Child Labour

Today Little Bear was sick so I had to stay home.

It was also the day that the Qld Teachers took strike action. Therefore I had Cheetah at home with me too.

I was tired as I have been under the weather myself & dealing with a sick Little Bear was about as much as I could handle, so early in the day I devised my devious plan to keep Cheetah out of the way thought up an interesting activity that would keep develop my child's co-ordination, physical ability & problem solving skills.

We have had a large palm of some sort in our pool area that attracted locusts & green ants like you wouldn't believe. Knowing how much my child loves to play with heavy artillery big boy toys, I told him that he could use my secateurs and his fathers saw to cut as much of this tree down as he wanted too. (the fronds shoot off from just above ground level so the secateurs can do most of the work at cutting it back).

I expected this might keep him busy for half an hour, maybe an hour if I was lucky.

He stayed outside ALL day. Breaking only for a quick bike ride, lunch & a couple of snacks.

Here he is almost finished.



And this gives you some idea of how busy he had been. The pile of palm fronds to the left is all his work.




Behind this tree was a fig tree growing that I only found out about a couple of weeks ago when the neighbours told me about it (as they didn't want a fig tree growing next to their new carport & were pretty sure I didn't want one in my garden either). I went to cut it down on Sunday & was very surprised to find out that it was an established fig tree that had 2 trunks 3-4 meters tall & I hadn't been able to see it at all behind the palm tree Cheetah removed without actually crawling into the back corner of this garden bed. I got most of it out, but there is still a fair bit of stalk remaining so I will have to find a way to remove the whole thing.

I was very proud of my Cheetah today.

You can read another post about his love of gardening tools here.