A couple of
weeks ago Madeleine came home from her Sparks meeting excitedly clutching two
little plastic cups of dirt. Personally, I was somewhat less excited about the dirt part. She explained that her leader Kelly had tasked
them with planting and caring for seeds that would grow into plants.
With the exception of the dirt-in-the-house situation, I loved this
project. When I was in grade school,
every year my dad would come to my classroom armed with a tray full of Black
Spruce seedlings and a lesson about tree planting and the environment. At the end of the lesson, each of my classmates took
home a baby tree in a little plastic cube, with instructions to plant it in a
wide open space. I like to imagine that
some of these trees are still standing today in backyards and fields throughout
Sault Ste. Marie.
Madeleine
has taken her task very seriously, and every day she waters her dirt and checks
for signs of life. After a week went by with
no action, I started to worry that the seeds might not grow. I wasn’t there when the seeds were planted,
so I had to take her word for it that her seeds actually made it INTO the cup. Madeleine reassured me, and said that Kelly told the Sparks it would probably take about two weeks for the seeds to sprout. "Trust me, Mom, Kelly said so."
One day the unthinkable happened: when
Madeleine was watering her plants, she accidentally knocked one of the cups
onto the floor, spilling dirt everywhere (the horror!). She immediately looked at her father and I
with big eyes and devastation moving across her face. We quickly assured her that the seed was
probably fine, that sometimes it’s okay to shake things up a bit. She put the cups back on the counter near the
window, putting faith in the fact that we were right.
Another week
went by and still nothing. I was
starting to feel a little devastated myself.
My experience as a parent includes a frequent struggle to balance my
girls’ happiness with the occasional need for them to learn a “life lesson”. (To be fair, there aren’t a lot of life
lessons happening for Stella yet, but you just wait little girl!) I will admit that I had a moment of desperation where I considered shoving a
couple of little seeds into the dirt to fudge the results (with apologies to my scientist
father), but in the end I decided this kind of life lesson was manageable for a
six-year old.
I got out of
bed this morning and went to check on the cups and was surprised and delighted to see the
tiniest little bud opening up above the dirt in one of the cups! I gently moved both cups away from the cat’s
perch on the window ledge (there is an elaborate backstory about Monty and his
fondness for houseplants which I will leave to your imagination) and went to
wake up Madeleine.
When I
shared the good news with Madeleine, she burst out of bed and
ran to the window to check on her little seed.
“See?”, she said, “See? I told
you it would grow!”. Oh ye (me) of little
faith.
What type of
seeds they are remains unclear, but I suspect we will have our answer in a few
weeks. You can bet
we’re going to plant this little seedling, whatever it is.
Life lesson
averted. Well, altered, actually.