SPL's Blog

   
 

SPL and I have been working on getting our garden ready and planted and today our focus was planting 2 plants and watering the 4 total plants that have taken up residence.  SPL was all ready: he’d "borrowed"/declared that my trowel was his and he was ready to dig.  So I grabbed his plastic green trowel and we got to work.

After the plants were in, we got out the water hose to sprinkle the new additions — and as you can imagine, that’s when the fun (and conflict 🙂 began.  after watching him for a few minutes being thrilled with watching the dirt become mud and the sensations of mud between his toes, and all-the-while (unfortunately) saying too many of the classic "don’t step on the_____" and "you’ve got mud on your_______" phrases — I finally let go of all the "getting dirty" and "stepping on the baby plant" issues, stripped him down to his diaper, gave him the hose at low flow, and got him into the non-planted garden plot to explore the sensations of mud.

and then the real learning began.  He had the hose, he had the mud, he was all set to get dirty and I was set to till an adjacent patch of garden with my hoe and shovel — and then he started crying?  Very uncharacteristic. I thought it was because I had told him I’d be turning off the hose in a "couple of minutes" (our favorite "signal" phrase indicating a transition is coming).  Thankfully he was able to articulate, amidst the tears, what he really wanted — and I thought I had it all figured out — silly mommy :-):

He couldn’t care less about the hose or the water — what he wanted was for me to play in the mud with him :-).  and he said this in those exact words even as I thought he was mad just because I was shutting off the water.

sometimes the learning you expect isn’t the learning that occurs.

[I didn’t snap a photo of him in his diaper and barefeet in the mud, but I did get the above photo afterwards].