A New Respect

I have a renewed and profound respect for my husband.

Why you might ask? It's not because of the long hours he works. It's not because of his love for his family. It's not because of how he finds a way to balance work and home.

No. It's none of those things.

He cuts the grass.

Our backpatch has newly planted grass. It is growing quite nicely. So nicely, in fact, that it required a bit of sheering. Now, our backpatch is not worthy of a lawn mower. I think a lawn mower might actually be like a quarter of the size of the entire yard. It's not even really worthy of a weed eater (though I'm starting to rethink this). We use scissors. Okay, that's maybe a little bit of a lie, but it sounds so much better. And grass clippers technically are a type of (very big and pretty sharp) scissors.

I took it upon myself to cut the backpatch today. This has been a manly husbandly job in our casa up until today, and as things are shaping up, I think it shall continue to be.

First, it's actually a lot harder than it looks.

Second, you can't get it even. No matter how hard you try, there are sections that are taller than others. When you try to fix it, it then becomes shorter than all the other area around it thus leading you to continue cutting, assessing, re-cutting, raking, re-assessing, cutting, and on and on and on.

Third, I think my forearms are going to fall off at the elbow. You are seriously lucky that I mustered enough energy to actually write this post because I can feel the pain in my arms as I type. Here's to hoping that AV learns to take off her own clothes, change her own diaper, open the fridge and make her own food and grows tall enough to turn on the water and wash her own hair all in the next 2 hours. I'm relatively certain that by four o'clock I won't be able to lift my arms.

On another, much less painful, gardening note, my garden is growing. My Garden Is Growing! I'm considering radish farming as my next entrepreneurial endeavor because those babies popped up so fast in perfect rows and are growing like champs. Nothing like a few sprouts to motivate this amateur gardener. The carrots are starting to look like carrots, the tomatoes are sprouting and the peas are going to need poles soon so they can grow onward and upward.

I can't say the same for the school garden we planted with our fifth graders. One of the maintenance guys took a look at it with my partner the other day and confirmed that our "sprouts" weren't the fruits of any of the seeds we planted but, in fact, grass that blew in and took root in our planter. So, needless to say, I'm working on spring break. We planted new seeds and will be heading to school next week to replant the garden. But, how psyched will the kids be when they come back from vacation and have sprouts all over their planter. Let's just hope they don't notice that they're not the same plants.