The Outdoor Hour Challenge last Friday was about earth worms. Hmmm… I don’t want to go there. I chose roses instead because, well, they have inundated my life in the last seven days.
Our rose bushes have exploded. Then, my husband came home with yellow roses, too.
My husband and I are celebrating our ninth anniversary tomorrow. He brought me a dozen yellow roses and a card.
Bouquet of yellow roses and baby’s breath my husband brought me for our ninth anniversary
He said we already have a garden full of pink roses. And, we do.
One of the many rose bushes in our garden
He wanted to bring me something different.
Somebody once said that flowers mean a lot to a wife especially because flowers have no lasting presence or usefulness. We wives tend to be a little too concerned with practicality and usefulness. We suffer from the Martha syndrome. Not Martha Stewart. The Bible Martha.
Flowers remind us to take time and smell the roses. I could not resist the cliché. Sorry.
As homeschooling mothers, we may be tempted, for instance, to redeem the time and gather up the fragments (or moments) and turn everything into a lesson.
Like, the rose is beautiful but its thorns warn us that looks can be deceiving, not to mention dangerous. Or whatever.
It does not have to be that way.
Our children need a mom, too. Not just a teacher.
That’s why I like these nature studies. They are observations. Moments in time we share with our children looking at pretty things.
I was surprised to find out that Anna Comstock did not include roses in her Handbook of Nature Study. I wonder if she felt roses were too well-known to be studied.
Here’s what I know about roses: rose petals, besides being beautiful, are edible. So are the seed pods the flowers leave behind once they wither. These seed pods are known as rose hips.
I grew up eating rose hip jam in Romania. I have never made it. Maybe one day, when my kids get older, I can enlist their help to make this one.
Until then, we enjoy admiring roses.
Now why would you want to study roses when you could study earthworms? 🙂
My boys love earthworms, and it’s the perfect time for them here, in the middle of digging garden beds. It will be a couple of months before the roses are out here. We have wild roses in our backyard…not so showy, but very sweet-smelling.
Ha ha, Nelleke! 🙂 Truth be told, my kids love earthworms too. But, for some reason, we don’t get many in our garden, where they should be. As far as wild roses, I know exactly what you mean. I pass by a bush of wild roses every morning and the air is thick with their fragrance. I almost always stop to take it in a few seconds more.