Spring Time

April 3, 2025

Time moves slowly when you're little: The days between birthdays feel endless, summer seems a lifetime away, and the idea that you yourself are changing too is nearly impossible to grasp. But spring—especially early spring—offers a gift: Day-to-day growth you can actually see.

Typically, I’m all about encouraging families to explore their communities and discover something new. But in early spring, I recommend a different kind of adventure: Return to the same outdoor spot week after week. Whether it’s a trail, a sidewalk, or a patch of woods, watching a familiar place transform is its own kind of magic. Forsythia branches that were brown just days ago will soon glow yellow. The bare patch of dirt under a tree will green up almost overnight. Kids, especially, notice these changes when we help them look.

And you don’t have to go far. When my daughter Madison was five, we spotted the tip of a tulip poking through the dirt in our front yard one March morning. Because we are nerds here in the Ross house, we measured it each day and graphed its height on the fridge. Madison watched that tulip for a month, and saw that it grew faster when it was sunny and warm than when it was cold and rainy. What she didn't realize at the time was that she was also learning about data, math, and patience. Years later, when calculus—which measures how change changes—came her way, she was already old friends with the concept.

Try it yourself: On your next walk, bring a camera and let your kids snap photos from the same spot each week to create a visual diary of spring’s awakening. Or grab a ruler to measure a flower or a sprouting vine. Graph the growth. Make the invisible visible. When our surroundings blossom right before our eyes—and when we observe this, measure it, and delight in it—we experience a sense of agency and connection to the natural world. It's a grounding we all need, and it's one of the main gifts of springtime.

—Deb