Thank you for the wonderful comments! Mom is doing well. I've got my 4yo daughter helping stack,. My 3yo boy swings the hatchet I did when I was little and splits cookies into chunks for the "forge". I'll try and post pics. And before the safety Sally's chime in (rightfully) I've taken the edge off and its 1/8th wide. I'll sharpen it up for him when he's mature enough. I've already made a new mulberry handle for it.
Beautiful Baby!!! Congrats! Yea, ya gotta start early in the training, I started training mine 15 years ago, and now look at her! … I can't get her away from the splitter now!
On the electric splitters you must mash a button to turn the motor on, and hold the lever to send fluid to the piston, he learned really fast to hold the wood with a shin if it won't sit right. This was last year, this year he's done a good bit of the stacking. Next year he might be ready for the gas splitter...
I reward him with more time on his phone, he and his sisters must earn everything after the first 60 minutes, I use an app called screentime and each task has time they can ask for after it is complete. It doesn't cost me anymore money, and they get motivated to earn more time for games. As one coworker put it, you don't have children, you have servants! No, I just expect my kids to work for what they want and to never expect to mooch for a living.
My wife sometimes tells me that I am abdicating my parental responsibilities. Perhaps she is correct, but it is my nature I suppose. When my grandmother told me the story of the ant and grasshopper as a kid, I always felt bad when the ant turned the grasshopper away when it was starving in winter because it had played all summer ... to this day, it seems such a better ending for the ant to have compassion and share with the grasshopper. One day I will have a talk with Aesop and suggest this improvement!
I grew up in a family where we all had chores to do. I think children having chores is a good thing, they learn about things; such as splitting wood, that can help them in later life. In my family everyone did everything so everyone learned how to do everything. I remember being in the crawl space with me Dad working on frozen pipes; copper pipes. Dad would tell me things as we worked; such as, as long as there is water in the pipe, you won't get it hot enough to loosen the joints, or solder repairs. Or helping to peel peaches to put in the pressure bottler; how to preserve food that we grew in the gardens; how to grow the food that we preserved. It is all good.
