Kelly's blog: How Does Your Garden Grow?

Every project is a BIG project in our house! Cooking meals, doing laundry, planning the schedule, and yes, even planting a garden can seem enormously overwhelming when you’ve got so many opinions weighing in! Who knew that planting a garden with the kids would create such strong feelings? I think somewhere along the way, they forgot the garden is going to produce vegetables and not skittles or chocolate covered candies! Gil reminded us all when he said, “This is a lot of work for food I’m not even sure I like!” We encourage healthy competition, but there’s no room for sore losers in the Bates household! In this particular instance, the kids needed to be reminded that a few moments ago, no one really cared about planting the garden, let alone where it should go! Well, just as any mom would, I stepped in and turned this moment of temporary tension into a learning experience for our family. No one likes to lose; we all love winning, but sometimes we have to ask ourselves at what cost? Have we turned a molehill into a mountain just for the sake of “winning” or getting our own way? We have to remember, that as a family, we’re on the same team and sometimes that means we give up our individual desires for the betterment of the team. When one of us is down, we’re all down! The point is, we should always (and only) be planting seeds of peace, love, joy, and kindness. Gil and I get asked a lot to give tips on parenting, and that’s hard to do, but the best advice we can give about making decisions in any size family is to make sure everyone feels seen, heard, valued and of course, loved. So it was, that I had to concede on where we planted our little garden! As I told my son Warden, “We’ll be the givers this time and maybe next time, we’ll be the takers.” All for the sake of the team…go Team Bates!

Love, Kelly Jo