Follow Friday: Kid's Gardening

The National Gardening Association has an associated website, KidsGardening,with articles for parents and schools. You can sign up for a monthly e-newsletter on the website. In June, the newsletter included their Parents Primer for getting started. This is an excellent resource for parents to continue their garden learning. It also has information for schools to set up a school or classroom garden.

On being a working parent.

At some point in this blog I like to talk about what it means to be a working parent. When we were expecting, my husband got into the Expectant Father series. I read them too, and was struck by how, with a stay-at-home-dad, I (Mom) felt the same pressures to work longer, earn more, make sure my family was taken care of.

I've always been career-oriented, and having a child hasn't changed that, much. I have to say that one of my biggest hopes, as a busy working parent, is to be like Charlie Brown's dad in this Father's Day strip.

Interlude: Resources for talking with small children about death

I spent the last weekend traveling to visit family, and attend an aunt's funeral.

Every family experiences a different pace of life and death. My side of the family was very fortunate, from what I can tell. Mamaw passed away in 1982, the first person that I truly mourned. Everyone else that I knew reasonably well, lived through the 1980's and 1990's. A few great-uncles passed on, but I only remember one or two visits with them.

Such a spate of "good luck" can't last forever. My son has attended three relatives' funerals already in his short life. He was not quite 2 when my grandmother passed away, and I don't think he knew her all that well. She tended to sleep a lot when we visited. A few months later my mom passed away. I think he's beginning to understand that loss. Today I'm going to mention some of the resources I've used to talk with my son about loss.