Grandchildren and the Garden

Sorry I haven't written lately. It suddenly turned into a busy summer, with the unexpected but happy necessity of caring for my grandkids for six or seven weeks. Luckily, we have the swimming pool, and they seem quite content to splash around and hit each other with pool noodles while I work on my laptop on the patio. Suddenly the diet is out the window, though, and I find myself shopping for Freezies and breakfast cereals for the first time in a long while. I may not be getting as much reading or knitting done as usual, but I'm outdoors a lot more.

One of the happiest things is watching my grandkids discover the garden. They will hop out of the pool to go search for raspberries. They'll hunt through the beds of strawberries and look for green beans. Once we gathered a handful of pea pods and sat in the shade under the maple tree to pop them open and eat them (nothing as good as fresh peas!), and my granddaughter worried that we were eating them all. She thought we should save them for later, as she knows I usually freeze them. She was delighted to learn that eating them now is just as possible as eating them later, and that there will be more coming tomorrow. It doesn't all have to go into the freezer.

Like me, Brio has had to learn to pace himself. The first few days he spent barking and running up and down the edge of the pool, trying to catch the kids' splashes, dropping his frisbee in the pool for them to return to him, and turning himself inside out with joy. But he paid for it with sore paws and a limp afterward, so now we try to remain calmer and do less running on the pavement. He sleeps very soundly at night now.

Tomorrow I think we'll go for a walk along the river. Maybe take a picnic. There's a zucchini almost ready to pick, and soon there will be fluffy lettuce seeds to gather. Lavender to cut. Tomatoes and cucumbers to collect. Lots of weeding to be done. Peaches to be bottled. But amidst the work, it's nice having two little weights to slow me down and remind me to enjoy the taste of fresh peas.