Helping Daddy

For the past few weeks I have been getting Alyce's new room ready. I am painting the walls, installing new trim, replacing outlets, and fixing up a window seat. Throughout the entire process I've had an audience, Alyce. Up until this weekend Alyce has simply watched and not interrupted. That changed this weekend. You are probably thinking uh oh this isn't going to be good. She didn't do any damage and actually helped a little bit. Throughout it all she was extremely cute.

This weekend I was assembling a new window seat for her room. Once I had it primed I needed to sand it smooth. On Sunday I starting sanding while Mom ran over to Jeff and Liz's house leaving Alyce with me. Rather than watching her play I asked her if she wanted to help. She responded with a head nod and a "uh huh". I handed her a piece of sandpaper and prompted her to stand on a step of her slide. She took up the paper and started mimicking me sanding. She would sand a little section and then rub her hand across it to see how smooth it was just like me. I figured she would do this for all of 10 seconds but surprisingly she helped me for around 10 minutes. She sanded a grand total of around 1 square foot, but it was the smoothest square foot ever.

Later the same day I was upstairs doing some wiring and Alyce came in to join me. She pointed towards the outlet and said "fixed it". I'm not sure if she means I'm fixing it, it needs fixing, or if I fixed it. But it was still cute. A bit later she picked up a strip of cardboard looked at me said "paint?". I said that she could paint the walls if she wanted. She proceeded to put the cardboard on the walls and drug it around like if she was using a roller. She thought this was cool and walked all over her room pretend painting little sections here and there. She even went into the hallway to paint out there.