You would think that on a blog named parent phobia, when I start a blog post off with the title “Planting Trees” I’m going to be speaking in the metaphorical sense. Well, your half right.

Today I slept in late and did my normal computing activities. I knew I had to wake up early tomorrow so I proceeded to mow my lawn. On a side note, if you turn your mower upside down and it doesn’t start, you need to replace your air filter. I’m not a normal out-in-the-yard kind of guy. I’m the artificial light sit-at-the-computer kind of guy, much to the chagrin of my “I love the outdoors” wife. But I stayed outside I finished the yard and proceeded to weed.

As I was weeding I noticed that there were some saplings growing here and there. Now they weren’t in a spot where I wanted them to stay, but I didn’t need to outright kill them. I spent hours (I said I don’t take the best care of my lawn) taking out saplings from here or there and replacing them along the edge of my properties. The varieties were Oak and some such tree I can’t identify. Xie came outside and helped with about half of the planting. Quite a few of the Oak saplings came from my gutters, we will go back to the fact I don’t care.

All said and done almost 40 saplings were planted, with another 10 – 20 to go tomorrow (more if I find another stash. Not all the saplings could be saved, some were mangled trying to remove them. It wasn’t in the cards for those trees. Currently, on the property we had 16 trees – so now we have a total of 56, with of course more coming. This means less grass for me to mow in the long term.

Now for the metaphorical part of the discussion. Being a parent is a lot like plantings trees. You will push ideas down to your child and hope some of them take root. I know all the trees I planted won’t survive, but it cost me nothing other than a day of planting. Exposure to ideas, even those you don’t agree with is important. Your child needs to understand your views as much as they need to arrive at their own conclusions. You shouldn’t expect your child to be a clone of yourself, nor should you even want that.

This of course is just a metaphor that I came up with while I was working. Take it for what it is, but it still was a lot of physical labor..