Helping

Long ago my mom bought us kids a record called "Free to Be You and Me." It was full of cute songs and politically correct stories and poems. Just think Boulder, Colorado, in the 70's. Yeah, we were all about macrame, recorder groups, ethnic print smocks and listening to politically correct kids' music. (Explains a lot about me, doesn't it!) One of the songs, written by one Shel Silverstein, goes like this:

Agatha Fry, she made a pie
And Christopher John helped bake it
Christopher John, he mowed the lawn
And Agatha Fry helped rake it

Now, Zachary Zugg took out the rug
And Jennifer Joy helped shake it
Then Jennifer Joy, she made a toy
And Zachary Zugg helped break it

And some kind of help is the kind of help
That helping's all about
And some kind of help is the kind of help
We all can do without.

I must confess that this song played through my mind a time or two on Saturday evening as I was doing some "hurry before the sun goes down" raking in the front yard. What do you say to your darling child who begs you to let her help? Of course, you say yes! I am guessing that it will not be too often in my life when I'm getting a big job done and my daughter is saying, "I'll help! I want to do that part! Let me try that!" It's actually pretty endearing, as well as surprising. She was actually pretty good at grabbing big armfuls of leaves and putting them in the bags, and she was also good at packing down the leaves in the bags to make room for more. She loved hauling the bags over to the bag tower by the driveway. The only trouble was when she was doing any actual raking. Luckily we had a spare rake for her so she wasn't just trying to rake with the same rake I was using, and she only beaned me in the head with it once or twice. And as it turns out she's quite effective at moving leaves with the rake. Just not in the right direction. If I were the leaf-piler, for example, she was the leaf UN-piler. I couldn't believe how quickly she could completely dismantle a mountain of leaves. Impressive, actually. I'd get a few piles going, and as I started bagging one, she'd have the rest of them spread out perfectly evenly over the grass again in no time.

I couldn't be mad, though. I just couldn't. How can you be when all she wants to do is help you? So I guess this was actually the kind of help that helping's all about. It's just a little more time consuming.

(See all those leaves she's running through? Yeah. I had already raked all those. That's okay. True joy is seeing a kid running and jumping into leaves, right?)