The Joys Of Summer

Summer! The time for jobs and hurting your back and mowing and allergies and vacations mowing and hurting your back and gardens and mowing and flowers and landscaping and hurting your back...  and mowing...

You know, summer.

The boys are getting old enough to take on more responsibilities as well as individual responsibilities.  Robby can handle the zero turn mower by himself now.  Caleb can push mow now.  They can both handle watering gardens, doing the dishes, cleaning their bathrooms and so on.

I had Robby tear apart the flower box over the septic tank since it was falling apart and starting to look quite ridiculous.  He did that and stacked the wood up in a relatively nice fashion.

So the next day, Lesley assigned Caleb the job of staining the flower boxes off the deck in back of the house and I assigned Robby the job of hauling the wood down to the creek and burning it. By himself. 

How'd it all go?

The Chinaman with paint brush in hand.  He did a fantastic job of re-staining the boxes.

Larger American boy admiring his fire as a man should.  Proudly.  He also did a great job and I showed him a trick towards the end where you fire up the mower, turn the blades on and point the discharge from the deck at the fire to get the remainder of it to burn up really, really fast!  We both liked that!

A job they're doing together.  We need to remove all of the river rock from the area between the sidewalk and garage.  They've been experimenting with both wet and dry techniques.  Wet is far messier, but they got more done faster that way.

My job... washing the North side of the house...

She cleaned up quite well after a good few hours of work!