Any home that is the habitat of young tykes is easily discernible from one that is not.
Certainly when it comes to the interior; I’ve written in the past how impressive and complete the mass destruction of every room in the house is on a daily basis even if the kiddos have access to a given space for more than a few minutes. Speaking to the exterior, and it’s not always the case, but in most domestic scenarios ye olde lawn landscaping tends to take more of a backseat with the arrival of children.
That reasoning is two-fold. One, simply being that parents have less time to dedicate to the upkeep of their outdoor spaces; and two, that the kids’ vast quantities of play items tend to occupy more and more of said space with each passing year. And the older the kids, the larger their stuff seems to get.
Prior to 2017, cutting my lawn and maintaining the garden and flowerbeds were straightforward tasks. Essentially, you popped the lawn furniture up onto the deck and had at the grass. Personally speaking, I’ve got a decent-sized backyard for living in the midst of a residential area in town. But I could still zip along with my push mower and have everything done inside 45 minutes.
As the years have went on and our house population doubled, things became not so cut and dry when it came to lawn upkeep. It never ceases to amaze me how much stuff two kids under six can accumulate.
Prior to adding our addition early last year, by the time I had removed all the toys, various vehicles and bikes, sandbox items and other random miscellaneous clutter and actually cut all the grass, you were probably looking at close to an hour and a half round trip. After the deed was done I typically had about four minutes to enjoy the tidily-cropped scene before Finn and Piper swept back through the yard and promptly proceeded to re-clutter the tranquility. Again, you have to appreciate their efficiently-destructive prowess.
Turning to the overall state of the grass itself, add into the mix the regular presence of a kiddie pool over the summer months and a dog that requires about 16 separate ‘business trips’ per day, and our backyard is not exactly one of those crisp, green lawns featured on a bag of Scott’s turf builder. Irregular yellow patches all over the place are now the standard. Our addition also required an unsurprising amount of excavation out the back, and that area still hasn’t replenished itself despite a couple hearty seeding blitzes.
We threw yet another wrench into the equation over the Easter weekend, when we got the kids a 12-foot trampoline. That thing isn’t light, and its position more or less in the epicenter of our yard is going to make for a problematic chop with the mower. Not like you can just fire it aside when it’s lawn-cutting time – she is there to stay for the foreseeable future.
Maybe I’ve been going about this the wrong way all along. Instead of trying to salvage the few scraps of green we have left in the backyard, we should be adding more apparatuses in an attempt to cover the entire space completely. Out of sight, out of mind?
I’ve (half) joked to my missus more than a couple times that we should consider just paving the whole thing and be done with it. Might result in a few more skinned knees, but toy clearing would certainly become easier. The snow shovel would become very handy year round – a couple quick laps with it and push everything into a neat pile beside the shed. Done and done.
That’s obviously not going to happen, and I’m resigned to the fact that our backyard transformation is the new reality. At this rate, I might be better just cutting the whole thing with the weed whip rather than hauling out the mower.
At least our much smaller front yard is fairly neat and tidy, and the grass is already full and lush with the constant swing of rain back to sunshine over the last couple weeks. It’s now just a matter of keeping the growing menagerie of clutter confined to the backyard.
Let’s just hope it’s not a losing battle.
Thanks for reading and I’ll see you back here in a fortnight.
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This is a bi-weekly opinion column; for question or comment contact Dan McNee at dmcnee@midwesternnewspapers.com.
