Chris and I officially win the award for parents of the year.

Why? You may ask.

Because we each dropped the F bomb in front of our toddler today. And by dropped, I mean shouted the word very angrily.

Here’s how the past two days have gone:

We have 500 daffodil bulbs, 300 tulip bulbs, 250 anemones, and sweet peas to plant now for spring bloom.  I, naively, thought the whole process would take about an hour. AHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAH. I was really, really wrong. It took two days.

My mother-in-law took Linc for the afternoon yesterday so we could plant. Chris went out to
re-till some ground, I snarfed my lunch while reading the directions on how to plant anemones. Anemones are like the winey, basic girls of the flower world. All other bulbs happily go into the ground without fuss.  Anemones need to have a spa day and hit up Starbucks for their Pumpkin Spice Lattes before they will even consider going into the ground.  After reading the directions from Gloeckner, calling our knowledgable, local nursery, Niepagen’s, and giving my Master Gardener Grandmother a call, here’s what I decided to do to get the anemones in the ground.

1. Soak the corms in plain water for 16-18 hours, but change the water
   every 3-4 hours
2. Then soak the corms in copper fungicide for 20 minutes, without rinsing
3. And then plant the corms

I also gave my sweet pea seeds a 24 hour soaking as well.

After I prepared the sweet peas and anemones, I went out to find Chris standing above our tiller that appeared to be snapped in half. Giving him a quizzical look, he affirmed “Our tiller is snapped in half.” Our damned 40-year-old tiller decides to shear a bolt, snapping the handle off, rendering it completely useless.  Awesome.

I call our friend and neighbor, Jason, to see if we can borrow his tiller. Jason saves the day. Chris runs over to grab tiller, I continue to plant daffodil bulbs, which are ginormous. I’ve never seen bulbs this big.

We go to run tiller in hoop house and discover the ground has become a cracked, impermeable surface.

After shoveling some dirt by hand to break up the ground, the tiller can make progress.

Where do the F-bombs come in? Well, fast-forward to today.

Chris preps more beds this morning, comes in and takes over and watches our son so I can plant the rest of the bulbs.

300 tulip bulbs go in easy peasy. They are planted closely together in the hoop house to maximize space. I dug a trench, placed the tulip and daffodil bulbs in, and then dug the walking path out. Like so:

After Lincoln, our son, has a nap and everyone gets lunch, we head back outside to be in the sunshine and to enjoy the fleeting warm days of fall. Chris and Lincoln head out before I do.

People always ask how we do it all. We don’t. Here’s why: when I’m not having a conversation with someone, I’m in a constant daze thinking about what are the next couple of things that have to be done. In this daze, I lock the back door to our house and head outside into the sunshine. NOT REALIZING WHAT I’VE JUST DONE.

We’re working for a bit, Chris says he needs to run in and grab something, he comes back and says “Please tell me you have your keys!”
“No, I don’t. Why?” I ask.
“Because you’ve locked the back door!!!!!!” Chris screams.
“Do you have your phone?” I ask
“No, do you have yours?” He asks back.
“No….”

Instead of freaking out, I calmly stare at him, because obviously this is an easy fix. I’ll just walk the half mile to our neighbor’s house, introduce myself, have some casual banter, explain to them the pickle we’re in and ask to use their phone. Blamo, problem solved.

Use their phone? To call whom? NO ONE ELSE IN EXISTENCE OWNS A KEY TO OUR HOUSE. What was I going to do? Call my in-laws to tell them, “Hey. Listen, if it wasn’t crazy enough that we spend every extra hour doing this back breaking farming thing….well darn it, we’ve gone and locked ourselves out of our house too, would you know?!”

Chris sees this thought process happening on my face, throws his hands in the air, yells, “F%$*!” and walks away.

That’s when you know Chris is pissed. Not when he yells profanity, but when he can’t even look at you and has to physically remove himself from the situation. He gets about five steps away from me. Turns around and bolts for his truck. Opens the door, and there upon his seat, sit the most magical, most beautiful thing, his keys to the house.

Whew. Crisis averted. We chuckle and move on with our day. Right before the whole “Audra-locks-her-family-out-of-the-house situation” happened, I began working on an arrangement to photograph for the blog. I put the finishing touches on the most beautiful arrangement, when the wind picked it up just right and this happened:

Que me shouting, “F$%*!”

Chris comes rushing out of shed, Lincoln runs over.
Chris: “What’s wrong? (sees mess) Geeze, I thought you impaled yourself on your clippers!”
Audra: “No! WORSE! My flowers got knocked over!”

So here’s my crappy arrangement, because after yelling the F-word in front of my child, I was pretty much all out of F’s to give at that point.

So, we don’t have a way to till up the ground, we don’t have the money to buy a new tiller. But I DO however have amazing in-laws who are out looking at our tiller as I write this to see how we can fix it. We also need to give a copy of our house key to said amazing family members.

Locking us out of the house and losing my arrangement were not funny at the time, but now that the dust has settled it’s pretty funny. Because in the grand-scheme of things, even though I wouldn’t be in my house, I still would have had my home right beside me.