Our Day of Labor

We decided to “labor” a bit this weekend. This afternoon we decided to start clearing some of the brush & other debris along the back part of our yard. While Ron got caught up on the mowing, the kids and I got started. They each used rakes to help pile up the dead grass and hay. Well, actually they each used rakes to swing around like bats, causing me to constantly yell “Watch out!” to the kid who was about to be knocked out. But in their eyes, they were helping pile the dead grass and hay. It was so amusing to watch the two of them that it surprisingly wasn’t frustrating at all.

We found lots of interesting bugs under the railroad ties along the back of the fence. At one point Tyler disappeared into the garage to find his bug box. They gave up on the raking and attempted to collect bugs. They managed to get a fuzzy green worm of some sort and 3 earthworms. Tyler thought one of the worms was giving him a dirty look. Danielle thought the fuzzy green worm was crawling up the side of the bug box so it could look at the mermaid on her shirt. When I asked to take her picture with the bugs, she held up the box and said, “Smile, buggies!” Tyler talked about keeping them in the house, so I reminded him that the kind thing to do is to release them where we found them after we were done looking at them. They wanted to know why, so I talked about their little bug families that might miss them. That made Danielle sad and she wanted to release them right away.

After releasing the “buggies”, the kids decided they wanted to catch butterflies. (We seem to have a lot of them around here.) Tyler couldn’t find a net, so he got Danielle a bucket & grabbed his bug box again. The two of them chased butterflies and moths around the yard, yelling “Here butterfly! Get in my bucket!” The sight of the two of them hopelessly chasing the butterflies around the yard, buckets in the air, was so funny. Tyler finally got frustrated and asked what butterflies liked, hoping he could lure one to him somehow. When I told him they like flowers, he and Danielle marched over to my flowerbox of impatiens and each picked one to put in their buckets. Danielle was just sure the butterflies would prefer a pink flower. That still didn’t help. They eventually gave up and we pursued a “game” of baseball instead. (Ron pitched, Tyler hit, I caught, and Danielle fielded the ball… when she wasn’t busy playing with grass or doing other girly things.) It was a good, productive day.

The kids also enjoyed playing superhero today. This is Superman and her sidekick.