Days like today remind me to live in gratitude for this place, for our little house in our lovely little neighborhood, just up the street from the shore of Puget Sound, where the soundtrack to our weekends is birdsong, the rumble of lawn mowers, and the joyful shrieks of children who have finished their breakfast cereal and told that no, they don't need to watch Netflix. Because it's a beautiful day.
The morning was bright with sunshine when I woke to the sound of my children's boisterous Saturday morning activity. (I use "boisterous" to spin their arguing in the best possible light. The truth is that they were being totally obnoxious and all up in each other's business.) We turned them loose outside as soon as we could. Matt mowed the lawn while they played with kids across the street; after lunch, he walked them over to Zannah's best friend's house for a birthday party, a fantastic backyard gathering in which Matt and I were also free to hang out, eat, drink, chat with the other adults, and watch the kids pelt each other with water balloons. I treated myself to my first pedicure of the season during the first hour of the party and headed over afterwards. At one point Matt walked back to our house to finish mowing the backyard and go for a run. I left once to scrub my kitchen, which was still full of breakfast dishes and spatters from the grill Matt used to make French toast. We popped in and out, sharing pot stickers from a nearby teriyaki place and chocolate birthday cake. Our hostess poured me a glass of dry Reisling, and I sipped it on the deck, chatting with other parents and half-watching the kids.
Shortly before five, I took my exhausted children home. I stuck one in the bathtub and one in the shower; they were covered with a sheen of sugar, dirt, and sweat. My son's mouth was ringed with remnants of birthday cake; Suzannah's lips were stained blue from Otter Pops. Their bare feet were grubby. Their hair clung to their sweaty cheeks and foreheads.
I love all this. I love that my children spent nearly all of their waking hours outside today. I love that we live in a neighborhood where we can pass the children back and forth: Our yard after school, yours after dinner. This yard on Saturday mornings, that yard on Sunday afternoons. Matt takes the kids to the park and swings by to pick up their friends on the way. We meet after school on the playground and say, "Why don't you send 'em over for awhile?" We intervene when someone's foot accidentally connects with someone's lip during a spirited game of tag, or when someone gets a little too enthusiastic with hurling water balloons at close range, but for the most part we can let the kids just be kids. We can let them just be.
Today there were no guided activities, no structured games, no Pinterest crafts we could later share on social media--just the comfortable being. The magic of childhood requires exactly this: that we let them run away from us, create their own games, and navigate their own roles. Figure it out, my loves. Over there. We are here, we are nearby, but we will not interfere in your world. Because deep down, we remember that the best part of childhood had nothing to do with whether or not our mothers decorated our birthday cakes or brought them home from the store and everything to do with the secret world we inhabited when they stepped back just enough to let it be ours. And the world we are learning to inhabit as your parents, this world in which we watch you grow and become and be from this barely tolerable distance, is equally full of magic.
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