I've said it before, I'll say it again: the wonderful thing about having adult children is that the child labour laws no longer apply!

Woo HOO!!

The spousal unit has been feeling more than a little overwhelmed by all the work ahead of him in the next month. Now that the good weather is here, he has clients screaming about carpentry jobs they want started. We have to get the wall closed in at the front of our house so that weather and animals don't invade the place.

(Zubby has already caught one squirrel trying to sprint into our living room through the gaping hole that used to be the front wall of my office. I'm telling you now, if they ever create an Academy Award category for Most Effusively Praising A Cat For Giving You A Dead Thing You Really, Really Didn't Want, I have a lock on that Oscar.)

Oh, and as if that previous work list wasn't enough, every time something needs doing down at the home farm where his mom lives, the spousal unit seems to be the go to guy.

I've been doing what I can to help, but I have a small home business here and we need the money I earn, too. Aye carumba. So I was whining venting about the situation to our daughter last week and out of the blue she offered to give up her long vacation weekend and come down here to help us out.

I don't think she will ever know what that gesture meant to her dad. The work she did was enough to make him feel that the rest of the month is doable. He was so discouraged before she came.

It was not fun work. There was all the siding and boarding from the old wall to be picked up, some of it pretty heavy. She and I wrestled with that job. There were intricate railings that the spousal unit had built for a client's deck that needed priming. It is the worst, most tedious, time consuming sort of painting. We managed to get five sets of rails done.

Down at the home farm a new water well had been dug a few weeks ago, destroying a big hunk of my mom-in-law's front lawn. The daughter went down at night and helped me rake it all smooth, sow it with grass seed and get it watered while bugs of various sorts treated us as their All U Can Eat Human Buffet.

Would I have done that for my parents when I was in my mid-20's?

Oh puh-LEESE, you would have stood a greater chance of seeing monkeys flying out of my butt than seeing me show up at my parents during a long holiday weekend so I could work stupidly hard at tedious grunt work.

But she did it. Even better, she did it cheerfully. AND AND she didn't even complain about my cooking, which this time of year basically amounts to me charring something on the BBQ. Oh, it was grim. If they served food like that at a prison, there would be riots, I tell you, riots.

Frankly, if we were Catholic I would be looking into the whole beatification process right now and getting her on the road to sainthood. Really. I mean it.

Um, is the daughter perfect? Nah. Who is?

But is she the woman I hoped she would turn out to be--creative, independent, hard-working, compassionate? Yes, she is.

I would love to take credit for the woman my daughter has become. Oh, man, but I would love to take credit for that. But the thing is, she was raised in an extended family, with grandparents who loved her to bits, folks who had been through the parenting experience once already. It was an incredible gift.

And really, in the end, each of us is responsible for the person we become. Our parents try to influence us, but each of us decides who'll we be.

You know, I knew I would always love my daughter. That was a gimme. What has surprised me is how much I have grown to like her.

--Marn

Mileage on the Marnometer: 266.48 miles (428.8 kilometers)
Goal for 2003: 500 miles - 804.5 kilometers