The Exhausted Dad: Life finds a way… at other people’s houses

Attention teachers and camp counselors: Stop sending my kids home with living things. This family can’t handle the responsibility.

While no fish or other typical pets have been offered to us to nurture and protect, the kids have brought home various seedlings and plants from school projects.

None of them survive. Never.

While cleaning up the kitchen this past weekend, I came across a Ziploc bag with my kindergartener’s name on it. Inside was some small object wrapped in a paper towel. I raised it up to show my wife, who then let out a terrified gasp.

Her: “Throw it out before he sees it!”

Apparently, our kindergartener was supposed to plant the seed inside the bag… three months ago. He lost the bag on the day he brought it home.

For his end of school year project, my kindergartener also brought home a small plastic cup of dirt with a small plant sprouting out the top.

Him: “It’s going to be a huge sunflower!”

No, it’s not, kid. I’m sorry, but it’s not.

We did everything right with the sunflower… for a while anyway. We kept it in the kitchen window with access to consistent sunlight, and the proximity to the sink meant that somebody in the house occasionally remembered to water it.

It kept growing through the start of summer, to the point where it was ready to go into the Earth and become a spectacular, stately plant to live alongside our front yard’s weed piles and brown grass.

Of course, we forgot about the plant’s transfer to the ground until the morning we were supposed to leave for our vacation. We weren’t going to be home for two weeks. Just as we finished packing the car, our 6-year-old botanist-in-training started to panic.

Him: “Oh no! My plant! It’s not going to get any water while we’re gone!”

After hours of planning, packing and cramming the car with two-weeks’ worth of family essentials (which included no fewer than six Squishmallows), we spent the final minutes before our trip trying to figure out where to plant this tiny, frail sunflower sprout that, let’s face it, will probably be ripped out of the yard by one of the neighborhood cats the second we drive away from the house.

We toiled for several minutes trying to find a spot in the front yard that would 1) Get sunlight, 2) Be in range of the sprinklers and 3) Not be in the middle of one of the seemingly 800 ant colonies currently living on my property.

Once we finally settled on a spot, the entire family looked at the little plant with both pride and sorrow. On one hand, it’s a miracle it lived so long in the house. On the other hand, it’s definitely going to die while we’re on vacation.

More recently, my family graduated into bringing home worms. After the second day of Girl Scout camp, my two daughters returned with several jars of dirt filled with at least two or three worms. (They were only supposed to bring home one jar each, but my oldest daughter, very excited about the project, convinced the camp counselor to let her bring home four. Yay.).

The kids were to feed the worms various scraps of food, I guess. I don’t know Scouts/nature stuff.

My oldest daughter at least consolidated her team of worms into a couple of jars, and for the last few days anyway, the little buggers appear to be doing just fine.

On this past Sunday, five days after she brought home her jar of worms, I asked my youngest daughter, 8, what she’d fed her worms recently.

She stood in silence for a moment. Then her jaw dropped.

Her: “Oh! I think I left my jar of worms in the car!”

Sure enough, she retrieved her piping hot jar from our van. She’d never actually brought her jar in after being picked up from camp.

Her: “Do you think they survived the heat?”

Me (thinking that worms sometimes survive nuclear blasts): “Yeah! Totally!”

We have not witnessed any movement inside the jar.

My daughter, at least, seems unbothered.

Her: “Eh, we can just get some more worms. I can’t be expected to take care of them.”

On another note, as of this writing, my son’s sunflower is still alive in the front yard. Barely.

• • •

Tyler Wilson is a freelance writer, full-time student and parent to four kids, ages 6-12. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.