i am the lorax and i speak for the trees

as some of you may know (all 2 of you that read this!) ;-) our brayden is one sensitive fellow. he feels his feelings deeply (as i say to people when describing him). well a year and a half or so ago we chopped down a tree in our front yard. it was dying/dead and wasn't gonna make it. we made the mistake of not warning/telling the children prior to the tree cutters showing up to do their job. it was during a weekday when the kids were home with the sitter. it would be an understatement to say that this DEEPLY affected brayden. he was very sad to see the tree go and didn't understand why we couldn't just water it to make it better.

fast forward to last saturday and we still have the stump in our yard (i know i know, we are ALL kinds of lazy about that. it costs all of $35 to get rid of it but whatever).

so saturday we were starting to think about seeding the yard for the spring (albeit a tad late) and brian decides that we need to go ahead and remove the stump so as to make way for a beautiful carpet of lovely grass.

he makes THE CALL.

stump then scheduled to be removed sunday.

somehow brayden gets wind of this and immediately goes to work. he starts pulling everything (that is easy to move) out of our garage to place it on said stump in an attempt to make it so the stump man cannot do his work. once he gets his pile in place, he marches around it guarding it dutifully. he is not planning on leaving his post and will sleep there if he has to.

(notice how he put the chair in the very middle on top of the actual stump so he could sit in it and take breaks from his guard. he ain't no dummy.)

later in the evening as it was time to clean up for bed, he and daddy moved all of the items back in the garage and he came up to prepare for bed. just before we got jammies on i asked if the boys wanted to go tell the stump goodbye because i didn't know when the stump man would be by and it may be when we aren't paying attention. brayden (of course) wanted to go and even bennett who has been down with fever for like 5 days nodded that he wanted to go too. we tromp downstairs and outside to the stump. i have them all put their hands on it and say something like, "thank you stump. thank you for providing such a wonderful tree for us and others all these years. we are sorry that we didn't get to tell the upper part of you goodbye but we wanted to make sure and tell you goodbye." i think a few other things were said on my part and then i turned to brayden and bennett and asked if they wanted to say anything. bennett - no. brayden - no but he had a huge tear running down his cheek. i hugged him again for like the 50th time over this and explained that it was time to let the stump go. he just sat down on it and said he wasn't moving. about that time brian walks up and i looked at him and said (out of earshot of brayden), "we may want to reconsider doing this right now." bennett and i went in and brian went over to talk to brayden. a few minutes later brayden came running in saying, "guess what?! guess what?! daddy said that we'll leave the stump there! they aren't going to come take it away!" and immediately started crying those uncontrollable happy tears of relief. wow.

the next evening i found daddy and brayden out in the front yard practicing batting. brayden was standing on that stump as if it was home plate and was looking mighty happy.