All Decked Out

When the Boys were young we would occasionally resort to trickery to entice them to do something on their own rather than having us do it for them. And by "occasionally," of course, I mean constantly and all the time.

"Oooh, that's not something a little kid can do," we'd say. "Only big boys get to [tie their own shoes, take their plates to the kitchen, put the VHS tape back in the case, etc.]."

I admit this without shame, and if you say you never did anything like this with your own children, I am going to scoff and point at the smoldering cuffs of your pantalones en fuego. Little kids are shockingly easy to manipulate, until they aren't, and you need to take advantage of every single manipulatable moment. Go ahead, call them teaching opportunities; I see through those semantics.

Anyway, the Boys learned to do many, many things just to prove that THEY WERE TOO BIG BOYS!

When the millennium-long deck reconstruction project finally finished last summer two summers ago, we were so relieved to be able to step out the back door and not fall to the ground that we didn't stain the darned thing. It was new and smelled good, and we didn't care that it looked raw until this summer, when Husband and Boy#2 spent Two's vacation power-washing away the impressive accumulation of bird droppings and drought detritus. They didn't get the stain on before Two left to go back to school, though.

"I'm not worried about it, though," he told me with a wry grin. "I know it will be sitting there waiting for me to stain when I get home for Christmas."

So for the past couple of weeks Husband and I have spent our spare hours slopping oil-based stain all over our arms and legs and amusing ourselves by saying things like "I've always wondered what I'd look like as a redwood." Hahahaha!

Yesterday enough of the stain had accumulated on the deck that we stood back and said, "Hey! That looks great! WE ARE TOO BIG BOYS!"

Oh, well played, Boy#2. Well played.