Teamwork is spelled F-A-M-I-L-Y

Morning!  Talk about a late start indeed – it’s now 2:34pm but wow, today has really been productive in ways other than (hope you’re sitting down for this) blogging!

Take this morning! 

Today, my husband and I decided we needed to do some massive re-arranging of our, ahem, worldly possessions (read: stuff accumulated over the past 10 years) and move them to the garage. 

Being the intrepid jolly parents we are, we figured that depriving our children of the opportunity to walk up and down the stairs 22 times (yes, we counted) would be the ultimate of crass lack-of-funness.  So!  Instead of selfishly hoarding all that extra opportunity to exercise to ourselves, we gently suggested to the kids that they WANT to leave their computers and join in the festivities. 

To a one (and we have multiple), they all agreed and threw themselves into the heavy labor with quite a lot of enthusiasm indeed.

Fact is, their help shortened the two hours we had originally planned into only 38 minutes! 

And during those 38 minutes, the amount of stuff that was moved just staggers the mind.  Even the 5 year old got into it and carried up and down several small boxes of junk valuable electronic heirlooms as well.

So what’s the lesson that was learned here?

If you live as a family and set up expectations of how each family member is to pitch in (and HOLD to those expectations), quite often, your kids will shock you with their willingness to pull their own weight.  

Sure, it was tiring, and yes, it was pretty unexciting (except for when yours truly tried demonstrating the right way to karate front kick while balancing memory boards on her head), and certainly, the kids could have just played on the computer instead….but when push came to shove, we all worked on the problem at hand as a team.

It made all the differerence in the world!

After we were done, I let the kids retreat back to their rooms, went out to pick them up their favorite fast food, and am home again…finally taking the time to get my days’ worth of work completed.

‘course, I could have also told them:

Kids, it’s Labor Day!  "Labor!"  As in, you go workee while Mom goes restee!

But then my husband and I would have missed out on all the fun.  🙂

Happy Labor Day everyone,

Barbara Ling

ps – speaking about teamwork: