With the return of school the older kids are all busy with the details of their own lives. This leaves Rowan, especially, feeling lonely and bored. We found a great book at the library about really messy experiments and have exploded grapes, launched nickles (instead of the suggested tomatoes), crushed cans, dropped watermelons, and basically added to the overall disarray of our environment. But sometimes throwing eggs or hurling bananas at your mother just don't satisfy a kid's more primal needs. So I finally decided to reclaim a bit of our Blue Hole heritage and, with some friends in tow, we trespassed on our old stomping grounds.
Willow, Cicely, and Clovis stripped down to their bare bottoms and dived right in but Rowan decided to get wet one garment at a time. Mostly he lurked around the edges- something that paid off when he caught a tiny frog- and then decided to do some tree climbing. He was quickly joined by an admiring group of lesser skilled tree huggers and we both realized that Willow needs some serious arboreal experience if she wishes to remain in this family. By her age all the others had found their ways to the top of more than one precarious perch and little Miss Thing couldn't seem to grasp (literally) the concept of tree scaling. Lucky for them both this particular educational inadequacy piques me, so we'll just have to make regular visits to the wilds of Blue Hole to polish our tree climbing skills.
P.S. My own private Kudo to the always lovely Vera, who wasn't quite up for skinny dipping but didn't hesitate to strip off her shoes and conquer the "snake" tree- skirt and all.
