In the spirit of teaching my 10-yr-old girl cooperation, generosity, kindness, and love…. I make her help me take out the trash.  

Sometimes we have a couple big blue cans to roll down the drive and one recycle bin or maybe Hubs has loaded the yellow wagon with cardboard that’s higher than my head.  It varies.

Since my goal is the lessons  you can just imagine my confusion when I am struggling to stack the cardboard for recycle and I look up to see Precious walking back up the driveway to the house.  

“Hey…”  says me

“Wha?” says she

“Come here.  And tell me what’s wrong with this picture that your forty-hmm-hmm year old mum is struggling with the cardboard while you are walking back to the house.”  I thought it was kind of a rhetorical question.  You know, the kind where the answer is so pathetically obvious that both parties roll their eyes and chuckle at the pathetic-ocity of the question.  Not so.

“Hey.  I’ve done my job.  I rolled out the can and that was my part and this was your part so I have every right to be walking back to the house…” says she.  She really said that ‘every right’ part.  Like it’s a democracy.  That’s when I screwed my head to the side like a dog whose not sure if he heard you right.

Well now instead of irritated I feel a pleased calm and give her a sweet smile like she has just given me a gift.  And indeed she has.

“Sweetie,”  I says to her, “Sweetie, it just doesn’t work that way.  And,  guess whose job this is now?”

Now, that WAS one of those rhetorical questions that didn’t need an answer!!  And she got it!  And she didn’t answer!  And she just barely rolled her eyes.  So although my lessons in cooperation, generosity, kindness and love  missed their mark, I  landed the lesson on rhetoric.

It’s the little achievements, isn’t it?