Post - Saturday Evening Post

So we had chicken for dinner last night. It tasted like chicken.

Then, in order to keep the kids from driving me insane by running through the house screaming at each other, we decided to get their shoes on and walk them over to the high school behind the complex.

We got over to the school's track area, where there's this (10 foot? 15?) hill that the kids can run up and down. They did this a few times and then we decided to go to the baseball field. This is a rather nice baseball field, much better than the ones I played on in high school. Texas really knows how to spend its money on high school athletics. It's such a shame that Washington wastes its capital on stuff like higher quality education... but I digress. The kids loved running around the diamond, and then they had to go see the school logos hanging on the outfield fence. There's little more fun than watching three young children running around the outfield.

Then we went to the pole vault pit. The kids love playing on the pad on which the vaulters land. A giant pad of foam rubber - what could be more fun to run around/fall down on?

After a few minutes of that, it was time to run around the track. Now, for adults, running around the track is a fairly simple operation that involves running around the track. For kids, though, the act is a little more difficult. First off, the kids seem incapable of running more than about a 100 foot dash before their attention is diverted. Then they have to inspect every pebble/grass blade/piece of paint/ant/what-have-you that exists on the track. Now, this makes some sense the first time, since you may want to know what you're running on. However, when you've been to the track over 2 dozen times, you'd think you kind of have a good running tally of what to expect. Still, the kids are meticulous.

Then it was time to run on the hill a couple more times, and then run across the soccer field. The soccer field running was uneventful. But after they crossed the soccer field, their attention was diverted by the sprinklers running on the field.

Having been a child once, you must remember how little could bring a child glee more effectively than a sprinkler.

The kids were a little leary at first, as they were the school sprinklers and part of a sprinkler system, which means that they shot out with a force that the kids were unfamiliar with. But they eventually figured out a way to get wet. And then the floodgates opened - so to speak.
I don't know that anything that has happened this month has been as much fun for me as watching the kids play in the sprinklers.

By the time we got home, we had three drenched kids, and my shirt was soaked from carrying the little boy. So we ushered them into the kitchen so they could take their wet clothes off next to the washing machine, and then go upstairs to get their pajamas on. The loose translation of that is we got to see three little naked butts running around the house in every direction except up the stairs, because let's face it, kids can't ever go directly where they're supposed to - see the track explanation, infra. Eventually, we get them all to the stairs, and while The Boy and the Girl go up easily, the little boy stops. You see, there was a little toy dinosaur on the floor (about the size of those old Army Men), and that meant that the little naked boy had to pee on it. His diaper was off a grand total of about 3 minutes. I'm convinced that he was holding the pee just on the off chance that he'd get to run around without a diaper and pee on something.

Anyway, after the kids were all in their pajamas, we watched a few minutes of Toy Story 2 before it was time to shuffle them off to bed. They were pretty tuckered out, and didn't even fuss. All in all, it was a good evening.