The One That Survived

Before we left Juneau in June, the girls and I stopped at Fred Meyer to stock up on some things that we thought would be nice for our "trip" to Hyder. One of those items was an envelope of flower seeds. For anyone who knows me, this might sound strange because I tend to have a black thumb. It's so bad that I even managed to kill our "wedding" fern that we were given at my bridal shower (you know, the kind that are supposed to symbolize your marriage - Ya, that one). It only took me 6 months and that thing was a crunchy corpse {ooops}. Needless to say, I don't have the best track record with being able to grow viable plants. Regardless, when you're standing in front of the "kazillion-gamillion" (Katie's words) packets of beautifully colored and artfully arranged flower seeds, it doesn't matter if you're the Grim Reaper of plants, you just have to get a packet (or 12) in hopes that maybe just one will SURVIVE your "efforts". So, that's exactly what we did. We bought a few packets of pretty, multicolored flowers to take with us.

When we first arrived here in Hyder and set up our travel trailer, I found one of the packets (Yes, you read that right.....ONE...not sure what happened to the others). The girls were so excited about the flowers that we planted them right away. We put some seeds in a pot and scattered the rest on the outskirts of our gravel pad. And, as is typical for 4- and 7-year old little girls, they checked on the seeds' progress every 5 minutes or so for the first hour and complained loudly that they weren't EVER going to grow. As the days past they started forgetting all about them, then a few weeks ago Alexis came to me all sad and deflated. She said, "Mommy, come look. There is something wrong with the flowers." Truthfully, I had forgotten all about them as well (thank goodness for all the rain). When we walked over to the little pot, what we saw did NOT look like flowers at all. It looked more like weedy, tall grass. I thought, "Great! They filled the flower seed packets with weed seeds - figures I'd only be able to grow weeds." We decided to just let them grow anyway since it was the only thing green I'd managed to keep alive (thank goodness I had completely ignored the plant, otherwise I might have succeeded in killing it).

Three days ago we found that our "weeds" had sprouted flowers.

 NO WAY!! 

Isn't it beautiful? We were so proud of it {smile}.

Of course, not knowing anything about flowers beyond what a rose, daffodil, tulip, and daisy are, AND not having saved the packet, we have no idea what kind of flower this is, but we love it anyways. As for the seeds we had scattered, nothing ever popped up - surprise, surprise {sarcastically, with an eye roll}.