Holiday pastimes...

Yesterday we took the three younger kids (Ant being away) to grandma's. She's re-decorating a room , and needed the old wall paper stripped off. So we took our steam stripper and a few scrapers and spent a happy afternoon peeling paper off the walls.
I let Bernie operate the steam stripper: she burned herself once but not twice: that's education! I didn't let Charlie have a go despite his clamouring - and despite being confident he could do so safely. I preferred to keep it as something that only the eldest child (present) could do. I think it is important to give the older children more responsibility than the younger: we make many more demands of them, so helping them feel there are positive aspects to being older is also important.