My best parenting instructor? Often, my garden. 
I find so many parallels between nurturing the plants in my garden and the children in my home. Perhaps this relationship training is why God first gave Adam and Eve a garden to tend. Did He know that the practice of planting, watering, and weeding to nurture Eden would prove perfect for all the people-relationships they would nurture in the coming years?
Yesterday I learned another lesson. Weeds at the corner of a garden box are the dickens to get out. The roots go deeper. Tools don't reach. You skin your knuckles like crazy to pull. Quite like the weeds at the corner of my life. 
Sin out in the open--in the middle of the garden box, so to speak--I can easily remove. Blatant disregard for others, yelling rudely at my children, selfishly seeking my gain at their expense--these wide-open sins are easily spotted and easily squashed. 
Sin at the corners--not so easy. The creeping sarcasm when child's misbehavior has worn my patience thin. The desire to control my child's preferences to match mine rather than stretch myself to match his. The knee-jerk punishment which, though deserved, is perhaps a bit harsher because my own selfishness has been offended. These behaviors which grow slowly, undetected until the roots have driven deep into daily patterns, prove hardest to remove.
Yet, my garden has also taught that if I settle for getting the majority of weeds from the middle and give in on the weeds at the corners, they eventually invade and kill all the growth I so carefully cultivated. They strangle the tomatoes, rob moisture from the peppers, crowd out the cucumbers. Rather than life-giving produce, I'm left with a box of weeds.
I don't want all the time I spend nurturing my children's character, praying over their future, or investing in filling their love tank to be robbed because I allowed weeds in the corner of my character to invade, strangle or crowd out everything else in our relationship. As with my garden, I gird myself to do the hard work of removing the weeds at the edges of my parenting. As I deal with my own sinfulness, my efforts in parenting yield greater fruit with my children. 
Yes, I think God knew exactly what He was doing. Gardens make great teachers.
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