Returning to Oz

                                                                                                                                                                     
Ahhhh, spring is here.  Our yard has exploded with the colors, sights and sounds of the renewal that springtime brings with it.  We have been as busy as the bees that buzz around us as we prepare our vegetable garden, trim the hedges, and weed the mint bed that is already knee-high.  

This is the season of new growth.  Jack will turn one in a month (WOW!), and his curiosity about life and all things surrounding him is growing as well.  He loves to watch the birds (that's in the Cunningham gene pool), and we happily noticed that the hummingbirds have returned--a true sign of springtime!  He also loves to play on the quilt outside, watching the trees, feeling the wind in his face and touching every blade of grass and leaf he can get his little hands on.  

As the spring turns to summer, I hope that Jacks curiosity turns to an eagerness--to learn and to help.  He can help in the garden by pulling up weeds and harvesting the produce that we've cultivated.  He can help his Daddy re-fill the bird feeders.  He can help me take kitchen scraps to our compost heap.

I love to take a page from the honeybees playbook.  The season, for me, always brings an attitude of "out with the old, in with the new!" as I seek to constantly streamline our lives and make the day-to-day a little less hectic and a little more efficient.  This is very difficult to do, however, when the chores are inside and the beauty is outside.  Still, it's a necessary task, as I hurry to clean out and re-organize the house in an effort to make room for the jars of food I plan to put by later this year and the Christmas gifts I am already working on (making gifts takes a while and I need a head start!).  If only I, like the queen bee, had an army of little workers equipped with tireless "can-do" attitudes and happy little map-writing dances! 

It is such an exciting time for us--the weather finally warms, the days are longer and the sight of little seedlings emerging brings so much possibility.  Even the rainy days are enjoyable as the rains wash away the yellow pollen and then somehow, all the colors pop out, as if we are following Dorothy and leaving the dreariness of a black-white-gray farm house to enter the Technicolor world of Oz.