I haven’t done a Way Back Wednesday post for a long time, so I decided to do a Throwback Thursday post tonight.

Because it’s my blog, and I can pretty much run the show here.

But really? The Throwback Thursday post is simply because the wrinkles in my brain have frozen themselves into a state of complete inactivity tonight, and WRITER’S BLOCK, PEOPLE!

(I’m beginning to think that Writer’s Block is becoming a lifelong ailment that I can blame a whole lot of ridiculously boring blog posts on.)

(I’d also like to blame other things on it. As in, “Honey, my Writer’s Block flared up today, so I didn’t get any laundry done; I’m sorry that you don’t have any clean Levi’s to wear to work, but you know how I suffer when the Writer’s Block is upon me. I think I’ll just lay here on the sofa for a while, with a cold compress and the television turned to HGTV.”)

These pictures were taken when the boy was five.

Back when he was a little darling and thought that helping me with the housework was fun. He had a plastic mop cart that Mam and Pa bought for him for Christmas when he was in preschool, which was loaded with all kinds of brooms and brushes and Clorox wipes, and he’d follow me around the house, sweeping all over and dusting everything. That boy of ours was USEFUL when he was five.

Now the boy’s idea of cleaning involves taking all the discarded Pop Tart wrappers off of the desk in his bedroom and throwing them into his closet. Clearly, he is officially ready for college, because I think that this is how the nineteen-year-old male cleans a dorm room.

Regardless, this series of snapshots tickles my funny bone and makes me ache to squeeze that five-year-old boy again. The pictures were taken at exactly this time of year, when the leaves were falling like golden rain.

At the age of five, the boy was not only helpful with housework, he was also helpful with outdoor chores. He loved the rake, and he was actually quite good at raking leaves into piles. He would, in fact, rake for hours, because he thought it was FUN! Now days, if Hubs and I hand the kid a rake he looks at us and asks, “How many leaves do I have to rake to earn twenty bucks?”

Raking leaves is really hard work, though.

And any time that man thinks a job is too hard, he turns to a motorized invention that will speed things up and make the work load easier.

In this case, it was the leaf blower.

Sometimes, though, a leaf blower can be stuffed under your jacket and turned on High Power. If you do this, your jacket will poof out like the Michelin Tire guy!

It’s actually pretty funny when your jacket fills up with air!

Unfortunately, you don’t get a whole lot of leaves raked when you’re busy inflating your Columbia jacket with air. No matter. Your parents will howl with laughter and take lots of pictures of you, and they’ll probably forget all about the chores you were supposed to be doing, before you decided to be the family clown!