Mama's Tradition

For my first two Mother's Days, Ben was very thoughtful and got me personalized gifts that included pictures of my sweet, sweet Harrison. Last year (on the second of those two days), we went to Earl May on Mother's Day and spent a small fortune on plants for my planters that sit by our garage. So I gave Ben a free pass for the future, telling him he could just buy me flowers to plant every year and I would be one happy mama.

Fast forward one year.  Now we have two sweet, sweet reasons to celebrate Mother's Day, so we made the trek to Menard's this time (slightly less fortune involved) and Ben entertained the kids while I picked out my plants. Now, I am no green thumb, but planters are one thing I can in fact handle. And since I started doing them several years ago, the plants have even survived. The whole summer! (Well, there was one year that the watering got away from me and the planters scorched, but you know - I'm learning). Planters are great though and I love picking out the different pieces that will go together in my pots, even though I pretty much always pick variations of the same things.

You see, this whole planter thing is another skill I learned from my mama. She is the one with a green thumb and has always had beautiful flower beds, a great garden, and gorgeous planters around her house in the summer. The first time I did my own planters, she was here to help me select the pots and plants. Since then I have filled them on my own, but I still follow her basic formula: some tall things, some dangling things, some green things, and some colorful things. Here is what this year's creation looks like:

I'm getting to the point that I can throw these together pretty quickly and today I did so while making rice to go with supper and doing my best to keep Harrison from being too much help with the planting. I distracted him with my super cool empty containers which he carried over to his sand table and was doing who knows what with once they got there. I'm guessing there is a fair amount of sand no longer in the sand table!

What I love about this little tradition we are building is the interest Harrison took in it this year. Besides hijacking my empties, he really did want to help plant my "beautiful flowers" that we got for "Mudder's Day" as he calls it. If you think about it, in the case of my planters, this is both cute and accurate!

After I got everything in the pots, I filled up our two watering cans and he got to help me water them in a bit.

Like the cow watering can? We just got it because Harrison has a major thing for cows. It is missing an ear and is surprisingly beat up for being new, but it trickles water very slowly which is great for toddlers because he can't flood anything while watering it. I figure it is also a good lesson in patience for him. :)

Apparently my eyes are a little bigger than my pots because I ended up with a few too many sun annuals purchased. That's OK, though, because our new house has some space out front that is decidedly random in terms of the plants that reside there, so throwing a few more in the mix is really no big deal. In fact, I wonder if that is what the previous owners did as well.

I tried to get Harrison to help me with this, but it was too close to supper time (i.e. too close to bed time) and he was too tired to really cooperate. Instead I ended up digging in a few more plants while he played, again, with the empty containers.

We have a few more to add yet, but we'll try those tomorrow in hopes that he might actually want to get in on the planting.

Now I almost had him with the watering again after I put these in, but somehow he got our watering cans confused.

In case you can't tell, this is my "How the Flip Diddle Did I End up with the Cow Can?!" face. I guess mamas can sometimes use a lesson in patience as well!

Happy Mother's Day! Enjoy your own traditions, whatever they may be!