July 26, 2004 - Monday
What does a parent do when a four-year-old boy says he wants to do the same thing as his father? It's an easy, if not a wholesome and endearing question most of the time. Just image a boy hitting a baseball with dad or painting a bureau. But, I've been chopping the wood and Harry's been helping carry it to the pile on occasion.

OK, so the splitting maul I use is much too heavy for Harry to lift off the ground, let alone split wood, so Harry has never thought about chopping himself. But, a couple of weeks ago Harry saw me using a small hammer/hatchet and, though at the time I was using the hammer part, Harry apparently put two and two together. That hatchet, he realized, was small enough so he could chop wood like dad. Today he asked.

It's the kind of request to which I had no immediate answer. At first ignored it, hoping it might just fade away. It did not. In fact, to the contrary and in the best leadership mode -- c'mon, follow me, here we go -- Harry went over to the door and put his shoes on, ready to go outside and chop wood.

I suppose the easy thing to do would have been to say "no, you're not old enough" or "it's too dangerous," but maybe that wouldn't be all that easy in the long run. I suppose I could have handled the complaining, but Harry has rarely tried anything he didn't feel very comfortable with and has a greater problem with *not* trying things. More importantly, saying 'no' probably would just create envy and a bigger desire. So, I took it as an opportunity.

Just like I learned in Boy Scouts, the first thing I did was to stop and teach Harry how to hold and how to carry the hatchet, as well as by very direct extension, how dangerous an ax can be if one isn't careful. I tried to scare him a little. But he was still ready to go.

He ended up splitting three or four fairly small and very dry logs, all by hitting them hard enough (often with my help) for the hatchet to stick into the top, then lifting the ax and log together and banging it down on the stump. It took him several hits for each log, but eventually he got through them. I think it went pretty well. He got a great satisfaction from it, especially the first one, but it was hard enough for him not to want to do too many and that's almost certainly for the best.


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