The Wagon

My kids have early out days from school all this week. Which normally would stress me right out. It’s not that I don’t love being with my children, but my boys have always been busy, busy.

I have to be at the top of my A-game to keep up with them. Because of this I have grown to cherish naptime. It allows me a couple of hours to catch up and sometimes even read a few pages in my novel for book club.

Obviously my oldest two no longer take naps. Which means I don’t get any afternoon alone time when they have early out. So I end up staying up really late trying to keep up on housework and any miscellaneous projects on my to-do list.

Normally this makes me grumpy. This week I decided not to let it.

When Monday afternoon rolled around and my two oldest boys came flying in the door I was ready for them.

And that’s when we started working on the wagon.

My oldest has been obsessed with making things for months. He’ll go outside with scrap pieces of wood and hammer for hours with his friends. He has created many things including a tipsy chair and an open-sided boat.

So I wasn’t surprised when he wanted to build something.

We have spent hours this week in the garage working on building him a fishing wagon.

We have carefully picked out wood – out of the scrap pile of old fence pieces that he begged off of the neighbor.

We have measured and drawn lines with permanent marker.

I have cut old fence pieces with a scroll saw – something I never thought I would be able to do.

We have split some of the old wood several times. We have bent up a bunch of aluminum nails. We screwed one wagon side on only to watch it fall off moments later.

We were going to give up when our teenager neighbor came by and helped us hold the sides together while we tried hammering it one … more … time.

Our woodcutting isn’t precise and our angles are crooked. We haven’t used any blueprints and we didn’t search for ideas on Pinterest. This has been a true amateur, build-your-own-idea-yourself kind of project.

And it has been great.

I don’t know if the wagon is going to pan out. We still have to figure out how to hook the sides on and who knows where we are going to get wheels for the bottom. It might fall apart the second we push it out from the garage.

Yet even if all the nails pop out and the wagon crumbles to splinters and we never get to use it to carry our poles, all will not be lost. I have spent time with my boys building something. We have laughed. We have grumbled. We have worked together.

We have made something greater than a wagon. We have made memories – memories that wouldn’t have been made unless my boys had early out this week.