Tailgating at the garden

While offering young hands painting as an outlet during planting and weeding holds promise, we needed a plan for how to engage young minds while watering our large garden plot.  Whether managing turns for watering with the hose or waiting out watering with the fan sprinkler, it can feel a lot like watching paint dry.

Today, we added lawn chairs, snacks and library books to our gardening tool box.  After a short bit of weeding and our second interval of planting peas and corn (which Nicholas and Astrin lovingly helped with), it was time to water.  Nicholas insisted on setting up the sprinkler (and he did a fantastic job) while I got us set up for a lazy afternoon in the sun.  Oranges, cucumber and water bottles surrounded us as we dove into a Where's Waldo? book, followed by an animated retelling of The Gruffalo.  We capped off our tailgate party with testing out the water for ourselves...below are Astrin and Jaelyn shrieking as the cold, cold water finally reaches them.  What fun!

Lessons learned today: 

  ~ bring rubber boots for retrieving the sprinkler once the watering is done.
  ~ have a stick handy for scraping off all that mucky mud.
  ~ pick out a couple extra books to supplement the children's picks, as we could go through their picks quite quickly.
  ~ the garden would be a pretty awesome spot for practicing some of the writing tricks we learned on our trip through the Haunted Wood last summer.  Bringing writing and drawing supplies would be handy.  In fact, restocking and packing our art-on-the-go bags (from The Creative Family) would be a good idea.