When people have babies for the first time you often hear about feelings of fear and not knowing what to do. I’ve heard people say jokingly, “Wouldn’t it be nice if children came with instruction manuals?” My Lamaze teacher had a better view about it. She said that there’s no reason to not know what you are doing and feel helpless, there are plenty of books out there. She suggested Penelope Leach. I bought the book Your Baby and Child.

It’s divided into chapter based on age. I read each section right before PB entered that age group. It helped me understand my kids and how to handle them. Sometimes I have a parenting issue, read a section (re-read now, I’ve read the book cover to cover) and feel much better. There aren’t  magical solutions, but it’s good to know that first; your child’s erratic behavior is perfectly normal and second; there are good ways to deal with the erratic behavior. I don’t follow everything in the book, but I get a good place to start from instead of starting from nothing.

I also read and loved (again I think I made it through this book cover to cover), The Nursing Mother’s Companion. I ended up nursing Peter past a year, nearly exclusively. Curtis is on the same track.

In one of Bill Cosby’s albums he says, “Intellectuals go to study things that people do naturally.” Reading up on child-rearing can be like that. But I believe that all my book reading has helped me be a better parent. What books do you like to read about parenting?

My son is growing from a toddler to preschooler, and I am suddenly confronted with the task of education. As I was thinking about school my mind turned to my own schooling.

I loved biology in high school, and felt a strong push to go into a science related field. I choose horticulture. Plenty of my peers had no love of science, but loved the art of designing and showing gardens. My peers complained over the science classes we had to take–chemistry, biology, genetics. They would rather take flower arranging, advanced landscape design. A professor told me that horticulture was a science degree. He did not look highly on the artsy design classes.

Both my professor and my peers lost the beauty of horticulture. Horticulture is a wonderful combination of both art and science. Nowhere is this more evident for me than in pruning trees. My favorite class in college was a graduate level class on environmental plant physiology. It involved a lot of hard-science and math calculations to determine exactly how plants grew. It also gave me the best education on pruning. As I understood how plants grew, I knew what I was trying to achieve in pruning.

When I’m in front of the tree, I’m not running calculations through my head. I use the science I know and turn it into an art. I envision how that tree can best get light and grow healthy and strong. With the skillful stroke of my pruners, I shape it into my vision. Pruning is my favorite art from. But if I had no understanding of the science behind it, it would not be beloved art, but a misunderstood chore.

I went  into horticulture as a scientist. But horticulture taught me to be an artist too.

This last week I happily was able to break out my beloved loppers and prune some shrubs. I miss having a garden. I am hoping that next garden season I will have a place to live that is not a temporary pit-stop. Apartments stink. I want land.

Most of life is simple, repetitive. But joyful too. I’ve been thinking about how sometimes life feels like a washing machine cycle. Wash, rinse, spin, repeat. Laundry never seems to get done. But even though life can get repetitious, it never does truly repeat itself. The varied repetition is the best way that we can learn and grow. We learn repetitiously, like performing math problems over and over. Muscles grow by doing the same exercise over and over. So life is the same way.

Ready? Go! Step on the yoga block, go under the chair, over the mat, bounce the ball, go under the baby gym, rock on the bouncer and jump over the finish line. Repeat. A lot. Then go play cars. Eventually:

I thought he was getting to old to do that. Apparently he got tuckered out by the obstacle course. And if you need something else to make you laugh:

Strong boy. This is the result of his daddy being a little ambitious. 

Chubby baby smiles. What could be happier?

A playhouse at the Atlanta history center. Wired, wallpapered and ready for little guests. PB had the idea for the set up. 

Playing doctor