Thursday: Helping hands

I don't know if I would have lived through Thursday without the help of others. I probably would have given up all the projects and been completely dejected ten minutes into the day. I was almost to that point around 6:00 anyway when two neighbor boys came over and offered to help us with our pile of soil. Mom, Julie and I had worked all day on the pile and moved about a third of it. These teenage boys came over just as I was about to give up. One of their friends joined in and with the efforts of these three boys and Paul another third of the pile was taken care of in about 45 minutes. That was a real confidence booster for those of us who had labored all day. We did take a break from the pile to move rocks part way through the day. Does that really count as a break? I don't think so! At least it is straining different muscles.

I am now officially letting everyone in on a secret about myself, which was revealed on Thursday: I have a very hard time asking for help. I have always known this about myself, but many others do not. I truly appreciate it when people offer to be of help, but the odds that I will actually take someone up on the offer are slim to none. After seeing these boys take on so much of the pile in such a short period of time, I realized that we really did need some help. I called up Kailee (she had offered to help if we needed it) and asked her if they could give us a hand. We had three additional sets of helping hands as we finished off the rest of the pile. We moved it and spread it across the yard in about an hour.

A huge "thank you" to all these helping hands! This is what the yard looked like on Thursday.