Becoming Family: Dirt

I've let down my hair, rolled up my sleeves, and got my hands into the dirt. I'm no stranger to dirt. I spent several summers and the first 4 years of my career working in the middle of huge - and very dirty - construction sites. I spent just about every weekend throughout college as well as most weekends for the year after college getting paid to crawl around in a dirty cave and encourage other people to get dirty as well. Add in my time spent hiking and camping and splashing around (and sometimes bathing) in rivers and it turns out that me and dirt have quite a history. Despite all my experience in dirt, I have shied away from letting my kids get too dirty. It isn't the dirt that really concerns me. It is the fact that I will be left cleaning up the dirt, doing the laundry, and getting the sticky off of the surfaces that it doesn't belong on.

But, I have evolved. I have now titled several outfits of my kids as their "gettin' dirty clothes". For years I have had my own pair of getting dirty pants. During the past week, we have put on our gettin' dirty clothes and had some fun.

First up was painting, which actually was done with no gettin' dirty clothes on, just shirtless (for the kids, not me... what were you thinking??) and with dishtowels tucked into the lap of the kids' pants.

Marcus got two different sets of paints for his birthday. These were the ones he wanted to try first and were the ones that I was most afraid of. But, I was brave. The kids were artistic and more upset about the fact that they got paint on their hands than I was. Most importantly, we all had a great time! Of course I still wasn't too happy that I had to clean brushes and wash hands and clean off the table and yell at Marcus at one point because he kept asking me if he could paint the wall.

Then it was time to put on our gettin' dirty clothes and head outside. At our old house, we really didn't have too many things to get dirty with apart from some grass stains. Now we have lots of dirt, a part of the yard that sometimes becomes swampy, a ground spring, a garden, a sandbox, and the woods. We played with it all. I am determined to try gardening this summer so we went out and purchased some dirt last week to get that started. The kids helped me plant some seeds that will be kept inside for another week or two until they are transplanted into our garden. We all got dirty during this project, Maya so much so that she needed a bath. Yesterday Greg and I got our garden area fertilized and ready for planting while the kids played in the dirt and I played with worms. (It took lots of coaxing to get these dirty little boys to even touch the worms that their own mother wasn't afraid of holding in her hands.) I am super excited and giddy with what is currently sprouting in the dirt that is hanging out on my kitchen counter for the time being.

We've got onions (which were hard to photograph because apparently they must have been growing so fast that the movement made the pictures blurry)