Our little Helper

In preparation for "Thanksgiving Extravaganza Year Three" at our house on Thursday, Mike and I are frantically trying to clean the house this weekend. This means that a certain someone is either spending the weekend watching T.V. (don't judge us), or trying to "help" in her own special way.

She loves to think of herself as a helper, and often asks if she can "help" me make dinner, which usually translates into her eating a pile of shredded cheese while sitting on the island and mixing broccoli and uncooked rice in a bowl. Totally super helpful.

So we often try to divide and conquer when it comes to big projects we need to accomplish, meaning, one of us accomplishes the goal while the other distracts the child. I planned on taking Ella to the store this morning so Mike could clean, but she insisted on staying home with Daddy, so I wasn't sure how much he would be able to get done.

He said that she was fairly helpful. While cleaning the dresser, he kept handing her things to put away. She is good with a task like this. If you give her something and tell her where to put it, she will usually follow through, but eventually being a helper gets boring and the idea of "going camping" in her bedroom becomes much more appealing.

The same thing happened this afternoon while I was folding laundry. She came in and asked if she could help, so I asked her to find all the socks and to put them in a pile. She went about her job dutifully and when she'd found every last sock, she carried them into the livingroom leaving no sock behind, and I showed her how to match and fold them. She was very excited to find the matches and even made an attempt to actually fold them. I left her to her task, confident that she could complete it. By the time I got back to the laundry room, I could hear her laughing and telling Mike, "Daddy, these are my sock puppets." She ran into the laundry room sporting two different socks on her little hands. She was quacking like a duck, so I guess the sock puppets were ducks? I'm not too sure of the specifics, but, needless to say, the socks did not get folded.

Hopefully we will soon have a little girl who both likes the idea of being a helper and can actually be one.

Sidenote: I just wrote a blog post about folding socks. This is what happens when you challenge yourself to write one blog post every day for a month. Good God it's only November 17th. Pray for me.