Garden

Today I planted carrots, kale, arugula, beets and bibb lettuce in my little raised bed (plus a raggedy parsley plant) – a rather ambitious start to my Fairbanks gardening career.  We'll see if the parsley and beet seedlings were sufficiently hardened off to survive the night.  Is that laissez-faire attitude really a good idea for a novice gardener?  My deepest fear is that nothing will grow.  My second deepest fear is that I'll mistake the seedlings for weeds and uproot my nascent garden before it even begins.  My third deepest fear, and probably the most realistic, is that a moose will come in the night and ravage everything.

As I was troweling up dirt in neat little rows, I suddenly noticed a cloud of buzzing flies surrounding me and I wondered if I had died and turned into a fly-attracting zombie.  But then I realized that they were just enticed by the unctuous aroma of the chicken poop I used to amend the soil.

Back inside the house now, and I discover that John has already fed Theo dinner, encouraged him to make his first in-the-potty poop, and is currently bathing him. This parenthood thing can be a pretty sweet gig if you play your cards right.