“Will they think I’m weird if I’m repelling off the play structure?”
“Who?”
“The neighbors.”
“They already think we’re weird.”
The three of us were walking across the park to the play structure. Jenny was carrying a climbing rope and harness. She’d come up with a new game – strategically place 10 bind weed blossoms and try to retrieve them without letting her feet touch the ground. In some cases, she needed to repel down and pick up the blossoms because she couldn’t access them from the structure any other way.
Will came along to watch. “Why do you care what the neighbors think?”
Jenny climbed the stairs of the play structure. “I don’t. Really. Well… I dunno. Is this weird?”
It was my job to gather the pink blossoms and place them around the structure. We had the whole park to ourselves. The sun was high and hot. I was wondering how long this was going to take. “If it’s fun, does it matter if it’s weird? Well, not too weird, I mean.” I found two more blossoms, “I hate wearing flips* to the park. Too many pokeys.”
Will laughed as he tried to fit his long legs and arms into the only bit of shade. “People aren’t really paying attention to what you are doing anyway. They’re mostly thinking about how they look and what they are doing.”
I looked up from hiding the last blossom. “That’s right. Where’d you hear that?”
“You told me that.”
I squeezed into the shade next to Will, “And you listened?”
*A million years ago, I lived in Redondo Beach for a couple months. I was asked to show my ID at a shop. When the cashier saw I was from Montana, he looked down at my feet and said, “Wow! They wear thongs (I told you it was a long time ago) in Montana?”
Tags: humor, kid wisdom, life, Parenting, thriving
Heh, heh. Ya never know what they file away. Way to go, Will! Did Jenny successfully retrieve her flowers?
And then when you get old, you don’t really care if they are watching. :)
Pat,
She got all but two because I couldn’t remember where the last two were.
Z,
And then when you get that much older, they stop watching altogether!
Thank God for that!