And common sense knows perfectly well that letting kids help with housework while they’re still little enough that the work is fun is the best way to ensure that they’ll be willing and able helpers when they’re older.
It’s just that common sense sometimes bails on me when I’m in a hurry.
This morning I wasn’t in a hurry. I’m trying to return to my good Flylady habits—the house is always so much pleasanter, both in terms of cleanliness & order and in terms of joyfulness of atmosphere, when I’m in the Flylady groove. After breakfast I moseyed into the bathroom to wipe down the counter and sinks. The moment my hand touched the spray bottle, Beanie materialized at my elbow.
“Can I ’pray?” she begged. Nothing, nothing appeals to a small child like a squirt bottle. Two or three Flylady grooves ago, in recognition of this fact, I oh-so-cleverly stocked every bathroom with a squirt bottle full of Don Aslett’s “light bathroom sanitizer,” which smells nice and isn’t full of harsh chemicals. I wouldn’t be comfortable turning a little kid loose with a bottle of 409 or Windex. I don’t even like to use that stuff. The Don Aslett cleanser comes in little packets of pink concentrate for you to pour into your squirt bottle and mix with water. Not to sound like a commercial—it’s just that I’m all about finding practical ways to make good ideas work. I read so many inspiring things about childraising and education, but sometimes it’s hard to figure out how to take those beautiful philosophies and make them functional. Which is why I post so many links and reviews here—when something works, I have to shout about it.
So here’s my shout-out for Don Aslett’s One-Step Bathroom Cleaner. Great stuff. Cheaper than 409, too.
And an unutterable delight to use, so Beanie’s sparkling eyes told me. She squirted, I wiped, she chattered away about a Father Brown story she heard on Jim Weiss’s Mystery Mystery CD—and I had to agree with her declaration. It is good, workin’. I am happy. I love helpin’ her.
I’m hijacking another post from my husband’s blog. It’s too good not to share.
Expertise, by Scott
So it’s a gorgeous day today, sunny, few clouds, tiny breeze now and then. I’m hanging out with Top Management and The Boy as she does a little bit of gardening out front and he practices going in a semi-circle, holding onto my knee as I sit on the front steps. He’s occasionally tempted to let go and see how far he can get but prudence is currently the better part of his valor. Considering the fact that just six months ago they weren’t sure he’d ever walk, I cut him a bit o’ slack.
We’re chatting and it’s extremely pleasant and then I look down and notice something odd I didn’t THINK I’d noticed before but with me who knows? And as is my oh so formal wont, I blurt, “What the hell?”
Top Management turns around and we both look at this puddle on the sidewalk which didn’t seem to have been there before. And it’s bright and sunny and there are no other puddles around. And obviously you’re all picking up on this much faster than we did. But we’re good in an emergency. Trust me, we are. Well, she is. I’m useless. What a shock.
So we notice that The Boy has a matching wet spot on his pants. I say, “Jeez, lady, when’s the last time you changed his diaper?” Which, yes, conveniently ignored for the moment the fact that nothing had stopped ME from personally changing his diaper.
I lift him up and his pants immediately fall and get stuck on his shoes. Turns out the diaper dropped down with the pants. Which means that, when his shirt rides up a little bit, his winky gets its first look at the world.
Top Management and I both burst out laughing, because she believes in solidarity and at a time like that it’s rude to let your husband be the only one with a thirteen-year-old’s mentality. Besides, it’s really funny when a baby’s winky suddenly pokes out in public. That’s not opinion. That’s simple fact.
The Boy’s amused, of course, because he’s being held up in the air and both Mom and Dad are making a big fuss about…well, SOMEthing, how’s he supposed to know what? So as usual, he assumes it’s about him. Which I guess it was, sort of. Or at least parts of him. Part of him. A little part.
Just then a breeze whips up. And the expression on The Boy’s face changes. Instantly. What had been mild amusement turns into a look of “What the heck is THAT?” as the wind tickles parts previously unused to any kind of weather conditions whatsoever. He turns to look at each of us, eyes wide, clearly thinking, “Seriously, what IS that? Do you know? Do you? Do you? You do? You DO? How long have you known about this? And what can I possibly do to get that going again?”
Howling with laughter, and much to The Boy’s disgruntlement, we head into the house to get him a new diaper and a change of clothes. And Top Management realizes that the neurosurgeon The Boy had seen earlier had taken off the kid’s diaper in order to look at his Unusually Protruding Tailbone (which, yes, needs to be snipped off) and had apparently not done a terrific job of redoing the diaper’s tape.
Which kind of gives you pause. This is one of the top pediatric brain surgeons in the world. Yet he seems unable to master the intricacies of Huggies. Are you sure this is the guy you want poking around your kid’s horned ventricles?
Turns out he indeed is. And I guess it just goes to show that we’ve all got our little areas of special expertise. For some of us it’s fixing toddler brains. For others it’s…well, for my part, I haven’t quite gotten that one sorted out just yet. But I’ve a feeling it’s going to be more along the lines of knowing how to secure a diaper properly rather than slicing and dicing someone’s innards with precision. Hey, it takes all kinds.
I was nursing Wonderboy today when Beanie careened across the bed and clonked heads with the baby. Wonderboy didn’t cry, but he raised a hand to his head and patted it gingerly.
“Awww!” cried Beanie. “Look, he’s signing ‘lettuce!’ ”
Click here to see why that’s what Beanie thought.
March 29, 2005 @ 9:16 pm | Filed under:
Wonderboy At the girls’ gym class the other day, someone’s baby dropped a pacifier. Wonderboy picked it up and regarded it studiously. Then he tried to stick it in his ear. He must have thought it was a hearing aid.
Yesterday my kids pulled out a CD we used to listen to all the time: the soundtrack to Snoopy: The Musical
. This was a play I loved as a teenager, when it was performed by some friends at a different high school. I had a crackly tape recording of a dress rehearsal which my sisters and I listened to ad nauseum. We had, after all, outgrown the soundtrack to Annie by then, and I had yet to discover the melodramatic satisfaction that is Les Miz.
So when Jane was five or six and I, for no particular reason, found myself humming one of the dear old Snoopy songs, I hunted around online and found a recording. Ah, the bliss of Google! My tiny girls loved the album, as I knew they would. A singing dog! A boy named Linus! A squeaky-voiced Sally belting out tongue-twisters!
Later, as the girls grew, they connected to Snoopy on different terms. One of our favorite songs on the album, “Clouds,” is like a theme song for homeschoolers. Charlie Brown and the gang are lying around looking at the sky, and someone asks Charlie Brown what he sees in the clouds.
“I see a—” he begins, but Sally cuts him off to sing that she sees: “A mermaid riding on a unicorn.” Peppermint Patty sees “an angel blowing on a big long horn.” Linus, ever my favorite, is a visionary. “I see Goliath, half a mile tall, waving at me….what do you see?”
Poor Charlie Brown. How can he get an answer in edgewise? Lucy sees a team of fifty milk-white horses; Patty sees a dinosaur; Linus sees Prometheus, waving; Snoopy, grandiose as always, sees the Civil War. The entire Civil War.
You could spend a year rabbit-trailing your way through this song. The Peanuts gang know their history, I’ll give ’em that. (Although they seem to hit a bit of a roadblock when it comes to a certain American poet/storyteller, as evinced by their poor classroom performance in the hilarous song “Edgar Allen Poe,” elsewhere on the album.) When these kids gaze at the clouds, they see Caesar crossing the Rubicon, the Fall of Rome, and even all twelve apostles, waving at Linus.
Linus: “The Pyramid of Khufu!”
Sally: “You too?”
All but Charlie Brown: “Seven Wonders of the World…”
For our family, this is a song of reciprocal delights. Some of these cloud-tableaux are historical events the girls already knew about, and the idea of Snoopy beholding an entire war sculpted in cumulus is irresistibly funny. Some events are things my kids first encountered in the song. When, years later, we read about the Rubicon in A Child’s History of the World
, there were gasps of delighted recognition from everyone including the then-two-year-old. Click, another connection is made.
So I was happy to hear the Peanuts gang belting away once more yesterday afternoon. It has been a couple of years since last they regaled us with their splendid visions. The girls have encountered more of the world, more of the past, and so they have more to connect with in the lyrics of Charlie Brown’s imaginative friends.
As for Charles, alas. The gang, having at long last exhausted the gamut of grand happenings to see in the heavens, demand of Charlie, “Well, what do you see?”
Says Charlie, glumly (and you probably remember the punchline from the Sunday funnies when you were a kid): “I was going to say a horsie and a ducky, but I changed my mind.”
(Cue hysterical laughter from little girls. Every. Single. Time.)
I’m a wimp in the cold. Much as I respect the Charlotte Mason “get out for a walk every day, no matter what the weather” principle, I don’t live by it. No well-bundled foul-weather treks for me, invigorating though they might be. The children are encouraged to get outside for fresh air every day, but if they want my company, they have to settle for the sofa, the fireside, and a good book. Preferably one full of heroic wilderness adventures in the elements.
But as soon as the weather begins to turn, oh, I’m there. Just try and keep me inside. Housework? Pah! The floors can take care of themselves. The kids and I have paths to tread, shoes to muddy, trees to meet.
In addition to field guides and the indispensible Handbook of Nature Study
by Anna Botsford Comstock, there are a few other books that leap off the shelves at me this time every year:
Wild Days: Creating Discovery Journals by Karen Skidmore Rackliffe
Keeping a Nature Journal: Discover a Whole New Way of Seeing the World Around You by Clare Walker Leslie and Charles E. Roth
Roots, Shoots, Buckets & Boots: Gardening Together with Children and Sunflower Houses : Inspiration from the Garden – A Book for Children and Their Grown-Ups
by Sharon Lovejoy
Mrs. Greenthumbs: How I Turned a Boring Yard into a Glorious Garden and How You Can, Too
by Cassandra Danz (for adults only)
Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Backyards
and Planting Noah’s Garden: Further Adventures in Backyard Ecology
by Sara Stein
Onward & Upward in the Garden
by Katharine White (A collection of gardening essays by the wife of E.B. White).
These old friends keep us busy during the wet and chilly days of March. Come April, we’re outside living the adventure instead of reading about it. I am intrepid! I am daring! No breeze is too balmy, no creek too melodic, no backpack too full of snacks for this nature-loving mother.
That is, until the weather turns hot.
Early this morning, too early, while The Baby Who Scoffed at Sleep played on the bed beside me, I finished reading Willa Cather’s splendid novel My Antonia. The book was due back at the library yesterday, but I want to copy a few passages into my commonplace book first. This is one of them.
I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning. Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping…
Many thanks to Kim Campbell for the nice write-up at her AHA Weblogs Blog. I enjoy daily visits to Kim’s sites, both her own family blog and her intriguing and vivid reviews of homeschooling blogs at the amusingly named Weblogs Blog. What a treat it was to see Bonny Glen there!
