“Clean up, clean up, everybody clean up…..” A song that we sing with Little Miss when it’s time to clean up her toys,  also comes in very handy when it’s time to clean up the perennial garden.

Little Miss was very eager to help me prune back our hydrangea.  With supervision, of course, I showed her how and where to use the pruners, she had a little trouble with the woody stems, but had a ball cutting the leaves off the branches, one by one. After about 2 minutes she was done and uninterested in the pruners / pruning anymore, so we moved onto other “clean up” things we had to do:  Putting our fairy garden to bed.

We pulled out the winter fairy storage container (shoe box) and took everything out of the garden.  One by one, we put them to bed for the winter.   “Why?” is a very common question around our house lately,  and these chores were definitely not exempt from the multiple whys.  Telling Little Miss that fairies like to sleep in a warm place (the garage) during the winter was a good enough answer for her, responding in her normal “Oh” and a shoulder shrug. 

Our next big cleanup will be raking leaves and, as it has been getting colder and more leaves are falling, we will definitely plan a raking party one of these weekends.  If anyone’s interested – let me know!