Caleb Says He Won't Clean the Garage a Third Time

"I'm not doing the garage a third time," Caleb told me on the cabin porch yesterday, with a Bear Lake raspberry shake in one hand and my folded-up list in the other. It had slid out from between the pages of my scriptures when I sat down. I hadn't said a word about the garage.

He has a point about the count. The first try was the second week of June, when he hauled everything out of our corner onto the driveway, sat down in the middle of it and found his old catcher's mitt. The second was after the Fourth, when David's lumber order arrived and needed the floor, so the whole pile got shoved back in. David turned the garage into his shop years ago and we keep our things in the one corner he's let us have, marked off with a line of blue tape. That corner has been emptied twice and filled twice.

What was Nehemiah actually turning down?

This week's Come, Follow Me reading is Ezra and Nehemiah, and the line everybody knows is in Nehemiah 6.

"I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down: why should the work cease, whilst I leave it, and come down to you?" (Nehemiah 6:3)

I used to hear that as a man too busy to take a call. Read the verse before it and it's different. Sanballat and Geshem wanted to meet in the plain of Ono, and the text says outright that "they thought to do me mischief" (6:2). A friendly-sounding invitation came and he said no, and verse 4 has them sending four more times and getting the same words back.

"Come on down, it's only an hour" works on an eleven-year-old for the same reason it worked on Nehemiah's neighbors, because it sounds reasonable.

The wall took fifty-two days (Nehemiah 6:15). From today to the first day of school on August 19 is twenty-two, and once we're home on the tenth it's nine. Whatever we finish will be smaller than a wall.

The list in Nehemiah 3 that I always skipped

Chapter 3 is where reading plans go to die. Meremoth, Meshullam, Zadok, "next unto him" and "after him" over and over, and Sunday evening I read the little phrases instead of the names.

"From above the horse gate repaired the priests, every one over against his house." (Nehemiah 3:28)

People fixed the part of the wall in front of their own door. Jedaiah does it in verse 10, "even over against his house," and in verse 12 Shallum works on his piece "he and his daughters," which I read twice. Back in verse 5 the nobles of the Tekoites "put not their necks to the work," and somebody wrote that down for all time. I find that oddly comforting, having run a chore chart.

The laminated one I told you about in what I've actually tried with three kids home all summer had a column for every job and not one you could point at. Caleb's corner has the same trouble, a heap with no place to start. I'd have wandered off to the driveway too.

What my dad did with 180 blocks

When I was twelve my father, who's a dentist and has never in his life enjoyed manual labor, decided to build a block wall at the back of our lot in St. George, where the yard slopes toward the wash. Forty feet long, four feet high. He worked it out on a napkin at dinner: thirty blocks to a course, six courses, a hundred and eighty blocks. I remember the number because he said it so many times.

He laid the first course on a Saturday in April and it ate the whole day. Strings, a level, a bucket of water, my mother bringing him lemonade and then around three bringing him a chair he didn't use. I mixed mortar for a dollar a course. He told me the first course was the only one that mattered and everything after it was the same course again, and I remember being twelve and thinking that sounded like a punishment. He re-leveled that course twice while the mortar was wet. My father, who once spent forty minutes on a single molar, looked at a crooked row of cinder block and took it apart with his hands.

It took him till November and the last course went on in a jacket. He skipped July entirely because of the heat, and by September I think he was sick of the whole thing. Some evenings I'd hear him out there saying "thirty" to nobody, and then the scrape of a block on the trowel.

The mortar under my fingernails annoyed me for months.

The wall's still there.

How do you help kids finish a project before school starts?

Give it a size you can see. The shop is David's and I'm leaving it alone, so ours is the taped-off corner by the door, where the sports gear and the garden tools and Lily's tack box and a bin of dead water balloons all live.

Last night on the porch I cut it into four pieces: the shelf of baseball things, the pegboard with the garden tools, the floor along the wall and the bins. Caleb gets the baseball shelf, because his mitt lives there. Lily gets the tack box and a low shelf she can reach, which is the same trick as the one-sentence prayer (we started smaller and it held). I get the floor, since I'm the one who can lift the bins. Ben carries one thing to the curb and is thanked for it.

Nehemiah 4:6 has a clause I keep rereading, "for the people had a mind to work." The wall was joined up to the half of it by then, and Tobiah had already stood beside Sanballat and said a fox could knock it over (4:3).

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should a summer project for kids actually take?

Shorter than you want it to. Mine has to fit in nine days between getting home and the first bell, so I'm aiming for about forty minutes a day, and if a piece needs more than that I cut it again.

What if my child quits halfway, like Caleb did?

Caleb's June attempt was a whole corner handed to a boy who was already thinking about lunch, so I'd look at the size of the job first. After that I'd sit down in it with him, at least for the first twenty minutes, and bring a snack.

Should kids get a reward for finishing?

Mine are getting a trip to the lake shop for shakes, but that's a habit of ours and not a theory. Give it afterward and keep it small.

Is Nehemiah 6:3 really about perseverance?

It's about turning down a friendly-sounding invitation from people who didn't wish him well, which is a bit different from a garage. He gives the same answer every time it comes, and that part carries over, though I'd be slow to call every interruption an enemy. Some of them really are lunch.

This afternoon I'm writing the four pieces on the back of the cabin grocery list with a name beside each. The day we get home it goes up inside the garage door, and Caleb's baseball shelf goes first.

with love, Melissa