Planting a garden with my mom

One of my favorite summer activities that I always look forward to is planting our annual garden with my mom. Since our backyard is very shady, we can’t plant the flowers in the ground, so we plant them in pots. The end result: colors everywhere!

It takes a lot of preparation and a lot of hard work, but at the end of the day our container garden makes our back deck look beautiful! We first have to take a trip to the garden store. The store near our house has a whole building full of beautiful plants and foods, from herbs like rosemary to huge plants with gigantic leaves that are almost as big as small trees! We have about 16 pots in our container garden, so it takes many flowers to fill them all up. We get a huge variety of species and colors. They are usually herbs and flowers. When we are done, we have a whole wagon full of plants that we have to load into the car.

Next we have to unload and prepare. After we get all of the flowers transferred to the back deck, we get all of our supplies, like gardening gloves, hand shovels, and small rakes. Not only do we prep ourselves to start planting, but we also have to prep the pots for planting. Usually there are leaves and sticks in the pots and dead flowers from the grueling winter. We have to empty all of that out for the new set of plants for the year. Many of our pots will still have perfectly good dirt for planting once you turn it over a few times, so we don’t even have to buy new dirt. 

Next we have to plan which flower will go in which pot. You would think we would just put the big plants in the big pots and the little plants in the little pots, but it actually takes a while, moving around the flowers and seeing which plants would go well next to each other.

Now is the easy part: planting the flowers! This part doesn’t take as long as any of the other steps, but you do get dirty! 

After all of our day’s work, our garden looks beautiful! It’s full of eye-popping colors, and herbs that we can use to make food taste fresh and delicious. Planting a container garden with my mom is definitely one of my very favorite summer activities.

—Kid Reporter Mari Chiles

My Summer Dog Walking Service

Many kids do different things to ear money during the summer. They babysit, mow lawns, work at the local swimming pool, or run a lemonade stand. What did I choose to do to make money this summer? I chose dog walking. When I first came up with the idea, I thought it would be very easy and that I would make wads of cash off of it. But dog walking is a lot harder than I expected!

Why? First you have to plan it out. You can’t just go to a random person’s front door and ask if you can walk their dog. Before I did anything, I did some research. I looked up what the regular pay was for kid dog walkers. On most websites and blogs, it said that average pay was about $10 an hour. So I settled on $4 for thirty minutes and $8 dollars for an hour. It seemed just about right since I am not a professional and I am a kid. 

The next big question: How am I going to let people know I am offering to walk their dogs? I chose flyers. I got on the computer and wrote a few sentences on what this business is for and why I am doing it. I put my email address on the flyer so that they would know where to reach me if they wanted to set up a time. Then I included my rates — the price I was charging for how much time I was walking. I printed out about 40 flyers and then I started putting them in people’s mailboxes. I did it around almost the whole neighborhood.

Now, the last step: waiting. You have to wait if you want people to respond to what you have put out. If you get a lot of responses, that’s great! And if you don’t, that’s fine, too. Just get two or three people in your neighborhood that you know and ask them personally if you can offer them your services.

In the end, I didn’t get too many responses. But I still got three people in the neighborhood whom I know who were willing to let me walk their pets!

—Kid Reporter Mari Chiles

Photo courtesy Mari Chiles 

Disney World's ESPN Wide World of Sports

When you think of Disney World, you may automatically think of Mickey Mouse, Cinderella, or the huge castle in Magic Kingdom. But did you know that Disney World has an entire sports park just for athletes and their really devoted fans? Recently, my family and I got invited to Disney World to tour Disney’s ESPN Wide World of Sports. 

The Wide World of Sports complex spans about 230 acres, all of it holding bunches and bunches of fields for any sport imaginable and any team that plays it. It also hosts more than 300 sporting events annually, including spring training camp for the Atlanta Braves, exhibition games for many other major league teams, and many amateur athlete tournaments from all over the country.

The Wide World of Sports also has some fascinating technology, and all of it is developed right there at the facilities. Through their work and with the help of the many games held at the parks, ESPN has come up with many ways to help coaches, athletes, and fans get into the game, including creating 3D televisions to make you feel like you are actually at the sporting event and high-def broadcasting so that you can see everything going on at the field. The Wide World of Sports is actually the headquarters for where the inventors of all of that technology do all of the testing and inventing for ESPN, and we got to see where they worked. 

We also got to do some pretty cool stuff while we were there. We got a tour of the fields and got to go inside some of the buildings that had just been upgraded. We also saw the unveiling of the new fieldhouse for all of the athletes and coaches. At the unveiling, we saw Mia Hamm, world famous soccer player, and Jason Witten, NFL star. Mia Hamm was even signing autographs after the unveiling, and my sister and I got to take a picture with her! My dad also got very excited when we went to go see the Atlanta Braves play against the Detroit Tigers in an exhibition match. 

What I liked a lot was when we got to pose for a picture and they made it look like we were on the cover of ESPN. They had us dress in a Braves jersey and hat and pose with a bat in our hands. It was a really cool picture when it came out. 

So the ESPN complex was definitely a world of fun, from the 3-D television to being on the cover of ESPN! I had a great time at Disney World’s Wide World of Sports.

—Kid Reporter Mari Chiles

Photo courtesy Mari Chiles