How to help your children take initiative with chores (the duet of vacuums singing a swan song).

Four children blackberry picking in August

Reluctantly crouched at the starting line

Can we go on a walk?
he asked.

I glanced at the clock. Pre-8am on a Monday. Up for many, many minutes, but I did not feel like going on a walk. I did not.

How about later?
I said.

He sighed a five-year old sigh.
Well don’t you say that it’s healthy to go on walks, so shouldn’t we go on a walk now?

I sighed a 45-year old sigh.

Excitement

I can hardly believe it! My brother found a giant cricket, and I am getting very sweaty!
-our 3-year old, bursting inside to inform us he bends over dry hot ground, scratchy tall grass, looking for grasshoppers, crickets, and other amazing creatures of the ground.

Monday morning playlist

Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro
Vivaldi’s Paris Concerto No. 5 for Strings
Verdi’s Rigoletto
Beethoven’s No. 5 in C Minor
Brahms’ Hungarian Dance

Food

How can you not like apple butter?

12-year old boy checking on goldfish in a pond

Worship

We spoke of Adam and Eve and Noah and Noah’s wife and how God loved them, and then I got off on a tangent about Biblical figures who are identified only as someone’s wife.

Help

I walked into the battlefield. A place of carnage and unspeakable, unrecognizable shapes and objects and limbs, and then I recognized two things. Two humans. They appeared to be healthy, and they appear to be my progeny, and they’re -

-What are you doing? I asked with a deep breath.

They looked up; the older answered first: ‘Oh, we’re just cleaning our room!’ He announced joyfully.

This sounds like a glorious thing. Children cleaning their room, on their own, taking initiative, and doing so in good spirits, and doing so in a vacuum duet. Oh, you don’t know what a vacuum duet is?

It’s when two vacuums are being used simultaneously. They were playing a vacuum duet. Two boys, two vacuums.

The only thing is this: normally, when you vacuum, you clear the floor first. You pick up clothes, books, papers, toys, etc. Anything that doesn’t go on the floor, you pick up first. Unless you’re them. The Vacuum Dueters.

‘We’re just vacuuming,’ they announced in tandem, as one flung his equipment onto the bed and began vacuuming a pillow.

I sighed, and felt like yelling, but was too tired, so I just closed the door, and went to listen to something loud. Something louder than the duet of vacuums singing their last song.

There’s probably some sort of lesson in there about the importance of making cleaning equipment and machines accessible to your children. Either that, or the opposite. I don’t know. But I’ll take initiative over apathy most of the time.

Mean man

You know, I said, honestly, I really don’t feel like having you bring in the contents of your bedroom to our bedroom, so please leave.

If this strikes you as a sad picture, then yes, it is. I watched them leave, the sad little figures as they trudged out, and one remarked to the other: ‘Fine, since Daddy won’t let us play in their bedroom, do you want to go hide and seek in our bedroom?’

I smiled, and I hope that the cleaning they had done earlier in the day hadn’t made it overly organized and thus difficult to find enough objects to hide behind, on top of, and under.

I peeked in, and fortunately, it turns out they were cleaning the bedroom in installments. Long-term installments. I pulled a vacuum off the bunk bed and left them to hide; a place which offered, at first glance, limitless possibilities of places to hide amidst three hundred and forty-seven thousand pieces of clothing, art supplies, and books.

And thus is character born.

I watched the older kids take turns pushing the mower up and down our front and side yards; our bumpy, molehill-filled, scorched front yard. It’s hard work. It’s hard work for me, and I’m incredibly strong.

I watched them huff and strain and puff and battle the uphill portions, and I smiled.