Hi fellow Edders,
Today I wanted to share a good life lesson for anyone, particularly children. Cleaning things yourself!
Don’t Kick the Can
Some of the things I want to try to teach our son for various reasons is that we need to be our own agents for things and one of those things specifically is change. I really get annoyed when I see trash all over the ground and especially when it’s on property that I am associated with or own. We don’t own anything besides our condo but the lake house, since it’s our family’s, I take some pride in trying to keep it clean.
With the weather warming up and preparing for the spring and summer ahead, I figured it’s a good time to do something good and get to cleaning some stuff up. We spent a lot of time last year in and around the dock in the water so I made sure that I wanted to focus our attention on this area and clean up the sheer crap that’s all over the area!
The little man was a little sad that there wasn’t any ice left for him to throw rocks onto. This is one of the first times he’s really been able to see the full season cycle. We spent a lot of time in the lake last summer, watched it turn into fall and then freeze. Now we are back for the start of the cycle so he found it interesting how it comes full circle.
So the great part but also the tough part about the property is that it’s got this huge concrete wall that makes it so we can stay up on the sand and look down at the water, gives us one of the highest views of the whole area compared to the other houses. Pretty fun when there’s a lot of water, we can see fish right from the yard. What’s challenging about that though is that means people who aren’t very nice will throw glass bottles and smash them against the wall since it’s guaranteed to go everywhere. This puts a lot of crap on the sand in the yard as well as sand around the lakefront area where we swim and play. This is what the pile started as when we got there. I had picked up a piece or two here and there when we were there in the winter but didn’t put too much effort into it since we would be coming back when the weather was warmer and easier to clean in.
The other fun part of it all for the little man is he gets to dig wherever he wants. At home he can’t really dig many places because of where we live, the condo folks don’t like it too much. Can’t blame them too much but they also don’t have any real place for kids to just be kids. The lake house though, he gets to do almost anything he wants and he has a lot of fun doing it. The beach cleaning day was also filled with lots of digging up things to see if we could find anything good. There were quite a few rusty nails and chunks of metal so we spent some time picking it all up while the water was down!
It wouldn’t be the little man without a fun time using his trucks! He loves these things and they provide endless hours of entertainment. We were using the dump truck here to haul our finds out and bring them to the dump pile. By the end of the few hours we were there we picked up a pretty significant pile of pure crap that shouldn’t be on a beach.
Time to dump the load we picked up! The job was nearly complete. We unfortunately didn’t have a bag with us so that will be for another day after more cleaning!
One of the fun ways I’ve been able to help the little man understand things about life and teach him life lessons is through this type of stuff. I’m not perfect and I get a little nervous and tell him constantly not to do things like pick up glass but he has fun and learns that we can’t throw trash and stuff on the ground. We will get a trash grabber thing at our next trip that way he can help do things more actively instead of just finding and pointing out the glass and stuff to me. He has leveled up a bit though, I let him gently pick up the rusty nails if he goes slow and places it on his open hand to give it to me. It’s a little dangerous but these nails are mostly rounded off from the rust so nothing is incredibly sharp. The glass I don’t know if I will let him do that for a while, considering how razor sharp the crap is.
I think we could do really well if we teach kids to do this type of stuff more often. Get in the habits of picking up trash, properly of course, and putting it in a pile if you own the place or bringing it to the proper trash bins. Small things like this make a world of difference for the environment and it’s so easy to do!
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