Showing posts with label playground fun. Show all posts
Showing posts with label playground fun. Show all posts
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I must confess to being down in the dumps a bit lately. The weather has been so muggy and hot. My intention to "do something fun every day" has suffered as we've spent a lot of time sitting around the house, and the kids have watched more movies than I'd like to admit. I was reading the kids a book about a sailing ship that gets caught in the doldrums and as I explained what the doldrums were I realized the perfect explanation was "the last few days around here."
We went to the art museum Friday and as we were ready to leave we looked outside and saw it was pouring. We poked around the museum hoping the rain would stop, but it never let up so we ended up getting soaked as we raced back to the car. When we arrived home, the sun was shining again, and the kids wanted to run through the big puddle that forms in our neighborhood every time it rains. We grabbed our rain boots and headed over:
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The rain boots came off and I winced, knowing one of my neighbors was probably watching and itching to voice her disapproval. Then my son decided to leave the puddle and take a trip down the slide on the nearby playground, one he's gone down a thousand times. But this time there was a huge mud puddle at the bottom:
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When he first went down, I thought he'd be traumatized at the bottom. But he loved it so much he raced back to do it again before his sister could even try it.
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There was so much laughter every time one of them hit that puddle.
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At some point the girl screamed, "This is the most fun day EVER!" and it hit me that you don't have to drive somewhere or plan some complicated adventure to have fun. Sometimes the best fun is what they discover themselves. Sometimes they just have to find a little mud.
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And then: a warm midday bath (with extra scrubbing behind the ears) and the sun shines until that puddle disappears. But at least there's a new wind at our back.
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We were at the farmer's market a few weeks ago and some of those boys who play the rubber buckets were busking for change and our boy was fascinated. The other day I found a bunch of different sized metal buckets and an old empty glass liqueur bottle and we dragged them out to the playground and he put on his straw Pith helmet and unleashed a sonic assault on the neighbors almost as bad as when 50 Cent played a nearby outdoor amphitheater a few weeks before. According to Wikipedia, this is exactly how John Bonham learned to play the drums.
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He wandered around the playground looking through the public pots and pans for new and different drums for his expanding kit. A regular Neil Peart over here.
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Our neighborhood has this huge community sandbox area, and sometimes the neighbor kids bring out plastic beach toys (probably the same plastic rakes, shovels, and buckets for sale at every Wal-Mart and Target across the country). For some reasons the kids don't really use them in the sand box, but I noticed a few weeks ago that whenever I brought over our real metal shovel the kids would fight over it. So we went to the thrift store the other day and dropped about $5 on a huge bag of metal pie pans and utensils and bakeware (again, probably less than the standard plastic beach set at your standard big box). The kids have played with this stuff every day since we brought it home, making all kinds of disgusting food that I have to pretend to eat.
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It's just further proof that some of the oldest ideas are still the best. Since we started discretely leaving the cooking stuff under a bush near the playground, we've noticed new spoons, bowls, and other utensils have magically appeared in the bucket.
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