Back to Life

I love to garden. I’m terrible at it, but I love it.

Just to clarify, by “garden” I mean plant seeds or seedlings and (ideally) watch them grow, harvest the fruits and veggies from those plants, and enjoy pretty flowers. I don’t mean weeding, prepping, etc… maybe that’s why my thumb is not quite green.

We have beautiful daffodils that come up every spring in our gardens (planted by previous owners) but not many tulips. Recently I decided I would like more tulips and went to the seed store. After looking up and down all the aisles, I found a staff member. “Where can I find the tulip bulbs?” I asked. “In August,” she answered. For some reason I thought that you could plant bulbs in the fall OR spring, but apparently I was wrong. Shows how much I know about gardening.

I’m also not great at caring for the plants living inside my house. Especially when I’m also caring for a newborn. So for the first few months of both Ari’s & Ezra’s lives, our plants suffered. We only had plants in two parts of the house, our family room and our living room, and for some reason I could not keep them both going.

A couple of months ago, I decided to turn this trend around. Maybe it was the completely dead plant sitting in the corner of our family room for months that motivated me to take better care of our greenery.

I consolidated all of our plants to one spot that has lots of sun, that I look at every day and that would be easy to water because they’re all together in one place.

And do you know what? Magical things happened. A plant that I received for mother’s day that I should have probably thrown in the garbage months and months ago, came back to life and flowered pretty purple flowers. Even the orchid plant, which I’ve never figured out how to keep alive, came back to life and bloomed!

In the midst of dealing with so much illness in my family, especially a baby who is suffering from chicken pox, this is exactly the uplifting encouragement that I needed. If I can nurse that beautiful nearly-dead orchid back to life, surely I can bring my family back to health again, right?

But this isn’t just my job. So I’ve recruited my 3-year-old to help me in the greenhouse department and we have had so much fun planting seeds and watching our little seedlings start to grow. Because even though winter doesn’t seem to want to go away, I am determined to bring a little bit of spring into our lives.

This weekend I went around our house disinfecting door knobs, light switches, cupboard handles, hand towels, etc. And this isn’t just my job either. So we had lots of talks about how spitting and licking spreads germs and constantly washed our hands.

While caring for our sick little baby, I have been doing a LOT of rocking and singing to try to get him to sleep (effectively undoing all of the sleep training we just did). His favourite song, that he almost always falls asleep to is “Tomorrow” from the musical Annie. Singing this song repeatedly has also been a great uplifting reminder that if I “just pick up my chin, and grin and say, (ooooh,) the sun will come out tomorrow, so you gotta hang on ’til tomorrow. Come what may!”. More like “COME ON, MAY!” Am I right?!

*Update: since publishing this post, I received a call from daycare, went to the Dr.’s office and discovered that my older son Ari has strep. Back into quarantine. I totally jinxed it…