Four wheeling lesson

In January Jay rode his four wheeler and guess what, it didn't have any oil in it and he blew his engine.  I have meant to blog about this but the past few months have been filled with my dad's unexpected death, his funeral and oh yeah, mom's stroke.  I digress.  Anyway Mike told Jay he would have to re-build his own engine.  During the winter months I would find Jay on his laptop looking up parts, making parts lists.  This spring our entire garage was set up with tables and parts everywhere.  We spent our spring and summer tripping over kayaks, four wheelers and parts.  When we reached this summer Jay had about had it.  It was a really big deal for Jay to do this.  He had to organize, plan and focus, and just when he thought he had everything he needed to get started, and that didn't even include building the engine, Mike would review his parts list and tell him he missed a few things.  Jay would have to get his book out that came with his four wheeler and review it yet again.  Jay would go back to the drawing board and keep adding to his never ending parts list.  Obviously all of these parts cost money, a lot of money.  Mike and I paid for his parts in exchange for Jay's free labor for Cornerstone.  At one point this summer Jay was so worn down by the process that Mike and I gave Jay a choice, we could scrap the entire thing.  We could sell his four wheeler as is, knowing we'd lose our shirt on it, and then Jay could work for Mike and Mike would pay him, or Jay could work for Mike, Mike would keep track of his hours, knowing Jay was "working off" his parts list.  Jay opted to keep moving forward in the process.  He wanted a running and working four wheeler.  He worked for Mike hauling bunk beds up and down stairs at a sorority (during a season when the girls weren't there, bummer), in addition to several other jobs that weren't very favorable.  About a week ago all the parts came in.  Jay enlisted his grandfather's help, as building engines for John is like cocktail hour for me, very exciting!  John and Jay spent 10 hours last Saturday rebuilding his engine.  Jay spent this week tweaking a few things and tonight he finally got it to turn over and start.  I was really proud of Mike and Jay.  Mike wanted Jay to learn a lesson which in the end taught him the consequences of his actions, perseverance, a job well done knowing he completed something from start to finish.  Mike likes his stuff cleaned up.  He takes care of his things and I know it drove him crazy to have his garage in the condition it was in for 9 months.  He kept at Jay because trust me Jay would have put this off, mostly because it was hard work and required a lot of focus.  I think most dads would have given in and taken the four wheeler to a dealer and paid someone else to fix the mess we were in, but Mike kept with it and in the end demonstrated to his son what it felt like to see something through until the end.  I give Jay a lot of credit too.  He was presented with choices along this journey and every time he choose to keep moving forward to get the job done.  He learned several hands on skills, not to mention the organizational skills he learned.  He stuck it out until the end which honestly isn't something I'm really good at, so to see him do this at 16 makes me exceptionally proud of him!