Sibling Rivalry

There comes a point with all children when they begin competing with their siblings.  L seems to grow more independent every day.  Most of the time I don't think he or N remembers that he isn't even two yet.  Almost as soon as he could walk, L would watch for N to stop playing with something, sneak over, and then take off running with it.  More recently, the fun of just swiping a toy has given way to a genuine desire to play with it like his big brother.  Of course, this competition goes both ways.  L has started playing more with "big boy" toys that N has interest in playing with as well.  L has passed the stage where he will instantly trade toys with N, and assume that he is getting something good just because big brother was playing with it.  It is going to be a long spring and summer for both of them learning to share and take turns.  Given equal toys though, they can play together pretty nicely.  This was evident on Saturday.  It was too muddy to play in the dirt, but I let them play in the rocks.  They both had loaders, and, for the most part, could take turns loading the dump truck.  Watching the boys play nicely together, in the sun, with the flowers in bloom, was a very beautiful sight.

The sibling rivalry apparently also rubbed off on my tractors this week. After my successful mowing exercise last weekend, I declared victory on Johnny and finally turned my attention to the carburetor rebuild on the Cat.  The carb, while complete, looks pretty nasty from years of neglect.  Upon starting the disassembly  process, I saw the nastiness continued on the inside.  I'm certain the carb has been rebuilt at some point during the tractor's 82 year life, but I suspect it was before the advent of ethanol fuels.  I have no way of knowing what the condition of the float would be otherwise, but whatever coating was on the cork had severely deteriorated.  It's no wonder it didn't meter fuel very well.

I didn't get too far on the carb before Thursday, when we had a break in the rain and I thought I better get the yard mowed.  I enlisted Johnny's help in doing the back yard, and as I was almost done, the engine speed started racing much faster than I wanted it too.  I guess Johnny didn't like me giving all my attention to the other tractor.  Fortunately, it just turned out that the governor needed readjusting.  Still that relatively easy fix took up most of my limited shop time over the weekend.  I'm going to have to hit the carb work hard this week if I want to have the tractor ready for the Route 66 show in two weeks.

I'll close this entry with an invention I came up with today.  I can remember Dad grumbling about the grass in our Easter baskets making a mess as I was growing up.  This morning I got to have one of those moments for myself.  I was cleaning up after breakfast as C was getting ready for church, and turned my back on N as I was getting L cleaned up and out of his high chair.  When I turned back around, N was standing on the couch using the yellow grass from his Easter basket as "pixie dust", sprinkling it all over.  I immediately commanded him to clean it up, which he begrudgingly started to do.  L, ever the little helper, jumped in too.  However, it didn't take long before we had built up enough static charge that more grass was sticking to our hands and arms than we were putting back into the basket.  This development quickly frustrated all of us, and I could see we were getting nowhere fast.  The whole thing seemed very similar to picking up the fake pine needles our Christmas tree leaves behind, which I usually do by wrapping masking tape around my fingers.  I didn't think that the boys would be able to help much that way, but then I saw their monster trucks sitting there and I had an idea.  I wrapped the truck tires in tape, and had them see who could pick up the most grass with their truck.  We filled the tape several times before we were done, but it was a good way to get them to help, and it did a good job of picking it all up.  We will probably still be finding pieces of grass for months, but at least we got most of it.