I have some friends who get together on Thursday mornings to work on each others’ gardens as a team. Our group consists of my old friend, Colleen, and two newer friends, Sara and Laurie. We have met since late spring, and I know for sure that my yard has been thankful for the attention. But more than just my yard has gotten the attention it needs, my creative brain has as well. These three women are all creative and hard working, great for bouncing around ideas, writing or otherwise. Today, for instance, we blueprinted the workings of how we could share a goat and chickens to graze our micro urban lawns.
When we get together we slather the kids in sun screen and turn them loose in the yard. Between us there are 9 kids, from 1 to 8 years in age. The older kids wrangle the younger kids or help pull weeds or complain that they are bored and they hate garden club and they want to go home. The younger kids walk under our feet and trip us or play unpredictably nicely or run off down the street preventing any real work from being done. All in all, it’s the exact right amount of chaos.
One day it rained when we had planned to weed my strawberry patch. I offered to make everyone lunch and mojitos and take the day off, but my team mates insisted on working on cleaning my kitchen– scrubbing the stove, cleaning the tops of the cabinets, washing the walls and organizing the pantry. I even felt energized enough to clean my oven after they left because we made so much progress. Since it went so well at my house we decided to continue through the school year, working on projects in our homes and shoveling driveways in the winter.
Getting this group started was a piece of cake. Sara just sent out a little facebook note and we picked a day and off we went. If you’re the kind of person who finds themselves just sitting there in the morning, clicking on the interwebs wishing something interesting would happen or that your house would magically get clean– start a group! Pick your people carefully, they should all be consistent and have the same general lifestyle so the work load ends up being even. But most importantly they should be people you already love, or people you really want to get to know better.
Garden club is just my most recent impromtu collective. I was in a mommy group when some moms I knew all had infants. Then I started a running club with a couple of moms to train for the akron marathon after that. I’ve been in a few crafting night clubs, as well as babysitting trade offs which have turned into planned weekly get togethers for just an hour or two to eat lunch and chat while we fold laundry or sweep. Not many of these groups have lasted for longer than a year, but some of them have been going on three years. All of the people I’ve met or gotten to know better have remained my friends even after the group ended.
I am rarely lonely.
I really love this! Thanks for sharing. Since I have several friends who homeschool and always have our kids underfoot, I’m wondering if there’s some way we can adapt this to help each other out. I do plan to watch a friend’s kids while she grocery shops (her 3 yo is awful in the store right now) and then I’ll run some errands too.
It has been the thing that’s kept me sane through the early kids years. I highly highly recommend it.