How does your garden grow?

It was a chilly, misty day today, but we braved the drab elements and all returned to school.
It was good to be there. Sometimes, when I am away for a time, I do not realize how much I miss it.
Usually, that is because I am caught up with other occupations, like doing the laundry and cleaning the floors and tending to feverish children.
But when I get back, and I see the smiling faces of the children and hear their laughter in the halls and am rushed upon with hugs by a student who missed me in my absence, I remember that it is a wonderful place to be indeed.
Family dinner was at our house this evening, but non of the adults were really feeling up to speed. Mom, Gramp and Joe are all fighting off sickness, and Patti stayed home for the same reason, and the rest of us are just recovering from bouts with colds.
Nevertheless, with tissues in hand, and in nasally voices, we conversed and laughed and talked about politics and God and everything in-between.
Gramp went to visit the doctor this morning, and had good reports as to his overall health. Now, if we can just keep him from catching cold!
Gramp had with him, when he arrived this evening, the second bulk of our seed order. He said we are waiting on two more see packages, but for the life of me, I cannot think of what we are missing.
We received two tophat bluberry bushes, 50 strawberry plants, seeds for the lettuce, carrots, peas, green beans, bell peppers, rainbow heirloom tomatos, summer squash medely, fanfare and straight 8 cucumbers, and a number of our herbs.
After dinner, the boys helped me plant the blueberry bushes in containers and start some of the seeds indoors in small peat pots.
"Planting is so much fun," Isaac mused as we sat on the newspaper covered floor, topsoil on our hands, filling the tiny pots with dirt and carefully placing seeds in each one.
"That it is, son." I answered.
I hope they find delight in this endeavour that lasts a life-time for them.
I hope there are many gardens in their futures.
And I hope, when they are old men, sighing over their tomatoes, contemplating curly cucumber tendrils with something like love in their rhumey eyes, breathing in deeply the green life the brown earth, inhaling the sun, standing in those quiet garden places with things growing up all around their seasoned feet . . . I hope they remember a day long, long ago, when they planted seeds with their mother on the kitchen floor of their childhood home, and that they smile.
On another note, Daniel discovered "preples" today. That's pretzles, to you and me.
Also, I was going over an old journal and came across this gem, "When Josiah sneezes, he says, 'Mom! I blessed!'" It made me laugh out loud. I could remember his little face, and his voice when he used to say that. And now, he will be seven years old exactly one week from today. Have I mentioned this yet?
I have lots of little notes like this all over the place about things the boys have said -- in journals, or written on scraps of paper stuck between the pages of books or stashed in drawers.
Perhaps I will try to collect them and compile a special post or a little booklet for each of them of isms -- Isaacisms, Josiahisms, Danielisms.
One more thing in a long list of things I desperately want to do.
But for now, I must concentrate on the garden.