Today marks the end of a very long and ambitious week for me. For the past couple of months, I've had the luxury of our mother's helper for three mornings every week. This past week, since I'd been feeling a bit more energetic (though after this week, that's no longer the case), I thought I'd be adventurous and attempt to take the kids to a playdate hosted at the home of one of the families in our Catholic Moms group, so I told E not to come on Wednesday. The kids loved the spacious yard with its fun play equipment and large kiddie pool in which to splash around with a bunch of other kids (and I loved conversing with the other moms in the shade). After that, though I'm so glad we went, it's safe to say we were all thoroughly exhausted-- enough for everyone to take long afternoon naps (except for me). But I got a message on my cell phone that afternoon that E wasn't going to be able to come the next day. So we made do and played and did reading and writing lessons in the morning and went to the library after lunch-- a feat, I think, in itself (I was reassured of the beauty of my library reserve system as we carted our 20 or so books, divvied up between the four of us, out of the front doors, and then had to
return to the circulation desk and check each of our books
again because the alarm went off, as it does 85% of the time when I have the kids with me). No matter...
checking on the bugs...
The kids always enjoy their outings to different parks around the South Hills with E, but I'm just not up for that yet-- at least the frequency with which they ask to go. While I'd love for them to "get outside" and "unleash some energy," our yard doesn't exactly pass muster for playtime. They'll ride bikes around the sidewalk connected to our neighbors' and tool around looking for bugs, and on rare occasions when I'm ready to take on three kids in wet and grassy swimsuits and bodies, we get out the hose and play sink, but it's not all that captivating for long. So we've been keeping an eye out on Craigslist for a suitable- and cheap- play set-- sadly, all the wood ones are too big for our yard. The other day, I found just the thing and emailed about it right away, and even asked the woman if she would take considerably less for it than she was asking (the nerve, right?), and she did! Mike went out during a thunderstorm last night to disassemble it to put in our van and bring home. Fortunately, we fared better weather-wise this evening and let the kids play around in the water while Dad expertly reassembled the playground in a matter of minutes. He's great like that.
The end result? A playground... and a dungeon and a mountain with a cave and a castle and an enchanted tower and a restaurant and a pirate ship and a tree house... all rolled into one! Now they have a medium to really let their imaginations run wild... I love it. And so do they. Jack was giddy this evening getting ready for bed, talking about how he wanted to show his friends how neat our new playground is... and when he could see it out his window-- he said he just couldn't believe we had that in our backyard, to stay. So sweet... all of them.
1 comment:
Fun! We're a-comin' over!
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