parenting – Cosmos and Chickadees

A few weeks ago our friend gave us a tour of a garden she’s been working on for eighteen years. Her garden is a bit of a rambling food forest with squash, mushrooms, and berries appearing at random. She explained to us enthusiastically about her plans for the garden for next year, as well as what she accomplished this year. It was interesting to see what she has done over the years, and also to see the transformation of her garden from the time she bought her house until now when she showed us pictures.

For the past month or so, I haven’t really done anything new with the garden. With ongoing construction around us and intense summer heat, I haven’t felt motivated to do much. I enjoy sitting on our porch and watching our garden for what it is now. Many of the plants we planted this year are growing rapidly, and those we planted last year have doubled or tripled in size.

Alongside the rapid growth of plants, my son has made some major strives in development in the past couple of months. He went from being completely immobile, to rolling, sitting, crawling, and now starting to stand! Accordingly, I’m spending a lot more time watching him, and he’s spending a lot less time napping. The days seem to go by in seconds, and I often only have a few minutes to myself. This means that garden maintenance has moved to the back burner. On the rare occasion that I get the chance to garden (when there’s little construction and my son is napping) I get overwhelmed by the amount of weeds. Because of this, I decided to be kind to myself and hire someone to clean up the garden this year. We will be going away soon for a couple of months, and rather than have the garden become even more weedy next year, I’d rather have someone take care of it now. I’m excited for the garden to become more established and less high maintenance in a few years.

*Queen Anne’s Lace has completely overtaken the side garden. It’s very pretty but I would like to grow other things as well!*

One thing that I’m starting to get better at since becoming a parent is learning to delegate and accept the things that I’m unable to do. I’ve always been an overachiever and have always felt that I should be able to do anything I put my mind to. However now I realize that – while I can do a lot of things that I want to – I only have so many hours in a day. I’m lucky in that I have the ability to ‘treat’ myself by hiring someone to help with weeding, and I think that’s one of the kindest things I can do for myself this year.

After the weeding is done, we’re planning on putting down some cardboard in order to start new gardens for next year. You really can only do so much in a year after all! For now the most important thing is spending slow paced days with my son while I’m still on leave.

In July, cone flowers, lilies and phlox started to bloom:

Now that it’s getting later in the season, we’re starting to have lots of brown eyed susans, and our sedum is starting to change colour. Our morning glories and cosmos are also still in full swing.

I’ll hopefully make another post towards September. Until then, enjoy the remaining days of the summer!

Last spring, when I was pregnant with my son we noticed that a house wren had taken up residence in our bird house. Everyday we saw the little bird bring sticks to the small hole of the house to build his nest with the goal of attracting a mate. From what we saw, almost every stick he brought he had trouble fitting into the hole. And yet, despite the sticks dropping, he continued. Day after day he brought more sticks until one day we saw a female coming to his nest. We watched them for a few more weeks and loved hearing them sing. However, for whatever reason they never decided to have their chicks in the bird house. We assumed it was because the male was never able to get any sticks into the house.

Last week I went to pick up a bat house I had made from someone nearby. The man I bought from is a nature enthusiast. His house is in the woods and the front is peppered with bird feeders of all sizes. When I told him about our wrens last year, he gave me a wren house that he made. He told me that it’s important to always clean out bird houses each spring, if not we risked not getting new residents that year. Hearing this I decided to clean out our bird house from last year. My husband unscrewed the bottom of the bird house and was surprised to see so many sticks within the house that none fell out! I cleaned out the house and couldn’t believe how much there was. Despite our thinking that the little bird was unable to get any sticks into the house, it appears he was quite successful! He was so determined to make the best house he could for his family that he persevered for weeks.

The endurance of the house wren reminds me a lot of how I feel as a first time parent. We’re on month four of having our little one in our lives and often I feel so tired that I’m convinced I can’t go on. But we do. His little laughs and smiles and the love he gives us makes all of the lack of sleep and endless cleaning worth it. And despite feeling like I’m down to my last sliver of energy, I go on. I imagine that the house wren was also tired spending hour after hour completing the repetitive task of bringing small sticks to put into a small hole. But he didn’t give up.

I’m not sure why they didn’t decide to make our house into their home last year, but I hope they come back this year and try again.

The determination and resilience of nature is amazing. I’ll continue to gather inspiration from other parents like house wrens as I work to build a home for my own little one.

Speaking of determination – this week we saw buds appearing on trees and new leaves in our strawberry patch.