I have had to, in other words, find things for him to do. You know -- be a parent and all. Sheesh.
I kid, I kid.
Still, the best thing I have found to do on Wednesdays is to get out of the house. And I did that, often, by going to the nearby playground and watching him go down the slide over and over, while I roasted in the hot sun and I am nothing but a delicate flower. And I began to like Wednesdays less and less until I had the mad epiphany of -- hey, how about doing something we might BOTH like?
So a few weeks back I decided that we should go to the beach. I live six blocks from the beach and never go, which is ridiculous until you realize that it's a steep downhill slog to the beach which means a steep uphill slog home carrying a 30 pound toddler, and see "delicate flower", above. So to assuage my guilt about driving there to avoid the climb we got in the car and drove to another beach, one with a duck pound in the park before it, and the beach beyond.
We had a grand time. We walked / ran over the grass, went and found the ducks, and had a great time feeding them. (Oats, if you want to know. My park naturalist mother would never approve of bread, no matter how healthy the loaf was.) We saw ducklings and marvelled over their cuteness. We meandered on down to the beach.
It was 9am on a Wednesday, and so the beach itself was deserted. Well, almost. Perfect for me, the introvert -- I like people but just not too many of them at once. And once we had finished with the ducks we continued our meandering down to the beach part. We trundled slowly across the sand, as The Boy found a few rocks and other things that he was determined to throw in the water, and so to that end we headed towards the tide line which was clearly demarcated on the sand with rocks and shells.
The tide line is pretty much perfect. There are stones and seaweed and shells, and it's close to the water's edge but dry enough for me to sit down. Which I did. And The Boy took his time sitting, standing, walking, picking up one thing and then another, tossing them into the water, doing strange toddler things, the works. The shells were quite entrancing. The clam shells were in amazing profusion, white and purple along the sand, intermixed among the black small mussel shells. The Boy was thrilled -- shells! They can scoop! They can splash in the water! And sometimes they come in twos! And then you can break them apart!
At this point I came out of my sea-induced reverie and showed him a few shells and gave him a mini-biology lesson about how the shells used to hold tiny animals and that's why they were together like that, an animal lived inside. Which he took in in his usual toddler way, which was to continue merrily along throwing them into the water and taking little notice of what I said.
In any case, I returned to my reverie by the ocean. Now I pause here to note that I grew up on the west coast, very near to the beach, and it figures largely in many of my most pleasant childhood memories. A childhood girlfriend of mine had a cabin right on the shore of a small island, and I spent part of each summer there for years, and the sound of silence broken only by the sea washing softly against the rocky beach is the one sound which can reduce me to inner peace in mere moments.
So I sit and enjoy myself and run an inner monologue congratulating myself on my amazing parenting AND self-care tasks, that I can find this thing to do that entertains AND educates my child AND gives me a few moments of reverie -- seldom found while parenting a two year old ...
And I notice that The Boy keeps asking again and again for joined shells. And finding them. And breaking them apart. And I help him find a few, and I notice that he opens them, looks in them, and throws them down. And it finally dawns on me, after several more minutes of this, and some amount of increasing frustration on his part, and "N" I say. "Are you looking for the animals?"
"Yeah," he replies. "Maybe they're deer!"
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