But this IS important!
We were on lunch break today, and I was working with Kristen in her room on geography. Amanda, Faith, and Paul decided to put on boots and play “Pooh Sticks” in the rain-swollen creek at the bottom of our front yard.
Perplexed and frustrated in figuring out some issues with time zones, Kristen was less than pleased when Jonathan showed up. “Go away! I’m working with Mom.”
“Can it wait?” I asked.
“But it’s important!” Jonathan replied.
“OK, what is it?” I responded a bit wearily.
“Paul is in the creek - naked! He’s too embarrassed to come in.”
Sure enough – there he was, standing totally naked in the yard, on this mild mid-January day. Wonder what Social Services would do with that? How glad I am that we live in the country, and have very little traffic past in the middle of the day!
After I’d wrapped him in a large towel and brought him back home, I asked Paul what he had been thinking. He told me that he had tried to go swimming, but his clothes got wet, so he thought stripping made sense. He didn’t count on the cold or the belated modesty. Once he had on dry clothes he was ready to try the creek again (wading only), but his sisters had come in by then for afternoon classes.
I don’t know what it is about water and my kids in the winter, but this seems to be their favorite time of year for rafting on the ponds and playing in the creeks. We still laugh at Kara for falling in Snake Pond one cold November day. (She disputes this and says she didn’t fall in, but bailed out.) Another January, after reading Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Andrew and Kristen took large barrels and tried to ride them on one of our little ponds, standing up. Yep, they went in, too.
Last week during our prayer time Peter gave thanks for the rain, not, as I expected, because it was watering the earth, but since it was filling the ponds and making the creeks more fun to play in. I had to do a mental double take; to me the continual rain seemed a nuisance. I love the way children help me to see things anew.
We’ve been reading Job in family devotions. Here’s what we read last night:
Job 38:25-30 Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm,
to water a land where no man lives, a desert with no one in it, to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass? Does the rain have a father? Who fathers the drops of dew? From whose womb comes the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens when the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen?
Perplexed and frustrated in figuring out some issues with time zones, Kristen was less than pleased when Jonathan showed up. “Go away! I’m working with Mom.”
“Can it wait?” I asked.
“But it’s important!” Jonathan replied.
“OK, what is it?” I responded a bit wearily.
“Paul is in the creek - naked! He’s too embarrassed to come in.”
Sure enough – there he was, standing totally naked in the yard, on this mild mid-January day. Wonder what Social Services would do with that? How glad I am that we live in the country, and have very little traffic past in the middle of the day!
After I’d wrapped him in a large towel and brought him back home, I asked Paul what he had been thinking. He told me that he had tried to go swimming, but his clothes got wet, so he thought stripping made sense. He didn’t count on the cold or the belated modesty. Once he had on dry clothes he was ready to try the creek again (wading only), but his sisters had come in by then for afternoon classes.
I don’t know what it is about water and my kids in the winter, but this seems to be their favorite time of year for rafting on the ponds and playing in the creeks. We still laugh at Kara for falling in Snake Pond one cold November day. (She disputes this and says she didn’t fall in, but bailed out.) Another January, after reading Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Andrew and Kristen took large barrels and tried to ride them on one of our little ponds, standing up. Yep, they went in, too.
Last week during our prayer time Peter gave thanks for the rain, not, as I expected, because it was watering the earth, but since it was filling the ponds and making the creeks more fun to play in. I had to do a mental double take; to me the continual rain seemed a nuisance. I love the way children help me to see things anew.
We’ve been reading Job in family devotions. Here’s what we read last night:
Job 38:25-30 Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm,
to water a land where no man lives, a desert with no one in it, to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass? Does the rain have a father? Who fathers the drops of dew? From whose womb comes the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens when the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen?
Comments
-Kristen
You left out the cool part we read while I was home - the part which really reminded me of our creek.
"... undependable as intermittent streams, as the streams that overflow, when darkened by thawing ice and swollen with melting snow, but that cease to flow in the dry season, and in the heat vanish from their channels." (Job 6:15-17)