- November 18, 2024
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Many of us spend all week working, pushing paper, answering emails, returning phone calls, and planning for meetings. But it’s always good to do some good old household tasks to remind us what life is really all about: family.
I recently asked my 4-year-old daughter, Ellie, to help me clean the house. But, it took some creativity to find a job that would allow her to succeed: The vacuum is too heavy, the kitchen sink is too high, the sweeping too dependent on no one getting distracted and playing in the dirt piles.
So, I settled on a stack of magazines. “Put all these in the recycling bin,” I instructed her.
But she didn’t have the sense of urgency I had hoped for. Rather than picking up the stack of about 10 magazines, she took them one at a time to the bin.
I suggested she could take the rest of the pile at once to save time. I loaded them in her arms, while she was protesting, “They’re too heavy!”
“It’ll be fine!”
This is what a good dad does, I thought. Encouragement, instruction, love.
“No it won’t,” she said. And she dumped the magazines on the floor and continued with her plan of taking one at a time.
After that was over, I found her playing outside. I said, “Guess what, Ellie? I have something exciting for you!”
“What is it?”
“Something exciting!”
She was hooked. “What is it?!” she said, her eyes wide, her curls bouncing.
"It's another job!” I said.
"OK, OK," she said, in her best teenage voice.
This time, she was supposed to put the forks on the table for dinner. And this time, I didn’t try to tell her how to do it, and her solution was quite elaborate: She removed a belt from one of her dresses and tied it to an empty laundry basket. Then she set the forks in the basket and dragged it like a wagon from the kitchen to the dining room — a distance of four feet.
Later, I finally found the job that she would relish. She was asked to wake up her 7-year-old brother from a late-afternoon nap. At first, she was gentle. Then she screamed. When that didn’t work, I admired her next attempt: a drumroll with her big, plastic mallets on her Fisher-Price drum.
That did the trick!
The next week, I got back to emails, phone messages, meetings and preparing for more meetings. And as I did so, pleasantly, in the background, I could faintly hear the plastic drumroll of home.
