Shelly Helps Clean the Garden

A few weeks ago, Shelly put her self on time out at Grandma's house. I love this about her. I love that she's able to recognize when she needs to go calm down, and then she separates herself from others and takes a break. This particular time, an unfortunate thing happened. She went into Grandma's room and laid down on her bed. The wallpaper in that room is starting to come up around the edges, but only right by the head of the bed. This proved irresistible to Shelly (I'd love to blame her, but I've stopped myself from doing the exact same thing more than once when we've come up to visit and they let us sleep in their bed). I don't believe it was a malicious thing, and I'm not even really sure she knew that what she was doing was a bad thing. She saw something that looked tempting, and it didn't occur to her to not do it. I confess, this is a problem that we need to work on with her. She was super quick to show us what she did, and the attitude in which she showed me what she did makes me think she didn't realize it was a bad thing until after I talked to her. She understood by the end of the day. Since Shelly needed to do something to fix it, and she's a little bit to small to help re-paper a bedroom, we decided to let Grandma decide what work she could do to help make up for the ruining of the wallpaper. Grandma decided that helping clean up the hoses in the garden and getting other debris out of the way was a good age appropriate chore for her. Well, the weather finally warmed up enough that we could fulfill that obligation, and we went over to help Grandma in the garden.

Shelly had a lot of fun at first, and Emily decided to 'help'

Finding the hooks that hold the hoses down

Now to pick up the hoses

Emily found a gopher hole (or some other kind of fresh dirt) to play with

How can she bend like that?

Her hands got a bit dirty...

Both of them

Shelly taking a break and finding a bug. She started to not like the work after a while.
I was glad she got to that point. I was worried that it would be a lost lesson if she only had fun. She kept working even when she didn't like it because she had to help Grandma. I was proud of her for the good attitude she kept up.

Jason didn't do much helping, but he did help distract Emily

Shelly showing off how many hoses she helped clear off the garden! She didn't pull all of the hoses off, but she did help pull most of them, and get hooks off all of them. She was proud of herself for helping, fulfilling her obligation, and doing so much work!