springing

Ah, spring. We've missed you! It was such a nice day today, so after dinner the boys and I decided to take a walk. I surprised them by walking to a playground we've never visited before, and as you can see they were thrilled by the chance to run around and play outside after so many months of being cooped up indoors. They swung, they slid, they teeter-tottered to their hearts' content. Max even made several trips to the top of the curly slide (and back down) all by himself.





But of course, nothing good comes without a price. In this case, the penalty for taking advantage of our sudden warm front was enduring the mud that melting snow had made of the playground. The boys fell a couple of times and got themselves thoroughly dirty. You can see it in many of the pictures, but take a look at this close-up of Max's knees from the end of the trip:


Needless to say, I spent the evening doing laundry and scrubbing all the mud off of our shoes. On a side note, Max is suddenly developing a fascination for doing what the big kids do. Today he demanded "no lid" when I poured his milk into a sippy cup. I took pictures of him drinking straight out of the cup like a big boy (he didn't spill at all!) but unfortunately it looks like I did some damage last weekend when I dropped the camera (luckily it's our old one, not the super new one Mike and the boys got me for my birthday). I thought the screen looked funny, and figured I had damaged it but that the pictures would turn out fine. But then I discovered halfway through our fun at the park that the problem was that the lens cover wasn't opening completely. I fixed it right away, but half of my pictures from the day turned out like this:


Which would be kind of cool if any of them had also been in focus. Ah, well.