Today was eleven hours of babysitting a busy four-year-old, most of it dashing around in the sun. I came home at 7:00 happy, and covered—no, really, covered—in scrapes (I cut up my knee nicely on the playground, diving to catch Aaron), sunburns, grass stains, chalk dust, sticky soap bubbles, and mud.
Here's what we did to earn those stripes...
- We assembled a jumbo jigsaw puzzle of the Solar System… Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. No Pluto. This blew my mind a little. (Great, the “my very educated mother just served us nice pizzas” mnemonic device is obsolete.)
- Aaron kept grabbing a bunch of partially deflated birthday balloons and shouting, “Up: Coming soon to a theater near you!” XD.
- Aaron piled into his little red wagon and we went to the Wagen Waschen place to sit on a little green hill, eat gummy worms, and watch car washes in progress.
- We went hunting for a new mysterious park (the stuff of Fountain of Youth and Northwest Passage lore) with no luck. Aaron grew pretty frustrated after awhile so I said cheerily, “Let’s play ‘I Spy’ while we’re looking. What should we try to spot?” Aaron looked at me like I had lead for brains and exclaimed, “The PARK!”
- Lead for brains or Lifesavers for brains. Aaron called me a Lifesaver…brain…head several times. I’ll try not to take that too personally.
- We spent about an hour up to our knees in the creek catching frogs. Muddy, muddy, muddy.
- Come naptime, I couldn’t for the life of me persuade Aaron to lie down for even one minute. He was obviously tired and verging on a major meltdown, so I strapped him in his stroller and took him for the longest walk ever. He fell asleep within minutes and I kept walking until he woke up 45 minutes later because I was afraid he’d wake up if I stopped moving.
- We busted out sidewalk chalk and bubbles at three and those kept us happily occupied until his parents came home at 6:30. We drew sidewalk rainbows, fish, sharks, Nemos, Wall-Es, Eves, Lightning McQueens, Titanics, Bad Icebergs, Big Dippers, Broken Wrists (not my idea!), centipedes, and aardvarks (because ‘aardvark’ starts like ‘Aaron’).
Really, a beautiful day all around. I felt very lucky to spend most of it outside and active, in the company of a little person who proclaimed almost everything we encountered ‘G’MAZING!’ XD.
