Watching my children trying to cope with the current situation of staying at home and not meeting with friends and family members, I decided to fill their time with some work combined with great fun. I started thinking about how I could change their day schedule without using the internet, television and even smartphones. Nowadays, children love new technology, so at first it was slightly difficult to encourage them. I had many ideas – one better than the other. Finally, I made up the plan to plant trees in my yard. In fact, it is almost a two-hectare field. Therefore, I had a nice place to show off. I did not tell anyone about my plan and just ordered seedlings.

Tricky questions

While waiting for delivery, I read information about properly planting and caring for trees to be ready for my kids’ tricky questions. I am not an expert so I just wanted to act as the tree expert. My daughter is 13 and she is interested in biology so I expected her to be able to ask me some smart questions. In addition, my son of 5 always asks me very surprising questions. I had to be prepared for everything!

Impressed

When the trees were delivered, I gave my children a short eco lesson about the importance of planting trees and their great influence on nature. My son was really curious, because it was the first time he saw such small trees. He even called them sweet little weeds. He started asking questions and one of them was: “Daddy, how do they eat if they don’t have mouths?” The next questions were even more demanding and surprising. Fortunately, my daughter turned out to be a real expert and she gave him smart answers. I was an impressed dad!

Heartwarming time

We planted almost 200 seedlings in 2 days. Afterwards we found a nice place to have a family picnic. It was a heartwarming time for me, my wife and especially my children. Given the sad circumstances of COVID-19, it turned out not to be so bad for our nature and for us after all. We tried to make a positive contribution to our Polish community!