Outdoor Fun
I’m settling into a nice routine getting the kids outside. Everyone eats lunch, I clean up the mess, and then we go outside for a while until naptime. We can spend anywhere between 15 and 60 minutes outside depending on how much the kids enjoy the fresh air, and how much yogurt Abbie that spewed about the kitchen I have to clean before we can go outside in the first place.
We don’t do anything special outside. I sit in the grass with the twins under a shade tree while Abbie runs around the yard. I take advantage of this quiet time to read the newspaper. The children take advantage of my inattentiveness to get into trouble.
Fortunately the twins are still too young to get into much trouble. Until recently, the worst they could do is crawl out of the shade and into the direct sunlight. This is a no-no because Ellie and I both have families with a history of fair skin, and by “fair” I mean “pasty white.” We burn easily, so it’s important to limit our sunlight exposure and stay in the shade. By gradually increase our daily time in the sun, we can build our tolerance up to a familial maximum of about 30 minutes without burning, a personal milestone typically reached sometime around age 100. Slathering them in sunscreen would help their tolerances, but it’s been too hot recently to be in the direct sun anyway.
The twins recently discovered a new outdoor activity: Shoving stuff in their mouths. No longer are they limited to the objects we hand them; they can pick things off the ground and chew on them. I’m not sure why it took them so long to figure this out, but I wish it had taken a little longer. They started by picking grass and chewing on it, but have progressed to sticks, rocks, sand, and anything else that makes it hard for me to scour the weekend’s garage sale ads. The one thing they haven’t tried eating are those toadstools in the grass with us under the tree, and that’s a good thing because they look nasty.
While I pull blades of grass from toothless mouths, Abbie likes to wander to the neighbor’s back door for a couple novel activities. First, she likes trying to break into their tool shed. I don’t know what they keep in their shed, but if it’s anything like ours, it’s filled with all manner of objects with extreme potential to poke an eye out.
The shed is just a diversion to her main goal of examining their flowers. They keep a couple large pots filled with beautiful flowers; the kind we’d keep if we had the time, money, and thumbs that weren’t grim-reaper-black. Abbie loves sniffing these beautiful blooms that she otherwise only sees in books. Then she loves grabbing and pulling them.
She hasn’t pulled any flowers off the stems yet to my knowledge, but that may only because she doesn’t realize she can pick flowers. Or maybe I just haven’t watched her close enough to see her ruin any blossoms. Either way, when I see her playing in the neighbor’s flowers, I put down my newspaper and hustle to their door. I then carefully extract any petals from her fingers, and lead her back to our backdoor. Once Abbie resumes running around, I return to my newspaper, but only after verifying that no woodchips are about to enter any little mouths.
We don’t do anything special outside. I sit in the grass with the twins under a shade tree while Abbie runs around the yard. I take advantage of this quiet time to read the newspaper. The children take advantage of my inattentiveness to get into trouble.
Fortunately the twins are still too young to get into much trouble. Until recently, the worst they could do is crawl out of the shade and into the direct sunlight. This is a no-no because Ellie and I both have families with a history of fair skin, and by “fair” I mean “pasty white.” We burn easily, so it’s important to limit our sunlight exposure and stay in the shade. By gradually increase our daily time in the sun, we can build our tolerance up to a familial maximum of about 30 minutes without burning, a personal milestone typically reached sometime around age 100. Slathering them in sunscreen would help their tolerances, but it’s been too hot recently to be in the direct sun anyway.
The twins recently discovered a new outdoor activity: Shoving stuff in their mouths. No longer are they limited to the objects we hand them; they can pick things off the ground and chew on them. I’m not sure why it took them so long to figure this out, but I wish it had taken a little longer. They started by picking grass and chewing on it, but have progressed to sticks, rocks, sand, and anything else that makes it hard for me to scour the weekend’s garage sale ads. The one thing they haven’t tried eating are those toadstools in the grass with us under the tree, and that’s a good thing because they look nasty.
While I pull blades of grass from toothless mouths, Abbie likes to wander to the neighbor’s back door for a couple novel activities. First, she likes trying to break into their tool shed. I don’t know what they keep in their shed, but if it’s anything like ours, it’s filled with all manner of objects with extreme potential to poke an eye out.
The shed is just a diversion to her main goal of examining their flowers. They keep a couple large pots filled with beautiful flowers; the kind we’d keep if we had the time, money, and thumbs that weren’t grim-reaper-black. Abbie loves sniffing these beautiful blooms that she otherwise only sees in books. Then she loves grabbing and pulling them.
She hasn’t pulled any flowers off the stems yet to my knowledge, but that may only because she doesn’t realize she can pick flowers. Or maybe I just haven’t watched her close enough to see her ruin any blossoms. Either way, when I see her playing in the neighbor’s flowers, I put down my newspaper and hustle to their door. I then carefully extract any petals from her fingers, and lead her back to our backdoor. Once Abbie resumes running around, I return to my newspaper, but only after verifying that no woodchips are about to enter any little mouths.
posted by Matt at
11:51 PM
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