Builders

We bought a foreclosed home.  From the outside, our house still looks foreclosed.  Except for all of the random kid paraphernalia strewn about.  Our front lawn is dead.  The weeds can sometimes get knee high.  Our bushes double as high rise spider apartments.  One neighbor parks a large motor home in front of our house a few times a week and another neighbor parks a large moving van.  I can’t say that I blame them.

We have a really nice garden on the side of the house.  It’s orderly and neat.  The rest of the yard is a wasteland.  It’s barren.  There’s only dirt.  We’d really like to plant grass but the previous homeowners had a strange obsession with rocks.  There are rocks everywhere.  They are six inches deep in some places.  We shovel and more crop up.  It’s a thankless job.

We have a huge pile of dirt.  I have no idea where it came from.  The rest of the back yard is flat.  I just chalk it up with the rocks.  I wonder when we move out if the new homeowners will be as confused with some of our decisions.  This hill of dirt is rather large.  The babies play king of the mountain on it.  Once Mikey dug a large whole and then buried Nathaniel.  It’s fun.  It’s better than a swingset.

This weekend the boys decided that they would try their hand at engineering.  They woke up early Sunday morning and went out to the dirt pile.  I mean really early.  When I got up at 7, they were already out there.  They dug with their hands.  They couldn’t find shovels and it was too early to ask where to find them.  It turns out I hide all of the hand shovels  because toddlers like to dig in the garden.  When they thought they had a good configuration they turned on the hose and flooded it.  They came in for breakfast, tracking mud and talking about evaporation and absorption.  They ran upstairs and found some stuff and smuggled it downstairs.  They continued digging with shovels and hands.  The hose was constantly on.  Shirts and pants started coming off as they become mud soaked.  There was serious talk about curves and depth and weight and sails. There was giggles and excited chatter.

Finally my curiosity got the better of me.   I walked over to see what they were up to.

They made a race track for their raingutter regatta boats.  This mud pit consumed the first half of their day with racing and modifications.  The second half was consumed with cleaning up all of the mud that had ran down the patio and driveway.  A boy couldn’t ask for a better day–a sunny day, a huge mud pit, a homemade boat and your best friend.