A Favorite, Continued

As I wrote last year, getting the goods for my planters is one of my favorite traditions we've established in our little family. I love, love, love doing something for Mother's Day that lets me bond with my littles and reminds me of how awesome my own mom is. Because, frankly, she's pretty awesome, and while I'll never have her patience or talent for full-on flower beds or gardens, planters I can do.

Normally I make both of my planters look exactly the same. I guess that's my Type A-ness, trying to make everything all balanced and perfect pretty. But this year, I couldn't decide on a small enough number of plants to fit equally in both; there were way too many beautiful colors and interesting buds for me to narrow it down. It didn't help (or maybe it did?) that I had a very anxious three-and-a-half year-old helping me with the picking...

For a wee bit I considered doing the plant shopping all by myself. Last year, even with Ben's help, it was a tad difficult to choose my plants and keep Toddler Man from destroying touching every plant in sight. OK, in his defense, he didn't actually destroy anything; he did, however, stress me out a bit as I tried to shop and I thought maybe I'd make the picking process a solo thing as a little gift to myself for Mother's Day. But then, somehow, we all ended up in the van and at the store together, and now I'm so glad we did.

A year makes a big difference. Harrison was still all over the place but he listened to my directions about looking with his eyes, not his hands, and he loved having me hand him the plants so he could hand them to Ben to be put in the cart. He also loved tracking down whatever color I said I needed next. "Here, Mama! Here's some yellow!!!" "This red one is mine! I pick this one!!" and so on is what we heard throughout our entire visit. There was, of course, some climbing on stacks of giant bags of soil and some frantic running through the aisles (done by HD - not me!), but really - it was a joy to have my whole family with me picking out my flowers and plants as they are the reason I get to celebrate this day in the first place.

The part of the process I did keep more for myself this year was the potting. I didn't want too much help in this department, so before I began, I let Raegan go down for her nap and Harrison distract himself with other ventures (OK, let's be honest - it was PBS. Ben needed to mow and it's Mother's Day, not Be Mother of the Year Day, so yes, I used TV to occupy my child for half an hour so I could play in the dirt in peace. And I'm more than OK with that!). He did, however, get in on helping with the second planter and did a good job of hanging on to each next plant while I dug its spot. Note: I tried to have him put them in the planter but his idea of "set in the hole" was more like "toss it at the planter" so we had to adjust a little on that. He was good at scooting dirt in around them, though. :)

Here are the final products. It is hard to tell from the photos that they aren't matchy-matchy, but we'll see as the warm weather continues, just how my contrasting colors and plants do. I hope to the high heavens I didn't buy anything that shouldn't be in a container this size, although I have a feeling this year's offering could turn out to be quite the experiment/lesson (however, if that's not a metaphor for parenting and life in general, I don't know what is!).