April 10, 2010
A leisurely breakfast, and then we met Nyika and Kayla at Gleiss Park in Skokie during Kai's dance class. It was a totally gorgeous, warm, sunny, spring morning.
Ayize dragged along a Vose-Sanders Bootery balloon from the day before (we had visited my childhood shoe store with Brady after Wiggleworms and I was happy to see they still give out punching-bag balloons to the kiddie customers) and he took it with him everywhere.
Through the tunnel...
...on the digger...
...even down the slide with Kayla!
Afterwards, we went to Dominicks and got groceries, headed home where he ate lunch, and he went down for a nice long nap.
After his nap, we headed to Prairie View Park in Morton Grove, one of our favorites, to meet Nyika and Kayla again since Kai had a birthday party inside the adjacent park district building.
This is one of the best parks in the area, in my opinion. Besides a mucho cool playground, they have a unique and awesome musical playground. More on that in a future park review, I promise!
Working together to fill the sliding sand pail.
Kayla strikes an adorable pose before climbing down the bug wall.
After the park, we headed to the new house to do a little gardening. I had been dreading cutting back a bunch of tall grasses covering one corner of the garden...
...but I knew it needed to be done.
I loved the way they looked, all golden and wispy, and the when the wind blew through them, they whispered in a soft, wheaten kind of way. But they had grown unchecked for the past three years and apparently that's not a good thing because they tend to "take over" and kill off whatever else is planted near them.
The previous owners had told me that they grew in a circular pattern around a bed of flowers that had been planted in layers so they would bloom in a series of a couple successive waves throughout the warmer weather. The grasses then grew taller and by late fall, when all the flowers were finished for the year, they sort of enclosed and protected the dormant seeds/bulbs during the colder weather. The owners used to then cut the grasses back to ground level each early spring to make way for the flowers, and since they're tenacious, they simply grew again by the following fall on their own, protecting the sleeping plants each winter in an ongoing cycle.
However, they'd been unable to cut them back for a few years so they now stood around four feet high, and they were a mess of thick, tough bunches, plus they were pretty sharp. And in their center sat a bunch of small, hardy little blue plants that had managed to eke out an existence despite the almost-complete grassy coverage of that area. I was afraid I would harm them when I tackled the cutting job.
Those facts, combined with their willowy beauty, made me dread the task at hand.
But help came from an unexpected corner!
My pal Liz, who lives across the alley, came over to see the house with her daughter Greta. For some unknown reason, Ayize calls Greta "Garbo", though none of us remembers where he picked this up. My mom did once refer to the actress Greta Garbo in front of the kids, but it was ages ago when they were really small.
Anyhow, Ayize was super thrilled to see Garbo in his garden as the two of them walked through our gate. He began shouting all kinds of things at her, like "Garbo, come on!" and "Garbo house!" as he gave her an enthusiastic tour of our digs.
So we showed Liz and Garbo all of our recent, new growth -- our budding hosta plants...
...and our sprouting peonies...
...and our blooming Susan magnolia tree...
...and the mint sprigs in our edible garden...
...and our lone daffodil.
I began to grouse to Liz about the tall grasses and what a pain in the hoo-ha I anticipated them to be. I had already taken some big garden shears out of the garage (again, a kind gift from the previous owners) but I had not been able to bring myself to do anything with them except contemplate them for the past half-hour.
I should mention here that besides being a good friend, Liz is a gifted gardener, and she seemed hardly able to understand what all my fuss was about. As I whined about not knowing where to start nor having any protective gloves nor knowing exactly how close to the ground to cut them, she simply picked up the shears and began slicing just above the ground.
Snip, snip, snap. They fell to the ground in amber waves.
"Oh. That's it?" I asked her, feeling stupid. Kind lady that she is, she assured me that my ineptitude was perfectly comprehensible -- though I know it was not, ha ha ha!
Anyhow, within twenty minutes, more than half the cutting job was done. Ayize provided some much-appreciated assistance, using a long stick to indicate where she should cut and then pretending to snip away himself with his stick "shears" LOL.
Liz's awesome job. I owe that lady!
Once I saw how to do it, I had the confidence and know-how to finish the job. I was so grateful for the impromptu tutorial! Once learned, never forgotten, is how I roll, so the lesson will stay with me forever and come in handy next spring, and the next, and the next...provided I actually have a flower bed still there to be protected. Only time will tell, I guess.
The little blue flowers are now long gone, their season quickly up, and with much watering and tending, I do have some shooting green stalks coming up in that area now...but they don't look like any flower-to-be that I've ever seen, so perhaps the grasses succeeded in killing off what-all was once there these past few years. But like I said, only time will tell.
So after Liz had done quite a bit of cutting, we took some waste pails out of the garage and used them to gather felled grasses and their wispy accoutrements. There was still quite a bit of debris among the little blue plants in their center, and in fact, I was shocked at how many wispies had woven their way tightly amongst the barely-budding blue plants already (I guess that's how they ultimately "kill") but in the coming days, I finished the job quite handily, now that I knew what to do.
I cut back the rest myself the following day, then spent an hour or two -- with good gloves on, after learning the hard way that those grassy wisps can really slice up tender skin and feel like paper cuts taken to a whole other level -- pulling, unweaving, and gathering all the years-old and more recently cut strands. Hurrah!
Anyway, back to the afternoon in question.
The sun was setting and the hour groweth lateth, but the kids continued to cheerfully play and "assist." Garbo had brought her own gardening tools, and Ayize had his kiddie-sized snow shovel (courtesy of the previous owners) and his handy-dandy stick.
They also made sure to stay well-hydrated, stocking their giant dump truck pseudo-cooler (a gift from Liz and Garbo, thank you!) with cold drinks.
They even helped us lug bucket after bucket of cut grasses out to the yard waste bin in the alley. They took their job seriously, too. Very cute sight to behold!
It was almost seven, so we said our farewells and Liz and Garbo headed off through the alley. We were hungry for dinner too so we also started for home. Ayize was talking about "pizzey, pizzey, pizzey" (he's really into Freschetta's ultra-thin crust pizza right now) but as soon as he saw the neighbor kids out and playing, he got a second wind.
Jane and some of the other kids on our block, who adore him, led him down the street to Joey's yard where they played merrily on big backyard equipment. Meanwhile, a few of the older kids helped me resurrect our crazy Cadillac Escalade from the garage, and they all took turns taking spins up and down the block.
It was almost eight by now, so I finally coaxed a reluctant Ayize into coming home with me for our long-awaited dinner.
He ate and crashed hard immediately afterwards.
Meanwhile, I opened our mail as he munched and was thrilled to see that all of our posters had arrived in two separate mailing tubes. I'd ordered a couple posters from Poster Brain because they had a special going (more on those later.) And I'd ordered this small print of Ayize' silhouette gazing at a swimming sea lion at the aquarium to hang in our bathroom, thinking that if I nestled it in the midst of the sea grass, it would go perfectly with our decor and always provide me with a happy memory to boot.
I didn't want to wait another minute to put it up, so Mom babysat the sleeping Ayize and I happily hung it in the bathroom.
All in all, it was a long, fun-filled day, with major garden help from a pair of our good pals, and gorgeous weather to boot.
No complaints here!
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