This One's For Uncle Mark

Last year on his blog, Uncle Mark admitted (somewhat abashedly) that he's in the habit of crawling across his lawn on his hands and knees hunting dandylions to pull out at the root. In his comments section I explained that dandylions have a revered status here in Norway as glorious harbingers of inpending summer. It's considered curmudgeonly and unkind to even consider mowing your lawn in early spring before the dandylions have gone to seed.

'Tis the season, folks.

This is a view towards our neighbor's house. Our own lawn doesn't have many wildflowers in it yet, because it's only been in for a year or two. The kids spend hours over in Mailynn's yard picking countless handfuls of løvetann (dandylion på norsk) and engkarse (the purple ones, no idea what they are på engelsk, but they go hand in hand with the løvetann, it's not uncommon to see entire fields turned all purple and spotty yellow this time of year). It can be hard to find a drinking glass in my house in early May because they're all sitting on my kitchen counter stuffed full of ragged bouquets of....well....weeds, basically.

This is the view towards our own house and yard. Mailynn (our neighbor) has always been very kind about waiting as long as possible about mowing her lawn so my kids can keep having their fun. She usually leaves the patch surrounding this fallen log to basically go to seed until mid-June or so. After my 267th bouquet of the year, I usually find myself wishing she would stop being quite so thoughtful.

This is a view of happy, rumpled children in their natural habitat. I pulled two ticks off Missy after this one sunny day of play (that last bit was for Grandma Gae, she's got a thing for ticks).