I raised my children and am now helping raise my grands.This is not the end-you will have alot of gardening time for years,this is a new adventure of learning great things.Talk to him all summer so he will feel the excitement of going to school.I loved school myself and instilled that in my children-as well as the love of gardening.It has made me proud that they still call me for answers from recipes,plants diseases,to how to clean things.Life has been wonderful and I pray it will be also for you and your nanny boy.I keep my grands almost every week end and most of the summer-I insist..lol And I have a nanny boy too)they help plant,plan,ws.everything moonphase

I agree with the above. Plus the fact that too much personal information gets divulged or can be mined by joining facebook. I'd rather limit my online participation to forums like GW and other, less inclusive, less wide open sites. I've been a member here for a long time....going on a couple of decades......and I have seen the same ebb and flow of visitor traffic through the seasons as we are now witnessing. January, February, March are always as slow as molasses but it will pick up when the gardening season comes into to full force in the next 6-8 weeks. And I have to say that the comments about excessive ads and pop-ups surprises me. I don't experience hardly any at all and just use Explorer with the standard firewalls. Didn't realize this was much of a problem anymore regardless of the Internet server one used...... I have to be honest when I say I read more than post. Most of the topics don't hold a great deal of interest for me and I tend only to respond to questions that get neglected or overlooked or when erroneous info is provided. Since conifers are not my area of concentrated expertise, I let others respond first - there is an amazing knowledge base here :-) But I still remain pretty active in some other forums. I also live in an area where the Internet is not widely available so I am not online at home. And since my work life is pretty seasonal and therefore computer access the same, I tend not to post much in winter anyway.

Keep a vacuum handy when you open the bin and sweep them up as they fly out. Just crack the bin enough to make them come through where it will be easy to catch them without chasing them. Chasing them in the air will just tick you off more. You definitely don't want to put the vacuum too close to the bedding! Do this in addition to what Andrew mentioned or use cardboard. If I get flies (nearly always seem to come in on bananas), I use cereal box cardboard to cover the bedding. If the flies come out, they will come out around the edges where it is easy to catch them with vacuum hose. Tapping the cardboard will make several come out at once.

Since I was a grandma at age 38, time is not at all, at all, at all, relevant. (I was 19 when son was born, he was 19 when his son was born, I was still "young".) I didn't feel old then and now that that grandson is 25,I think I look great for "a woman of my age". The big secret is that inside I am still 33!!! But, don't tell anybody - there are definite advantages to being a "cranky old lady". My grandma was 104 and still played cards twice a week (in her own apartment, serving oodles of appetizers and nibbles she made), other grandma was 99 and made bread and doughnuts every Saturday for the retirement home she lived in - for 25 years straight, because someone told her that she could not live alone at 74 - pshaw. That is my goal - to still be a fruit farmer and be making homemade jam well into 40 years past retirement -- that's started 10 years ago as I retired at 55 so I could get out of the stifling corporate workplace to sell my jams and baked treats at my local farmers market every week, making people happy with "old-fashioned" so I still have 30 years left. I'll be 66 come June and have wrinkles galore - every single one I've earned. I went to my 25th reunion in 1988 and saw such despair that I vowed never to go again. They all, like, stopped living past high school or college. Could not relate. They had no "present tense". I greatly object to obituaries that cite from whence and where someone finished high school or college as if that made them who they were and then -- they stopped. I much prefer the obits that say he/she loved their family and what they did to show that, or took in strays, or painted murals, or knitted hats for preemies, or grew gorgeous roses, or volunteered at soup kitchens, made great casseroles, or knew how to prune bushes and trees, or drove cross country with 3 kids, or helped out at a preschool, or whatever REAL THING they did AFTER they graduated umpteen years before. Those people I can relate to, not the ones whose ONLY accomplishment in life was that they graduated. Nancy