Daddy’s Little Helper

Nessa was helping me do chores Saturday morning. No, she really was helping. You could actually tell where she had been sweeping leaves on the deck, and she raked them all into the leaf shovel by herself. She was quite a sight, maneuvering the broom and rake all by herself—I was very impressed. She also held the nails and handed them to me when I was putting up plastic over the sliding door on the deck.

All the while we had a great conversation. We talked about all sorts of things: why we were sweeping the leaves off the deck, where God is, what to do when you’re scared, why we were putting plastic over the sliding door, how many boards I was going to need and how long they should be, what she did at daycare last week, what we should do next, where we were going to put the leaves, and many other things. It was absolutely delightful to get such an extended glimpse into how her mind works and what kind of connections/comparisons between things she’s making now. Between Sunday School and what we read to her, Nessa’s been exposed to lots of Bible stories over the last year, and they often surface when she can make a connection between something she’s doing and something in a Bible story.

Afterwards we just played for awhile. I pushed her on the swing, and then we played Tag. Nessa seems to have Tag confused with Hide and Seek: she thinks that after you tag someone you’re supposed to go hide from them. Then we climbed up by the top of the slide and took the ship to Egypt, to the new playground there. Nessa has a wonderfully inventive imagination, and things from all over get conflated in her play scenarios.

Saturday afternoon Nessa helped me rake leaves. She did a good job of raking leaves into a pile…until the pile was big enough for her to jump in. Then the rake got abandoned and the pile succumbed to entropy. This happened several times in different places in the yard. She was having such fun that I was having fun watching her, so much so that I didn’t even mind raking. Now there’s a first!