Boulder Baby

This is an outdoorsy kind of a place, and Eleri immediately got the bug. All she wants to do is go outside. Outside, outside, outside. Here is a common scene in our house:


Outside is great, except that I have no idea what to do with her once we're out there. I keep thinking of that Chevy Chase movie The Great Outdoors. (I can't really remember anything about it except that the title is a bit ironic, which is the point here.)

We go for stroller walks. We sit in the grass and watch the squirrels. We pick plums off our neighbors tree and eat them (both of the girls are extremely enamored with this activity- and really, who can blame them?) I try, oh, how I try, to remember the games of my idyllic, suburban youth; what, exactly, are the rules to Kick the Can? But then I realize that this is the problem: those games don't apply at this age. I can't remember being one, and when Clio was one I was working full time, she was in day care full time, and I was about to become pregnant; there was no "outside." There was only, "Oh yes, I remember you. Let's eat dinner and go to bed."

Last night, I feel like we finally kind of got it. We ate dinner on the deck, then Dave started doing manly, husbandly work in the yard, clearing some old brush and collecting branches into the compost bin; and fatherly things like locating a bright yellow tennis ball and throwing it so very high up in to the air that his daughters shrieked in delight, asking "again, Daddy, again". I got to do lazy woman things like flipping through Real Simple over a glass of wine and glancing from time to time at my children, playing in the long grass. It bears noting that when I did get in on the action, the game of my invention--bouncing the tennis ball on the ground and encouraging the girls to get it on the rebound before I did--resulted in tears, not once, but three times. So, as long as the daddy is around, we can probably all get used to the outdoors. And make them great.