Today was a really really long day. Crazy busy at work, crazy busy in life, still tired kicking off the last of this marthon cold/bronchitis. By the end of the day I was sniffling along my drive home, just trying to get us all there and get to the point of my day when I could lay my head on a pillow and rest. But a bit of an earlier harvest than I expected cleared my tears and got me the rest of the way home dry-eyed.

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We probably got it from our parents, but remembered summers and conversations with the hub make me think they got it from their parents and other influences in their lives. The parental monologue. Started day one with Wolfie, talking our way through diaper changes and feedings and every waking minute of every day. Just seeding him with the universe.
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As my mate and I prepared to marry, I started four months before the event “growing” our decorations. I potted little seeds and not-so-patiently watched them grow. They went from bitty little seeds floating in re-used egg cartons to vines up eight-foot poles after some careful tending and benign neglect. A fun little project, and a great framing to our ceremony (we stood beneath a tent supported by the vine-clad poles).
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I had indications that seeding Wolfie’s brain was really working well, quite soon after his second birthday. He would ask me to change our angle of incidence to get the sun out of his eyes (hey, quantity =! quality and I did take the practical track in highschool). He’d put bits and pieces of stories he remembered. He started asking me what I did at work along our drive home, without prompting, in response to my daily questions about his school day.
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As we started cooking up Helvetica, I was finally ready to set into motion my first vegetable garden. Over the years I’d “helped”, in typical kid-fashion, to tend family gardens. I’d started a lot of little plants and watched them die, planted flowers and watched them go, even spliced a few trees in interesting shapes as I’d seen done in a kid-oriented science magazine when I was twelve. So at the start of that pregnancy, I built the boxes and hauled the dirt. Planted my seeds and waited. And waited. And waited.
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We started a few months later seeding more ideas into Wolfie. The idea of being a big brother and expanding his universe to more than Wolfie. He started to speak in longer sentences and make up completely new concepts (or take them after one telling from school mates - I know his dayschool teachers didn’t teach him the idea that monsters coming around would eat him up). Amazing to listen to him babble on and teach us about his universe. He became quite attached to the idea of “the baby in the uterus” and spent a lot of time telling us what he’d teach her.
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About this time my vegetable garden began bearing fruit. I’d had a ton of sprouts, cheery and green, but nothing, I thought, tangible. Something to hold and say to myself, hey, I did this. I made this.
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Then we got busy with the craziness of two kids, two jobs, two of everything in that inevitable calculus that 1+1 does not equal 2, but rather 4 or 5 or 6, depending on the mood of each child separately, in relation to each other, and dependent on the positioning of the moon, several stars, and supernovae to be named later. The garden went to seed and the animals and bugs had a huge number of parties in my little garden boxes. But things kept growing. I popped out to the garden in a spare moment a few weeks back and found potatoes growing out of food leavings I thought I’d simply buried to compost. There were flowers on the broccoli plant and a lone worker bee was going to town. It grows even when we forget to conciously tend it all.
. . .

Today was a really really long day. Crazy busy at work, crazy busy in life, still tired kicking off the last of this marthon cold/bronchitis. By the end of the day I was sniffling along my drive home, just trying to get us all there and get to the point of my day when I could lay my head on a pillow and rest.
. . .

Halfway home, through my feeling-sorry-for-myself tears at my long long day, an excited little voice broke through my personal raincloud. “Helvi’s making happy noises!” and “Look, look, the blimp is back!” and “Look at what the sun is doing to the clouds! They’re going to red and orange and purple! Just like the moon!”
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May just be among the first green sprouts of the “garden” of Wolfie’s life that we’ve been working all these years, but a delightful harvest nevertheless.
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Hey. We did this. We made this. And we’ve got that second “crop” growing.