Hello readers! Hope everyone is recovering or preparing for their kid’s spring break and that no spring breakdowns are involved.
We’ve got a new podcast episode this week! To celebrate Earth Day around the corner, Ophira talks with CNN Climate Correspondent Bill Weir about his new book Life as We Know It (Can Be). Bill and Ophira talk about remaining hopeful, talking with your kids about the environment, and Bill’s short stint as a stand up comic. We recommend his book, our podcast episode, and this guest post from Lucy Huber!!
This weekend we decided to tackle weeding our backyard. This is the kind of fun thing, before I had kids, I imagined we might all do together as a family. Outdoors! Gardening! Kids love that kind of stuff, right? Getting dirty, playing with bugs, planting flowers. No matter that my backyard backs up to the literal woods and we bought this house last August after it sat vacant for a year and became basically the hottest new club for weeds in town. I swear to God, I think there are ferns back there that went extinct with the dinosaurs but returned from being entombed in amber for 500 million years just to colonize my yard.
This was really the kind of job several men with large farm-grade tilling equipment should tackle, not two adults who have never gardened in their life with the help of a three year old and a 14 month old. But I see people do stuff like this themselves on Tik Tok all the time! In a 30 second video, no less! And we don’t have the money for a professional. What we do have is a three year old with endless amounts of energy, suspiciously strong arms for weighing only 31.8 pounds, and a desperate need for something that will tire him out enough to actually go to sleep at 8pm. So we decided to DIY it.
I did have the foresight to ask my mom to come help take care of the 14 month old baby, who I knew wouldn’t be much help beyond watering the same spot with a watering can 75 times in a row. (Which is so great, Winnie! Good job!) So I took the 3 year old to the hardware store and we stocked up on gardening tools, seeds, gloves, and a bag of M&Ms he “accidentally” ripped while we were checking out so we were forced to buy it.
We came home, ready to work. I pulled one weed and immediately got some sort of poison ivy/oak situation, but no matter. The three year old was actually eager to help. But that’s the thing about three year olds: they are SO helpful until they start acting three, so for 15 minutes he was happily pulling weeds until someone pulled a weed he wanted to pull and he erupted in tears. Then he stopped to take a break and swing on the swing for a while. And then he needed me to stop and take a break and do stickers with him. Then he was hot so he wanted a juice box. Then he noticed the giant gardening shears and he needed to use them and he promised he wouldn’t cut off his hand, and then of course that was another tantrum. (When I said no, not because he cut his hand off).
All in all, we spent 3 hours weeding, and cleared about 1/16th of the yard. I often feel like a huge failure when I see Tik Toks of families that have young kids and still manage to do all these home reno projects or plant beautiful gardens where they grow vegetables and then have time to cook those vegetables into a healthy meal. I just want to be like that! But these kids keep getting in the way. What do those people do with their kids? Surely their kids are just out of frame demanding to use the weed wacker and spraying their baby sister with the hose on full jet, right? But then how do they manage to get it done and why can’t I? Even with three adults we couldn’t wrangle the children enough to make any sort of meaningful impact on the backyard situation. Just get the kids involved, they say, but when I get the kids involved that means they have to be involved and you can see the problem there.
Later that night, after we’d put the kids to bed, I walked downstairs and looked out the back window. My husband was on his knees, weeding alone in the dark. I went outside. “I think this is the only way we are going to get this done,” he said. He was right. Little by little, we’ll get it done in the dark. Everything seems to happen like this now. Eventually, we get it done, it gets messed up and we get it done again. It is never the speed we imagined, the way we imagined, or the quality we imagined, but we get it done. Then maybe those kids will enjoy the nice, cleared-out yard for a few days before they go to college.
Enjoy this week’s episode with Bill Weir. And stay tuned for upcoming episodes with Andy Richter, AJ Jacobs and some fun moms in May for our Mother’s Day Month!