Planting Trees
Creeva on July 14th, 2008
You would think that on a blog named parent phobia, that when I start a blog post off with the title “Planting Trees” that I’m going to be speaking in the metaphorical sense. Well, your half right.
Today I slept in late and did my normal computing activities. I knew I had to wake up early tomorrow so I proceeded to mow my lawn. On a side note if you turn your mower upside down and it doesn’t start, you need to replace your air filter. I’m not a normal out in the yard kind of guy. I’m a in the artificial light sit at the computer kind of guy, much to the chagrin to my “I love the outdoors” wife. But I stayed outside I finished the yard and proceeded to weed.
As I was weeding I noticed that there was some saplings growing here and there. Now they weren’t in a spot where I wanted them to stay, but I didn’t need to outright kill them. I spent hours (I said I don’t take the best care of my lawn) taking out saplings from here or there and replacing them in along the edge of my properties. The varieties were Oak and some such tree I can’t identify. Xie came outside and helped with about half of the planting. Quite a few of the Oak saplings came from my gutters, we will go back to the fact I don’t care.
All said and done almost 40 saplings were planted, with another 10 – 20 to go tomorrow (more if I find another stash. Not all the saplings could be saved, some were mangled trying to remove them. It wasn’t in the cards for those trees. Currently on the property we had 16 trees – so now we have a total of 56, with of course more coming. This means less grass for me to mow in the long term.
Now for the metaphorical part of the discussion. Being a parent is a lot like plantings trees. You will push ideas down to your child and hope some of them take root. I know all the trees I planted won’t survived, but it cost me nothing other then a day of planting. Exposure to ideas, even those you don’t agree with is important. Your child needs to understand your views as much as they need to arrive at their own conclusions. You shouldn’t expect your child to be a clone of yourself, nor should you even want that.
This of course is just a the metaphor that I came up while I was working. Take it for what it is, but it still was alot of physical labor.
