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Fall Down Seven Times

As with most couples, we tend to split up chores around the apartment. It's only fair that no one person has to do everything. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that we each do exactly half of every single chore. For one, there are some chores that I don't like doing, and there are some chores that the Mild Wife doesn't like doing. For another, we sometimes have time constraints that make it easier for one person to handle the task. Long story short, we each have our assigned tasks.

Most of the time, this is just how we do business. It's a fact of life, and it's fairly mundane. In one very specific instance, however, it has led to quite a bit of conversation. You see, I am in charge of our petunias. We got them a long time ago as a gift from our neighbors, roughly around the time when we moved in.

I don't even remember how we came upon that particular division of labor, but that's how it went down. Now, I don't have tons of experience with gardening, nor do I have a green thumb of any sort. Still, it's my task. So, me being me, I try to do it as well as I can. I'm not super anal about it or anything, but I usually use filtered water and I track the days on which I water the plants (a few times, I couldn't remember the last time I watered them, and things got dicey). Basically, I want to at least give myself a shot of getting it right.

This behavior has not gone unnoticed, and the Mild Wife likes to joke that the petunias are my "plant babies." Yup, I've acquired some green children in my mid-thirties.

Amazingly, the petunias have survived this whole time. From what I understand, they are supposed to be perennials, so they're supposed to bloom and grow quite a bit in the spring and summer, then die off in the fall and winter. Ours, however, are some sort of zombie plant. They have pretty much had a blooming flower throughout the entire year. I don't quite understand how that's possible, but that's what we've seen. They just refuse to die.

As much as I'd like to take credit for this, it's not me. Remember the Mild Honeymoon? Well, we were gone for a while and had no way to water the petunias during that time. I fully expected to come back to dead plants in that time. Instead, it looked roughly like this (taken a week or so after, but still):
In case you missed it, those are some green shoots sprouting up along with the actual flower
Somehow, the petunias managed to not only survive, but thrive during that time. Remember, it was winter time and they received no water unless there was some rain. This is a plant that's supposed to die off in the winter, but it somehow managed to grow during that time. Your guess is as good as mine, honestly.

All of this leads me to the blog post title. Our petunias remind me of a Dwyane Wade commercial that seems to epitomize our little plants: fall down seven times, stand up eight.
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