Finding beauty in the mess

Life isn't perfect.

Life is often a mess.

And there is nothing we can do about it.

Except finding beauty in the mess.

We have had a hard time keeping up with our flower gardens.  When we moved here the gardens were immaculate.  The previous owners obviously took such great care of their gardens.

We have a 2 year old.  There is not hours spent weeding in the gardens.

So as we work through the mess, and work harder to stop getting letters f
rom the HOA about our shitty gardening abilities, I often get discouraged.

It obviously goes greater than the gardens.  We all get discouraged as we wade through shit.  But sometimes that shit turns out to be a good thing and there is always something beautiful in that shit.

As we deal with things not going great in other areas of our life, I am so heartened to see a single rose bloom.

I love roses.  And in our garden we have plenty, but they are often choked out by every other thing you can imagine.

But this little rose, right next to our porch, has thrown down this year with the first bloom of the season.

And look how beautiful it is.

No matter what you are going through, no matter how much shit you are wading in, remember that there is something beautiful to be seen.  It may not be as perfect as a single rose, but it is there.

Find the beauty in your mess.

Replanting

As you learned, we had a pretty massive garden failure of all our spring crops.

It sucks.

But it gave me the chance to replant the seedlings inside and try again.

I think my failure was the weather wasn't right for them to sprout.  Not enough sun, not enough water, not enough of anything.

So I'm trying something new to see if that helps.

I have replanted everything inside, in a seed pod, for now.  And when they sprout up an inch or so, I will transfer them outside.  

So in a week or two, max.

This gives me the ability to say, yes, everything I planted was sprouted when I put it in the ground! 

Any future failure will not be because of a failure to sprout.

Which gives us the ability to figure out what else can be going wrong, if we do have another failure.

Along with replanting our spring garden indoors, I went on and started out seeds for the summer garden in doors.

My theory is that giving them the same ability to sprout indoors gives them a bit of a better chance.

Will it work?

Beats the hell outta me!

But all of gardening is guess work.

Especially that first year!

So here's to hopefully a beautiful and bountiful summer harvest!

Here are some sprouts!  It's so rewarding to see them taking off!  Hopefully they'll survive the transplant!  

Making tea

A whole post about making tea?

Yes.  Because this tea is delicious.

And I'm not even a big bagged tea fan!  I prefer my loose-leaf amazing stuffs.

But this tea company I found on a whim, after falling down a rabbit hole, researching something completely unrelated to tea or Natives.

How's that for a the opening of a tea story?!

Anyway, here is a step by step of making tea.


So we ordered this sampler pack for Native American tea company.  Worth it.

Tonight I had the teepee dreams.  It's a peppermint tea that's supposed to be good for sleeping.  Since I don't sleep well, I figure why not give hot tea a try!

Tea kettle and filling it up!  I love our kettle.  It's new and just perfect.  I am honestly loving having a kettle again.

Set on the quick boil burner.  

Next to the muffins we mad today.. and a dirty cast iron skillet I haven't cleaned yet from supper the other night (Bison tacos!)

 I mean, look at these muffins!  Chocolate chip on one side, blueberry on the other.

Oh we are also trying out our new silicone muffin liners!  I'll let you know what we think once we try taking one out.

Also, look at this cute felt alphabet thing I found at Target for baby girl!  She loves letters, and this just is perfect for her.

Oh right, back to the tea!  While the water is warming, I got down my gigantic favorite mug ever.  I've had this mug for probably 15 years now?  Love it.  And dropped my tea bag into the mug.  All waiting on the water!  

 Water's done!  I don't let it get to the full whistle for herbal teas.  I typically just like it steaming, but not full on rolling boiling.

Poured over, and now we wait.

5 minutes later, tea!  

I use my spoon only to stir the tea around.  I don't add anything, but I bet a little honey would be delicious in this tea.  

Enjoying my tea while playing my game.  The game that probably makes it harder for me to sleep because I play it so late.  

All well.  It was delicious.  

I highly recommend these teas to everyone!  They taste great.  

Oh, and my poor loose leaf tea brewer.  My husband picked this up for me in China almost 9 years ago now.  It's leaky but awesome.  A little jealous right now since I'm using bagged tea, but it'll get a work out soon enough.

Garden failure

You can kind of see the lettuce up top there!

So by now, we should have had a pretty nice harvest of our spring greens.  Lettuce, spinach, and cabbage mostly.

But we haven't.

We had a massive garden failure.

And I wish I knew why, but in reality I don't.

I do know it looks like the lettuce is TRYING to come up.  The little sprouts could be lettuce.

Or they could be volunteer strawberries that we can't get rid of.

I'm giving them the time they need in order to figure it out.

Worse comes to worst, we have strawberries!

I can't see that as a bad thing.

So many volunteer strawberry plants

Zero volunteer greens

However, I am still incredibly sad we haven't had anything pop up yet.

I keep telling baby girl we are going to make a salad from the garden.

I'm pretty sure she doesn't believe me when I say we are going to eat these things.

She gives me that "papa, I'm not eating dirt" look.

Because trust me, she's a child who has never eaten dirt.  My little clean child.

So for now we mourn the spring garden.  I'm hopeful we can get replanted because it gets overwhelmingly hot outside.  Maybe salvage a few greens this year before it bolting (which is fine, seed collection and all).

Gardening life

You know your family is gardening when your shoes always look like this.

It might be time to invest in the some work boots for the kiddo.

If nothing else than to save her poor shoes from the constant washing they deal with right now.

Getting tomatoes in the ground!

So our Earth Day was spent planting our tomatoes.

It was an absolute BLAST!

And hard work that had me sweating in 70 degree weather.

But we did it with only a few casualties of the toddler.

She was very helpful though, when she wanted to be.

And when she didn't, I set up some bamboo sticks and gave her one and she was content to smack the other sticks since they sway and bend pretty easily.

All in all, I am excited for what is to come from our maters!

Here we are getting everything set up.  I measured and used the smaller bamboo sticks I had to put down where I needed to plant the tomatoes.  I alternated each post between the Black Vernissage and the Cherokee Purple

All my future supplies.  And the garden soil I was using to mix into the bed.  The soil in the raised bed is the same red clay we have all over the yard here.  So I got a couple different seed mixes to mix in with it to actually plant the plants with (all of them, not just the tomatoes).  

Moving along swimmingly!  About half were planted by this point.

And my little helper took a break to play a bit!  She helped her daddy get some raspberry brambles chopped down and put out for yard waste.

Done with planting!  It took waaay too long to finish, but hey, it was done!

Mulched and staked.  Ready to tie the tops of the bamboos together for the tomato cage!  And yes, I do plan to mulch in between, but I ran out of mulch.  I wanted to outline the plants first because that is how we show baby girl where she can and cannot step.

All tied and ready to go.

I still need to put the cross bars on the cages.  But I just ran out of time today.  They were then watered and we were done.


Still to do for these?  Basically I am going tomorrow to get mulch.  Or if not tomorrow then a day it doesn't rain.  And I need to spread mulch from the first row of tomatoes all the way out to the edge of the garden around the blackberries.  I am hopeful that will cut down on the volunteer strawberry plants we have still coming up despite weeding them constantly!

Our food is shaping up nicely!

Put down the books

It seems you can't ask for parenting help anywhere without getting a ton of recommendations for books.

I constantly get asked if I've read this book or that one.

If I have a review for them on it.

And I do read parenting books.  I find them troublesome and amusing all at the same time.

But my advice to you?

Put down the books.

Walk away.

Be with your child.

Okay, hear me out before you close the browser, mumbling about how much you love your parenting guru.

I hear you.

I understand you.

I was once you.

And then I realized my child wasn't any of the children in any books I've ever read.

She was her.

And her alone.

And I needed to stop trying to be the perfect parent a book outlines.

And instead be the perfect parent she needs.

And Deserves.

I'm not perfect, but I'm exactly what my daughter needs at exactly the moment she needs it.

I don't do everything "right" according to the books.

I don't "pick and choose" what fits my ideology.. because then what's the point of reading and advertising the book in the first place?

I don't enjoy the idea that someone knows every child and what they need in their parent or caregivers.

I'm not saying those people don't have good ideas.

I'm not saying their ideas are bad (or all of them, some of them are VERY bad).

I'm saying that as a parent, trying to live up to the expectations of a book was not the path I wanted to continue on.

Trying to make my daughter fit into one of he examples given in a book and then dealing with her in that way was unfair to her.

It didn't help my parenting.

And it made us both mad and intolerable in the end.

So I put the books down.

And currently I'm working on listening to my daughter.

Her needs.

Her experiences.

Her wants.

And parenting her according to those.

And sure, we aren't perfectly gentle in every thing.

We often say GOOD JOB!

We are even known to lose our shit and yell.

And that's okay.

Because we don't have to live up to a book to be good people.

To raise good people.

Our children rarely turn out good despite us, or in spite of us.

We are all active participants in the lives of those around us.  And we change those lives daily with our interactions.

And that is what empowers us as parents to teach our children to be the best they can be.  The impact we have on them daily in our decisions and reactions to them.

And so I threw away the books.

And I've turned myself inward.

And I parent my daughter based on how she needs to be parented.

Not what a book says.  Or a guru says.  But based on what she says.

And that is good.