Community Garden: Night 1

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What I actually typed was this:

Why am I always the one without a spouse or partner at family-friendly stuff? It's bad enough to be the lone mom in a sea of parents and grandparents at gymnastics ... now I'm the lone mom at community garden. Le sigh.

UPDATE:

It would've sucked to be one parent and one child at community garden except that all the big families pitched in to help us till, weed, and fill our planting beds. We have two beds that are 8'x4' each... and that would've been a lot of soil to haul, but two of the older dads took it upon themselves to help out everyone. Otherwise we would've been there all night!

Javi was uninterested when we got there, but they had a little "guess the tool" quiz that we were supposed to do as a team. He had a lot of fun with it and we came up with silly names for all the tools we didn't recognize. His favorite was "manure picker upper" and "manure digger." Can you spot the theme?

He also enjoyed working with the tools to get all the weeds out of our beds and then level out the soil. His favorite part, though, was using the garden rake to spread the compost/soil. He even directed a few of our soil deliveries to the areas he thought they should go. It was like watching little farmer Javi.

Of course, toward the end, the men were really annoyed by all the children around so I tried to keep Javi focused on stuff that would keep him out of the way. Which is sort of messed up. I mean, seriously? This is about teaching children and families to enjoy nature and learn where food comes from. So what letting them help takes longer. We're not on deadline here and you aren't a commercial farmer who needs to hurry up and get plants in the ground... So lighten up!

But other than that slight annoyance ... we are grateful for the help and created some fun memories. The whole way home, Javi went on and on about the grub worms he found, the other children, the manure tools, and what kind of gardening gloves he wants. So for Night 1, I call that Mission Accomplished.