Tough Chickas

Our girlies are growing up and we've been feeling like they need to toughen up.  Maybe it's just a  particular challenge we face in our family since we have two MUCH older brothers, but most of the outdoor work has rested upon Darin and Nathan for years.  After all the boys are to the point where Ken rarely even has to help them out with something minor like starting the lawn mower.  They edge, mow, weed whack, and even blow the clippings all on their own.  Not just for us but also as a job for our neighbor. 

But when we think about it, at the age the girls are now, the boys were starting to help Ken do some of those things.  They certainly did a lot more hard work then pulling a few weeds and picking up their toys outside.  Which our girls have kind of been messing around a lot even when doing that.

So it was beyond time to start toughening them up.  I want girls who can work hard outside and get things done.  The first step was to ban Ken and the boys from helping.  I'm totally not kidding!  I'm grateful the men in our household are always so willing to pitch in and help but the girls need to struggle so that they can feel proud of themselves too, and so that they will become the type of girls who are willing to pitch in and help also.  I really did ban them, I sent Ken in to take a shower and then work and kept telling Darin and Nathan that they had better stay away unless they plan on mowing their sisters lawn from now until eternity.  They pretty much decided to take a water break after that and watched them from inside half the time. Ha!

Ken had cut down 4 trees in our backyard and I had the girls drag all the branches from the backyard and load them up.  When I told them they had to be tough girls and work hard they really did.  They moved fast and didn't complain about the scratches or anything.

Who-hoo!  So proud of these girls!

After we loaded them up we went to landfill where they recycle them into mulch.  I would love to complain about how we pay them a crazy amount to recycle them only to have them sell it back to us as mulch but I won't, well except for that:-)

The girls hopped out at the landfill and quickly unloaded the trees too.  I am really proud of them!  And more importantly they were super proud of themselves.  When they came back and told Ken all about it, it was as if they had conquered a new world!

So moral of this story is that it is much harder to raise a younger set of children.  There are so many additional steps.  Obviously when it is a parent schlepping around doing chores it means the faster you teach your child the faster you can stop doing it.  But when you have older children doing the chores you have to be extra conscious.  Also it is no longer having a child help you out with something you were already doing, now you are having to put that chore back into your schedule so that you can teach them.  Plus the hassle of of teaching the older children to stay out of it and/or teaching the older child how to teach the younger one.  Yep, it was much simpler teaching the boys these things.