Posted by mommyfranklin at May 1st, 2008

With Scott being busy wrapping up the Spring semester and me recovering from surgery, the kids haven’t gotten just a whole lot of attention from mom and dad. They haven’t been ignored, and got lots of good grandparent time last week. But, there just hasn’t been much family fun going on with just the five us. I have been improving steadily and Scott was able to take a break from his course work, so we decided that tonight would be a family fun night.

Around here, family fun night means no tv or computers after school. Scott was already home when we all got home from school. A friend was coming by with a meal at 5, so we straightened the house up a bit and then had a quick errand to run. After a great dinner, we decided to go for a walk around the block. Emily’s participating in a Marathon Miles activity at school in which she walks or runs 26 miles. They are allowed to get up to 5 of those miles outside of school miles, so we’ve been trying to do our part to help her reach her goal. After that 1/2 mile walk, I had reached my activity limit and the boys were ready to do something else so we went to a park.

As I sat on a park bench watching the kids play, a group of kids caught my attention. A girl, probably around 8 or 9 years old, was explaining to a group of boys that looked to be a year or two younger than her that they should not touch the rabbits that were at the park because they have rabies. One of the boys shot back, “you have rabies.” As the girl started chasing the boys, I stopped paying attention to them and switched focus back to my own kids.

It struck me that, for the most part, elementary school aged kids really haven’t changed that much in 25 years. Remember when the real way to insult someone was to add the word “head” to end of it? “You cootie head!” were real fighting words!

Anyway, we had a lot of fun just hanging out together. It felt good to put everything else aside for just a little while to spend time together.

:)