Springy

I guess now that it's officially Spring I'll have to stop saying, "But it's WINTER!" every time the daily temperature is forecast to hit 80 degrees. It's been going on for several weeks now, though, off and on. I have been enjoying the mild days (though 80 is a little much), but it feels like shenanigans nonetheless. Is this happening everywhere, or is it just here that the weather has been freakish pretty much since the non-winter started?

As usually happens, I'm all full of Big Exciting Spring Plans!™ that will probably never come to fruition (see: every year of my mostly-failed garden blog). But just for fun, my big ideas:

1. zoo!

One thing that will definitely happen is lots of zoo trips. We bought a family membership this year and Nico and I have already been four times since the end of February. They're open on Mondays unlike most of the museums and other educational kid-friendly places around town, which is quite convenient since I take Mondays off to hang with the kid already.

2. garden!

I had decided to just let the garden go again this year. Last year I cleared and landscape-fabricked half of it before it got too hot and I gave up, and then I never ended up planting anything. I figured I could let it sit one more year and re-evaluate next year, but then Nico developed a sudden fascination with digging in the dirt. It started on a walk one day with my dad, when they stopped by to visit a friend of Dad's in the neighborhood and Nico was allowed to dig around in the guy's front porch planter. All the way home that day, he chirped in the backseat, "Play in the dirt! Play in the dirt with Grandpa!" Ever since then, he's been regularly requesting to play in the dirt again. This week Dad took him to the big park playground and let him play with his dump truck in the big dirt-filled but plant-free planter there.

Knowing that Nico is excited about dirt makes me want to get him out there in it while he's interested. Thus the new plan is to clear out the raised bed I built the summer I was pregnant and plant some easy toddler-friendly things like snap peas and cherry tomatoes. I've also decided that redoing the landscaping fabric every year is too much of a pain in the ass for too little benefit. It takes forever, it costs money every year, and inevitably the birds and Indy tear it all up. The new plan of action is to eventually go to all raised beds back there with mulch or something in between them. To that end, Dad and I picked up a half-truckload of bricks from a freecycler this week (which is another whole blog post that I want to write). Nico and I stopped by the Home Depot tonight after a spontaneous dinner date to price dirt for the new bed I want to build. Hilariously, every time we passed one of their lines of lawn tractors, Nico would say, "Wow! Look at all those toys!" Dream big, my son! He was also quite enamored of the huge rolling ladders that the guys were pushing around the store. ("That's a really big ladder! He was pushing a really big ladder!")

This weather has me all confused about the correct timing for gardening, though. Usually we don't put anything in the ground until Mother's Day weekend, because there's almost always a chance of frost until then. But the trees and grass and flowers have been going gangbusters for weeks so do we plant now? Wait until later? Split the difference? SO CONFUSED.

3. tadpoles!

I don't remember how I came upon this idea, but I'd really like to raise tadpoles with Nico this Spring / Summer if possible. We had some in an aquarium at work last year and it was so cool to watch them go through their metamorphosis. All the kids who came in loved it and most of the adults did, too. To facilitate this, I got the okay from MB (who seems mystified but is willing to indulge my weird whims) and bought a 10 gallon aquarium off Craigslist for $5 tonight. Now I just need to be on the lookout for stranded tadpoles. The ones we had last year came from somebody's pool cover, so I've put the word out on facebook in case any pool-having people find some stowaways. I think this'll either turn out to be a really awesome idea or a really bad one…there probably won't be any middle ground.

4. hair!

This is probably unrelated to my Big Exciting Spring Plans™, but around my birthday I got this sudden and powerful urge to cut off all my hair. I had the same thing happen the year Nico was born and went out around my birthday and got my hair cut to just past my shoulders. I wore it down for one or two days with curl-product in it and then gave up and started wearing a ponytail every day again. I just can't stand hair in / around my face while I'm working. This year, I decided to go big or go home. It's the first time I've had short hair since a tragic haircut at age 12, and so far I think I love it.

(probably the closest you'll ever get to a real photo of me on this blog)
I am planning to donate the chopped-off hair to some wig-making charity or another, so I drove home from the salon with it on my passenger seat. I don't care how good a cause it benefits…it will never not be creepy to walk around with a huge hank of one's own severed hair.

5. Jax!

This has nothing at all to do with Spring, but it has to be shared. I watched two episodes of Sons of Anarchy before bed last night, which is not unusual in itself. Then this morning right before waking up, I had a long and elaborate dream which was basically my subconscious mind's version of an episode of SoA. I was even running around with Tig and Opie and shooting bad guys and eventually being rescued by Jax. More of that, please.