Perspective and an Impromptu Object Lesson

This week we received our first letter from our newest Compassion Child, a little girl from Kenya who was born the same day as our son.   This morning my husband was reading the newest Compassion Magazine, which we received yesterday and I asked him, "Did you read Sharon's letter? Did you see one of her chores is fetching water?"  Both of our kids were playing in the kitchen while we talked so when my 6 year old heard us he asked what "fetching water" meant. 

Since we were standing in the kitchen I turned on our faucet and told the kids how lucky we are to have running water.   I explained about how many people around the world aren't lucky enough to have water in their house and they have to go get it.  I explained that some people get their water from a well and others have to go get theirs from a body of water that they share with animals who drink and go to the bathroom there.  I asked the kids how they'd like to drink water that came from where animals pooped.   Needless to say there was a chorus of "EEEWWWWW".

I asked my son, "Sharon is your age.  Do you think you could carry water back to our house without spilling it?"  In typical 6 year old bravado he said, "Of course! That's easy!".   Immediately an idea started forming in my head and within minutes we had an impromptu object lesson this morning.

I filled 3 buckets with water: a small one they received as a gift, a 2.5 gallon bucket and a 5 gallon bucket. Our side of the street doesn't have a sidewalk, so I carried the buckets across the street and instructed them to carry the buckets down a few houses to a neighbor's house.

My 4 year old went first with the small bucket:

Next up was my 6 year old:

After both kids successfully carried the small bucket past 4 houses in our suburban neighborhood I had them attempt the 2.5 gallon bucket:

As you can see, my daughter couldn't even lift the 2.5 gallon bucket and by the time my son walked to our neighbor's house that we'd designated as our end point his bucket was basically empty.

The water ended up primarily on him, which he didn't mind since we're in the midst of a Phoenix summer and it was already about 95 when we were doing this at 11am.

After watching what happened when my son picked up the 2.5 gallon bucket I was quite interested to see what would happen once the kids attempted the next challenge:

I don't know if the kids fully got the object lesson I was trying to teach because they were more into how fun it was to get wet on this hot morning, but hopefully it'll stick.

Once we got in the house I was getting a little pushback when I asked them to mop the floor and unload the dishwasher.  We talked about how Sharon would probably LOVE a machine that did the dishes for her and I told them that where she lives they have dirt floors so she would think our tile floors were extremely fancy.

Our activities this morning were also a good dose of perspective for this mom.  For the past few weeks I've been seeing pictures on Facebook of vacations my friends are taking and I've been getting discouraged that we haven't been able to fit anything like that into our budget.  (Ironically when my kids dressed themselves this morning they both put on shirts given to them by a family member who went to Disney World last year and one of the things I've been really struggling with is not being able to afford to take our kids to Disneyland, despite it only being 6 hours away so I had that "god" in my face the whole time the kids were doing this).

Mom needed this dose of perspective at least as much as the kids.