After several months of teasing with freezing rain, slush, and an occasional flurry, winter finally arrived in a grand style this past weekend. Now that Christmas is over and spring planting seems so far away (or at least buried under about 2 ft of snow), I turned my attention to a few late winter projects. While I normally don’t blatantly write about my own spiritual life in my posts, I thought my latest idea was fairly versatile and could be of use to anyone who’s looking to share the idea of spring growth with their families (especially with little kids!) Whether or not you observe the season of Lent, I think that my recent arts-n-crafts extravaganza would be a great way to share something as a family during a meal.

When I was growing up, I always saw the months between Christmas and Easter as a really boring, dark time. Frankly, the excitement of Christmas was over, and suddenly we were thrown into several weeks (which seemed to drag on forever…) of giving up chocolate, or jelly beans, or something that seemed absolutely impossible to live without by the third day into Lent. My mom, being the ever-creative teacher tried to redirect our family’s annual 40-day journey into one of growth rather than just repentance. I remember her doing a caterpillar-to-butterfly project with her first grade CCD class every year, and that idea sparked the craft below. I’m eager to test it out in the Kelly house this year, and I will give a full report of how it fared. Brian was pretty intrigued as I was cutting out little foam leaves during Downton Abbey last night, so I think at least 2/3 of the family is on board.

Disclaimer: I’m sure this idea exists somewhere else on the Internet, but all the ideas below came from my own brain, for better or for worse. If you are interested in making one and have difficulty finding supplies or the time to do it, let me know and I can try and help out.

Without further ado, I present to you our family’s first Lenten tree! I was wracking my brain last spring trying to think of ways to explain Lent and the countdown to Easter to a toddler. Advent seems much better suited for little kids, especially when you’ve got candles and a wreath just sitting there on your table each night. I decided to create a tree centerpiece for our dining room for Lent this year where we can add leaves and flowers each day as we get closer to Easter. It helps that with 40 days plus Sundays, the tree will look pretty full by the end.

The Lenten tree, fully-loaded

For the tree itself, I found a yarn-wrapped wire tree at Target last year on clearance after Easter. Just about every craft store sells these throughout the year (especially in spring with Valentine’s Day and Easter). I liked this one because the yarn-wrapped branches will be easier for little hands wanting to help.  Even if you can’t find one, you could probably break off a (very) small branch from your yard. For the leaves, I bought two sheets of green craft foam and cut out little football shapes; I used a pushpin to poke a hole in each leaf so they could be skewered on the branches. For the flowers, I considered cutting out flower shapes from foam (ha!) but instead found bags of pre-cut pastel foam flower stickers from the Dollar Store. (Seriously, I did a little dance for joy when I spotted them). I peeled the backing off two flowers, stuck them together, and bam– instant reusable flowers. As far as numbers go, I cut out 40 leaves, and I have 6 purple flowers, and 1 pink flower. We’ll use leaves for weekdays and the purple flowers for Sundays. For Easter, I plan on switching out the purple flowers for either white or multi-colored ones.

What I am hoping for is that at dinner every night, we’ll add one more leaf to the initially bare tree and share/pray briefly about growth in our lives. With a toddler, I see it more of a visual practice now, but I hope that we can continue doing this as Alexander gets older and he can have a more active part.

While I know that this project might seem a little early for Easter or even a little too involved for a busy schedule, I was able to construct the whole shebang in fewer than 50 minutes. No matter what your beliefs might be, I hope that my slapdash craft idea might inspire you and your family to talk about ways you can grow stronger as individuals and closer as a family.

After our very extended hiatus on HSWT, we are now strolling back into autumn, picking our final cherry tomatoes, and drying out every fresh herb we can get our hands on.

Inspecting his wildflower collection

As a little update on Alexander’s first garden experiment, I can happily report that it has been a smashing success. Though his idea of watering was a few tiny buckets of water and weeding was mostly random fistfuls of plants, Alexander loved being able to romp through the open beds. He’d usually look around the beds, grab a leaf, look at me for approval, then pop it in his mouth. (Of course, immediately following, he’d chew a few times, then make a face and attempt to remove it). He was much more receptive to our cherry and grape tomatoes– though his t-shirts suffered quite a bit from tomato stains from his occasional binges.

The biggest success by far was his “hanging” strawberry gardens using a few shepherd hooks and hanging baskets. Earlier this summer when he was still using mostly signing for food words, he excitedly told me “Mama, strawberries!!” and dragged me over to show me that there were honest-to-goodness strawberries just waiting to be picked (and eaten, of course!) The punchline, of course to this story is that he had strawberries smeared all over his mouth when he told me. Watching him discover planting after planting was so much fun– from his wide eyes at the cucumbers on a trellis to his little “whoa!” when I pulled our first beet, it’s been well worth the effort.  Though he’s been less than thrilled with his random samplings of his swiss chard, I’ve been sneaking snips of it into almost all of our pasta dishes. He has looked at me with his little furrowed brow when I come in from the garden with a handful of chard as if to say “What are you doing with that, mama?”

We unfortunately got caught in a recent airport snafu last weekend, which grounded our big fall travel plans. Rather than mope for the entire planless weekend, we took advantage of our free time and beautiful weather to do a few major harvests of our biggest crops. Alexander “helped” me harvest all of our candy cane beets, which we roasted and all have been enjoying this week. Given his penchant for wanting to help me do everything mixed with an intense desire to touch EVERYTHING in sight, he was the prime candidate for Apprentice Herb Dryer.

Carefully selecting basil leaves for drying

Why didn’t I think of this earlier? After several rounds of “Mama, help! Help!”, I appointed my new apprentice, handed him a brown paper bag, and demonstrated how to pick herbs. At first, he was a little selective about which leaves, but then he hit our sage bushes like there was no tomorrow. I checked his handiwork, and he graduated to Italian parsley and eventually genovese basil. Every day now, we take turns shaking the aerated bags and giving them a little sniff test. Alexander even dutifully smashed our first round of fully-dried leaves. (He is now my official ziplock crushing concierge– tortilla chips, cookies, herbs, you name it!)

So many nasturtiums, so little time.

We’re also beginning to collect seeds for next year’s planting– mostly cosmos and nasturtium. For anyone with young gardeners, nasturtium is a super easy flower to grow (and really, really hard to kill), not to mention that their seeds are HUGE, so if you want to collect and dry them for future years, it’s pretty straight-forward. We’re also starting to pull bachelor button seeds as well.

In summation, Alexander’s first garden was a smashing success. I look forward to watching next year’s crop of asparagus come up, our little guy helping out even more, and enjoying our dried herbs all winter long. While our weekend ended up being a total washout for travel, it resulted in our family realizing what a cornucopia our gardens have been to our little guy this year.

As the adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. I’ve unsuccessfully attempted several posts to encapsulate our summer adventures; I think I’m just going to let the photos speak for themselves this time! It’s been a great summer off for us all, but we’re rested and ready to share updates and our upcoming adventures. Stay tuned to Have Stroller, Will Travel!

We here at HSWT prefer to do our shopping discreetly to avoid causing a media frenzy.

Mother’s Day weekend at Casa Kelly was filled with everything you might come to expect from our household– multiple trips to multiple home improvement stores, stuffing a tree into our backseat, and hauling enough paver bricks to make us sweat.  As I was swinging a hatchet on Mother’s Day afternoon at a dead elm when other moms were guzzling mimosas at the spa, I couldn’t help but laugh. They say that little girls slowly become their mothers; if there is any truth to that statement, then I am well on my way.  And when I got caught in a huge downpour after planting our brussels sprouts and tomatoes? I was relieved that I didn’t have to water my latest additions to Alexander’s garden– the weather took care of it for me!

For those of you interested in the planting lineup for Alexander’s edible garden thus far, here goes:

• Bright Lights Swiss Chard: beautifully and colorfully veined greens
• Nasturtium: peppery-tasting flowers with circular leaves, often added to salads
• Asparagus: generally takes two years to sprout
• Italian flat leaf parsley
• Genovese basil
• Purple basil
• Thai basil
• Jade Cross brussels sprouts
• Mammoth dill
• Oregano
• Rosemary
• Cilantro
• Dianthus (carnations)
• Spearmint and Peppermint (in a pot)
• Lavender
• Beets (chioggia variety)
• Spinach
• Arugula (rocket variety)
• Mesclun mix of greens

Though the list sounds quite impressive, the garden is mostly looking like a large dirt pile. I did edge the garden with bullet pavers this afternoon (which helps contain the garden soil) but it’s still looking fairly sad. With the spring rains today, I hope to see more of the seeds sprouting.

For those of you reading this and thinking “Yeah right, I don’t have time for this,” I recommend checking out a product called Seed Bombs. I had a box in reserve from a previous stocking stuffer, and Alexander put them to good use this afternoon. They are basically seed mixes combined with a starter/fertilizer into a compact ball. I handed each herb ball to Alexander, and he happily hurled them into his garden. We did some minor watering, but the instructions indicated that even without rain, with time the seeds would sprout. I’ll give a full review on this as things start to grow, but as of now, they were a no-mess hit for my favorite toddler.

Rain won’t keep this young gardener down. He’s sharpening his skills until the skies clear.

I can’t emphasize enough how much fun this gardening project has been for both myself and Alexander. During a rainy weekday, I watched him take his play gardening gear, his kitchen sink, and some play flowers and set up shop on our coffee table. He “filled” his watering can in his sink, potted up his plastic flowers in a small box, then proceeded to water them with his watering can. Today, after an energetic play session with his water table outside, he took a few cupfuls of water over to his new rosemary plant without any prompting.  It’s a true joy to watch him blossom along with his garden!  Mother’s Day gifts are nice, but watching my son find pleasure in exploring nature is incredible.