When we’re helping, we’re happy

Today Suzanne called me to see if I wanted to go walking and I instead convinced her to go get some free mulch with me. We loaded up the kids and a bunch of bags and headed to the church (our church got a bunch of mulch to put around the trees and they had a lot left over so they asked people to take it). Anyway, we got to the church and shoveled 4 bags full of mulch while the kids went crazy until we finally got them out to play. We went back to Suzanne’s and spread the mulch around her trees and in her flower bed and used all of the mulch up. It was noon by this time so we made the kids some sandwiches jumped back in the car and headed back to the church to fill up 5 more bags. It was a fun and tiresome adventure. Suzanne got a sunburn (it was 89 degrees here today) and Lucas puked up bark. But overall it was a fun and productive morning. The kids were such troopers. Even before we started the whole mulch excursion, Audrey and Kate helped me weed our flower beds. Then, Audrey helped weed at Suzanne’s and spread the mulch and then helped spread the mulch at our house too. This a huge improvement from last year when she wouldn’t do any outside work because she didn’t want to get her fingers dirty. I kept telling her what a good job she was doing and I said, “It’s kind of fun to work together, huh?” She said, “Yeah. Is that why you had kids?” I totally remember thinking that when I was younger – that the reason my parents had kids was for us to do all the work (I was in high school at the time, so she figured it out much sooner than I did).