The Garden

I love that I'm a child of the 80s and can still recall listening to vinyl records on my little Fisher Price record player. Some of my favorite albums were Raffi (of course), Sharon Lois and Bram (from The Elephant Show) and Anne Murray's "There's a Hippo in the Bathtub." Clearly, it set me up for my great taste in music today. When we'd go visit my grandmother in Sudbury, Ontario, we'd almost always put on her Sandra Beech "Inch by Inch" record. While I loved the songs, I also really loved the album cover. How can you not feel happy just looking at it? So anyways - and here's where I get to the main point - I think it began my love of sunflowers and my desire to have a garden with a sea of flowers as tall as me.

But then I discovered how much work was involved in creating said garden and how very much I disliked weeding and my dreams of seas of smiling sunflowers were dashed from reality. Until recently! Of course, we're nowhere near flowers up to my shoulders, but thanks to Audrey (our friend who lives above us), Tim, and my brother-in-law Dave, our front garden is slowly coming into itself and is totally making it look like some serious gardeners live here when only one (Audrey) actually does.

I have yet to plant sunflowers but I already have the perfect spot for them:

Jack loves watering the garden. So we send him out there every morning at 6 am and every evening at 8 pm, all by himself, to water the plants*.  As you can see in the foreground, we have totally failed our now completely dead grass. The only green things there are the weeds (at this point, it seems fruitless to pull them out). Our plan is to overhaul it in September. Until then we are stuck with crunchy "parking lot" grass as I like to call it. 

For now, we're just thankful that people's eyes are diverted from the grass and into our lush green garden. All that's missing now is a gnome (and sunflowers).

*Falsehood.