What I'm saying is, when they're done, they're done. Stick a fork in them, they're through.
Besides the bigger events like that we do, I try to do fun little side trips now that it's summer. We'll hit the pool or the splash park, maybe the little nature center to see dead animals and live snakes and nearly empty fish tanks. Today at camp they made handkerchief parachutes and I thought, hey, it'll be fun if I take them somewhere really high where they can throw them off. Like the high school bleachers. Then we can bike in the big parking lot. Simple but fun!
As soon as Emery woke up from her nap, we loaded the bikes and a toy shopping cart in the car, grabbed two water bottles and headed to the high school. What fun this would be! An empty lot for us to ride to our hearts' content.
Owen literally crashed his training-wheeled bike within 20 seconds. So fast that I hadn't even gotten Avery on her bike yet. And when Owen gets injured, it's done. There's no shaking it off, no moving on. It was tears and trauma and screaming and not letting me touch him for the next 60 seconds. I know it was 60 seconds because that's how long Avery decided to ride her bike. "I'm done." Swallowing my fury and frustration, I load the bikes back into the van and decide we'll at least go on a walk, with Owen dramatically limping along the way.
We walk up to the high school track, climb the bleachers, throw the parachutes off. They were not super impressed.
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We continue our walk, around the football field. Around the baseball field. Owen limping along. Avery expending all of her energy rolling down hills. Emmy being herself, being super happy and agreeable despite the 85 degrees. We round the outfield and we see two fawns staring us down, so I had to get a little video as we scared them into crashing baseball practice.
Even through his injuries, Owen was asking to go to the playground that is near the high school, so we made the trek back toward the car and then another football field length over to the playground. We found a bouncy ball, so we hit the blacktop and Avery and I fought each other for it. Avery trying to capture it is proof she takes after me.
It didn't take long for us to be done with the playground after our long walk, so we were headed back to the car when I realized my keys were missing.
What's one thing you don't want to lose when you've got all three kids out on a hot day when you've walked a mile around in the grass and all over tarnation? Your flipping KEYS that's what.
I patted my pockets about 50 times because surely I couldn't be so stupid. My phone and a wet wipe filled with Owen's tears were all that remained. We get to the car and I'm hoping that surely they're in there because that really was the best case scenario: Alan would come home about half an hour earlier than planned and rescue us, and we'd sit and wait and drink our bottles of water. But then I distinctly remembered having my keys in hand, beeping the car locked as we headed off on our walk.
I call Alan alerting him to the possibility that I lost my keys, thank God that we'd grabbed our water bottles out of the car, and we set about the task of retracing our steps. With three kids who, remember, were ready to get in the car and go home. Whose faces had been red and flushed for like a day already at this point.
We head all the way back to the playground because maybe the bouncy ball chasing had jarred them loose? That would be second-best-case scenario. Then we wouldn't have to do that whole mile-long walk again. Ha! Because that would be crazy! But deep down I knew I'd have heard them fall on the ground on the blacktop, and sure enough, they were not there. I cry a defeated internal cry and remember: the deer.
I'd taken my phone out of my back pocket to get video of the deer. Surely that was where they had fallen out. I wouldn't have heard them land on the grass, and it was the only thing that made sense. Just guess where we saw the deer? Pretty much at the opposite end of the complex. Around the football field and almost all the way around the baseball field. This time around, I had the added fun of carrying Emery the whole way.
Sleuth Avery declared it The Case of the Missing Keys, but she is a poor Sherlock because when we got to the spot where we had seen the deer, she walked within a foot of the keys and didn't see them. She was distracted by the deer, who we'd seen again in the outfield and managed to scare back to where they came from.
I've never been so happy to push the buttons on my keys and have the doors of the van slide open. It's always a little bit magical, isn't it? Or maybe that's just my dehydration talking.
