Growing Versions

My son pledged with his friend this weekend to visit every playground they saw.  His friend made an important addition to this pledge, to visit every unseen one too.

We have had a sick boy on our hands and one of the many ways that he has endured it is dreaming up pranks and admiring this girl's hacks.  The balloon one especially keeps on giving and now I have a balloon phone case which I cannot show you because it masks my camera.  He's perfected this one! We have started to make a list so we can unsystematically try them all. Main ingredients, ballons, glue, glow sticks and more glue.

 Have you heard about The Land  in Wales?  It is a playground that most of us, at first glance, would say looks more like a vacant lot.  Kids play freely there, able to tend fires, jump on old mattresses, play with garbagey things and muck around in the dirt. In other words, it is the best play ground ever.  I love this Paris  playground too. It is simple and unassuming, but I can just tell that its' suggestive cement canvas gets kids reinventing on a daily basis. The fair came to town and gouged the heck out of us, as usual.  It created a lot of drama, a lot of want and hard feelings (teachable moments?) and after forking over too much money, it was fun for about 4.5 minutes and then it was right back to want and hard feelings. After the money and patience ran out, we head back to the free fountain which kept creating fun an hour later. You can't beat free, in every way.

 1. Pick a box, any box. 2. Poke 26 holes in it, all over. 3.Buy 26 suckers (or find them lying around). 4. Choose 10 to be winners. 5. Paint the tips of each of the 10 winning sucker sticks. 6. Let dry. 7. Poke suckers in the holes. 8. Put rocks in the box so it doesn't topple over. 9.Find 10 prizes. 10. Offer friends to pull a sucker. 11. If they pull a sucker that has a red tip they get a sucker AND a prize. 12. If  they pull a sucker that has no red tip they just get a sucker. 13. Save box so you can do this again without having to do steps 1-8.

Should we pre-pour the lemonade the night before? Should we switch business plans?                                                                        Re-branding.                                                              Workforce engagement.                                                          

We are watching a movie backwards. The mouse just put the cheese back in the trap.  How do you entertain yourself during a storm day? I am toggling between twitter and melting mittens and shovelling. Watching a movie backwards is a better plan I think.

Of all the sports,  I prefer the glow-in-the-dark ones the best.

Five Christmases ago I lived in the country. I lived behind a line of tall trees, down a long stretch of secondary highway. I had a wee baby and a three year old.  That year, when Christmas came around, if I couldn't get a present at the grocery store on the weekends or at the Sears catalogue place "in town", I didn't get it. Pretty much. I had no vehicle through the week, and at the urging of a neighbour, I signed up for "the flyers". At first I was skeptical. I thought, aren't flyers the bane of our existence these days?  We're losing forests to flyers.  When I had lived in the city I had indignantly posted my "please no flyers" sign.  That all changed during the first round of flyers.  I had a tiny baby at the time, and at the urging of people I was listening to, I read everything to her, including the flyers. I would make a coffee and settle into "the flyers". Shopping was an abstraction living out there in the country....

And just like that...after seeing only a curve or a line arranged in random order, the c has come into focus, along with it, the l and the p and g. That picture is a sound that I know. You can sing it or say that shape with your hands or your tongue. You can make that shape with your body or see it in a twisted branch. The c's and the b's and the t's are all around, here and there and over there. They have broken the surface that kept them just underneath. Now they are popping up all over.