They call me Dr Worm

Moving out of a rental property inevitably involves much of the gardening, and not the fun, creative type where you get to nurture beautiful things as they grow, but more of the type where you pull up ever single stone in the badly constructed path out the back of your chaotic rental property garden and rip out the roots of the cooch grass and various weeds that keep growing up between the stones.

This is not particularly fun but last time I found myself doing this, the exercise was much improved by the presence of my beautiful older son.

Bundle not only helped with the weeding, he also spent a pleasing amount of time ensuring I took gardening safety seriously. As a result, the lifting of each stone was accompanied by constant reminders along the lines of “Be careful daddy, there are ants under there. Be careful. [beat] Are you being careful Daddy?” and so on.

We also found a number of worms, and after a brief initial hesitation, Bundle accepted my assurance that worms were friendly and not at all dangerous and we had to be nice to them because they help the garden grow and other such things that parents find themselves, sometimes to their own surprise, saying on these occasions.

More surprising, and infinitely more pleasing, was Bundle’s understanding of the world of worms, summed up by the following conversation which took place shortly after I had lifted a worm out of the way so as not to squash it when replacing a flagstone, and the worm had taken a very brief look around before burrowing straight back into the ground:

Bundle: Oh, where did he go?

INC: He went back into his home

Bundle [considers this for a moment]. Yes. He’s had a lovely day, but it was time to go home now. Hmmm. Yes.


Happy third birthday, Bundle. You are truly gorgeous beyond description and your very proud parents love you endlessly.