Daughter, tree can grow together

It’s going to be fun to see how fast each of them grow.

No, that’s not me teasing another Baby Schanz.

One is enough — for now.

One of the items on the unofficial checklist of things Chrissy and I wanted to do before we were “ready” to start a family was buy a home.

Previously, we were renting a two-bedroom apartment that wasn’t big enough for the two of us and our zoo of pets (two dogs and three cats).

There’s absolutely no way a child and all of its requirements would have been able to join us in that space.

Well, we just passed the two-year mark of being in our home. We really lucked out with this house. While they say these days the first house you buy generally isn’t your “forever” home, this very well could be.

It was well cared for by its previous owners — the younger married couple had two small children, and it was move-in ready when we bought it. It’s a modest, three-bedroom, two-bath ranch with a full, unfinished basement and a two-car garage.

The land has a spacious area in both the front and back. It’s got plenty of space for a child to play, with siblings or friends. It gets a ton of natural light and the sun shines inside both during the morning and evening.

It has a shed in the back yard, mulch around the perimeter of the dwelling with solid curb appeal.

It just lacked one thing I always wanted in a yard.

Trees.

There are a few arborvitaes in the southeast corner of the backyard, and the northeast corner has two giant birch trees. One of them is half dead and needs to be pruned, but that’s about it for trees in our yard.

There was at one point another tree near the arborvitaes, but only the stump remains.

Some old Google Street View images of our house showed there was also a tree in the front yard. Unfortunately it’s long gone.

So I was desperate to replace it. During the summer months, the sun beats down on the front of our house, and it would be nice to have some shade to keep the house a little cooler.

Deciding on which tree, however, was a tough process.

My wife and I tend to be indecisive with how we want to decorate.

Cases in point: the duplex we rented for 15 months didn’t have anything on the walls outside of a corkboard I used for work purposes. And, our current home remains bare aside from some of my photographs I got printed to hang in the office.

If we’re unable to decide on what to put inside our house, how are we going to decide what to put permanently on the outside?

I initially wanted to plant a tree for our daughter the spring after she was born. Like most things recently, we didn’t get around to it.

Mother’s Day this year, I made it happen. And the decision of what to plant ended up being an easy one.

Our neighbors have a big, luscious snowdrift crabapple tree in their back yard. For those unfamiliar, in the spring it blooms large, white flowers.

My wife has ogled over them each of the last two spring seasons.

I knew that was the tree for us.

After using the Michigan equivalent of Indiana 811 to identify any utility lines in our front yard, a snowdrift crabapple was transplanted into its new yard. The 5-foot, 8-inch tree, which is just as tall as me, is able to soak up the sun all day long and one day provide much-needed shade for our front yard.

With Baby Schanz proud to stand on her own, we took her out to her tree recently to snap some photographs, and we will make it a yearly tradition to get pictures with our daughter next to her tree.

While she’ll never catch up to Mother Nature, it’s going to be fun to track their growth.