By Rhea!

When I was 5 years old, my mom and architect dad built our new house across the street from the house where we lived.

Before they ever started, they had a load of sand delivered to our new front yard. Then they threw a handful of small but shiny plastic beads into the sand and mixed them in with the sand.

When I started discovering them, I thought we were rich! I spent weeks searching through that sand collecting those obviously valuable gems. I didn't understand why they ignored me, when I showed them my treasures.

So their little trick worked. I was kept completely occupied while they built the house.

But every once in a while, they would give me a hammer and let me "help." I even got to walk on the beams before the floor was laid.

Even though I am now way past 50, I still remember those days so vividly.

The main place they let me actually drive some nails into the house was in the closet in my brother's bedroom. (I guess they figured no one would ever see them there.)

I remember trying to do a great job because I was "helping" the family and they needed me to do it right.

Yes, I bent nail after nail over which my dad would come behind me and fix. But I kept trying. I did finally learn how to get it right (even though today my carpenter husband wouldn't agree!) ;)

I almost felt like they couldn't build the house without me.

I wish there had been some kind of ceremony to commemorate the end of the project but I don't remember that there was. It just ended and we moved in.

A few years later, a builder built a small rental house across the street. All I remember was my dad being mad and I didn't know why. (It obviously affected the price of homes in our neighborhood and not in a good way.)

I mentioned that we should buy it to rent.

He promptly told me that he did not want to fix toilets in the middle of the night.

I didn't have a clue at the time what that meant.

I really wish he had bought that house because it soon changed hands, then again, then again.

Today, I would totally know what to do with a rental house like that because of the vast experience my son, my husband and I have had with rentals and selling houses on eBay.

Any way, I was surprised that Pop didn't listen to the wise advice of a probably 8-year-old.

When it came time to choose a college and a career, I sat on the floor in the lobby of the guidance office at my high school and selected one catalog off the shelves full of options. The college catalog wasn't too big and it wasn't too small, about an inch thick.

It was from Auburn University.

I opened it and immediately realized Auburn has a School of Architecture. So I flipped to the section where it gave a course overview.

All I wanted to see was what my dad had taken in school when I suddenly realized that I could take and probably pass all the courses listed, except art.

Being a "conscientious student," I had always taken the most academic classes. Art didn't seem to be part of Real Life. It seemed to me to fit in the category of fun stuff, along with P.E. and Band.

So although I had been in band from seventh grade through my senior year and loved P.E., I never had much regard for art.

When my guidance counselor had a minute, I asked her to get an application for me for Auburn. She quickly pulled one out of the drawer.

"Everyone who has ever gone to Auburn has absolutely loved it," she said.

So I filled it out and mailed it in.

About three weeks later, I got a nice acceptance letter in the mail.

My parents were shocked! They didn't even know I had applied to a college. I didn't really realize what I had done either.

So later that year in the early fall, I left home to attend the school of Architecture at Auburn University 8 hours from my home in Central Florida.

I was thrilled to begin studying something I loved only to realize how handy it would have been to have studied art a lot earlier.

After two years, I changed my major to education and graduated years later. I could have stayed at Auburn forever but alas, marriage changed my direction.

When I married my carpenter husband, I thought we would build and remodel houses forever.

We worked on a few projects but not like I thought we would. Then I started having babies and my Real Estate life ended.

Many years later, my oldest son became a real estate investor when he was 18. I dusted off the old dreams and accompanied him to live trainings all over the country for several years.

I was in heaven... until he learned how to sell the houses on eBay in about 7 days without even touching them.

So now he no longer remodels houses, he just sells them.

Off and on through the years, my husband has built or remodeled houses but I've never been able to help because I was having babies - lots of babies.

But now we're at a place where my husband is working with my older children to build houses for other people and I'm happy.

Even though I'm not able to work with them like I would like, I love it that they are working together and learning how to do Real Stuff.

This whole love of houses came from a positive experience a little girl had when she was 5 years old.

The next time you decide to park the kids Some Place Else while you work on Real Projects, realize what you could be robbing them of - a dream that could lead them for a lifetime.

The house is not the main thing you're building; you're strengthening an existing relationship, creating a memory that will last forever and giving your children a very meaningful experience that reveals the true purpose of work and could easily direct them throughout their lives.

Be careful with those gems.