Taking a page from childhood

As we engaged in all this yard work, the kids helped out, too. Or rather, Abby helped. After the first 15 minutes, Camille informed me (as I crouched in the flower bed pulling up crabgrass with sweat pouring over my glasses), “Mommy, I’m getting sweaty. I want to go in now.” There was a slight sheen on her forehead.

She actually hung in there for a while. Abby was more of a trooper, but even she was ready to quit when we started attacking the shrubs. I managed to re-engage them both with a little technique I remember from childhood.

See, we all worked in the garden, and when I say garden, I’m talking about a huge garden with multiple rows of green beans, butterbeans, corn, tomatoes, squash, okra… We helped plant, weed, pick, shell, and we even served as primitive kind of pest control. Though most of these tasks were just considered our regular chores, my dad would pay us a penny for every beetle we picked off the bean plants. We’d put them in a jar, and then when we’d collected all we could find, we’d crush them between two bricks, counting as we went.

I’d told the girls this story before, and I suddenly saw a great opportunity. Some species of ivy had taken over the flower bed while I’ve been out with a bad foot. The girls pulled it up easily, but it was covered with little green berries, all of which fell off and rolled about in the mulch, where they would undoubtedly sprout new plants. So I told the girls I’d give them a penny for every berry they collected.

Even Camille got excited about this, charging into the flower bed with renewed zeal. When they were done, they had collected 121 berries! Abby also hung around and helped us collect five bags of clippings from the shrub assault.

$1.21 just didn’t seem like enough, so I promised them $2 each, and we took them to Coldstone after dinner for ice cream.