At The Playground, Ya' Know?

Today started off kind of rough. I do childcare for a moms group on Thursdays and we had a child who was injured and there was blood and messiness and your average no-fun experience stuff. For some reason it put me in a bad mood for the majority of the day. As was evidenced by my fully nutritious lunch of nutter butters, a chocolate bar, and cheese and triscuits and my refusal to do my much needed house stuff and sit grumpily staring at the computer for an hour. Oh, and I forgot to include the diet Mt. Dew that topped off my balanced meal. My husband wasn't feeling well and came home from work and was a little whiny about not felling well which served to further irritate me--not a lot whiny, honestly, but I was already in a crummy mood so it just put me over the edge into a full-fledged snit. Now as an aside, I am NOT condoning my mood or saying it is acceptable to berate one's sick husband for generally existing, I am just saying how my day was is all, ok? Make your mental judgements and move on please. I do not claim to have attained Proverbs 31 mastery. Thank God His mercies are new EVERY morning right??? Anyway, it was time for me to go pick up not only my children from school but also the other 2 kiddos of my good friend with whom I share pick up duty. I had told her I would bring them to my house since she had a parent teacher conference but since Thing 3 was home taking a nap and the husband was at home and his presence was annoying me (I KNOW that is not nice, I going for transparency here, not what you think I should say), and it was a nice day outside, I decided to take them to a little park near the school. I realized when we got there that in my hurry to get out of my house in a dramatic huff, I had not brought anything like a book or knitting or anything at all to do at the park while the kids played. Oh man, I was now even more annoyed. This was going to be LONG afternoon at the park where all I had to do was sit and stew over the terrible day I was having. There was NOTHING for me to do. Well, that ended up being the best part of my day. I had nothing I could do other than play with the kids. So we swung on the swings together and tried to be "married" (a phenomenon that occurs when your swings are perfectly coordinated-hilariously funny to the boys I had with me when they were "married" with me--'OOOOOH! I'm married to Mrs. Hilt-hahahaha, she's all old!' was stated at one point) And then we tried to 'popcorn' where we tried to all swing at different times. And we walked the loop around the park (picture above) while the boys raced each other and my girls and I held hands and dribbled a basketball and watched the boys and rolled our eyes and said, "boys!" And we raced each other back to the swings where they graciously gave me a "Super Honorable Mention" for coming in last, which I shamefully admit did not happen because I let them win, I really was last. I am "all old". And we climbed on the great big pyramid-web of ropes that is about 15 feet high and we all found, after struggling with how uncomfortable ropes can be in certain "places" (you would think all that padding back there would make sitting on deadly iron spikes be no big deal, but no, turns out my big posterior really is good for nothing), spaces to hang out in the ropes like we were in hammocks. And we discussed every category of the food pyramid and out of each category what was our favorite food. And we giggled. And talked about how hungry we were getting.

And suddenly, I realized I was having the most fun I had had in a while. With a couple of 9 year olds, a 6 year old and a 5 year old. And it was genuine. And it blessed me so much. All because I left the house in too much of a huff to remember my objects of distraction I usually have at my fingertips. And then I praised God for His amazing grace.