Amish Day

Yesterday was an Amish Day for us. It all started years ago with a family that was close to us. They suggested that on an occasional basis we should get together for a Saturday Amish style. The men would work all day on a home project (no, never raising a barn) while the women would prepare food and watch kids. It was both productive and a lot of fun. When the family moved away, our Amish tradition stopped. But recently, we have formed a new three-way alliance and the Amish days have been resurrected. Saturday, the families (6 adults and 17 kids) gathered together to work on one of the homes.

When you gather this many people together at one house, it is important to remember the primary objective:

When all damage to the house by kids playing is subtracted from all of the progress made by projects being done, it will be a net gain for the house.

The primary objective was sometimes jeopardized when the adults got fully absorbed in either the project or in conversation leaving all of the kids loosely supervised. To make matters worse, the primary objective was seriously threatened when it began a long sustained rain forcing all kids indoors.

Picture in your mind painting a two story foyer. It was filled with ladders, paint buckets, roller pans, rollers, and brushes. Now add a constant stream of housebound kids through the foyer as they went upstairs, then back downstairs, then upstairs again. We got off pretty easy with only four unintended paint incidents (two kids and one dog twice).

At the end of the day when we were loading kids into cars to travel home, the damage side of the equation was at a remarkable zero. That is, until our son Buddy became enamored with the gas lamp post in the front yard, shook it, and knocked off one of the mantels. Oh well. At least we still met the primary objective.