A tongue-in-cheek-but-rooted-in-truth complaint you'll overhear muttered at FDR HQ is "why are we raising such empowered children?"
You'll hear it following the shattering of a ceramic bowl, full of pistachios, after Lucy had dragged a stool over to the counter to help herself. (It's equally likely this bowl is full of raw rolled oats and coconut. We get a lot of that, too.)
You'll hear it after we find a suspicious, muddy trail leading from the front door to the bathroom sink, where Peter is filling his plastic bucket with water for outdoor mess-making,.
You'll hear it when we find a pile of washcloths and towels, used once and tossed in the washing machine, after someone cleans up a spill.
Or when upon encountering the empty bin of orange slices at the Chinese restaurant, Lucy insists that we "ask the man" at the Chinese restaurant to refill it. Now. NOW!
And I often think it after engaging in a frustrating battle of wills with the preschool set. It would be so much easier if we were "in charge" and they didn't harbor any notions of being equal participants in the family.
Then again, I know that their empowerment is a key component to their successful development. Kevin's nervous that they will tumble into the terrible obnoxiousness that he sometimes sees with his elite liberal arts students. I'm just thankful that when they make a spill they even think of cleaning it up, even if it does add to the ever-mounting load of laundry.
***

And so in this spirit, here's something that really, truly happened last Thursday.
We'd just come home from the vegetable market, and as I was putting away our groceries Peter set to answering some questions about nails and rocks and wood.* A few minutes after dragging his toolbox outside, Peter came running back inside. "Mom? Can you help me? I'm trying to hammer some nails and Thomas has the saw and he wants to saw me."
Yep. Toddlers with saws. Later, hammers.
This afternoon ended in a way that surprised me, if only because we've never considered doing it before: hiking into the woods to cut down a tree. No photos were taken of the sawing, but let me assure you it was amazing that we left with all fingers and thumbs intact.
*I'm not clear on the actual question, but it was answered by hammering a nail in a rock and in wood. Something about density, or weight, or floating versus sinking objects?