Surprising

 I am truly surprised at how satisfying and fulfilling it is to grow your own food.  What started as a means to an end (feeding my family better), has accomplished so much more than ever imagined.

It is relaxing to spend time in the garden, inspecting the plants, caring for them and watching them grow and mature.

There is so much more involved in gardening than simply planting, watering, and harvesting.  There is bug identification (friend or foe?), plant diseases to watch out for and treat, pruning (knowing where, when and what to snip), all the various methods of supporting vertical growth to pack more into our space...

I was a bug catcher as a kid, so using my bug app on my phone to identify all the critters in our garden is fun.  We have California Glow Worms that look like tiny lightening bugs, parasitic wasps, lady bugs, leaf cutter bees, ants, leaf miners, cabbage moths, flea beetles and lots more that I can't remember the names of.

The kids love to help me water and end up soaked at least every other day.  They like to learn about the different bugs and see the food growing in the garden.  It was my baby this year, next year, now that I have a better idea of what is going on, I will involve them more in the process.

We have harvested a handful of strawberries, three cucumbers, radishes and one zucchini.  We still have at least two more months of harvesting to come!

Loss

 We had to put our "puppo" down yesterday.  It was unexpected and heart-wrenching.  

She liked to play with rocks.  She tossed them into the air and would try to catch them again.  Kind of like she was playing catch with herself.  The x-rays showed a jagged rock stuck in her small intestine.  It was completely blocking her system and too large to pass.  The price for the 'exploratory' surgery would have taken up everything we had, with no certainty that it wouldn't happen again.  We have a lot of rock in our yard.

Choosing to put her down was one of the hardest decisions of our lives.  I didn't anticipate that being a possibility.  Her spay surgery was so much cheaper, I never imagined the cost being so high.  Grieving her loss has been hard.  The unexpected loss adds to the hurt, watching our children grieve is absolutely heartbreaking...

Our older three were present.  Everyone got to say their goodbyes.  Our kindergartener sobbed and hugged her, he asked all kinds of questions.  I explained everything as simply as I could for him.  On the way home he was sad, but still curious about the world and asked me which was meaner, wasps or mosquitos?  That's when I knew he would be okay.

Our freshman bawled and bawled, but seems a little better today.  Our oldest is taking it the hardest.  She always does.  Walking through grief with them is hard.