Three stories from the garden

For years now I have successfully tricked Isaac into thinking that hanging around and talking to me while I garden is actually playing. He comes up with an imaginary scenario which involves me to some small extent, and I recite my lines as instructed, sometimes adding additional plot points to keep the game going. It worked again this week.

Lately Isaac has been obsessed with the chapter book series "My Father's Dragon," and the boy in the books has a jackknife. So when Isaac got tired of helping me prune some overgrown bushes, he removed the rubber handle from his pair of pruning shears and began pretending that it was a jackknife. Then I remembered that we had a real Swiss Army knife, and I suspected that it would provide him with hours of entertainment (plus the pride of feeling like a big boy).

And it did. I managed to spend an entire 45 minutes pruning a Japanese maple, and all I had to do was keep talking to Isaac about how he was using his jackknife to rescue various small animals caught in the underbrush. Meanwhile Isaac sat nearby and scraped at dirt and rocks with the knife's bottle opener. It wasn't until the very end that Isaac said, only somewhat accusingly, "Hey, we haven't been playing. We've been right here the whole time!"

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Another day this week, Isaac, Laurel, and I were outside enjoying the sunshine, rocking on the couch-swing at the edge of our lawn. Then Isaac decided that we had just arrived at a museum. He purchased three tickets for us from the admission desk, and we entered the museum -- that is, we walked off the lawn and onto a bark-covered path, where we stood by a wooden bench.

"What kind of museum is this?" I asked. "Are those dinosaur bones?" I gestured at a nearby flower bed bordered by rocks. I thought it was a pretty good suggestion.

"No," said Isaac. "Those are weeds. This is the History of Weeds Museum."

Ouch!

"I don't know if I want to go to this museum," I complained. "I have enough weeds at home."

Isaac explained that these were not the domesticated weeds you would see in your yard; these were the weeds you would see in a "nature park" like Yosemite.

"So instead we could call them wildflowers, or native plants," I suggested.

Nope. He was sure it was the History of Weeds Museum, and we walked through quite a few exhibits, marveling at the rare and unusual weeds they had.

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And does Laurel also like to play outside? Yes, she does. She has several favorite outdoor activities, none of which are convenient to me. That's why I carried Laurel around while we were playing the museum game.

For one, she doesn't walk yet (even though she is 14 months old!), so she has to crawl through the mud, bark chips, and rose prunings that litter our yard. For another, she still shoves everything into her mouth, and being so close to the ground gives her the perfect opportunity to discover many inappropriate items. But my bigger problem is her unrelenting desire to climb. She clambers onto unstable patio furniture, scoots into mounded flower beds, and crawls up the flagstone steps to the upper yard.

I set her down on a brick garden path next to an appealing assortment of ride-on toys, but 15 seconds later she is hitching her way to the forbidden steps, giggling all the way.

So I found a blog post from the past to remind me that when Isaac was 16 months old, it was difficult for me to work in the garden with him. He was a pretty good walker by then, as he had been walking for two months, but he still needed constant supervision. Just a few months after that, however, he was much more reliable, and would even try to help me pull weeds.

Laurel's developing very differently than Isaac, however, so I don't necessarily expect the same from her.