Hannah's Hard Lesson Learned

This summer Hannah had quite the learning experience that totally brought a childhood experience back to me.  All three girls were outside riding the 4-wheeler; Hannah driving.  Dave and I were inside preparing dinner because we had Grandma Welker, Grandma Welker, Grandma Peterson, and Aunt Wendy coming.  Hannah comes through the back door and with a sad face tells us that she ran over a tree.  Now let me say that we did our yard last year so these trees aren't very big.  In fact, it was one year ago now that we purchased the trees for the yard.

Dave asked Hannah how bad the tree was hurt.  She said it's laying down.  I have to say I was quite impressed with Dave.  He didn't get mad at Hannah.  He just asked her if she was driving too fast.  She said she wasn't but he told her that she must have been in order to not have missed the tree.

When Dave went outside to check the damage to the tree, he returned and informed me that she did a doozer.  The tree was unsalvagable.  She broke it off at the bottom.  Come to find out, Hannah had her head turned backward talking to the other girls as she was driving forward slowly and ran over the tree.  Oops!

This totally reminded me of the time when   I was little that I was outside driving the lawn mower.  Yes, I was driving the lawn mower.  We didn't have a cool 4-wheeler at the time.  I was on the side of our house in Smithfield and was going in reverse when I ran into the chain link fence.  I was so devastated because it bent the fence.  I remember my Dad was at work and I knew I was going to be in so much trouble when her returned.  I asked my mom if she would call my uncle to come up and fix the fence before my Dad got home.  Then I told my dad a dog ran into the fence and left some blood on it.  Do you think he ever figured out that the red was the paint from the lawn mower and not from a dog?

After everyone left from dinner, Hannah wasn't happy but we made her hold the tree so we could get some pictures for posterity sake.  In a few years the story will be funny.  For now......we're saving up to purchase a new tree!  Hannah is worried we'll make her pay for it but we were more impressed that she took ownership of the situation and came to us with the truth instead of trying to hide it.  Can you punish a kid for that?  Hopefully this is a good lesson to her that she can come and talk to us about anything.  I think it's better to keep the door open for communication than worry about replacing the tree.