on persistence, ingenuity, and an avimorphic girl

I try to get the kids outside when the weather is nice.  Esther needs no persuading.  She has loved going outside since she was tiny, and would happily spend far more time playing outside than I can afford to take away from my indoor chores to watch her.  Daniel is another story.  I think that outside, especially on sunny days, is just too bright for his light-sensitive eyes, and he does not "do" sunglasses.  But as with Esther (and myself, for that matter!) I have observed that when he spends time outside he seems calmer, more positive, and better regulated.  So when we had a really nice afternoon last week, I arranged for Esther and me to be already outside when Daniel came home, and greeted him with the announcement that he was going to do an outside chore instead of an inside chore today.  (My goal is to have him do some chore every day, although it doesn't always work out that way.)

Mind you, my day with Daniel had not started out well.  Daniel had woken up, apparently, on the wrong side of bed, and I could do nothing right in his eyes.  He wanted to talk with me over breakfast, but all he had to say were complaints and criticisms.  Our discipline methods were unfair and excessive, we expected too much studying of him, we loved Esther more than him, and so on.  The final straw was when he first got mad at me for looking at him while he was eating, and then a few seconds later got mad at me again for not looking at him while he was blowing his nose!  His mood the evening before had been similar.  I managed to send him off to school with a sincere "I love you!", but I have to admit I was wondering if we had entered a new phase and, if so, how long it was going to last!  So I had no idea how he would take to the news that we were going to spend some time outside.  He did gripe and grumble a bit at first, and went inside by himself, but he was out again a little later and ready to make the best of things.  The chore I had in mind for him turned out to be impractical, so while I was looking around for something else to do, he started monkeying around in a tree.  Then Esther wanted in on the fun, so I lifted her up in the tree and let her climb around a bit.  Then I got her down and got ready to do some work.

Esther asked me to put her back in the tree again, but I was intent on getting something accomplished.  Rather than give her a direct "no," I told her that if she wanted to get up in the tree again she would have to figure out how to do it for herself, as I was busy.  I imagined that she would try for a few seconds to shimmy up the trunk and then give up and find another activity.  But I reckoned without my girl. 

I should stop here and try to describe the layout of our back yard.  There is a flat part just behind the house, and then a steep hill running down to another small flat pocket in the bottom of the yard.  In the very corner of that bottom flat place, where there is a gap in our hedge, we keep four tires as bumpers for when we go sledding down the hill.  This picture doesn't quite capture the steepness of the hill, but you can see where the tires started on the far right, and the branches of the kids' climbing tree on the far left.

The next time I consciously noticed what Esther was doing, she was rolling a tire along the bottom flat portion of the yard.  I thought she was putting away one that Daniel had gotten out, and commended her on her hard work.  That was when I saw that Daniel's tire was still sitting at the top of the hill and Esther was getting a second one out.  Well, I figured, it's a harmless activity and it will keep her busy for a while.  So I went back to my work.  Meanwhile, Esther was getting a workout from that tire.  She would roll it partway up the hill, and then it would get away from her and roll back down into the hedge.  She would patiently chase it down, drag it out from under the hedge, and start again.  After several repetitions of this Sisyphean project, she finally laid the tire down flat and started turning it end over end up the steep hill.  This method turned out to be successful, and she finally got the tire up to the top of the hill and over to the trunk of the tree that she wanted to climb, where she heaved it up on top of Daniel's tire to make a tower that she could climb on to reach the lower branches by herself.  She then repeated the process with the remaining two tires.  At one point she convinced Daniel to help her for a while, and at one point she experimented with tying a rope around the tire and pulling it, but basically she just kept end-over-ending the heavy tires up our hill, getting her sleeves soaked and dirty and no doubt giving her muscles a good workout in the process.  I did help her lift the last tire up onto the tower, and then lifted her up onto the tower, as it had gotten just too tall for her.  But the solution to my challenge and almost all of the work of carrying it out were all hers.

When Esther finally got up into the tree, she enjoyed the fruits of her labor with the zest that only comes from having succeeded on a project after persistence and effort.  She announced to me, "Mommy, I'm a bird!  I'm going to stay up here all night!"  And she did stay up for quite a while.  Daniel, meanwhile, took photos from up on our deck.  And everyone had a satisfying and peaceful afternoon.