And ... it begins :)

After weeks of planning and rain delays, it finally happened …

Summer Arrived

and with it, the first of many trips to our favorite park with the best of friends.

But it almost didn’t happen.

Ben had to work late.  And our friends had commitments at school.  And by 7:30 it was looking like we would need to push this trip off one more week.  But just as the sun sank below the horizon, ten ecstatic kids jumped from van sliders and suburban doors and raced towards their monument to childhood.

And a winter’s worth of pent up energy was let loose in a mess of wind-blown hair and mud-stained jeans.

 

For a few pointless moments I wondered how Sean would fare with his hand bandaged up.  Turns out, he managed just fine.  He was more than capable of showing off fresh-baked cookies from the Christensons to every.kid.around.

 

And fiercely protective of his six feet of bright purple tubing.  Don’t even think about trying to crawl through there.

Dude means business.

     

Apparently so does Growly. 

I tried to stop her for two seconds to clean off her train wreck of runny nose vs. sandy pit only to be repulsed with an emphatic Noooooo!

Alrighty then.

Instead I had to settle for blurry shots as she spent her precious minutes of play time racing from tube to tube, giggling, jumping and climbing.

Or maybe they weren’t blurry pictures after all.  Maybe Ash was just out of focus from eight to nine o’clock.

While the boys raced across monkey bars and hid out in tunnels,  the girls sped down slides and up sand-covered steps.

     

And around the edges, four tired parents chatted and watched and counted noses and stood guard and smiled as the first rush of summer swirled around.

And somewhere in the middle of the happy commotion, I noticed a little girl running around where my baby was supposed to be.  Maybe it was the piggy tails—a first for Ash.  Or maybe it was that she was dressed so much like a kid instead of a baby, but the image was a bit jarring.

Where did you come from?  And where did my baby go?

 

She’s growing up.  It’s another year.  Another beginning to another summer, and the reminder that life and all of its living never stops moving—just like my Dirty Half Dozen.

And so I smiled at my girl … and finally got that faced wiped off … and sent her back into the whirlwind of sand piles and mud holes for the last few minutes of the day.

Welcome summer, indeed.

*************************************************

Thanks Neil & Amy for a great night with your beautiful children!