From The Shade Of A Friends Fence

Last night we went over to a friends house to let our kids run through their sprinkler. Our kids never want to run through our sprinkler, although after running through theirs Eleanore has requested that we pull ours out tonight, but if you take them over to somebody elses house to run and jump and play through their sprinkler- yeah well, theirs is always going to be wayy more fun, right?

So we filled our hungry bellies up with fresh fruits before we left the house, piled into our scorching hot bbq of a van, and headed down the street so that the babies could play in the water, while the mama's and papa's layed in the shade.



It was a little unfair, for Evelyn, who these days is determined to do everything that her older brother and sister do. Unfortunately, since she can't walk yet, and since she gets distracted by the delicious stomach puncturing dead grass along the way, we kind of had to hold her captive on the blanket with us.

But look at that smile. How bad can it be?



Charlie spent a lot of time going back and forth between the 3 sprinklers spigits, and his own-personal-but-really-just-borrowed man cave.



And when he wasn't hanging out in his no girls allowed play house, he was spying on the neighbors through the fence behind us, who were also outside playing in water, and by the smell of it, possibly grilling. ...aaaand they had a puppy, so- .



Eleanore is very particular when it comes to temperature and texture. The host (aka Jen) had made some bananas-dipped-in-honey freezer pops before we came, and Eleanore surprised us all by digging in. To get her to eat something like this at home would have been an awful battle of will not worth fightingfor. But here at her friends house, where she was distracted with summertime sunshine and squishy orange balls that soak up water, her mind was opened up to the possibility of eating something other than plain fruit. Something a little bit more fun. And that was pretty cool. Theres no other way to say it.

I'm going to take that as a step in the right direction for our fiesty four year old, be real when it comes to not expecting for it to happen again, tuck it away in my lint filled pocket, and hope to find it again on a rainy day. Or maybe even another sunny day.


Soon the bananas went mushy though, the sprinkler lost its thrill, and tiredness turned into whining turned into tantrums turned into ok-its-time-to-go-home. So we stood up, shook the sweat off of our foreheads, stripped off the wet clothes in the driveway, and went home for bowls filled with pineapple, plates of dates, a tv playing sesame street, and a story and then to bed.



An afternoon well documented.