Won't you please, please help me?

Jacob is a great helper. He always wants to help me wash the dishes, empty the dishwasher and sweep the floors. My visiting teachers told me that I should take pictures of him doing some of these things so that when he is a teenager I can prove to him that at one point he WANTED to help me... without me even asking! So here is the proof:

Sometimes the task at hand may take much longer with his "help" than it would if I just did it myself, which makes it easy to be temped to say, "Mommy doesn't need help with this" or "not this time". So when Jacob wants to help me I have to stop for a second and remind myself that if I want him to help me in the future I have to let him help me now. Then he feels good about helping me and will (hopefully) be more willing to do the things that I ask him to do. Besides, I have learned to get more creative and let him "help" me by sweeping the floors while I work on getting something else clean in the kitchen.

It was a cloudy, windy day today, so we didn't get to go play outside. Instead Jacob and I worked together to build this lovely castle while Ephraim napped. I bet you can't even tell which parts of it I put up, and which parts were added by Jacob.