Little Leaf Helper

We have a neighbour who is always helping us out with our yard. That is, I think he's "helping". That's how I see it. But I guess he could be just doing it because he's disgusted and annoyed with our lack of interest in keeping our yard perfect. (I have kids, a lot of them, and so there is always bikes and toys in our yard)  He's an older man who speaks limited English as in his age his Polish is coming out more, so it's hard to tell sometimes. I try to follow along with his conversations, but it's not always easy, but I know that he's been frustrated more than a few times with us. Mostly I take it with a grain a salt and always make sure I thank him for his help. (which reminds me that I should pick up a gift card to Timmies for him this week!) I appreciates his efforts and I want him to know that.

This week he was out blowing our leaves into a pile for us, which I thought was great. So did the kids, less work for them to make piles for jumping in! However, I got the strong feeling that he was annoyed that there was this pile just sitting there, waiting to be picked up, and all the kids seemed interested in doing was playing in it! Kids these days! There were a few words of "discipline", but I didn't get what he was talking about, so I ignored it! But I thought that I had better pick some of them up to add to our compost bin.

 Eden insisted on helping too!  When she wasn't crying and getting angry because she wanted to use my shovel, that is. (And, yes, I used a big snow shovel to pick up the leaves. It's just easier. I'm not too sure where we got the shovel from though. We have so little snow here, so I doubt that we bought it, so it must be from our MIL! She'd get us one.)  She found a little blue dust pan to use instead. We're clever like that, using different utensils for other uses!

She just needs to stretch just a bit higher....
It made me giggle. I thought it was cute that she was trying to dump the leaves into the bin, but couldn't reach, so most of them would fall into her face in the end. She still kept trying though, and that was sweet.

I love toddlers. They always want to help you out because they don't think of it as "chores" yet!  That will change soon, I'm sure.