Things I learned from making my kids work in the yard with me:

My kids aren't as bad as I thought. I asked Sam to retrieve a bowl planter that was in our neighbor's yard. It had been there for awhile and had filled with rainwater. I asked Sam to dump out the water and throw the pot back over the fence. He carefully picked it up, walked to the neighbor's rose bushes and poured the water out onto the roots of each of them before bringing the pot back. That Sam's a nice guy.

There is something better at proliferation than Mormon families: Iris. The flower, not the Mom. We have been thinning out our iris rhizomes and spreading them around the yard since we moved in, and they are still taking over every flower bed I place them in. I ripped out one whole bed in front of the house and had enough to give to two neighbors before I threw the rest in the yard waste bin. They are like a lovely plague.

You find what you need. I offered some of our iris to a neighbor I don't know too well, and before I knew it I was giving her a tour of our house, chatting with her about adoption, and making plans to start walking with her in the evenings. She offered to keep me in mind if a position at her work comes open, which she tells me is highly flexible and she loves it. She is a bit of and IKEA freak too, so when she came in our house and saw all of our IKEA stuff, she said "It's like I found my soul mate!" She has a wall in her house the same purple as our wall. And to think she has been living down the street all along.

The hard labor might have been a better balm for my mood than my kids'. They actually got a bit grumpy at first, but I started feeling better when my hands hit the dirt, and by the time the ice cream truck came around, everyone was happy. I think we really benefitted from the sunshine, the co-operation and the sugar.