One of my co-workers asked me yesterday if my husband, Brian, and I planned to go out to dinner after we got home from work. She knew that our three children were at camp so we had some free time on our hands in the evening. I told her "no," that instead of dinner we probably would work on some outdoor chores.

      That’s exactly what we did. I mowed lawns with the riding lawnmower and Brian mowed weeds with our rotary mower that is pullled behind the tractor. When we finished our respective mowing jobs we went to check out the garden and found that there were a lot of vegies and raspberries that needed to be picking. I spent the next hour filling two plastic grocery bags with beans, zucchini and beets while Brian picked bowlfuls of raspberries.

        By the time we finished it was about 8 p.m. so we headed indoors to eat supper. Before I sat down to eat, though, I wanted to start cooking the beans and beets so I could make refrigerator pickles with them and spent the next half hour taking the ends off of the beans and washing the beets. At 8:30 p.m. I finally sat down to eat a sandwich. By the time we finished with supper and straightened up the kitchen, the beans and beets were done cooking so I made a vinegar/sugar mixture to pour over them and cleaned up the kitchen again.

          It was 10 p.m. by then, so I headed to bed, knowing that my 5:30 a.m. wake-up call from Rosebud, our daughter Ellen’s golden retriever, would come all too soon. Before I fell asleep, though, I was thinking about how much our evening resembled our pre-children days when we would get home from our day jobs and spend all evening working on inside and outside projects without any interruptions.

          My reflection didn’t make me long for the "good old days," though. Raising our three children is the best project we’ll undertake and anything else suffers by comparison.