When the cat's away....

I always thought that I'd love to be a flyspeck on the wall seeing what the kids do when I'm not around. Christopher uses the camera once or twice a year usually, but he did take some photos last week of the big kids frolicking one night while I was at work. To set up the scenario, you have to understand that the days when I work, the kids are well looked after at Grammy and Grampy's house (aka Utopia). Often, the transition is a tough one for the kids. Not that they don't love their Daddy, but who among us would want to leave pure paradise (endless rivers of chocolate milk, the occasional cookie, a Land Before Time (dinosaur) movie, and the patience of saints) to return to a place where you are expected to eat your vegetables, endure time outs, brush and floss your teeth and be asleep by 7pm? (Wait a minute, THAT might actually be Chris' and MY definition of utopia!) At any rate, Daddy has smartened up and started offering bribes (I mean, incentives) to get the kids moving off towards home without the usual tears, kicking and screaming. And what did he offer last week? Puddle jumping in the mud on a dark, stormy night! What more could two boys shy of 4 years old ask for? You can see they had a ball climbing to the top of the cord wood mountain and jumping in knee-high mud while out taking a "rain bath" as Colin likes to say. It's the simple pleasures for our boys and honestly, the fun was worth the filth-encrusted play clothes that will never ever be the same again (OxiClean be damned for their false advertising). You can imagine the state of the clothes that will be passed on to poor Eamon. But, the great thing about having boys is, they've never once complained about my choice of outfits for them and they seem to enjoy the dirt they've accumulated. If one can measure the pure joy of one's life from the number of clothes that were destroyed during it, our boys are well on their way to being blessed with VERY happy lives.